The Dangers of Anti-Activism Media

Jun 08, 2020

"The people will believe what the media tells them they believe."
-George Orwell

Connections

After the tragic death of George Floyd and as protests began across the nation (and the world), I found startling parallels between the media's coverage of Black Lives Matter and animal rights protests. Mainly, the use of fearmongering and vitriol to "other" the protestors and make their cause seem radical. But when the same things happen in other countries, they are quick to blame the government as the culprits oppressing their citizens into compliance with their corruption. To be clear, I don't fully support the looting and arson or the destruction of property of persons unrelated to the issue. And I also have concerns with gathering large groups of people to protest while we're in the middle of a pandemic, but I understand the need to act in response to this tragedy.

The vast majority of human beings don't want to protest; we just want things to be right, to have justice. Only in response to an extreme injustice will we take to the streets to voice our anger, as is our right by law. What I mean to say is that protestors don't simply wake up one day with a desire to create chaos and upend the world as we know it. They don't do it because they want to stand out in the brutal heat for hours, wearing masks over their faces to prevent catching a deadly virus, holding up signs, yelling out chants for justice over and over until their throats are sore, and risking the potential that they could be arrested and/or beaten by police. They do it because their eyes have been opened to something that other people may not yet be able to see -- whether that is systemic racism in the police force or the unnecessary exploitation of nonhuman animals -- and they feel a personal responsibility to speak out and shine a spotlight on the issue. There is nothing radical or extreme about that. In fact, the apathetic response to protests is what is most disturbing.

The Animal People

To start, since I am much more aware of how the media portrays animal rights activists and how the police interact with us, I'd like to draw a few comparisons between what is happening now with the Black Lives Matter protests and the protests documented in The Animal People. But first, I want to make something very clear: the path to justice is often fought through violence and war because those who commit injustices are generally the ones with the most power. Black people did not gain basic human rights in America until the bloodiest war in American history, and even then it took another 100 years of abuse until everything came to a head with the civil rights movement in the 1960s; there is always a battle for good to prevail, and we are in the midst of a battle that has been brewing since the inception of our country. If we can fix the systemic issues in our country, there will be a time when we look back on these protests and cringe and cry at how warped our society was, just as we now look at the backward ways of the Confederacy or even anti-suffragists. Just because we live in the modern world doesn't mean there aren't still battles to fight.

Breaking Unjust Laws

Just like animal rights activists often take the law into their own hands by breaking onto farms and "stealing" animals destined for slaughter, there is a time when abiding by unjust laws is the wrong thing to do. If the law is not protecting those that need protection, then we have a duty to do whatever we can until the laws change. In The Animal People, we saw activists do this by disrupting businesses, disturbing neighborhoods with loud protests outside homes, and even destroying property of businesses associated with Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS). And we saw the same reaction by police to these animal defenders that we're seeing right now on the streets in cities across America: riot gear, arrests of peaceful bystanders, beatings of activists, and the like. (We still see the same response to virtually every large animal rights protest today. Even small gatherings bring the police running, prepared to silence activists.) Whenever a group of people poses a threat to a major organization -- whether it be a multinational animal testing corporation or the United States government -- there are painstaking actions taken to silence them.

One of my favorite parts of The Animal People was what I call the "war of definition" in which there was a disagreement on what is violent behavior. The activists argued that violence is the threat of harm to an individual, whereas the actions they were taking, though forceful, were never intended to incite any physical harm to their protest targets. However, the media could take an image of a protestor yelling into a megaphone or banging on someone's door and broadcast out to the public that they're coming to get you. They intentionally failed to mention that the activists never committed acts of violence to any individual persons and their only targets were people associated with this awful company that horrifically abused animals. Because if the public got to see both sides of the story, if they got to see the puppies howling in pain while being punched in the face or monkeys having autopsies performed on them while still alive, the public would know unequivocally who the bad guys really were in that situation.

