#greenanarchism — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/michael-loadenthal-deconstructing-eco-terrorism

#AnimalLiberationFront, #ALF, #DirectAction, #EarthLiberationFront, #ELF, #GreenAnarchism, #Terrorism @readinglist

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Michael Loadenthal

Deconstructing “eco-terrorism”

rhetoric, framing and statecraft as seen through the Insight approach

... Asymmetric labelling is a powerful and impactful aspect of statecraft. It not only serves to justify and legitimate violence, but it also functions to inform the wider society as to how they are meant to interpret social movements, their political objections, and their revolutionary projections within the political imaginary. The difference between labelling a movement “extremist”, “terrorist”, “revolutionary”, “supremacist”, or “reformist” serves to inform the public, buttress State policy, and effect movement participation through selfpolicing. The animal and earth liberation movements, as represented by the ALF and ELF, are targeted with the violence of State rhetoric as they challenge core tenants of hegemonic control. Through the strategy of direct action (i.e., vandalism and economic sabotage), these movements are able to challenge proscribed methods of political protest in terms of both tactics and strategy. Through these methods, these movements function to challenge the State’s monopoly on violence (and the labelling of violence), as well as subtler ideological stalwarts such as speciesism, anthropocentrism and the commodification of animal and plant life for commerce.

As a result, the State has chosen to not only silence these movements through traditional legislative, judicial and policing methods, they have also used the rhetoric of terrorism to mark these movements for the crime of not abiding by the social contract establishing appropriate protest. Due to the nature of such a framing occurring largely in the venue of rhetoric, discourse and State voice, the Insight approach has great utility in not only diagramming the creation of the conflict narrative, but also for identifying sites of disruption along the linearity of threat construction. The contributions of the Insight approach to this analysis of “eco-terrorism” are key in illustrating the schema of the State’s constructed threat narrative. By viewing the State as a permeable collective of individuals we are reminded that juridical action, like an individual’s socialisation, is informed by previous experiences with violence as well as safety, fear as well as tranquility.

This case study was meant to push the boundaries of an appropriate subject for treatment via the Insight approach, as an analysis of statecraft functions uniquely to other personal, interpersonal, social and super-structural processes. The Insight approach advances terrorism studies through the application of a traditional peace and conflict lens that aims at understanding and interpreting. Thus, by not limiting Insight to individual-level mediations (e.g., marital dispute, work place negotiations) the methodology of narrative and cognitive analysis is tasked with a much larger subject: the enormity of the State. The preceding case study adopts a conflict resolution tool in the interpretation of both terrorism (e.g., ALF, ELF) and counterterrorism (e.g., AETA, “ag gag”, Green Scare), and in this sense, allows the minuteness of the human experience to be examined in light of the vastness of the socio-political matrix. Far too often, terrorism studies becomes mired within the myopic trap of counterterrorism and the questions become limited to: “How can we prevent, mediate, or react to terrorism while preserving life and property?” Peace and conflict studies aims to achieve a more laudable goal, as the protection of life and property must be accompanied with the presence of justice, representation and dignity, not simply the absence of injustice, authoritarianism and humiliation. This can only be achieved through an understanding of violence beyond simply its prevention. If we are to transform conflicts and violent non-State actors, one needs to interrogate terrorism studies with a peace and conflict agenda, and it is with tools such as Insight, that these types of inter-disciplinary challenges can be advanced.

Contained in the preceding discussion of the Animal Liberation Front and associated, clandestine animal advocates, is the proposition that a multidepartmental, nationwide entity like a State, can be explained in terms of perceived threats and constructed narratives in the same way one could explain an individual’s psychology. Like any individual, the State is constantly constrained by the limits of its horizon, the borders of its common sense, and the embedded nature of its bias. It is constantly allowing “bias [to] creep into one’s outlook ... ideology into one’s thought” (Lonergan 2004, 18). When interpreting acts of political violence by animal liberationists, the State recalls successful social movements of the past and the challenges they offered to its monopoly on violence and its position as the sole legitimator of force. The State recalls the millions of dollars lost on destroyed property and missed revenues, and it remembers its intended role as the protector of property rights. When a window is broken, a slaughterhouse burned, or a factory farm exposed, the State immediately imagines a constructed future where protestors reign; where private property is not sacred, and activists’ force ceases to be labelled as violence. Like a frightened person nervously reaching for mace when faced with a hooded stranger on an unlit street, when the State conjures up this image, it strikes pre-emptively, and in its own self-defence.