Justice will ultimately prevail
RAGE (Radicals against Greed and Exploitation), our newly formed collective, makes its debut and hastens to build a bridge
By Jason Miller
As highly-respected Animal Rights philosopher Tom Regan has observed, those who truly embrace an animal rights and vegan ethic view nonhuman animals as friends and equals, recognizing that fundamental differences between species do not entitle one species to dominate, torture, and murder members of another. We anti-speciesists, who refuse to remain complicit or neutral in the insane war that the dominant culture wages against nonhuman animals, face a nearly constant struggle, including perpetual exposure to the macabre spectacle of our species’ barbarism toward our nonhuman brethren; discrimination for our spiritual beliefs; marginalization by an ignorant, misinformed majority of the human population; ridicule; arrest for legal activism via creative law enforcement; and draconian laws like the AETA to ensure that our hands are tied while vile corporations and blood-thirsty individuals rape, butcher, burn, boil, slash, stomp, carve, cut, beat, bash, smash, electrocute, shoot, blind, enslave, neglect, abuse, and eventually eat the rotting corpses of our friends.
It goes without saying that our friends, the nonhuman animals, suffer far more than we, the vegan abolitionists, do. But as their defenders, we agonize over the pain and death that they experience, while facing derision, exclusion, ridicule of our beliefs, disregard for our dietary needs, and the ever-looming specter of severe consequences for having the sheer audacity to speak out against abject cruelty and to stand up for defenseless nonhuman animals.
Meanwhile, we can take solace in the fact that while we are on a morally righteous mission, our enemy is merely acting on the depraved, narcissistic, hollow agenda drilled into their skulls by the social engineering of corporatism and consumerism. While the corporate-state complex and its brain-washed minions (who regularly gorge themselves with rotting animal flesh and bodily fluids, murder animals for food and “sport,” torture nonhuman sentients in the name of “science,” and park their adipose-cushioned posteriors in auditoriums to watch other animals “perform” for them) strut cockily about and project a smug confidence in their morally retarded positions, their ostensible courage is a false bravado enabled by the backing of the social, legal, political, and economic systems that buoy their sadistic, depraved, craven, and barbaric behavior. Most of them lack the will, commitment, and moral fortitude to sacrifice or struggle for something more meaningful than their own selfish agendas that they’ve been programmed to believe take precedence over virtually all other considerations. It’s “all about them” and in their narrow, myopic, and indoctrinated little worlds, their pleasure, comfort, satisfaction, and personal “rights” are all that matter.
These serial animal abusers are drunk with power, wielding it as clumsily as an over-grown toddler attempting to maneuver a massive sledge-hammer, blindly bashing anything or anyone in their way. Their essential moral rights to live free of others inflicting mental, emotional or bodily harm upon them; torturing them; enslaving them; or killing them are preserved by a deeply corrupt entity that is euphemistically called a “justice” system. Yet these empathy-deficient moral primitives disregard the essential rights of other sentient beings, including humans, unless it a) benefits them in some way or b) potential consequences scare these cowards into considering the rights of others.
In their narcissistic world premised on anthropocentrism and the religiously-endorsed “dominion” of “man” over womyn, nonhuman animals, children, and the Earth, their repugnant existences and actions are encouraged, perpetuated, protected, and rewarded. Their potential victims, and those with the chutzpah to stand up to these over-grown school-yard bullies, scramble to engage these overly empowered moral midgets using asymmetrical strategies, attacking them intellectually, politically, legally, economically, socially, and via both on-the-street activism and direct action tactics.
Fact is, despite the asinine distortions and stereotypes thrown out by haters of nearly all economic and social stripes (most of whom are too apathetic to vote, let alone undertake political philosophy or praxis-arm-chair quarterbacks so lethargic and engorged that they can scarcely wiggle their fat asses hard enough to rise up out of their aptly named “Lazy boys”), vegan abolitionists make tremendous emotional, financial, intellectual, and physical sacrifices AND take significant risk in fighting for our nonhuman brethren. What we lack in money, power, and sheer numbers, we make up for with our determination, our passion, and the moral righteousness of Animal Rights (and this premise will withstand any coherent, logical, or pseudo-logical assault upon it-see Chapter 4 of Tom Regan’s Empty Cages: Facing the Challenges of Animal Rights).
We can rest assured that justice will ultimately prevail and that the anthropocentrists’ over-confidence, apathy, moral turpitude, and lack of conviction will hasten and ensure the demise of the dominant paradigm of speciesism. Yet, as small as our numbers are relative to those who relentlessly immiserate and annihilate billions of nonhuman animals per annum, as we press to advance animal rights and liberation we need to heed Steve Best’s call to build bridges with other radical social justice movements. And our newly forged anarchist collective, RAGE (Radicals against Greed and Exploitation), will start by building an alliance with the LGBTA Rights Movement.
Arguably the most oppressed group amongst our species, members of the LGBTA community have been primed by our patriarchal, Calvinist, materialistic, exploitative, and barbaric system of monopoly capitalism to tap their capacities to empathize and fight back, both for others in their community and for individuals of other species. And as defenders, voices, and activists for the most oppressed sentient beings on the planet, we Animal Rights activists are prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with LGBTA’s as brothers and sisters, tenaciously opposing our mutual enemies: ignorance, barbarism, arrogance, subjugation, mean-spiritedness, prejudice, and moral primitivism in all its hideous manifestations.
Ultimately, empathy-deficient moral barbarians like Fred Phelps and Ted Nugent are cut and sewn from the same ragged, soiled cloth with the same cheap, flimsy thread. They are self-hating, sociopaths who take sadistic, orgasmic delight in inflicting pain and suffering on those with a limited capacity to fight back. And once united, our two movements will mutually oppose human excrement like Phelps and Nugent.
RAGE’s passion for social justice and our rage against the morally rotted status quo are palpable, further extending the expansive plot of common ground which we share with gays, queers, transgenders, lesbians, bisexuals and the others comprising that heavily oppressed segment of the human population. Both Animal Rights activists and Gay Rights activists are driven by a fierce thirst for the quenching elixirs of justice, equality, and dignity. Why wouldn’t we align with one another?
Equally intense passions and common foes aside, RAGE is naturally poised to be a leading force in fusing the two movements simply because some of the people who comprise our collective are already engaged in both battles, as they are both LGBTA and vegans. If and when they come out with their sexual orientation is their choice. But rest assured; they are amongst us.
As tenacious guerilla activists in this nightmarish 10,000 year-old war on other animals (it’s a wonder they’re not ALL extinct yet), we at RAGE recognize the strategic necessity of aligning the causes of Animal and Gay Rights. Once we’ve succeeded in wedding the two movements, we will be poised to inflict some serious damage on the indestructible barriers of homophobia and speciesism!
It won’t be total liberation, but it’ll be a long stride in that direction…
RAGE will never surrender, and as our recent communiqué to our 20,000 strong network of allies reads, “We will not be intimidated!”
RAGE is Sunil Potnis, Judy Levy, George Albayan, Colin Biroc, Kyle Kellerman, Stacey Rakic, Jason Miller, Kiantha Shadduck, Lane Ferrante, Dominique Landis, Michael Bishop, Jennifer Bowman, and Ricky Setticase