Being non-violent isn’t the same as passive acceptance or asking the animal industry if it wouldn’t mind please going out of business. This is not a world of polite entreaty. Force is the way of the world, and all of our systems are kept in place by force. As animal activist vegans we can’t fight force with force. We have to be more subtle than that.
If enough activists are committed to other approaches, considering and trying them, we’ll see how powerful non-violent action can be.
If there are ways to approach this awful problem (omnivorousness), using less ‘in-yer-face’ methods, the theory is surely that as soon as these methods are seen to work they’ll catch on. There will be a snowballing effect.
By accepting that violence, in any form, is ineffective when dealing with the general public majority, we bow to a largely untried force. It’s a long shot I admit, to put all our effort into altering attitude rather than people’s eating habits. However it’s taking a punt on ‘truth-force’, backing the after-my-own-lifetime selflessness over the short sharp burst satisfaction of ‘being aggressive’. Using ‘truth-force’ to do our work for us, it may be slower but it will be truer. It will more honestly reflect the genuinely matured adult. By ‘going non-violent’ we respect timing and placing; we respect the reality, that we’re a tiny minority dealing with a vast majority who are not yet sympathetic to our cause.
What can we do? Set fire to fur-farms or be a consistent source of subtle pressure?
Thursday, February 3, 2011
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