If defending life on Earth is extremist, we must own that label

Police say climate groups such as Extinction Rebellion are a ‘threat’. They’d have done the same for the suffragettes and Martin Luther King

Extinction Rebellion protest at Heathrow airport, December 2019. Photograph: Guy Bell/Rex/Shutterstock

t’s not an “error” or an “accident”, as the police now claim. It’s a pattern. First, the Guardian revealed that counter-terrorism police in south-east England have listed Extinction Rebellion (XR) and the youth climate strikes as forms of “ideological extremism”. Then teachers and officials around the country reported that they had been told, in briefings by the anti-radicalisation Prevent programme, to look out for people expressing support for XR and Greenpeace.

Then the Guardian found a Counter Terrorism Policing guide to the signs and symbols used by various groups. Alongside terrorists and violent extremist organisations, the guide listed Greenpeace, XR, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, CND, the Socialist party, Stop the War and other peaceful green and left organisations. Then the newspaper discovered that City of London police had listed XR as a “key threat” in its counter-terrorism assessment.

There’s a long history in the UK of attempts to associate peaceful protest with extremism or terrorism. In 2008, for example, the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) produced a list of “domestic extremists”. Among them was Dr Peter Harbour, a retired physicist and university lecturer, who had committed the cardinal sin of marching and petitioning against an attempt by the energy company npower (then RWE npower) to drain a beautiful local lake and fill it with pulverised fly ash. Acpo sought to smear peace campaigners, Greenpeace and Climate Camp with the same charge.

The police have always protected established power against those who challenge it, regardless of the nature of that challenge. And they have long sought to criminalise peaceful dissent. Part of the reason is ideological: illiberal and undemocratic attitudes infest policing in this country. Part of it is empire-building: if police units can convince the government and the media of imminent threats that only they can contain, they can argue for more funding.

But there’s another reason, which is arguably even more dangerous: the nexus of state and corporate power. All over the world, corporate lobbyists seek to brand opponents of their industries as extremists and terrorists, and some governments and police forces are prepared to listen. A recent article in the Intercept seeks to discover why the US Justice Department and the FBI had put much more effort into chasing mythical “ecoterrorists” than pursuing real, far-right terrorism. A former official explained, “You don’t have a bunch of companies coming forward saying ‘I wish you’d do something about these rightwing extremists’.” By contrast, there is constant corporate pressure to “do something” about environmental campaigners and animal rights activists.

We feel this pressure in the UK. In July, the lobby group Policy Exchange published a report claiming that XR is led by dangerous “extremists”. Policy Exchange is an opaque organisation that refuses to disclose its donors. But an investigation by Vice magazine revealed it has received funding from the power company Drax, the trade association Energy UK and the gas companies E.ON and Cadent.

One of the two authors of the Policy Exchange report, Richard Walton, is a former police commander. A report by the Independent Police Complaints Commission said he would have had a misconduct case to answer had he not retired. The case concerned allegations about his role in the spying by undercover police on the family of the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence. The purpose of the spying operation, according to one of the police officers involved, was to seek “disinformation” and “dirt” on the family, and stop their campaign for justice “in its tracks.”

The home secretary, Priti Patel, has defended the inclusion of XR on the police list of extremist ideologies. But it seems to me that people like Patel and Walton pose much greater threats to the nation, the state and our welfare than any green campaigners. Before she became an MP, Patel worked for the company Weber Shandwick, as a lobbyist for British American Tobacco (BAT). One of her tasks was to campaign against the EU tobacco control directive, whose purpose was to protect public health. A BAT memo complained that the Weber Shandwick team as a whole “does not actually feel comfortable or happy working for BAT”. But it was pleased to note that two of its members “seem quite relaxed working with us”. One of them was Patel.

In her previous government role, as secretary of state for international development, Patel held unauthorised and undisclosed meetings with Israeli officials, after which she broached the possibility of her department channelling British aid money through the Israeli army, in the occupied Golan Heights. After she was not candid with the prime minister, Theresa May, about further undisclosed meetings, she was forced to resign. But she was reinstated, in a far more powerful role, by Boris Johnson.

Our government is helping propel us towards a catastrophe on a scale humankind has never encountered before: the collapse of our life-support systems. It does so in support of certain ideologies – consumerism, neoliberalism, capitalism – and on behalf of powerful industries. This, apparently, meets the definition of moderation. Seeking to prevent this catastrophe is extremism. If you care about other people, you go on the list. If you couldn’t give a damn about humankind and the rest of life on Earth, the police and the government will leave you alone. You might even be appointed to high office.

