💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › crimethinc-we-don-t-forget.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 08:56:08. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: We Don’t Forget Author: CrimethInc. