Radical Routes

Throughout Psyclone and this site I have maintained what I felt was a balanced approached and output, trusting that the information would speak for itself without provocative or vitriolic rhetoric. The truth is though that faced with the abuses being heaped on the innocent around the world, with willful ignorance, selfishness and apathy, with the raping of our Mother Earth and the murder and exploitation of the most vulnerable of her children, balanced appeals to rationality and humanity, whilst constructive in the long-term, are not the only responses that come bubbling up. To be honest I will confess a desire to scream and shout, to shake smugness off the faces of the overfed and overbearing overseers of this world; to smash and burn, blow up and tear down. She is my Mother, they are my children, and I’m not so submissive or docile that I could stand by and do nothing. As I’ve said, I’ve chosen a way that I feel is the most constructive and will, I hope, touch most people. Some choose another way, and judge if you will, but action through anger is better than apathy any day, and like the man said, if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.

So moving on from the previous section, this then is for those who prefer their protest with an edge.

They can shoot us now. Go ahead. They can put us in jail. Feel free. They can beat us. Do it, I’ve paid for better. They can throw us out of first-floor windows. But we can fly. They can say how it ain’t on their monopoly media. Please do. They can equate our justice with their violence. Of course they will. They can draft in liberals to steal ideas. You know they’ll try. They can ban us. Stop us. Fight us. Scare us. Kill us. They can close airports, stations, roads and minds. The can provoke and scheme. Cheat and prosper. Distort and destroy. They can create laws, more laws and by-laws to suit themselves. They can build bigger and better weapons to attack us with and to enrich their pals. They can sell us crap, sell us fear and sell us out. They can call us consumers not citizens. Apathetic not angry. Disinterested not disillusioned. They can make us despair and weep, fear and loath, run and hide. They can take our work, our money and our lives. But we come with justice and fire. We come with honour and ideas. We come with decency and desire. We come now and we come as unstoppable as the rain. They can shoot us now. Go ahead. (By Adam Porter)

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When The Smoke Clearz

 

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 Stockholm Syndrome Watch

Exposing Traitorous Individuals and Organizations Who Identify and Collaborate with Exploiters and Cops over the Exploited and Militants in the Animal Advocacy Movement

On August 23, 1973, four armed robbers stormed the Kreditbanken at Norrmalmstorg, Stockholm, seized six bank employees for hostages, and held them for nearly a week as they all shared a vault during negotiations. Criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, who assisted the police throughout the ordeal, observed that the victims became emotionally attached to their captors, and even defended them as good people. To describe the odd and irrational attachment of victims to their victimizers, Bejerot coined the term “Stockholm Syndrome.”

Thus, the “Stockholm Syndrome” describes the paradox that arises when hostages identify or sympathize with, or even defend, their captors, rather than expressing a “normal” contempt and resentment toward those who hold them against their will, exploit them as bargaining tools, threaten, and endanger their lives. Individuals suffering from the Stockholm syndrome have positive feelings for their captors, they sympathize and “humanize” them, as they often experience fear, distrust, and anger toward law enforcement who put their own lives on the line to save hostages. 

While the Stockholm Syndrome is more likely to manifest in situations where victimizers do not physically beat or abuse their victims, allowing captives to conflate lack of physical violence against them with kindness, it also surfaces in people who are threatened with death or physically harmed. In the 1985 hijacking of a TWA plane, for instance, hijackers released the women and children and kept the men hostage for bargaining chips. The men were threatened with guns pointed at their heads or shoved in their mouth, and one man was beaten to death and thrown out the back of the plane. Yet, after the ten day ordeal was over, one man said, “They weren’t bad people; they let me eat, they let me sleep, they gave me my life.”[i]

Since Bejerot coined the term “Stockholm Syndrome” in 1973, it has entered into common parlance and taken on a broader meaning to refer to any situation in which people held hostage – often threatened with injury or death, sometimes physically beaten or abused, and certain put in grave danger — identify and sympathize with their captors (as Patty Hearst, kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974 and held captive for two months, seemingly voluntarily participated with them in bank robberies. Or recall the case of 14 year Elizabeth Smart, kidnapped from her Salt Lake City home in 2002, did not flee from her captors despite the many chances available to her over a nine month period).[ii]

We, an assoication of 25 dedicated militants, have formed a new group — The Committee to Eradicate Stockholm Syndrome from the Animal Liberation Movement –and  have united to stop the insidious spread of this disease and the paralyzing effects it has on our ability to fight speciesism, to attack the command centers and functionaries administering the Animal Holocaust, to monkeywrench and destroy the capitalist machines of planetary destruction, and to smash hierarchical oppression in all forms.

