Monthly Archives: June 2012

Farm Implements Can Also Be Used to Fight Wars

While gathering knowledge for yesterday’s post, I came across footage of an encounter between environmental activists and out-of-work fishermen who had been let loose on an arctic glacier to bludgeon seals. The environmentalists started filming the seal hunters going about their job, a tactic which succeeded in provoking the sealers to react with violence. I was surprised that these men, who were simple fishermen, would behave so menacingly. I can understand getting angry, but threatening harm to another person is another matter. Perhaps they felt shamed about what they were doing and wished to resist that impulse by asserting themselves in an agressive manner. It may be worth noting that they were holding tools in their hands designed to cause fatal damage to living things: Hooks and clubs. In another context maybe these could be considered weapons. But they are not weapons; they are tools for working. However, if one’s work is butchery, it might also seem like a normal and well-practiced thing to to apply them in combat.

Since we live in an age in which manual labor is a rapidly vanishing phenomenon, few of us are accustomed to using tools and implements which, though designed for productive purposes, could easily be used for injuring and maiming people. Those who do work with chainsaws, powerful construction equipment, threshing harvesters are aware of how dangerous they can be because in a single instant of inattentiveness these machines could mangle them for life. We use tools to shape and alter raw material. This cannot be done without destroying the old form somewhat to suit the new. For this reason, tools can also be dangerous.


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Throughout history, in times of civil conflict or religious fanaticism, farmers have abandoned their crops and marched to war with their pitchforks, wood axes and threshing flails. A pre-industrial farmer had an entire armory available to him, because he does with the land and to his animals is every bit as vicious and destructive as pitched battle. He has knives for slaughtering pigs, whips for the horses. He plows furloughs into the earth with an iron blade. Countless times throughout history, these implements have been repurposed, with varying degrees of success, for war. When Peter the Hermit inspired great swaths of Europe’s peasantry to march on the Holy Land in the People’s Crusade, his army was reportedly so poorly outfitted that when Hungarian authorities confiscated 16 suits of armor from his ranks, it was considered a major loss to his arsenal. In 1381, Wat Tyler led a force of Essex farmers into London and seized the Tower within a day, though almost no one in his army owned a sword.

In the Illiad, because his audience is composed primarily of peaceful landowning farmers and their families, Homer employs pastoral similes to describe the battlefields of Troy and the movements of Greek armies. He compares the Argive column to a swarm of honey bees and their rushing of the field likened to winds running through a wheat crop. Champions are illustrated figuratively in the same way a Greek might describe a prized bull. The poetics of Homer bridge the gap of centuries between peace and war and enliven dull, rural life with the spectacle of great events. But inasmuch as violence and brutality are a regular component of human existence, agriculture and warfare possess a least a few common traits.

Going to War Against Fisherman

Last week I made mention of the International Whaling Commission’s moratorium on whaling, which has now been in effect for over 25 years. I observed that Japanese and Norwegian fisherman regularly violate the moratorium and continue to hunt whales on what they term “research” expeditions. The moratorium excludes traditional whale hunts for certain native tribes in the North Atlantic; however, the quotas for these traditional hunts have inflated from a few dozen to several hundred whales as the black market demand for whale meat has grown with the moratorium.

In the absence of standardized law and enforcement on international waters, militant environmental groups with abolitionist views toward destructive fishing practices have taken to harassing fishing vessels found to be in violation of resolutions of the United Nations Environmental Programme. Dangerous sea battles have resulted when the two sides have met in the open ocean. The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society documents many of its confrontations with fishermen in documentary films, books and now a reality television show that airs on Animal Planet.
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The other day, while I was at my job and supposed to be working, I watched an hour or so of one of the Sea Shepherd documentaries. I was surprised at how belligerent the fishermen were whom they encountered. I watched footage of fishing trawlers attacking Greenpeace vessels that were present at whale catches to peacefully observe. Many of the Sea Shepherd people were former Greenpeace members who had grown tired of the group’s program on unconditional non-violence. The Sea Shepherds ram whaling ships they meet at sea. They sabotage ships they find in port. They board small fishing boats and take the fishermen hostage. This article by Richard Spillman for the Huffington Post is fairly representative of the left’s disapproval of the Sea Shepherd Conservancy’s militant tactics. I can’t imagine that the Sea Shepherds could even begin to care about what the political mainstream thinks about what they are doing. The whole basis for abandoning nonviolence is that you no longer have to worry about public relations. You are no longer waiting for the public to hear you and to react in favor of your agenda. Violent protest effects its own change. When the Sea Shephards encounter a drift net at sea, they do not report it to the coast guard or local media and wait for the conditions that caused or allowed the fisherman who cast the net to change. They pull the net up immediately and ambush the boat when they come back to collect it.

You can donate to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society here. Since the SSCS is considered a terroristic organization and engages in destruction of property, your donation will not be tax deductible.