Revenge is Sweet, But an Expensive Indulgence

If you are at all like me, you wince at the horrors depicted in our newsfeeds, and cringe at the cruelty we see inflicted on our fellow creatures by unfeeling POS that pass for human beings.

And if you are at all like me, you fantasize about payback.

Even if we could exact revenge on the scumbags that brutalize and murder animals, revenge does nothing to restore the lives of their victims. All revenge does is gratify our own need for justice.

And if we are captured and prosecuted we will have accomplished nothing at all.
A different standard of direct action applies to preventing animal abuse and murder. To saving lives as opposed to memorializing them.

We should work toward taking out the killers before they kill.

Everyone who works in the slaughter industry is guilty of murder.

Every driver of livestock trucks, every field hand at factory farms, every day laborer at feed lots, every executive and secretary working at a slaughterhouse. Every person on the slaughterlines, from the drivers with the cattle prods to the thugs with the bolt guns to the grunts with the knives, the chainsaws, the bone saws, the scalding tanks.

Just doing one’s job, or just trying to feed one’s family, are hardly justification for murder. Guards at Auschwitz, who were merely following orders, were nonetheless prosecuted for war crimes. Had we a non-speciesist legal system, the same standard would apply to animal murderers who plead that they are following orders of others.

Morally, there is no defense to murder, regardless of species.

The basic premise of animal rights is that all sentient beings have the same right to live and to be free from exploitation. The view that humans have a superior right to life is speciesism.

Speciesism is the universal enemy of animals. Animal activists must not buy into the premise that murdering some Earthlings is acceptable while murdering other Earthlings is not.

For example, accepting the speciesist argument that religious zealots who kill people (ISIS, for example) are distinguishable from religious zealots who kill animals (mainstream practitioners of Islam, as an example) reinforces speciesism and undermines the very core of animal rights.

Direct action has largely been ineffective and wasteful of animal movement resources. The Animal Liberation Front, founded by my friend Ronnie Lee, has judiciously avoided violence and has inflicted only economic injury in its attacks on animal exploitation targets. The net result of such attacks is primarily to raise public awareness and to raise animal exploitation industry insurance premiums. Little dissuasive effect has resulted from such direct action. Fur farms re-capture their mink, fur stores file insurance claims, restaurants continue to sell veal and fois gras.

Animal liberationists must turn their sights upon the killers, not just on the buildings in which they work.

Sabotaging trucks and destroying cages are ineffective tactics to thwart animal enslavement and murder. The most effective direct action is that which will substantially raise the cost of producing animal corpses, while focusing media and public attention on the horrors of the Animal Holocaust, attacks on the killers themselves, and on those who own the slaughterhouses.

If those goals were achieved with every liberationist raid, direct action will have been worth the risk of capture and prosecution.

But an even greater effect may be realized. Direct action against the boards of directors of animal exploitation industries, Big Oil, Big Coal, etc, could ignite social revolution against the capitalist system.

Revolution must be our long term goal. Capitalism is the primary cause of most of the animal cruelty, exploitation, and murder in the world.

All who oppose capitalism are our allies. The animals’ allies. Even if they don’t give a damn about animals. Because socialism, by its very nature, reduces the number of animals that are enslaved and murdered.

Socialism removes the profit incentive from animal agriculture. The result is that socialist societies murder and consume half the animals per capita as do capitalist societies.

Worldwide socialism would mean saving THIRTY BILLION animals each year. That is Thirty Thousand Million! 30,000,000,000 innocent lives that would not be sacrificed on the altar of capitalism!

That fact alone should make every animal activist a socialist revolutionary.

 

 

Author’s Notes:

• I am unaware of any other blog with the Armory’s mission of radicalizing the animal movement. I certainly hope I am not alone, and that there are similar sentiments being expressed by comrades unknown to me.

If you know of other blogs dedicated to animal rights and the defeat of capitalism, please comment with a link.

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