Underground Eco-Vandal Arrested
Nick Gillespie | March 13, 2008, 8:33am
The Cincinnati Enquirer is reporting the capture of an Environmental Liberation Front member charged with causing $1.1 million of damage to Michigan State University buildings and facilities in 1999:
[Marie Jeanette] Mason is accused of going...on Dec. 31, 1999, to Agriculture Hall on the Michigan State University campus in East Lansing. The indictment says [the group] intended to destroy federally funded plant genetic research being conducted by university employees.
They are accused of getting into the area where the research was stored and setting it on fire. Mason is accused of spray painting "No Genetically Modified Organisms" on building walls just before the fire.
The fire caused $1.1 million damage.
"It was an assault on a core value of free and open inquiry at a research university," MSU President Lou Anna Simon told the Detroit Free Press on Tuesday. "Once you chill the academic climate from doing this kind of work, the cost to society is enormous."...
Mason and the others also are accused of setting fire to commercial logging equipment in Michigan the next day, causing $18,000 in damage while spray painting "ELF" and "Log in Hell." She and the others are charged with arson and conspiracy to commit arson.
More here. This story reminds me of older tales of '60s and '70s radicals popping up years later. And that this sort of stupid, specifically luddite behavior has generally disappeared from the scene. In 2006, reason reported on one bizarre reason why that might be.
TrappedEastOfTheBigMuddy | March 13, 2008, 12:51pm | #
@joe
Hundreds of people have been killed in hijackings. Planes have been blown up, bodies dumped on tarmacs, Jews and non-Jews separated in terminals so that the former could be killed. It is this history that makes hijacking a mortal threat.
No one has been killed in these ELF attacks. Quite the opposite, they have made sure no one would be killed.
Sigh.
They made an effort to keep people from being killed, and so far succeeded.[1] That's good. We can all agree that there are distinction between various gradations of bad. Fine.
But when I sit down and try to work up a definition of terrorism, it always includes a few elements:
* the use of violence
* to scare people
* in order to effect a change of policy.
There is plenty of room to quibble over the details: state versus non-state actors, what types of violence get to be "war" (and presumable is OK) and what sorts are branded terrorism, and so on.
But that's my definition.
Under that definition these eco-vandals get to be terrorists. Relatively small scale, and quite modestly evil, to be sure, but still terrorists.[2]
Oh, and they are wrong, wrong, wrong.
[1] This is akin to a military trying to keep down the "collateral damage". A good idea, on the whole, but don't expect much credit for it.
[2] Perhaps we need some new words. You know, like meh-terrorist, terrorist, and phat-terrorist.
joe | March 13, 2008, 1:41pm | #
Fluffy,
First, there's no need to swear just because this argument is going poorly for you.
Your argument only works if arson isn't violence or isn't threatening. Correct, if the property damage isn't threatening, it isn't violence.
if I set your house on fire this afternoon and left behind political slogans. That would be terrorism, because burning an occupied dwelling is indeed a explicit threat. Compare this to burning the model homes last week, which had never been occupied, or burning cars on a sales lot at night.
The ELF arsonists are comparatively minor terrorists in the grand scheme of things, but they are terrorists.Repetition doesn't make an assertion true.
They're also vigilantes Yes, I agree.
You're just struggling to avoid the use of the word "terrorist" because... My motives have nothing to with the validity of my argument - you know, the one you can't refute - but since you asked, my motivation for agreeing with Nick that the word "terrorism" would be misapplied in this case is right there, in my very first post. With the stakes this high, it's best to be very precise in the use of the term "terrorism."
Sorry, joe, but above you argued that people shouldn't be terrorized by arson because the lack of deaths in arsons by ELF to date means that the arsons aren't an obvious threat. This absurd statistical approach to the question would REQUIRE that until someone actually is shot or blown up in a hijacking, there's no such thing as an "obvious threat". That's the fault of your argument, sir, not mine. The only thing you should be sorry about is your lack of reasoning skills.
I'll write it again, see if you can keep up: if someone puts a gun in your back, or says they're going to blow up the plane you're on, that's a threat to your life. Terrorism, as you rightly note, involves putting people in fear of their lives, deliberately, for the purpose of coercing their behavior.
Ergo, putting a gun in someone's back crosses the threshold I mentioned, that of threatening someone's life. Writing "I'm going to kill you" threatens someone's life. Writing graffitti that recalls previous murders - KKK, a swastika - can threaten someone's life.
Writing graffitti from a group that hasn't killed anyone, and goes out of their way not to hurt people when they carry out their actions, does not. It threatens their property.
This is a very easy, clear distinction. You are working way to hard not to get it.
Fluffy | March 13, 2008, 2:07pm | #
Terrorism, as you rightly note, involves putting people in fear of their lives,
I don't think it's necessary for people to be in fear for their lives.
I think that, for example, if I formed a new non-Klan racist group, with no history, that announced that it would never hurt any black people deliberately, but would "merely" burn down the houses of any blacks who moved into the area, that would be terrorism. Even if we always made sure that no one was home at the time.
The black people would "only" have to be afraid of taking a property loss, but that fear would still be the result of my having terrorized them.
deliberately, for the purpose of coercing their behavior.
Ergo, putting a gun in someone's back crosses the threshold I mentioned, that of threatening someone's life.
And so does setting fire to a building that they occupy for part of the day.
Writing graffitti from a group that hasn't killed anyone, and goes out of their way not to hurt people when they carry out their actions, does not. It threatens their property.
Only if you think it's impossible for anyone to ever get hurt in an arson. Or if you think that a group that is willing to commit arson will never advance to the point of hurting a person.
