How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm

Author:Andreas Malm
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Verso Books

It should be noted that this argument is not tailored for the climate crisis, which receives no mention.

Second, there must be grounds for believing that mellower tactics have led nowhere, and that this lack of progress is itself a symptom of the structural depth of the ills. Third, there should be, at least ideally, some higher charter, convention or edict the wrongdoers have flouted and violated and that the activists can refer to. Thanks to three decades of institutionalised logorrhoea, there are no scarcities here: from the UNFCCC to the Paris Agreement, not to speak of the ceremoniously promulgated national pledges and plans (at least in Europe), whole libraries’ worth of covenants and consensuses have been assembled for climate activists to pursue the felons with. But Smith concedes that all three criteria need not be fully satisfied. ‘The severity or urgency of the harm’ may be such that direct action needs no further warrant.

There is nothing madly aberrant about this radicalism; rather, the literature is replete with similar deductions. Nor is Smith alone in claiming that the right to resistance at some point can morph into a duty. In fact, once the gravity of the climate crisis is duly recognised, it is difficult to see what ethical precepts could be marshalled to keep that morphing at bay and uphold a ban on destroying the causative property. To date, no case has been made for the precedence of the physical integrity of CO2-emitting devices.

What of terrorism? We have seen Lanchester speculate about a scenario where people scratch SUVs with their keys and subsume it under that term. Is that appropriate? Few other concepts are as loaded with ideology or coloured by a particular moment; ‘violence’ has a history as old as the mists of time, but ‘terrorism’ can now hardly be uttered without the likes of Donalds Rumsfeld and Trump ventriloquising. Less reason, then, to make concessions to ordinary usage. If terrorism is to have any analytical substance, its core definition must be the deliberately indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians for the purpose of instilling terror or something very nearly like it. We have rejected the claim of Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya to be nonviolent – should we also label them terrorists? On this definition, it would be risible.

In just war theory, the differentia specifica of terrorism, the particular moral transgression that blackens its name, is the failure to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants when killing people. Reznicek and Montoya didn’t kill combatants. They killed no one, injured nobody, touched not a hair on anyone’s head, and so they must be placed at the farthest remove from the category of terrorism. Someone who would brand them terrorists would in all likelihood refuse to extend the term to people who invest or indulge in CO2-emitting devices, thus recommending that acts that wound no living beings be deemed terrorism and acts that actually, certifiably kill people be absolved. Such conceptual abuse from the guardians of business-as-usual would not be in the slightest surprising.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.