It is hard to think of any successful campaign for democracy, justice or human rights that would not now be classed by police forces and the government as an extremist ideology. Without extremists such as Emmeline Pankhurst, who maintained that “the argument of the broken window pane is the most valuable argument in modern politics”, Patel would not be an MP. Only men with a certain amount of property would be permitted to vote. There would be no access to justice, no rights for workers, no defence against hunger and destitution, no weekends.

In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr, subjected to smears very similar to those now directed against XR and other environmental groups, noted: “The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?”

Good citizens cannot meekly accept the death of the living planet. If seeking to defend life on Earth defines us as extremists, we have no choice but to own the label. We are extremists for the extension of justice and the perpetuation of life. SOURCE

 

What’s necessary for good people to do nothing

When it comes to the climate emergency, Canada’s courts want people to choose between being ineffectual and doing nothing at all

If, as the maxim goes, “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” we ought to ask just why it is that good people so often do nothing.

Last month, Vancouver-based educator and award-winning poet Rita Wong was sentenced to 28 days in prison for peacefully protesting the construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project (she was released early). Her act was in violation of a 2018 B.C. Supreme Court injunction ruling, which threatens those blocking construction with being found in contempt of court.

In a statement to the press, Wong explained her decision to take action:

On 24 August 2018, while BC was in a state of emergency because of wildfires caused by climate change —breaking records for the second year in a row; putting lives at risk, health at risk, and displacing thousands of people— I sang, prayed, and sat in ceremony for about half an hour in front of the Trans Mountain pipeline project’s Westridge Marine Terminal.

I did this because we’re in a climate emergency, and since the Federal government has abdicated its responsibility to protect us despite full knowledge of the emergency, it became necessary to act.

On social media Wong’s sentence was met with shock for its harshness. The judge, Kenneth Affleck, who has presided over numerous cases relating to Trans Mountain, had previously professed his belief that “a general deterrence” is now required in order to prevent people from violating the injunction (which he also issued). Wong’s imprisonment is consistent with that belief, part of a new escalation of punitive measures, which were previously limited to fines and community service, and then very brief jail time.

When we ask why good people do nothing, perhaps we should look to the decisions of authority figures like Affleck as an important case study.

As epitomized by Affleck’s rulings, the Canadian judicial system is not equal to the challenge presented by the climate emergency.

Faith v. necessity

How seriously you take climate change — what measures you are prepared to accept being taken in response to it — has a lot to do with how much you believe that reigning institutional arrangements and practices realize and maintain a decent society. If you occupy a position of authority in one of those institutions, that distorting faith might cause you to mistrust established practice rather than risk deviating from the status quo, the one you believe generally promotes positive ends. And that might make you ill-suited to making decisions on a threat like climate change, where doing as we have always done will break our world.

An unduly strong institutional faith is suggested in a couple key instances of Affleck’s reasoning. The first was the resort to the injunction itself. Its intention is to prioritize rule of law in a way that avoids having to consider the reasons people might have been acting outside the law in the first place.

The necessity defence is premised on the idea that there are circumstances in which the rule of law cannot be adhered to if injury, loss of life, or serious moral transgressions are to be prevented.

Because all the court is concerned with is whether a person was or wasn’t knowingly engaging in activities forbidden by the injunction (and not why), normal injunction proceedings would not, therefore, require the presiding judge to engage deeply with defendants’ arguments.

But something occurred that caused Affleck to lay bare his reasoning, and the flaws in it, more clearly: the decision by Wong and others to turn to the “necessity defence.”

The necessity defence is premised on the idea that there are circumstances in which the rule of law cannot be adhered to if injury, loss of life, or serious moral transgressions are to be prevented. A classic example would be a driver breaking the speed limit or operating a vehicle without a licence in order to get a dying person to a hospital when no other option was available. Therefore, people committing illegal but preventative acts should not be found guilty of actions that, technically, constitute crimes.

The climate necessity defence is a variation of that, intended to protect those who, concluding that our institutions are failing to act quickly enough to prevent climate breakdown (or are willfully contributing to its acceleration), take direct action against major fossil fuel projects or operations. But for it to work, the ruling judicial system has to proceed from an understanding that the danger posed by climate change is of a unique nature. MORE

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