OR if you think that people shouldn't feel threatened by persons who are willing to go outside the law to destroy the property of other people to make a point.
This is a very easy, clear distinction. You are working way to hard not to get it.
The Klan adopted their uniforms and night-riding tactics for the specific purpose of putting black people in fear of their lives. The Nazis' brownshirts had killed hundreds of people in the streets before Kristallnacht.
Joe, you're the one arguing that:
a) actions by groups that haven't killed anyone yet aren't threatening
and
b) attacks against property aren't threatening.
That would mean that ALL actions by groups that haven't killed anyone yet aren't threatening, and ALL attacks against mere property aren't threatening. Unless other factors can be considered, or unless we can consider the feelings of the targets of those attacks in our analysis.
Fluffy | March 13, 2008, 3:02pm | #
Burning down people's homes inherently a threat, as I wrote before.
How? Why?
Burning a home with no one in it is no more threatening to human life than burning a business with no one in it. In both cases, someone will only get physically hurt if I make a mistake.
Again, you're making this arbitrary distinction because destroying some people's property is terrorism, but destroying other people's property isn't.
An explicitly racist group carrying out graffitti attacks will always refer back to the Klan, and will always thereby imply a threat to life and limb. There's just no getting around that.
There is a long history of landowners employing violence in Brazil to keep squatters from using their land, so yes, it would be terroristic for you to make such threats, as they would certainly be taken as threats to life and limb.
Here are the two logic flaws in that:
1. If you can claim that even if the Fluffy Liberation Army explicitly promises to only destroy property, my actions are terroristic because of the history of other radical groups, why can't I ignore the promises of the ELF based on the history of other radical groups? Because of the cause espoused?
2. By the terms of your argument, if by some chance I was able to convince people that I truly did not want to cause anyone to be physically hurt, it would in fact not be terrorism to destroy the property of any black family that moved into my town. Don't you realize how perverse that is? You're basically saying that it wouldn't be my acts of destruction that would make me a terrorist, it would be
my credibility or lack thereof that would make me a terrorist.
I think that if I threatened to destroy the property of any black person that moved into my town, but not kill or injure anyone, and that threat made black people
who believed me not move into my town, I would be a terrorist. I wouldn't be terrorizing just the ones who feared for their lives. I would be terrorizing the ones who only feared for their property too. Whether it's a house, a business, a car, a used bag of baseballs, whatever.
I know you don't like me to characterize your motive in the discussion, but I still think that you are designing your definition of terrorism to not include people who aims you have sympathy for. And there's no need to do that. Because I would say that not only is it possible for there to be "really bad" terrorists [like Osama] and "kinda bad terrorists who aren't that big a deal" [like the ELF] it's also possible for there to be "good" terrorists.
You dig your heels in on the word because you think it carries a moral content that it doesn't carry for me. If you and I got in the DeLorean and went back to 1850's South Carolina and started burning down slave auction markets, cotton warehouses, the offices of hunters of escaped slaves, etc., leaving behind pro-abolition messages, we would absolutely, positively be terrorists, even if we never killed anyone. We'd also be the good guys.
joe | March 13, 2008, 3:16pm | #
Hey, Fluffy, I've got this crazy idea: how about, when you ask me a question, you let ME answering, instead of projecting onto me what the liberal in your head tells you?
Huh? That would be novel.
How? Why?
Burning a home with no one in it is no more threatening to human life than burning a business with no one in it. In both cases, someone will only get physically hurt if I make a mistake.
Perhaps, but there is a personal connection between a person and his home which makes any damage to it a personal attack. You know, "Home is where the heart is?" They don't say "Work is where the heart is." Think of why Suzette Kelo's case was so much more gut-wrenching that E.D. cases that involve taking the same value property in the form of a parking lot.
If you can claim that even if the Fluffy Liberation Army explicitly promises to only destroy property, my actions are terroristic because of the history of other radical groups, why can't I ignore the promises of the ELF based on the history of other radical groups? Because of the cause espoused? Not the cause itself, but the history of those who have espoused that cause. This is why Latin Kings graffitti is considered threatening, and Boy Scouts graffitti wouldn't be. It's not about the causes themselves, in terms of the taggers' political program. Terrorism is a tactic that one can utilize in support of any cause.
By the terms of your argument, if by some chance I was able to convince people that I truly did not want to cause anyone to be physically hurt, it would in fact not be terrorism to destroy the property of any black family that moved into my town.
The object of terror is terror. In the absence of putting people in fear that they may be harmed - if you were to, somehow, convince your victims that there was no way you would harm them - then it isn't terrorism. Terrorists go out of their way to convince people that they WOULD harm them.
The reason your example is so perverse is because there is NO WAY to ever convince people that an anti-black cross burner wouldn't harm them. The connection between acts of violence and murder, and racism, is so ingrained (and rightfully so) that one can NEVER rule out violence and murder when we're discussing the subject.
I know you don't like me to characterize your motive in the discussion, but I still think that you are designing your definition of terrorism to...
I have a great deal of sympathy for the Republican cause in Ireland, but I have no trouble calling the Provos terrorists. Do you know what that is, Fluffy? Because they killed people.
If you and I got in the DeLorean and went back to 1850's South Carolina and started burning down slave auction markets, cotton warehouses, the offices of hunters of escaped slaves, etc., leaving behind pro-abolition messages, we would absolutely, positively be terrorists, even if we never killed anyone. No, we wouldn't. We'd be vandals. And if we did start killing innocent people, like John Brown did, we'd be terrorists, even if our cause is right.
