The Green Scare
from the New York Rat #6
On December 7th, 2005, the arrest of Daniel McGowan, an environmental and social justice activist from New York, and six others from around the country signaled the beginning of a concerted government campaign to destroy the radical earth and animal liberation movements. The Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a press release shortly after, that silenced any doubt that the raids were anything but a well-coordinated campaign against activists. The DOJ dubbed the campaign, “Operation Backfire,” and explicitly stated that their investigation was far from over and more arrests were to come. True enough, Operation Backfire has claimed new arrests and indictments every month since the campaign was first announced last December, with a total of 16 people now under indictment, six of whom are in prison awaiting trial. Many of these individuals are facing more than a minimum of life in prison if they are convicted on all the charges heaped upon them.
However, Operation Backfire is but one highly prominent part of what is now widely called the Green Scare—an expression alluding to the ‘Red Scare’ of the 1940s-50s that was characterized by a government campaign of raids, arrests, agents provacateurs and legal prosecution against real and imagined communists, anarchists, and other radicals—which is to say, a campaign of intimidation and criminalization against dissent, now with a particular focus on the radical environmentalist movement. Aside from the raids of Operation Backfire, there have been a number of other arrests, convictions, indictments, grand jury witch hunts, and proposed legislation that show us the real scope of the State’s plans.
As we all know, the government serves to protect the interests of Business, and since 2001, has held the earth and animal liberation movements as a top domestic threat. The State, as well as various corporate special interest groups, have tried to call the economic sabotage that is but one tactic of earth and animal liberation groups, “eco-terrorism,” in a clear attempt to exploit both the fear and paranoia cultivated by the government post-9/11. It must be stressed that the direct action—in the form of economic sabotage—to stop the exploitation and destruction of the natural environment or animals has not resulted in one person ever being harmed. However, damages resulting from these actions have totaled around 100 million dollars combined. It is fairly obvious that the radical earth and animal liberation movements are being aggressively investigated, infiltrated, and incarcerated because they are above all, absolutely successful.
It is incredibly important to understand how this affects all of us, not just those of us who are in environmental or animal rights/liberation circles, but as anarchists, as radicals, and as individuals in resistance. In New York, it may be easy to see the Green Scare as something far away, something that does not affect us, something “out west.” However, a campaign to destroy one movement, one people, one threat, does not exist in isolation for long. It moves on to the next movement, the next people, the next threat, and it is a slippery slope indeed. Last month, an FBI official in Austin, in a lecture at the University of Texas Law School, listed the Austin branches of Indymedia, Food Not Bombs, and anarchists in general, as a potential “terrorism” threat. And just recently, the FBI has launched an investigation of Scott Crow, a co-founder of the Common Ground Collective in New Orleans.
The charges filed against the individuals in the Green Scare are meant to send a message to the rest of us. These cases are attempts to impede our collective ability to wage struggles against injustice. If we sit by and let repression build, it will weaken our ability to resist future persecution. We must set the course of history and prove that we can’t be intimidated, if for only one reason: that one day they may come for us.
But that certainly is not the only reason to be active in this fight against government oppression. We must not give in to the intimidation and fear that are the State’s real objectives, because besides attacking revolutionaries and radicals, repression attempts to squelch and sterilize dissent. Those in power know that it is not our actions themselves that pose a threat, but rather the possibility that non-activists will recognize radical action as something more than unconstructive or impossible. Our enemies want to scare people away from participating in radical action and supporting radical solutions, and to marginalize us further into small communities of rebels and revolutionaries.
The Green Scare is but the current focus of government repression. If we are to ever create a world made of our desires, we will need the solidarity and resistance of everyone. We cannot sit by and rationalize the nightmare of our fellow comrades as inevitable state repression, or romanticize action while shirking solidarity. After all, an injury to one, is an injury to all.
