This clip is about two years old, but it’s too good to keep to myself. At The Connecticut Forum, Ann Coulter says her hero is Joseph McCarthy (I mean, what’s not to love? Blacklists, naming names, ruining lives– a true American icon whose legacy lives on). She then says if she could be anyone in history, she’d be FDR so she could stop passage of the new deal. Al Franken handles her dumbassery perfectly.

This is a great video by Naomi Wolf that pulls together many of the issues discussed at GreenIsTheNewRed, in a much broader context (and it’s a great follow-up to last week’s post “5 Reasons Why Republicans Should Care About the Government Labeling Activists “Terrorists”).

Wolf is the author of “The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot.” A particularly relevant quote:

“What always happens in a fascist shift is that the state will start by abusing people that no one in the mainstream really identifies with much. In Germany it was anarchists, communists, homosexuals…then what always happens is that there’s a blurring of the lines, and the noose starts to catch up more and more members of mainstream society, and it’s always the same cast of characters: us.”

The recent FBI arrests of animal rights activists as “terrorists” for chalking sidewalks, protesting and making fliers marks a drastic turning point in the Green Scare, and in the history of this country. The government and corporations are clearly hoping to set a legal precedent for the sweeping power of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. But these arrests are much more than a test case, or an isolated incident of ambitious prosecution.

These arrests are part of a 5-step process the FBI and other government agencies are using to overtly label First Amendment activity as “terrorism.”

The process has worked something like this:

1. Label. The first step was to label illegal direct action by groups like the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front as “terrorism.” The FBI, corporations, industry groups and politicians began doing this in the 1980s, through media campaigns, think tank reports and legislation like the Animal Enterprise Protection Act.
2. Guilt by association. Next, these groups expanded their smear campaign to anyone who ideological supports direct action and economic sabotage. They began labeling the above-ground supporters of those movements as “terrorists.” A turning point was the conviction of the SHAC 7 for running a controversial website that vocally supported a wide range of tactics.
3. More guilty by association. This is now. The guilt by association is spreading from those who vocally support direct action (and, like the SHAC 7, perhaps even publish anonymous communiqués) to those who are merely lawfully protesting as part of the same campaign. In the SHAC 7 case, the government argued that the defendants were “conspiring” to promote illegal activity by running a website. In these recent arrests, the government is arguing that the First Amendment activity itself is “terrorism” because it’s part of a campaign that involves illegal tactics.
4. Expand the net. With the latest arrests, the government is still trying to play up the fact that illegal actions have happened recently in California, including bombings that have been recklessly attributed to animal rights activists. The next step is to completely drop that pretext. In other words, the next step is to go after people who are using their First Amendment rights and are not engaging in home protests, chalking sidewalks or wearing masks. This is the same expansion of the net that happened during the Red Scare: targeting writers, speakers, journalists, and public figures. I feel strange writing this but, in many ways, the next step is to go after people like me.
5. Repeat. This process will be repeated for different organizations and different types of people (activists, non-profit leaders, writers) and it will be repeated for other social movements. The government is not establishing these legal and legislative precedents simply to abandon them once the animal rights “radicals” are imprisoned. The legal latticework will be used against the next social movement, and the next, and the next. This has happened in every era of government repression throughout history: once those in power discover tools for silencing one opposition group, they never stop there.

In analyzing a process like this, it should be very clear that I don’t mean to imply, in any way, that this process is inevitable. The FBI is formulaic in how it cracks down on protest movements—we can see the patterns throughout U.S. history. The responses of activists and everyday people, though, need not follow any formula. The future is fluid. We have the power to intervene in this process—through education, community building, media outreach, lobbying, and the courts—and we must do so immediately, swiftly, and forcefully.

A well-known author, speaker and artist in the radical environmental movement has become the target of another “Green Scare” grand jury witch hunt.

The grand jury is investigating six “eco-terrorism” cases in Pennsylvania. The actions by the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front, in 2002 and 2003, caused about $1.5 million in damage, including the release of animals from fur farms and the burning of a construction crane.

Kevin Tucker is a green anarchist, or anarcho-primitivist, who has been very public about his views on industrial civilization and the destruction of the environment. He isn’t accused of committing these crimes. But he was hauled before a grand jury because the FBI says they believe he might have information about the saboteurs.

So, what’s the problem? These actions were clearly illegal. And the government is simply doing their job by investigating, right?

The problem is that grand juries are routinely used in political cases to force people to talk about their political beliefs and political associations. To that end, grand jury targets frequently include the most public and visible activists, those considered “leaders.”