We broaden the term ”Stockholm Syndrome” to include a person’s identification with victimizers over victims, whether that individual is directly involved as a victim or not. In fact, since this is a Watch Site dedicated to documenting the ubiquity of the Stockholm Syndrome as it manifests in the animal advocacy movement generally (in any and all aspects, from welfare to rights to psuedo-abolitionist, and although examples will be given from other social movements on occasional as well), it must be emphasized the true captives and victims are that concern us are not human but rather nonhuman animals. Billions at a time, they are not merely seized to be used as bargaining chips for possible release, they are stolen, bred, and confined precisely to be exploited as slave labor and to be killed. They are hold held for a short or temporary period, but rather for the duration of their short but miserable lives. They are never treated “kindly,” but rather are psychologically tormented, physically tortured, and visciously murdered in unspeakably violent, obscene, and horrifying ways.

Moreover, where bank robbers, kidnappers, and hijackers blatantly violate serious laws and are given long prison sentences or even executed by the state, those who confine, torture, exploit, and murder animals do so with the blessings of the state and only in rare cases are penalized if their abuse blatantly violates “humane” treatment or killing laws and is documented by a whistleblower or undercover investigation.

Given that animals are the real victims – who suffer and die at the hands of unconscionably sadistic vivisectors; breeders; fur farmers; hunters; whalers; sealers; administrators and workers in factory farms and slaughterhouses; operators of circuses, zoos, rodeos, and aquariums; and sundry thugs, exploiters, and butchers – the cases of Stockholm Syndrome documented on this site are obviously not the animals themselves, but rather the so-called “advocates” of the animal welfare or rights, whose moral inversion and sick psychology causes them to feel more sympathy for animal exploiters than the animals themselves. They are victims too, but their victimization facilitates, enables, and often actively facilitates the smooth operation and rapid global growth of the Animal Holocaust Industry.

Since these pseudo-advocates, collaborators, and traitors to animals invariably are misinformed dogmatic pacifists (the worst offenders being the “vegan abolitionists” who slavishly follow the erroneous, misguided, and reactionary teachings of their cult leader and guru, Gary Francione, they also identify with the Eichmann’s and Mengele’s administering the efficient operation of the Eternal Treblinka, along with the cops, state, and security apparatus that protects corporate killers and bloody butchers, far more that with the true-blue protectors of the innocent and champions of justice — the militants in the aboveground who defend, document, analyze, and legitimate the tough “by any means necessary” tactics necessary to wage war against speciesism and the true warriors in the underground who boldly break into the prisonhouses, concentration camps, and dungeons of death to free animal prisoners; to inflict as much property damage as possible against exploiters; to weaken or shut down altogther legally-sanctioned houses of horrors; and to dole out the fear and punishing blows that alone can eliminate the violence and deter every butcher and their bastard offspring from ever hurting an animal again.

According to the FBI’s Hostage Barricade Database System, about 27% of victims exhibit the Stockholm Syndrome, in other words, most victims do not exhibit symptoms. While neither I nor anyone has studied the percentage of victims of the Stockholm syndrome in the animal advocacy movement, it is disturbingly widespread in many social movements, but seemingly a disease afflicting the “animal advocacy movement” above all.

This page will be updated on a regular basis, and we encourage people to send us examples and evidence (including links, citations, etc.) of the Stockholm Syndrome operating among morally skewed individuals and sell-out, pseudo “animal advocacy” groups, as well as how this mental disease afflicts other movements as well. As as Committee of only 25 full-time volunteers, we cannot possibly all by ourselves keep up with every manifestation of this debilitating mental illness afflicting our movement.

With Deep Gratitude and For a Psychologically and Tactically-Sound Liberation Movement,

The Committee

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