Day: June 7, 2004

Animal Extremists Campaign of Harassment Against Sumitomo Executive

In late May, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty posted a report of a protest by California animal rights extremists directed at an executive of a company that SHAC claims uses Huntingdon Life Sciences for animal testing. According to the SHAC post (emphasis added),

On Sunday, May 23rd, 20 activists visited the home of Mitchell Lardner, a Sumitomo executive who lives at . . .. Apparently, the neighbors had been planning for our visit and over 30 of them gathered at Mitchell’s place to greet us. They were so intimidated by activists asserting their constitutional right to free speech that they called out the entire Monrovia police department to join the protest! And the Monrovia police were so scared that they called out the Temple Station deputies to hold their hands and even asked the Los Angeles Police Department to come with a helicopter! That still was not enough to make the residents of Mitch’s neighborhood feel comfortable, so the incompetent Monrovia police called out their fire trucks and ambulances to wait down the road.

Mitchell Lardner truly became an embarrassing spectacle as about 75 people watched anxiously as grassroots activists exposed Mitch as an accomplice to the murder of 500 animals who die every day at HLS because of its customer, Sumitomo. The neighbors started chanting and tried to start a mosh pit, but failed miserably; they clearly had little experience dealing with activists who easily droned them out. We persisted in explaining what it means to have a puppy killer in the neighborhood, and the police just did not know how to deal with the excitement.

As the tension increased, the police arrested 3 activists in a pathetic attempt to stop the demonstration. As the neighbors cheered, activists chanted, “for every arrest, one window!” and this really shut them up. No matter how many police officers and grumpy neighbors cower before Mitch’s home, the grassroots animal rights movement will not be affected or deterred. The arrested activists were released after just a few hours, unfazed and excited to return to Mitch’s house.

We will continue to come back and make Mitch’s ritzy neighborhood into a circus until Sumitomo stops contracting with HLS.

Before delving further, it’s good to note that even with activist’s own self-serving commentary, it’s clear that the neighbors in the area weren’t buying into extremist’s campaign of harassment. That the neighbors may have actually confronted the animal rights extremists instead following the script that SHAC and others want — cowering in fear and directing their frustration at their neighbor — is very heartening compared to how often people and companies tend to cut and run when faced with pressure from such extremists.

A brief item in the Pasadena Star News backs up at least part of the activists’ claims noting that,

Three animal rights activists were arrested for disturbing the peace late Sunday [May 23, 2004].

. . .

[Monrovia police Sgt.] Alfaro said the activists picketed and assaulted people, he [sic] but could not say who or how many were assaulted.

The protesters were being held overnight and released on a citation today.

Not a terribly helpful description, but this is not the first time activists have shown up at Lardner’s door. They also showed up to protest on May 14, and the Pasadena Star at that time provided a bit more information about how these brave animal rights extremists chose to express themselves (emphasis added),

A family in Monrovia was harassed by animal rights activists when their home was vandalized with phrases like “puppy killer’ and “murderer,’ allegedly by members of the Animal Liberation Front. On Wednesday, animal rights protesters put on masks and hooded sweat-shirts and shouted anti-animal testing slogans through a bullhorn as neighbors and police looked on.

. . .

. . . Dressed in all black, some wearing skull masks, they obviously tried for the scary look . . .

Strike three in the intimidation attempt was the fact that one of the activists arrived at the scene in a shiny new Audi with the license plates removed, of course.

Ah those brave, relentless animal rights activists. They’ll put your home address, phone and the name of your kids on their web sites, but they won’t protest at your home without wearing masks and hoods (a lot like another group of cowards who hide behind masks and hoods while harassing and intimidating the objects of their hatred).

Sources:

3 animal rights activists arrested. Diana L. Roemer, Pasadena Star News, May 23, 2004.

Rockers to the rescue. Pasadena Star News, May 14, 2004.

Reagan and AIDS

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force has a press release/letter out reminding people about Ronald Reagan’s supposed hostility to AIDS sufferers and lack of action to combat the disease. For example, the press release notes that,

AIDS was first reported in 1981, but President Reagan could not bring himself to address the plague until March 31, 1987, at which time there were 60,000 reported cases of full-blown AIDS and 30,000 deaths.

Interesting, except that it’s not true. AIDS cases were first reported in the United States in 1981, but it wasn’t until 1983 that HIV was formally identified as the cause. As Deroy Murdock notes, Reagan mentioned the disease at the latest in September 1985 when, responding to a reporter’s question about AIDS funding, Reagan said,

[I]ncluding what we have in the budget for ’86, it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS in addition to what I’m sure other medical groups are doing. And we have $100 million in the budget this year; it’ll be 126 million next year. So, this is a top priority with us. Yes, there’s no question about the seriousness of this and the need to find an answer.

