Right now, anger is more important than love. Feel the rage of the holocaust and dying planet! Let it burn in your heart and soul and galvanize you to take radical action against capitalism, hierarchy, speciesism, militarism, and nihilism. “Civilization” is waging total war that will not stop unless we match their force with a greater counter-force! Justice! Vengence! Liberation! The stakes cannot be higher! The time for delay is over! The day of reckoning is here! The unqualified defense of the Earth begins now!
- "Steve Best is a very, very dangerous guy." David Martosko, Center for Consumer Freedom
- “Steve Best is not conducive to the public order.” UK Home Office on the decision for a lifetime ban of Dr. Steven Best from the entire UK, 2006
- “Steve Best is still not conducive to the public order.” UK Home Office on the decision to reaffirm the lifetime ban of Dr. Steven Best, 2011
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Fuck this corrupt, omnicidal, nihilistic, corporate-controlled, fascist world-system; you don’t reform evil, you destroy it. Not a chance in hell to create a culture of life until we destroy the culture of death. Disease has consumed the entire body of civilization. We live among ruins, we inhabit a graveyard, an apocalyptic wasteland strewn with corpses, carrion, and zombies.
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We need to focus like a laser beam on a grim truth: whatever the gains of a worldwide environmental and animal rights movements throughout the last four decades, they have nonetheless continued to lose ground in the battle to save biodiversity, to stop or even slow down the destruction of the rainforests, topsoil, coral reefs; to prevent ever-worsening resource wars; to end the blatant and open war and Holocaust against nonhuman animals; and to come to grips with the immanent catastrophe of climate change in our minds let alone our policies and actions.
- The sense of urgency is rising in proportion to the severity of the crisis. Increasingly, calls for legislative change, moderation, compromise, and taking the slow march through the institutions can be seen as grotesquely inadequate, as growing numbers of people gravitate toward more radical tactics of change. “Reasonableness” and “moderation” in the current situation seem to be entirely unreasonable and immoderate, as “extreme” and “radical” actions appear simply as necessary and appropriate.
- From Athens to Paris to Brazil, there is growing realization that politics as usual just won’t cut it anymore. We will always lose if we play by their rules rather than invent new forms of struggle, new social movements, and new sensibilities. The defense of the earth requires immediate and decisive action: logging roads need to be blocked, driftnets need to be cut, and cages need to be emptied. But these are piecemeal and reactive measures, and in addition to these tactics, radical movements and alliances must be built that unites struggles on behalf of humanity, nonhuman animals, and the earth in a politics of total liberation.
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Resistance is the oxygen of the future. Live to resist, resist to live.
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Categories
Anger ..
As the planet lies in its death throes I’ve wachted helplessly all morning while down the road the council cut down 4 healthy, beautful firs. Just because they had grown too high in their view, and neughbours – this neighbourhood is very anti-animal and anti-nature (have fought an uphill struggle here for years on my own) – have very likely complained. My own landlady holds the view that trees should grow in a forest, not in people’s gardens. She been trying to set the chain saw to her own trees for years now. Even to a lovely cherry out *my* front door which has the most beautiful fruit every year. The woman says she does not need it, she can buy cherries at the shop. Every year I fatten up the local hedgehogs for winter (*II don’t want any of those in my garden!!*); take them to the vet when one of those nuts in the neighbourhood has cut a leg off with his lawn trimmer, say. I raised a magpie last year that had fallen out of the 10m- high nest (in one of the trees that does now not exist any more) and received only flak for it from both my landlady and the neighbours (*get rid of the fucking bird – it shits on my veranda*). Well, the bird is gone; someone likely shot her down. I’ve been watching this orgy of destruction in the neighbourhood for years now. One tree after the other falls, animals are being chased away, are fatally injured or killed. Often I could do no more than bury them. Whenever I say anything I get shouted down as the animal/tree-hugger nut that everybody wants gone ideally. Yes, I feel anger, lots of it. But I am on my own. This morning I opened the window in helpless rage and shouted out “Fuck you” and what not. But how does that help? Rage? Yes. At so much indifference, uncaring, wanton destruction – all of it either perpetrated or tolerated by authority. Germany is a country where NOTHING must stand in the way of progress. The activists having lobbied for over a year now at Stuttgart trying to save over 200 old trees in the city centre from being felled for a new train station development are now also left to watch one tree after the other falling. I know how they feel. As I write this the machine that shreds the dead trees whose branches reached into the sky this morning crunches loudly. I feel ill with rage and desperation, and yet can do nothing. I look into these people’s grinning faces and the more I get worked up the wider the grin gets. Because they know I can do nothing to stop them. The world burns around us, and more fires are laid every minute of every day. One you manage to put out, 10 new ones spring up in its place.
