Sunday, July 25, 2010

Animal Liberation and the Threat of a Good Example

Review of Muzzling A Movement: The Effects of Anti-Terrorism Law, Money & Politics on Animal Activism by Dara Lovitz (Lantern Books, 174 pages, 2010).

You have the right to free
speech as long as you’re not
dumb enough to actually try it.

The Clash, “Know Your Rights”

The animal liberation movement is feeling the sting of its own success. Corporations and their guardians in government got annoyed when animal advocates started making waves in the 1990s that touched the bottom line of the animal exploitation industry.

Annoyance evolved into anger in the decade that followed. The government’s preoccupation with the animal liberation movement became a full-fledged crackdown. To its credit, the movement hasn’t gone into hibernation. The government’s unconditional support for the animal exploitation industry may in fact spawn a more determined yet shrewd animal liberation movement.

Congress has led the charge. Legislation, such as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, chipped away at basic freedoms. And don’t expect AETA to be the government’s final legislative word on dealing with activists who dare to speak out on behalf of nonhuman animals. Based on the history of other liberation movements that disrupted business as usual, conditions will worsen before they get better. But animal liberationists are passionate and committed people who won’t let a dose of government repression discourage them.

The movement has many resources on which to lean for support. Dara Lovitz, an animal law expert, has written a wonderful little book about the government’s use of draconian laws to suppress the animal liberation movement. The book, Muzzling A Movement: The Effects of Anti-Terrorism Law, Money & Politics on Animal Activism, examines the origins of AETA and how the federal court system is stacked against animal activists and criminal defendants in general.

“Animal activists are being silenced apparently because of how effective they have been at financially harming an animal-abusive industry and thus making enemies in high places,” Lovitz writes.

AETA’s passage demonstrated the U.S. government is clearly on the side of the corporations and organizations that torture, mutilate and kill nonhuman animals. Not only does the federal government legally protect these actions, its laws often require corporations to conduct gruesome tests on animals before products get approval for human use.

Over the past decade or so, the federal government has labeled people who peacefully act to end animal exploitation as “terrorists.” The government and its corporate partners understand the effectiveness of applying the “terrorist” label to animal liberation activists. The strategy deflects public attention away from the real extremists in this equation: the vivisection and animal agriculture industry that torture and kill millions of nonhuman animals every year.

The terrorist label “is a public relations ploy designed to marginalize, silence, and even imprison animal activists,” Lovitz writes. The media also engage in “oppositional measures to undermine the animal advocacy community.”

Consider how the media decides to use the word “terrorism” to describe certain actions but not others. “When the media confront the decision of whether to describe an event that they are covering, their choice to use the word terrorism or any of its derivatives can greatly change the way the public perceives the event and its actors,” Lovitz explains. “Calling one episode an act of terrorism and another a retaliation reveals bias in the media and largely influences the viewing audiences in their perception of political violence.”

Muzzling A Movement is a fact-based, unemotional look at the government’s war on the animal liberation movement. Lovitz keeps the focus on the “unconstitutional failures” of AETA and steers clear of emotional outbursts about evil vivisectors.

Lovitz makes a clear case against the government’s targeting of the SHAC 7 activists and explains why the legal proceeding should never have gone to trial, let alone resulted in convictions. The SHAC activists were handed absurdly long federal prison sentences simply because they were involved in an effective campaign, protected by the First Amendment, with the sole purpose of putting Huntingdon Life Sciences out of business.

“After considering that the mere hosting of a website, as in the case of SHAC, could lead to activists being convicted of terrorism and spending substantial time in federal prison, any activist would hesitate before engaging in legal Internet activist,” she writes.

Muzzling A Movement is an exceptional educational resource for activists and the general public concerned about the government’s crackdown on the animal liberation movement. In no way should the book discourage readers from working on behalf of animal liberation. Let it simply serve as an authoritative analysis of the forces who oppose the movement and the vicious manner in which they’ll fight back when financially threatened. -Review by Mark Hand

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