Kevin Tucker fits that bill (here’s a profile of Tucker, “Wild Times Ahead”). He’s been public, visible, outspoken, and, to the government at least, controversial. He has spoken at events with authors John Zerzan and Derrick Jensen, and took part in Total Liberation Fest (a conference that was the subject of quite a bit of scare-mongering in 2004). For instance, Tucker wrote in Green Anarchy:

“The end of civilization is coming and I believe it will be in our lifetime. I can’t say how it will end, but things will get much worse before they get better. Those holding power now won’t go down without a fight… Our response must be fitting.”

Tucker appeared before the grand jury for about 20 minutes, and nobody–not the Feds, not the defense, not Tucker–will comment on what he said. All proceedings are secret. (Which is another way that grand juries are used to disrupt social movements: if someone appears before a grand jury, others are left to wonder what, if anything, was said, and who, if anyone, will be next. Appearing before a grand jury fosters distrust and speculation).

The use of grand juries to harass, intimidate and railroad people with controversial views isn’t unique to the environmental and animal rights movements. It’s a government tactic used, for instance, during the Red Scare as well. To give you an idea of just how secretive, and corrupt, grand juries can be in political cases, check out this Red Scare example.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, and they were executed for it in 1953. Now, it has come out that a key prosecution witness, Ethel’s younger brother, lied under pressure from prosecutors. He turned on his own sister in exchange for saving his own skin, and spending 10 years in prison. (Sound familiar?)

But get this: all these years later, he still wants this grand jury testimony to remain secret, and a judge ruled in his favor. As the BBC reports:

US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein said the public’s right to know was outweighed by the tradition of grand jury secrecy.

“He may be a scoundrel, he may be a hypocrite, he may be a liar,” Judge Hellerstein said. But he added, “It’s no easy task to compare the value of accountability with grand jury secrecy.”

UPDATE 9/15/08: Check out this Erie Times-News editorial on “eco-terrorism.” It seems that to the editors, the fact that Tucker was hauled before a grand jury is guilty by association….

Tucker, a writer and public speaker, calls himself a “rewilding human being.” His aim is to free the world from civilization and to return to a primitive existence. That’s his prerogative.

But it’s also our prerogative to remind the public that it’s a crime to set fires and destroy property for the sake of what the perpetrators think is a greater social good.

Those who commit these acts, under cover of night, are rightly called terrorists.

What do you think? Should Tucker have appeared before the grand jury? Post a comment…

Another reason to oppose the “eco-terrorism” rhetoric, and “Homegrown Terrorism” legislation, is that it eerily paves the way for things like this. I started using the analogy between the Red Scare and Green Scare simply to make a larger point, and it has been truly frightening to see the specific similarities between the two, right down to rolling back habeas corpus, creating black lists, and using parallel language.

From The San Francisco Chronicle:

A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the long-time director of the FBI, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty…

Hoover wanted President Harry Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The FBI would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover compiled over many years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven percent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.

Only 12,000, J. Edgar? Puhleeeze. You’ve got nothing on the Bush administration. 755,000 and counting, baby.

[And yep, that's J. Edgar Hoover with O.J. Simpson, courtesy of this website.]

Al Gore’s “Live Earth” is sending out emails with the tagline “Is green the new red?” (about sustainable Valentine’s Day gifts). [Thanks Drew!] And this month’s issue of Outside has an article, “Red is the New Green” about environmental issues in Cuba. This, on top of the Red Scare/Green Scare confusion I noted a while back (be advised, Patrick Swayze jokes are after the link). Clearly, you all have made GreenIsTheNewRed.com so popular that Al, Outside and crew are trying to ride some coattails. Right? Right.

On a serious note, sorry for the lack of posts lately. I was out in WA for part of the Briana Waters trial and then came down with a really bad fever and have been out for the count. I hope to have some new stuff up this weekend, and more on Waters’ case.

I have a new article in Counterpunch on how the government landed a conviction of nonviolent activists on “terrorism” charges. Check it out and please let me know what you think!

Here’s an excerpt highlighted by the good folks at Food Fight:

“It’s not enough to cowardly distance ourselves from the ‘eco-terrorists,’ as many did during the Red Scare. That won’t protect us. It’s up to progressive activists to stand with the defendants, and say loud and clear that ‘terrorism’ can’t be batted around in political games. Speaking out against this government smear campaign doesn’t mean we’re balaclava-wearing animal liberationists: it means we know we could be the next communists.

I mean, terrorists.”