Why Animal Rights is like the Islamist threat

I said in my last post that there is an alarming similarity between the animal rights movement and Islamism. I went on to list how it is already affecting our lives for the worse and how its ultimate goals would undermine our civilisation in many profound ways. I want to consider five specific aspects of the threat which seem to me to be shared by the two movements.

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FIRST, like Islamism, on which there is no room for negotiation, the terms of absolute submission being antithetical to Western civilisation, animal rights is an ideology with no room for compromise. It cannot be appeased, but is an appetite for reform that grows by what it feeds on, scenting victory and pressing any advantage it is given. The government and the police have been aiming at tactical calm by using piecemeal appeasment and a low profile. This is a disastrous strategy, allowing the movement to grow without serious attempts to destroy it in the hope that it is a civilisational phase that will vanish of its own accord. Animal rights is a worked-out philosophy, courtesy of extremely clever but dangerously misguided individuals, notably Peter Singer and a Christian apologist, Andrew Linzey. It is not a generous outward extension of the rights we find inalienable to any human person to other animals, as the Great Ape Project implies. It is a radical smashing of the special value we place upon the human person, as Peter Singer's article in Foreign Policy magazine, dreaming of an end to the sanctity of human life with thirty-five years, makes clear. This is not an additive to our moral landscape, it is an earthquake that reshapes it utterly, so that there is no protection for people from a chilly utilitarian calculus and the death of humans may be weighed against presumed harm to animals and found the ethically superior option. That position, so seductive, so full of good intentions and so swiftly leading us into hell is one that must be robustly fought against at an intellectual level. It must be understood as diametrically opposed to a view that accords special dignity to persons, that puts humanity at the centre of our moral concern, that says a single life is too valuable to be put in the scales of a revolutionary project. That is unChristian and definitely unHumanist. It is a repulsive ideology that feels cosy as you put it on - rather like wearing a fur inside out so it cossets your skin even as the world is confronted with bloody horror. You couldn't come to a compromise with Nazism's rejection of the humanity of Jews, homosexuals, Slavs and blacks. You can't with those who want a worldwide umma. You can't with this either.

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SECOND, and even worse: like Islamism, this ideology that cannot be accommodated is also one that permits violence in its cause. As stated above, when a position destroys any special moral status of the individual human being, a utilitarian calculus may swiftly arise in which that individual may be caused to suffer or die for a larger good. For those who equate the treatment of animals with the Holocaust, as they do (including the otherwise very talented writer, J.M. Coetzee, who suggests it may be a crime of stupefying proportions), it is not surprising at all that they are willing to carry out vicious acts to stop us. This is enormously important. People think that animal rights violence is an unfortunate extreme wing of a legitimate movement, such as any group may suffer from. Peter Singer uses this argument to distance himself from their activities. But the point is that his arguments are precisely what gives their actions their ethical ground; he may make a different utilitarian calculation, but the idea that it comes down to cold-hearted sums is his -- his arguments make these actions possible, make people able to square them with their consciences. As a contrast, consider anti-abortion violence in America. Now here is a case where people again genuinely believe that a crime which they compare to the Holocaust is taking place. They do so because of Christian belief. Yet that belief also tells them that they must not murder, that they should turn the other cheek, that every human life is of special value: it does not legitimate violence as a solution. It is very hard to get from that ethical system to murder, even when you sense an appalling crime. That is why, although people have, terribly, been killed by anti-abortion terrorists, it is not so large and dangerous a movement as the animal rights terror.

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THIRDLY, in practice, the movement has formed a very dangerous and potent alliance. We have seen the theoretical dangers: that the animal rights movement is a philosophy that is incommensurable with Western civilisation and one that permits its followers to use violence to achieve its victory; that it believes a crime equivalent to the Holocaust lies at the heart of all our lives and seeks to remake the world on its own twisted model of virtue. In actual practice, this has drawn a surprising combination of followers, both very sophisticated, wrongheaded thinkers and emotional hotheads, all bound by a constitutional bias against the status quo ante. This is an explosive mixture: revolutionary thinkers divorced from the practical life and alienated hysterics who will happily put their thoughts into practice. Islamism works through old men with a monstrous, driving idea sending young fools from the volatile Arab street or alienated, paranoid corners of the West to kill and die for them. People think of animal rights terrorists as lone nutjobs, but they are a fusion of knife-wielding zealots and prophets of blood--a lethal combination.