What now???
Anger is a powerful motivator, that is my only point, in conditions where pacifists disparage these feelings as “violent”; the point is not to work out a tactics, but to begin with anger and outrage, and these are the conditions of possibility for anything.
Stop thinking rationally and trying to organise your anger. Let it be and let it grow on its own. Get on with getting up every morning, get on with your neighbours, let them grin, let them smirk, get on with doing your thing. At the end of it all they are the ignorant, the complicit, the deniers, the dissociated. Meanwhile, your anger will simmer away only more fueled and eventually it will work its way out…. thats when things will happen
Hi Steve,
yes, but – if I act on my own here – and let me be clear: I get no support (indeed, when people find I frequent this site, or support your view of things, I am shunned) – I just end up in jail. And I cannot afford that; I have responsibilities ..
This anger eats me up from inside, and I can do nothing to turn it into action. This, as said, is a very difficult country for animal rights.
I did receive your book yesterday, by the way. Thanks.
But the poliics of anger is entirely separate from the politics of militant direct action, it can motivate one to protest, start a legal campaign, or go underground and do sabotage and liberation. All I am saying is for anything to happen, people have to stop taking soma, stop being overly optimist and shiny happy vegans, and get really pissed about what is happening to the earth and all life. That is all I am saying, let the anger direct whatever actions people decide to take, and most will take peaceful actions, I am only trying to inspire and awaken people to the severity of the global social and ecological crisis. That is all, you wrongly insist on tying this to illegal action; feel the fucking rage good and hard, and let it inspire you to take what ever action you are comfortable with, be it art, teaching, protesting, or sabotage. The anger is important! If you have my TOFF book, there is an essay in there about how Thomas Aquinas made this same point in the medieval era (!), while distinguishing among different types of anger.
No, I am not insisting on tying this to ilegal action. But our opportunities for ‘legal’ action are becoming smaller every day. Soon even leafletting the neighbourhood, approaching a fur wearer in the street (peacefully, mind you) or becoming vegan will be an act of terrorism. That is how things are going at the moment, and there is no reason to think the tide will turn. I am no optimist about this at all. I still, though, prefer open opposition – and there’s a handle to come to grips with – to the silent acceptance and indifference that is so common here, and that is very hard to fight.
I watch the “left”/”liberal” news on commercial TV–I know, I know. Like Current TV, which is Al Gore’s network. I was watching Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown” as well as The Young Turks, both on Current TV. I started sending emails with pro-animal posts, like trying to challenge these “liberals”/”lefties” to open up their minds, but I guess it wasn’t welcomed–they blacklisted my emails as spam.
On the other hand, they won’t let racist, sexist, homophobic or Islamophobic news reports go unchallenged; but challenge hateful remarks or attitudes towards animals–infra dig. Humans are dying, so why should AN ANIMAL live! Humans are hungry, so why should an animal eat! Humans are suffering, so why care about animals! Humans are attacking and killing each other “like animals.” How dare you care MORE about animals, they’re “sub-human.” Maybe I care more about animals because THEY DESERVE IT. I go by merit, not favouritism.
Keith Olberman had the best show when he was on MSNBC, but he NEVER passed up an opportunity to make jokes or disparaging remarks about animal stories and never sympathetically reported on one; it was such an obvious and huge flaw, but typical left-liberal humanist-speciesist crap
Quite, Rodent. So do I. I think we are all making the same experiences with mainstream media. There was an article on the Thai/Vietnamese dog trade in the German “Spiegel” this week. I translated it and sent it round. The article was commented online by a fair number of people. But – low and behold – a good 80% showed every understanding for the dog eaters and their, whatever, culture, and little for the few people who spoke up for the animals. They got thoroughly kicked for their ‘narrow-minded’ views and their ‘ideas’ of animal suffering possibly being on par with human interests. And I am glad to report that I am not the only one who noticed this unfortunate distribution of sympathies – the lady heading the Thai initiative mentioned in the article got back to me today (she’s a German) and was also rather taken aback at the comments and the direction they took. In the UK, it would be exactly the other way round – 80% compassionate people, 20 % idiots, who often just post something stupid to provoke.