In fact, far from refusing to talk about AIDS in public, Reagan repeatedly mentioned it, as in a February 6, 1986 speech about U.S. health policy,

We will continue, as a high priority, the fight against Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). An unprecedented research effort is underway to deal with this major epidemic public health threat. The number of AIDS cases is expected to increase. While there are hopes for drugs and vaccines against AIDS, none is immediately at hand. Consequently, efforts should focus on prevention, to inform and to lower risks of further transmission of the AIDS virus. To this end, I am asking the Surgeon General to prepare a report to the American people on AIDS.

But hey, why bother doing any research when the March 1987 date makes the press release so much more dramatic.

Besides the March 1987 date is all-but canonical. Even Rep. Henry Waxman uses it on his website to criticize the government response to AIDS (emphasis added),

While the epidemic expanded and scientific understanding of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and its modes of transmission became clearer, the federal government under the Reagan Administration consistently refused to commit the resources and effort necessary to provide urgently needed research, health care and preventive services. Indeed, President Ronald Reagan refused to mention AIDS publicly until 1987, after 19,000 Americans had already died of AIDS.

Notice the discrepancy in deaths, too. According to the NGLTF there had been 30,000 deaths by 1987 whereas according to Waxman’s piece, it was only 19,000.

Update: A previous version of this story erroneously reported the number of AIDS deaths the NGLTF claimed had occurred by 1987.

Prairie Home Companion Audience Cheers Reagan’s Death?

Apparently, a small number of audience members of Prairie Home Companion reacted to Garrison Keillor’s announcement of Reagan’s death with cheers. Too bad the show isn’t available on the web so those of us who don’t listen to it can listen ourselves. There is, however, some discussion of this in the Prairie Home Companion’s forum area.

Salon.Com Managing Editor: U.S. Would Have Been Better if Reagan Had Never Been President

Salon.Com managing editor has a factually challenged blog post about Reagan’s 1980 victory over Jimmy Carter inaugurating a “dark age” in America,

I was a senior in college when Reagan was elected — in a very close election which he’d probably have lost had it not been for the participation of a third party candidate (John Anderson) — and that moment was like the start of a dark age. As a fiery young writer of editorials for my college paper I’d railed against Carter for his compromises with conservatism, and proudly chose to cast my first vote for an American president not for Carter against Reagan but for Barry Commoner.

It was a stubborn gesture, and in retrospect a dumb one. Too much was at stake to throw my vote away just so I could feel consistent. (Naderites, take heed.) America would have been a lot better off if Ronald Reagan had never been president. This was true while he was alive, and it is no less true now that he is gone.

The dark age comment is just silly, but his analysis of the 1980 election is a typical example of Salon.Com’s dedication to the facts.

The 1980 election was hardly close. Reagan earned 51 percent of the popular vote to Carter’s 41.1 percent and John Anderson’s 6.6 percent. The electoral college was a landslide with Reagan defeating Carter 489-49. Carter carried only Georgia, Minnesota and West Virginia.

Apparently, Rosenberg paid as much attention in college as he does as Salon.Com’s Managing Editor.

Source:

Scott Rosenberg Blog Post. June 6, 2004.

Was Reagan Just Lucky?

One of the best articles I’ve read about Ronald Reagan in the past couple days is Glenn Garvin’s review of Peter Schweizer’s biography ReaganÂ’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism. Garvin tackles head on one of the claims about the triumph over Communism that started floating around liberal circles almost immediately after the USSR fell — what Reagan did or didn’t do was beside the point. Soviet Communism was in its death throes in the 1980s and the USSR would have collapsed regardless of what American foreign policy approach had been adopted.

Which is kind of an amusing flip-flop as Garvin notes. When Reagan was elected, the consensus among his critics was that the USSR was economically and politically strong, and pursuing an arms build-up to bankrupt it was madness that would only lead to war. After he leaves office and the USSR crumbles, the consensus among his critics was that the Soviet collapse was inevitable,

In retrospect, ReaganÂ’s point that the Soviet economy was on life support seems obvious to the point of banality. In fact, thatÂ’s one of the arguments his critics use against him: that the Soviet economy would have imploded anyway, even without ReaganÂ’s defense buildup. But thatÂ’s not the way foreign policy intellectuals saw it in 1982.

