What REALLY Happened in the Churchyard

Steve Best and Jason Miller with Joan Court, Janet Tomlinson, and Lynn Sawyer

I. Background

Anyone who follows the animal rights movement in England knows that the direct action element has become increasingly powerful and controversial. By abandoning what they see to be futile efforts to persuade a government beholden to corporate interests and speciesist ideology to respect the rights of animals, a growing number of activists have taken the fight directly to the animal exploiters themselves. Over the last few decades, groups such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), SPEAK (originally named Stop Primate Experiments at Cambridge), and Save the Newchurch Guinea Pigs (SNGP) have developed highly effective campaigns against all facets of the vivisection industry. While the ALF is an underground network of activists engaged in "criminal" actions involving sabotage, arson, and break-ins, other direct action groups such as SHAC and SPEAK are aboveground organizations and employ legal approaches.

By Steve Best and Jason Miller

For all the political prisoners of the animal liberation movement, for everyone involved in militant direct action for nonhuman animals and the Earth, and for all the nonhuman animals themselves who suffer at the hands of human barbarity.

By Steven Best and Jason Miller

"I am one of those who believe that it is the mission of this war to free every non-human animal in the United States. I am one of those who believe that we should consent to no peace which shall not be an Abolition peace. I am, moreover, one of those who believe that the work of animal liberationists will not have been completed until all the sentient beings of the Earth, shall have been admitted, fully and completely, into the moral circle of humanity. I look upon speciesism as going the way of all the earth. It is the mission of the war to put it down." --revision of a quote by MLK

Paul Watson interviewed by Jason Miller

Simulposted with Thomas Paine's Corner

"Well, as usual, you people have everything all upside down and turned around and back to front."

-Mel Gibson as Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon 2

As a species of beings that reflexively and unequivocally identifies itself as "superior," we human animals have taken self-deception to a level of inimitable brilliance. And we Americans who have self-servingly cast ourselves in the role of moral beacon to the world (while engaging in industrialized wholesale violence against humans, animals, and the Earth on a breath-taking scale) are the living embodiments of the word hypocrisy.

By Jason Miller

7/26/08

For Sylvia

We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.

-William Ralph Inge, Outspoken Essays, 1922

Blatant speciesist and self-described "liberal Republican" William Saletan recently penned a predictably narrow-minded and weakly argued anti-animal rights editorial for Slate Magazine.

Originally bowing to the will of Microsoft, Slate is now economically beholden to the Washington Post. Billed as "liberal" (which simply means they're sycophants to the filthy status quo as they call for "reform" to a hopelessly degenerate system), naturally Slate was more than happy to provide Saletan a forum for his unbridled arrogance and bigotry.

By Jason Miller

Click on the link below to see the hard-hitting photos that accompany this essay:

http://www.bestcyrano.org/T HOMASPAINE/?p=566

Canine. It's what's for dinner.

We pride ourselves on our devotion to the principle of equality here in the United States, so it's time to put our values where our mouths are, so to speak. Pigs, chickens, cows, and the like already endure abject suffering so we can consume their flesh, so it is only fair that we include "man's best friend." How could they better prove their deep loyalty to us than by sacrificing their lives to feed us?

"Again, if PETA is putting something out, I will always have my doubts - they see things one way and one way only. Theirs. In many ways the activists in this country are terrorists of a kind...." [Excerpt from an email written by a heavily indoctrinated and reactionary US American]

By Jason Miller

Thomas Paine's Corner

http://www.bestcyrano.org/T HOMASPAINE/?p=460

For a year now I have been an ethical vegetarian. Last Thanksgiving, I made what I thought was an enlightened moral decision to stop eating meat and to severely restrict my egg and dairy consumption. However, an email recently hit my inbox that presents such a powerful argument justifying the wanton torture and slaughter of animals (so we can please our palates) that my moral sensibilities and capacity to reason have been utterly disarmed. Signed with a cryptic "JC," this missive pummeled me with points I had not even considered when I made what I now rightly view as my ridiculous decision to go "meatless."

Thanksgiving Reflections of an Anti-Capitalist

By Jason Miller

Thomas Paine's Corner

http://www.bestcyrano.org/T HOMASPAINE/?p=453

Gluttony and greed kill more than the sword.

--Italian proverb

Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving.

~Charles Lamb, 1821

Another propaganda-driven greed-fest has nearly passed in the land of the corporatized and the home of the subservient. Obedient little wage slaves and consumers that most of us are (to varying degrees of course), we have once again dutifully greased the wheels of the monstrous capitalist machine and made our proper sacrifices at the altar of Mammon. Between our voracious inhalation of all manner of edibles to our obscene spree of rapacious spending using money eagerly fronted by the usurious kings of finance capital, Thanksgiving and Black Friday are celebratory days indeed for the moneyed elite comprising the allegedly non-existent ruling class in our "egalitarian" and "democratic" nation.

Thomas Paine's Corner

"The moral duty of man consists of imitating the moral goodness and beneficence of God manifested in the creation towards all his creatures. Everything of persecution and revenge between man and man, and everything of cruelty to animals is a violation of moral duty."

-Thomas Paine from The Age of Reason

Despite the trappings of a civilized culture and the incredibly persistent myth of our moral exceptionalism, we in the United States are collectively a group of mean-spirited, depraved barbarians. Sparing our psyches the pangs of conscience by ferociously devouring the corporate media's seemingly endless supply of rationalizations, euphemisms, historical revisions, distractions, denials, distortions, and affirmations of our pathological self-absorption, we each carry a degree of responsibility in the infliction of immeasurable unnecessary pain and suffering upon the rest of the Earth's sentient beings.