Fire with Fire

Now that I've covered the animal rights comparison, let's look at the primary fuel of anti-activism media in our current situation: the looters. Though Black Lives Matter protests peacefully, there is a group that has decided to take advantage of the situation to commit crimes. And it's no surprise that when militarized police are sent in with guns, tanks, riot gear, smoke bombs, flashbangs, pepper spray, tear gas, paint guns, and rubber bullets that things begin to escalate. It doesn't matter who you are -- if the police come marching up and surround you with batons in hand, riot gear on, covering their faces with protective masks and riot-force shields, or when they're shooting at you (regardless of what it is they're shooting), ready to force you out of the way -- that's terrifying, especially when you're doing absolutely nothing wrong. And I can't imagine how much scarier it would be to be a minority in that moment.

Regardless of your personal feelings about the president, you will never have a peaceful, just, equal society when you attempt to squash certain factions of the population through "domination." That is what dictators do to their detractors, not what elected leaders do to their constituents. To lump together peaceful protestors -- who have the legal right to be there -- with criminals and demand they all get off the streets is ignorant, dangerous, and bigoted. What we need right now is our leaders' support for peaceful, nonviolent activism and to eliminate any use of "violence" against the police and unrelated targets. Because as soon as just one person throws a brick or a bottle, the media has all they need to call the entire movement violent. (But, as I mentioned above, is that really violence?)

Bad Apples

To say that the death of George Floyd was a result of a bad apple is not only an insult to his life, but is also a blatant lie. To call killer cops or abusive factory farm employees just "a few bad apples" is to ignore the rot tainting the rest of the bushel. People don't spontaneously go bad: there must be a culture of violence and abuse of authority for the rot to fester and then bubble up to the surface. This doesn't mean that every cop is a racist out to destroy minority communities. In fact, there have been several heartwarming accounts of officers and protestors working together in this time; cops are human too, and many of them want to do what's best for the people they're sworn to protect. But it's difficult when there is underlying prejudice within the system to protect certain people more than others.

Additionally, to those of us who mostly hear about police brutality on the news or social media and do not experience it firsthand, we are only seeing an incredibly small fraction of all the violence. (Just as the general public only see a minuscule portion of all the abuse farmed animals face.) It's not like George Floyd's death was some rare instance of a cop going too far; these kinds of things, unfortunately, happen all the time. We just don't hear about them because then our trust and faith in the system would be eroded and would eventually collapse. Though we'd like to think that officers would be held accountable when involved in the death of a civilian, most investigations into these cases are handled internally, just as factory farms are charged with ensuring they follow proper "humane" animal handling laws, and the officers involved are often protected by unions. So, how can we trust a system that prevents outsiders from taking an objective look inside?

Economic Sabotage

The media has had a field day with these protests; finally, there's something else tragic happening in the world besides COVID-19. They no longer profit from facts; they all push a biased narrative that suits their investors and gets viewers to keep coming back for more. And what's more enticing than making people angry with those on the other side? When you turn on the tv and see images of the protests, the media isn't going to show you the hours of peaceful marches, moments of silence, kneeling, and standing around that makes up the bulk of these protests. That's not good television; that's boring. What gets people incensed are images of cars burning and broken shop windows and hearing sad stories of people who've lost their family business because of these "radical extremists." Again, though I don't necessarily agree that this kind of behavior is acceptable, to say that it is entirely reprehensible goes against what history shows as an efficient way to generate change.

To draw another comparison to The Animal People, let me include a quote from my review of it:

"But threats of violence, sabotage, and property destruction are the actions that have created change in the past. One of the examples used in the film is of the Boston Tea Party, in which protestors conducted 'economic sabotage' by dumping boxes of tea into the harbor to protest taxes. As Kevin says, 'That’s not terrorism; that’s America.'"

Sometimes, it's hard to tell what actions will ignite societal change, and those actions will often be scorned by the public at the time of their occurrence for rocking the boat, for not being peaceful enough, for not trying to do things the nice way. But there comes a time when, in the presence of inaction, we have to take more drastic steps to get people to take our cause seriously. And we may be ridiculed now, but history rewards those that stand up for the right thing despite what others say. We remember Rosa Parks who had the audacity to sit at the front of the bus and be arrested for her crime, or the Greensboro sit-ins that began with a group of black men sitting in the whites-only section of a diner, or Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Susan B. Anthony. We remember people who broke laws and risked their lives for the greater good, to do what they knew was right. Those with power may try to keep us quiet, to hold us back from progress, but, as MLK said himself, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."

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