Breaking Unjust Laws: AETA, Fugitive Slave Acts, and Oppression Connections

Continued from part 1, “Breaking Unjust Laws: Clarence Darrow and Inherit the Wind.”

In his essay “Theory of Non-Resistance,” Clarence Darrow wrote, “In modern society the controlling forces arrange things as they want them, and provide that certain things are criminal.” And in our society, where the majority do not object to oppression of and violence toward our fellow animals — and indeed, where many even profit from, and much of society is based on, that oppression and violence — that translates into unjust laws protecting violence and criminalizing, of all things, acts of compassion. Exploitation, abuse, and killing are accepted; rescue, investigation, and free speech opposing the oppression can be prosecuted.

One of my favorite quotations from Darrow fits well with his “controlling forces” statement and is oh-so-relevant for the animal rights movement (and much else) in today’s climate:

Free and open criticism of all public acts, measures and policies is the only safeguard of liberty. And no remedy can be found for the unjust, unequal, oppressive laws under which we live except through public agitation and action. (“The Influences That Make the Law”)

Green Scare laws such as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act don’t just criminalize efforts to agitate and act against injustice and unjust laws. They take that criminalization to the extreme, painting as “terrorists” those who would challenge the status quo and making illegal and “terroristic” even those actions that are truly and entirely nonviolent, leaving animal rights activists in a position where they must agitate not only against the original laws oppressing our fellow animals but also against the laws layered atop those original laws, meant to oppress animal advocates themselves, to keep them from challenging the status quo.

Some of the parallels between the animal rights movement and the antislavery movement are astonishing when examined, as I learned this year while copyediting an encyclopedia that covered the U.S. antislavery movement (including its internal battles regarding strategies and goals) in detail. And when I hear about animal rights activists being arrested or threatened with arrest for laboratory break-ins and rescues, for taking a languishing dog off a chain and to safety, for breaking into a farm and documenting the conditions or rescuing animals, for failing to cooperate with authorities or adhere to unjust or illogical laws, or for lending aid to those who take these actions — for merely engaging in acts of compassion or defense of an innocent, oppressed, and abused other — it’s difficult for me not to think of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (which went steps further than the similarly named act of 1793). Under penalty of fines and jail time, the law obligated even those officials who adamantly opposed human slavery to aid in the capture and return of runaway slaves and forbade anyone from giving aid to a runaway, or “fugitive,” slave with shelter, with food, or by any other means, even overriding Northern states’ personal liberty laws, passed in response to the 1793 act.

The controversial 1850 law was passed and enforced to give comfort and protection to powerful, moneyed Southern slave owners, who were worried about the progress that anti-human-slavery abolitionists were making in changing people’s view of slavery and about the financial cost to them (via the loss of their valuable slave “property”) when Northerners gave aid to runaway slaves. Does this sound familiar? The AETA, of course, was passed to protect the profits of — and at the urging of — the powerful pharmaceutical/biomedical and animal agribusiness lobbies.

Social justice movements that are glad to support, and draw parallels to, other social justice movements often treat the animal rights movement as if it isn’t connected to all the other battles against injustice, as if it’s markedly different. It isn’t. All oppression comes from the same place, the same mindset, and the oppressor-oppressed relationships play out in the same ways. Things that have happened before are happening still; the victims may look different, but the injustices are the same.

You can’t truly be for peace and nonviolence and compassion while still supporting unnecessary violence toward and oppression of our fellow animals, which in turn creates human injustices as well, from the role eating animals plays in global hunger to the exploitation and endangerment of slaughterhouse workers. And patriarchal, oppressive systems won’t be dismantled as long as the most oppressive system on the planet is supported and propped up, in rhetoric and in daily choices, even by the progressives who champion their commitment to battling oppression.

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Photo of rusty chains uploaded to stock.xchng by sundstrom

Note: I should be clear on something. I am not among those very few who draw parallels to the fight for the abolition of human slavery and then suggest that because physical violence against actual people occurred during that movement, it is justified in our movement too. When I say killing breeds killing and violence breeds violence, as I often do, I mean it, across the board. Self-defense in the face of imminent danger is one thing; setting out with the intention to seriously physically harm or kill is, for me, a whole other matter. I am also absolutely not suggesting that there are animal advocates out there actually doing this. Indeed, the conversation about activist repression right now is based on the fact that animal rights activists aren’t taking these violent actions, yet are being labeled as terrorists as if they were. I merely want to make clear that my drawing parallels does not mean I want to see everything that happened in the anti-human-slavery movement happen in this one at some point. After all, that movement involved a civil war.

More about the parallels (some uncanny) between the abolitionist movement on behalf of humans and the abolitionist movement on behalf of nonhuman animals to come in time.