photo by SG

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Look

I know that I'm supposed to blindly support everything which gets done in the name of "the movement," but I have to draw the line somewhere.

Blowing up buildings to stop military research? Okay, likely to get caught, but power to ya if you can get away with it.
Blowing up buildings to stop "genetic engineering of plants"? (as a suspected ELFer facing jail time is alleged to have done in 2001) Ridiculous! Indefensible! Misanthropic!

Okay, if she didn't do it, than she's another in a long line of political prisoners. But that seems unlikely to me.

I've noticed that primmies speak out of both sides of their mouths about the destruction of science. On one hand, they'll claim this woman is innocent. Which she could very well be. Let's face it, the State doesn't exactly have a good track record for treating radicals fairly. But while the defenders of the Green Scare arrestees are ranting and raving about how those cute white kids with a weird affinity for nature and firebombs have never done anything wrong in their lives, they let little smirks go by when you ask if they thought it was a good idea.

I can understand a response like that in public. It's pretty standard radical procedure to pretend that an imprisoned radical is a harmless liberal when soliciting money from rich liberals. Everybody pretended Rosa Parks was just a tired old lady, even though of course she was strategic and had a plan. But everybody in the Birmingham NAACP knew who she was and exactly what she was doing.

I mean, come on guys, everybody knows what you're doing. The FBI knows, Homeland Security knows, we know. You're trying to drag humanity back into the mystical past and aren't afraid to use firebombs to prove it. So why are you surprised when you get locked up? Because you didn't think that middle class white people could get nabbed? As to the innocent ones: maybe if your politics weren't centered around basically making lots of people die, you wouldn't get confused with your friends, err, one of those dirty terrorists.

Is this the same as rightwingers telling a rape victim that she should have expected it because she was wearing "provocative" clothing? I don't know. What do you think?

1 comment:

Nate said...

hey dude, I just stumbled onto your blog. Well put. I find the whole anti-science thing - at least when taken to a sort "back to the whatever-really-long-time-ago era!" kind of thing wicked annoying for two reasons (among many). My wife and I were both born 5-6 weeks early. Without infant intensive care units, we'd both not be here. And my brother in law is in a wheel chair. Frankly, I'll take the pollution caused by steel and rubber production for him to have mobility. Of course, those two options don't exhaust the range of possibilities, but if those _are_ the two options, I pick my family over the environment, full stop. And greenarchists who don't agree either have to admit that they will have to resort to authoritarianism to deal w/ folk like me and my family or admit that their anti-authoritarianism limits the extent to which they can achieve their vision for human society.

take care,
Nate