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FOURTHLY, this dangerous mix of vicious action and righteous justification has learnt a very powerful tactic just as Islamism did. Both ideologies feel justified in utter ruthlessness, and are therefore able to attack those tangentially connected with those they consider their enemies. For Islamism, those in the twin towers; for animal rights terrorists, a nursery used by the children of those connected to animal experimentation. The nursery changed its policy and gave a good demonstration of just how powerful this tactic is. Firstly, it is extremely brutal, putting those who are innocent by any stretch of the imagination into the firing line. This introduces a deep sense of terror, a sense that anyone could be a target and all because of a tightly-located primary target which they then are driven to wish away to get the danger away from them. Second, by choosing peripherally-involved companies and individuals, it challenges those who are most ideologically "soft", a relatively easy target in which to sow disquiet and a sense that there must be something in their position or they wouldn't so vehement in its pursuit, and thereby to gain their acquiesence. Thirdly, it is almost impossible to protect against because it spreads the web of potential targets so wide. If one supplier is protected, they will try the local pub and so on. Islamism has profited from attacking soft targets from embassies in Africa to the Tube in London. Animal rights terror has learnt the same tactic and there is no reason to see why they should stop: they are already seeing it succeed.

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FIFTHLY and finally, not only do animal rights extremists hold a philosophy that cannot be accommodated, that permits the killing and torment of people in its cause, not only has the movement in practice formed a dangerous coalition between the wickedly clever and the brutally direct, not only has it learnt and implemented a tactic of soft targetting that has proven highly effective for Islamism and in their own hands, but they are also, again like the Islamists, profiting from a very modern possibility: asymmetric warfare. The demonic Davids of the animal rights movement are able to topple corporate Goliaths on the side of right because they are a loosely distributed network of highly committed individuals bound by modern communication technologies, especially the internet, taking on tightly organised corporations guided by their responsibility to the health and safety of their workers and to the profits of shareholders. Only an individual can have a conscience, can take a stand not in its immediate interest for a larger principle, actually putting itself in danger to do so. As the Danish cartoons of Muhammed proved (see the link in my earlier posting, or view them here), a corporation cannot take a stand and publish the cartoons, even if it wants to, because it cannot presume to put its staff at risk. Boris Johnson admitted in a diary column that this was why the Spectator had not published them, in the same edition as the editorial pronounced high-mindedly on why it would have been the wrong thing to do on entirely other grounds. To say you will keep doing what your company does even when it puts your staff and customers at risk is extraordinarily difficult and this asymmetric power allows a few committed individuals caught in an intellectual and emotional error of terrible proportions to dictate to the New York Stock Exchange, just as those of another movement can challenge the preminent might of the US army. The only means to resist the T-shirt row would be for a large group of individuals willing to wear a T-shirt with the cartoon on to walk down the streets together. That is very hard to do, but the only way to restore symmetry to the battle. Those under siege must discover a value system for which individuals in large numbers can decide they are willing to put themselves on the line, as their opponents do. Unfortunately, political correctness and multiculturalism encourage self-censorship, which is just what we do not need at such a time, and may be part of the reason such malevolent groups are springing up: because they can do so unchallenged, until they become impossible to ignore, by which time they are also almost impossible to stop. It is why the Pro-Test march in Oxford was so important and why it came so late. It is also why it must only be the beginning. For these five reasons, you should take animal rights very seriously. The violence may only be carried out by a few, but the justification comes from the heart of the movement and the extemists swim in a supporting sea of those who share their radical goals but are held back by the folk memories of conscience that have stayed with them from their former membership of civilised and humane thought. We need to win them back.