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Pissing in the cornflakes
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Originally Posted by willravel
This thread is showing me that a lot of people out there don't understand protesters at all, and it's really frustrating. I'm 100% serious.
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Greenpeace: Yes To Violence
From ConsumerFreedom.com
Jun 24, 2002
Greenpeace is "the radical environmental group with a penchant for publicity," Amy Ridenour of the National Center for Public Policy Research writes in a Contra Costa Times commentary. In some of its latest exploits, Greenpeace joined "with a number of domestic eco-terrorist groups including… the Ruckus Society and the Black Bloc anarchists" for an anti-corporate demonstration in Dallas recently.
The Ruckus Society runs training camps that teach wannabe anarchists "police confrontation strategies," "street blockades," and "urban climbing and rappelling," among other things. Ruckus activists are generally known for wearing masks, assuming aliases, and giving false names to arresting police officers, and the organization has been linked to the Black Bloc anarchists who smashed up stores, restaurants, and private property during demonstrations in Seattle, Washington, and other cities.
Greenpeace tries to cloak its association with such extremists, in the interest of keeping its respectable veneer -- and $23 million-plus annual income -- intact. But those who know Greenpeace best know the truth. Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore calls his former comrades "a band of scientific illiterates who use Gestapo tactics to silence people who wish to express their views in a civilized forum."
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Dr. Moore is someone I personally respect and seems to understand whats going on in the environmental movement. What drove me from it in the first place. Of course now that hes not waving the anarchist flag hes considered nothing but a corporate shill, but then who would have thought the best way to help the environment was to work with the existing power structures to make it better when you could be painting 'no nukes' while pirating vessels on the great lakes. They call him an 'eco-traitor' I call him a grown up. Perhaps it coincidence he left the folds of the environmental left (though then it wasn't thought of that way) the same year I saw the light, perhaps thats when things finally got 'bad'.
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As Moore sees it, the composition of Greenpeace has changed dramatically since his heyday. He says the fall of communism brought an influx of anti-corporate extremism to the environmental movement because, "suddenly, the international peace movement had a lot less to do. Pro-Soviet groups in the West were discredited. Many of their members moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their eco-Marxism and pro-Sandinista sentiments.
"A lot of those in the peace movement were anti-American and, to an extent, pro-Soviet. By virtue of their anti-Americanism, they tended to sometimes favor the communist approach. A lot of those people, a lot of those social activists, moved into the environmental movement once the peace movement was no longer relevant." Social activists, he suggests, "are now using the rhetoric of environmentalism to promote other collectivist agendas, such as class struggle -- which I personally believe is a legitimate area, but I don't believe it's legitimate to mix it up with environmentalism."
In addition to the activist influx, those who joined early on and remain in the group today have become more radicalized. Moore explains that as society adopted many of its original social and economic goals, the environmental movement "abandoned science and logic and moved to the left. Unfortunately, environmentalism is still defined by the media and by our culture as an adversarial role. If you want to remain in that adversarial role while society is adopting many of your more reasonable positions, you have to become more extreme in your positions."
So members with a more radical mind-set ascended to power -- "monkey-wrenchers, tree-spikers and boat-scuttlers," he says, many sporting fatigue uniforms and red berets. Intolerance and extremism became the norms, the Greenpeace founder continues, and the organization adopted a policy of preaching "fear not fact."
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Who would have thought the environmental movements would be a victim of the end of the cold war, but I can't fault his logic based on what I saw myself at the time.
Fear not fact, the montra of the modern 'environmentalist'.
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Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host
Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.
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