“It is a vulgar mistake to think that most people in Eastern Europe are miserable,” declared economist Lester Thurow, adding that the Soviet Union was “a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States.” (I wonder if Thurow had ever flown on a Soviet airliner?) John Kenneth Galbraith went further, insisting that in many respects the Soviet economy was superior to ours: “In contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.”

Arthur Schlesinger, just back from a trip to Moscow in 1982, said Reagan was delusional. “I found more goods in the shops, more food in the markets, more cars on the street — more of almost everything,” he said, adding his contempt for “those in the U.S. who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse, ready with one small push to go over the brink.” (By the way, Schlesinger, who has spent his life in praise of JFKÂ’s adventures in Vietnam and Cuba but foamed at the mouth over every other American military action of the Cold War, proves Isaiah Berlin wrong: In addition to foxes and hedgehogs, there are also chameleons.)

Reagan nonetheless persisted. He boosted production of conventional arms and borrowed a play from the Soviet book by backing anti-communist insurgencies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Most controversially, he poured billions of dollars into his missile defense program.

Whether SDI will ever work (20 years later, itÂ’s still mostly theoretical) and whether, even if it does work, itÂ’s a wise strategic choice in a world where AmericaÂ’s most implacable enemies are not superpowers with hundreds of ICBMs but terrorists with suitcases, are arguments for another time. But what has largely been overlooked in the debate is that the Soviets had no doubt whatsoever that it would work.

At arms summits, Gorbachev frantically offered increasingly gigantic cuts in strategic missiles — first 50 percent, then all of them — if Reagan would just abandon SDI. Schweizer, mining Soviet archives and memoirs still unpublished in the West, shows that GorbachevÂ’s fears echoed throughout the Politburo. SDI “played a powerful psychological role,” admitted KGB Gen. Nikolai Leonev. “It underlined still more our technological backwardness.” Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko understood exactly what Reagan was up to: “Behind all this lies the clear calculation that the USSR will exhaust its material resources before the USA and therefore be forced to surrender.” Most tellingly of all, the East German-backed terrorist group known as the Red Army Faction began systematically murdering executives of West German companies doing SDI research.

Reagan, unmoved, stiff-armed the Soviets on SDI while winning huge concessions on other weapons. When Gorbachev complained, Reagan needled him with jokes. (Sample: Two Russians are standing in line at the vodka store. Time passed — 30 minutes, an hour, two — and they were no closer to the door. “IÂ’ve had it,” one of the men finally snarled. “IÂ’m going over to the Kremlin to shoot that son of a bitch Gorbachev!” He stormed up the street. Half an hour later, he returned. “What happened?” asked his friend. “Did you shoot Gorbachev?” Replied the other man in disgust: “Hell, no. The line over there is even longer than this one.”)

The arms buildup (and a little-appreciated corollary, ReaganÂ’s jawboning of the Saudis to open their oil spigots and depress the value of Soviet petroleum exports) quickly took its toll. The Soviet economy began shrinking in 1982 and never recovered. By SchweizerÂ’s accounting, the various Reagan initiatives were costing Moscow as much as $45 billion a year, a devastating sum for a nation with only $32 billion a year in hard-currency earnings. Meanwhile, ReaganÂ’s rhetoric (the “evil empire” and “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” speeches in particular) emboldened opposition movements in Eastern Europe. Less than a year after Reagan left office, the Berlin Wall fell; the Soviet Union itself disappeared a little later.

The Soviet view of SDI is fascinating. We know from recently declassified CIA documents that the Reagan administration ran a successful intelligence operation whereby the United States allowed the Soviets to steal what they thought were plans for advanced technologies but which in fact contained fatal flaws and caused at least one major disaster (an explosion at an oil pipeline) in the USSR. The Soviet system was so defective it couldn’t even see through bogus technology and the inherent problems that would need to be overcome to create a working SDI system.

Source:

The Gipper and the Hedgehog. Glenn Garvin, Rason, November 2003.

An Example of How Animal Rights Extremists Rationalize Violence

Animal rights activist Ari Moore, who says he is a member of both People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and Farm Sanctuary, has a post on his weblog in which he rationalizes his desire to engage in violence to further the animal rights cause. Moore’s thoughts on violence are inspired by an issue of Satya magazine that offered a platform for advocates of animal rights terrorism, including the University of Texas at El Paso’s resident terrorist apologist, Steven Best.

Moore writes of his acts of wanting to move beyond his acts of animal rights-inspired graffiti,

I was at a place right before I read the first issue where I was going to step up my anti-speciesist graffiti by throwing red model paint at fast food restaurants and stores that sell furs and/or lots of leather. It hardens to a dark red gloss that looks a lot like blood and is very difficult to remove. I’d also affix a statement explaining the action, perhaps stuck in the paint so it would be difficult to remove. Time was, I would not engage in any action that caused fiscal damage. Over time, I began writing on and stickering over advertisements on phone booths, advertising walls (disgusting marketing development in New York), subway posters and the like. After a while, throwing red paint started looking like a good next step.

