Vegans Must Illegally Overthrow Society to Save the World

by KATHERINE TIMPF 
A professor at the University of Texas at El Paso wrote a manifesto saying that animal-rights activists must rise up and commit “illegal raids” and “sabotage attacks” in order to save the world from a “mass extinction.”

In a 2009 piece for the Animal Liberation Front titled “Manifesto for Radical Abolitionism: Total Liberation By Any Means Necessary,” associate professor of philosophy Steven Best says that groups like PETA are just not radical or progressive enough. After all, they work with corporations (boo!) “in order to regulate, not eliminate, the ongoing nonhuman animal holocaust.”

Best explains that capitalism is “destructive,” the state is a “corrupt tool,” and keeping animals enslaved will definitely lead to a “mass extinction” — and so basically it’s just not enough to go vegan or adopt a rescue puppy.

What does he suggest we do instead?

Well . . . We endorse a form of abolition that (1) defends the use of high-pressure direct action tactics, along with illegal raids, rescues, and sabotage attacks; (2) views capitalism as an inherently irrational, exploitative, and destructive system, and sees the state as a corrupt tool whose function is to advance the economic and military interests of the corporate domination system and to repress opposition to its agenda; (3) has a broad, critical understanding of how different forms of oppression are interrelated, seeing human animal, nonhuman animal, and earth liberation as inseparable projects; and, thus, (4) promotes an anti-capitalist alliance politics with other rights, justice, and liberation movements who share the common goal of dismantling all systems of hierarchical domination and rebuilding societies through decentralization and democratization processes.

Now, in case you’re thinking his pitch sounds a little too intense, he insists that it’s absolutely necessary in order to continue to exist — which I’ll admit does sounds like a pretty important cause:

We must link the liberation of other animals to human and Earth liberation, and build a revolutionary movement strong enough to vanquish capitalist hegemony and to remake society without the crushing loadstones of anthropocentrism, speciesism, patriarchy, racism, classism, statism, heterosexism, ableism, and every other pernicious form of hierarchical domination.

Humanity may not succeed in this endeavor, but it is one that we must undertake. It is no longer the classical choice between ‘revolution or barbarism,’ but now that of revolution or ecological collapse and mass extinction.

Oh. Well, okay then. Best did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

— Katherine Timpf is a reporter for National Review Online.

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