Animal Rights Activists and “Eco Terrorists”
* Even while conservative commentators successfully lobbied to halt intelligence gathering on right wing terrorists (See Section Seven) for three decades there have been continued to be overblown claims of “eco-terrorists,” radical environmentalists who use vandalism as a tactic. To many conservatives, any form of environmentalism is “radical.” Some of them demonize environmentalism even though as much as 80% of public agrees with its causes in most polls. Environmentalism is so mainstream, George Bush Sr. called himself the Environmental President.
* Eco terrorists are generally defined as those that focus almost exclusively on property damage, including the freeing of animals by animal rights activists. This includes sabotage like pouring sugar in gasoline tanks of bulldozers, setting fires, putting metal spikes in trees in old growth forests so they cannot be cut down, and vandalism against testing laboratories using animals. Listing these tactics, one might think it inevitable that some people have died or been crippled, even accidentally.
* But the number of deaths caused by eco terrorists is zero, not one single person. With rare exceptions, such activists almost never intentionally try to kill. More than a few environmentalists and animal rights activists are extreme and absolute pacifists when it comes to living creatures, both human and other animals. Many are vegetarian or vegan. How ludicrous is it to claim someone who will not eat an egg or use animal fats in cooking is going to deliberately try to kill people?
* By the FBI's estimates, so called eco terrorists caused $100 million in property damage in both the US and Canada. Thus the best criticisms of both eco terrorism and animal rights groups are how ineffective they are, and how they harm their own causes. For $100 million is less than many major companies spend on public relations. Such tactics are an irritant, a slightly costly nuisance. By using violence which potentially could harm or kill, such fringe types could alienate a public which is otherwise very sympathetic to environmentalism.
* If anything, the federal government has cracked down on these groups far beyond the dangers they actually represent. More accurate labels for them would be vandals and saboteurs, not terrorists. They are somewhat comparable to antiwar activists during the US-Vietnam War who vandalized army recruiting stations and ROTC offices. Compare the death toll from vandal environmentalists, absolutely zero, to the hundreds from actual US terrorists on the far right. (See Section Seven again.)
* What about presidents who cracked down on vandal environmentalists? These go back fairly far. The first federal law targeting vandal environmentalists was under Reagan in 1988. Putting metal spikes in trees was, rather bizarrely, made illegal under the Drug Act. The Animal Enterprise Protection Act targeting animal rights saboteurs was passed under George Bush Sr. in 1992. An updated version passed in 2006 under GW Bush won the support of congressmen on the left and right, co sponsored by Diane Feinstein.
* One also cannot point to any president who has gone easy on them or ignored their crimes. One of the more ludicrous claims in recent years has surrounded the Unabomber, Ted Kacynski. Kacynski, by any reasonable standard, was no terrorist. He was a serial killer, with gaps as long as six years between his bombings. Terrorists have a cause. By definition, they use terror to promote or achieve that cause.
* But no one knew Kacynski's supposed cause for more than a decade and a half. His motives remained mysterious to the public, his victims, and law enforcement. There was also no conceivable way his cause, a very wide anti technology hostility, could have been achieved by his bombings against university professors, lumber company and airline executives, and computer store owners. An anti technologist should have targeted power stations and factories, not almost random individuals. Compared to actual terrorists he simply was not as deadly as most. In sixteen bombings, he killed three people. He was not very competent either, much more often injuring people. Two of the deaths were the very last bombings.
* Equally ludicrous was the attempt by some conservatives to equate Kacynski with either the Clinton administration or Al Gore specifically. Kacynski was anti technology, where the Clinton administration played a huge role in promotion of internet technologies. No, Al Gore never claimed to invent the internet. That is a lie spread by opponents during Gore's run for president. But the administration did create an atmosphere very hospitable to IT companies.
* The federal government's attempts to go after vandal environmentalists was so broad that some environmentalists complain of a Green Scare, a witch hunt mentality much like the Red Scares of the 1920s and 50s. This claim is half right, but half overblown. There is no wide public hysteria against environmentalism, only among a few on the fringes of conservatism. But there is definitely a very heavy handed government prosecution of vandal environmentalists.
* The ideological bias of the law, prosecutors, and investigators are obvious. These vandals are prosecuted and sentenced far out of proportion to their crimes, while actual terrorists on the right wing are at times not even seriously investigated until after the fact. Yet while this prosecution is also persecution, it is not deadly. Just like the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Patriot Act, one cannot point to any resulting deaths caused by the government or presidents.