I thought I had everything well thought out but now my thinking is even more developed, though I still haven’t decided whether I’m going to stop with the fiscal damage or step it up even further, perhaps join the ALF. (Shhh, it’s secret.)

Moore then goes on to describe the two basic competing ideas he ran through — how would any such action benefit animals and how would the intended audience perceive it. You’ll note that in his analysis he doesn’t waste a single word on the rights of his proposed victims. They simple don’t count,

The issues as I see them are this: I have to keep two things in mind, the benefit to the animals I’m working for, and the impact on my audience — people. While theoretically, stealing farm animals and burning the farm buildings to the ground would save not only the present inhabitants but prevent them from being quickly replaced by yet more animals, this would most likely have a terrible impact on the credibility and image of the animal rights movement, and could possibly be so damaging that in the long run more animals would end up suffering while we repaired the damage. Conversely, while a purely non-violent, pacifist approach that excludes all property damage and vandalism would make for a very respected and trusted movement in the public eye, this restraint would be a form of passive violence (i.e. if a psycho rapist is threatening to harm children, you get in there and you push the fucker away, pacifism be damned).

You have to love that last sentence — by not committing an act of violence against McDonald’s or a furrier, Moore would in fact be committing a large act of violence against animals by failing to help them. Although acts of terrorism are clearly not on par with those committed by groups dedicated to killing as many people as possible, such as Al Qaeda, they do at least share with such groups ridiculous attempts at rationalizing their actions. If Moore commits an act of violence it’s not his fault or responsibility — its actually his victim’s fault for putting him in a position where if he does nothing he is guilty of a “form of passive violence.”

Moore restates this basic idea a couple paragraphs later by claiming that extreme situations require extreme methods,

On one side of the debate there are total pacifists, many of them making rash generalizations about how violent so many animal rights activists are, and on the other side there are those who use violence against property (but not against any sentient being, unless you count intimidation as violence) to varying degrees.

I have to admit that I’m feeling more in line with the latter folk. When Malcolm X used the words “by any means necessary,” he wasn’t advocating random violence, but self defense. The violence carried out against people of color, women, the poor and the homeless demands that we exercise our right to defend ourselves — or in the case of animal rights, to defend those who can not defend themselves. Extreme situations require extreme methods. In the words of Ingrid Newkirk as quoted by Steve Best, Ph.D. in Satya:

If a concentration camp or laboratory is burned, that is violence, but if it is left standing is that not more and worse violence?Â…IsnÂ’t the chicken house todayÂ’s concentration camp?Â…Will we condemn its destruction or condemn its existence? Which is the more violent wish?

So how will does all of this work in everyday situations? If I throw red paint at McDonald’s, some worker may get pissed off the next day because he has to go scrape it off, and a few people may feel guilty when it occurs to them that what they’re eating is rotting corpse, but they may then close off and get angry instead of changing their actions. But perhaps a lot of people walking by will wake up a little, be startled into thinking about something they don’t usually think about. Maybe the people eating there who feel guilty will decide not to eat there again. Maybe the workers will question what it is they’re being paid to do, and what it is they’re eating. Maybe vegans passing by will feel validated in knowing that other people feel the same way they do, and maybe they’ll be inspired to do some direct action themselves.

Fascinating. Moore has gone from saying that acts of violence may be justifiable because to stand by will allow greater acts of violence to occur, to suggesting that acts of violence may be justified if the acts are publicized and end up validating others who agree with him. This, of course, is exactly the argument that racist extremists use to justify vandalizing the homes of minorities — such vandalism both acts to intimidate the victim (and like Moore probably don’t see intimidation as being violence) as well as validates the opinions of other potential racists in the community. (And, like animal rights extremism, usually tends to produce a backlash much bigger than both).

Moore concludes his essay with a flourish,

So I believe that in some cases non-violence is needed, and in others, considered and careful use of violence against property is needed — a diversity of approaches, always keeping the benefit to non-human animals and the impact on humans in mind. It’s just occurred to me that these two considerations are essentially ahimsa: the most good and the least harm. So I knew this all along. I just had to read a lot and think a lot to get to the answer in a more roundabout way.

Which is simply a long-winded way of saying that, for Moore, the ends justify the means. What a shocker there.

Source:

Yet more vegan evolution. Ari Moore, May 7, 2004.