Scene from "Whale Wars."
This week, Shaun Monson — who wrote and directed the hard-hitting documentary Earthlings — posted an insightful blog on the Huffington Post called “Legitimate Animal Activism.” Shaun’s post is in response to a June post by Richard Spilman, in which Spilman accuses the group Sea Shepherd of eco-terrorism.
It has become common these days to call animal activists terrorists, and frankly, I think it’s a cop-out — a convenient brush used by too many pundits to vilify and discredit the work of activists. It’s as if these writers don’t want to spend the time actually considering why animal activists must do what they do; they’d rather use a word that is quickly becoming the 21st-century equivalent of a racial slur. Referring to the popular show on Animal Planet that features Sea Shepherd activists confronting Japanese whalers, Spilman writes, “In the end, ‘Whale Wars’ is a highly dangerous sideshow, which may make for diverting ‘reality TV’ for the couch-bound, but has nothing meaningful to do with ‘saving the whales.’”
Shaun calls Spilman’s post bold and reckless. “After all, it is a curious terrorist organization that hasn’t actually killed anybody,” he writes. Shaun goes on to observe: “The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer is credited with saying there are Three Stages of Truth: first, ridicule; second, violent opposition; and third, acceptance. This was certainly true for the abolitionists, who were told that to abolish slavery would threaten the entire economy of the United States. Indeed they were ridiculed and violently opposed long before there was any acceptance. We look back now at human slavery as one of the darkest periods in American history. Women seeking the right to vote, known as the suffragettes, experienced a similar fate. They too were ridiculed, and violently opposed, until finally, after long grief and pain, they were accepted.”
These social justice movements have become inspirations to animal activists, who, as Shaun points out, are often ridiculed and violently opposed. He ends his post by reminding us that it wasn’t the government that set out to end to slavery or give women the right to vote; rather, it took agitators — like today’s animal activists — who recognize an injustice and then battle the odds to win acceptance.
By the way, Shaun is currently working on volume 2 of the Earthlings trilogy, Unity.
5 comments
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July 1, 2009 at 11:38 am
jenitreehugger
Excellent blog post and so true.
July 1, 2009 at 2:44 pm
maya938
I love Whale Wars. Talk about reaching a broad audience to raise awareness on a field of important issues. This context sheds serious light on great content. Great pitch for the animal rights movement.
Next up – Vegan cooking show…
July 1, 2009 at 10:05 pm
hart444
Richard Spilman is a corporate whore who shills for whomever pays him to.
July 13, 2009 at 2:14 pm
mathomas
I was watching Whale Wars recently, and one of the Sea Shepherd crew said something very interesting about so-called eco-terrorism. The Japanese whaler being chased by the S.S. Steve Irwin had lost a man overboard, and the hunters were searching for him (or rather, his corpse, because a human could survive no more than an hour in the freezing Antarctic waters). Sea Shepherd’s Japanese translator radioed the whaling vessel to offer them assistance in the search, to which the whaling captain replied that they would not accept help from “environmental terrorists.”
Talking directly to the camera, the Japanese translator explained that it was NOT Sea Shepherd, but rather the WHALERS who were the REAL eco-terrorists because they were killing nature’s creatures. I had never thought of this interpretation before, the profundity of which was underscored by the fact that the translator was concealing her identity with a mask over her face for fear that her family would suffer violent reprisals at the whalers’ hands. Think about that sad reality, and it’s pretty clear who the true terrorists in this story are.
From another angle, it’s also despicable that language is so abused by those who seek to redefine words until that they mean their exact opposite. For instance, while the true eco-terrorists hypocritically denounce animal advocates as “eco-terrorists,” we also see this attempt in the meat industry’s appropriation of “humanely raised” as a marketing term: that is, it is by definition inhumane to exploit and kill animals for the pleasure of people’s palates. Such distortion of discourse amounts to a form of psychological terrorism, so it is not surprising that those who make a living by killing would project their own violent tendencies onto others by accusing them of what they themselves are guilty.
July 29, 2009 at 12:03 pm
mhawthorne
Thanks for your comment, Mat. Those are excellent points. I’d never considered the position that Japanese whalers are the real terrorists, but it makes perfect sense.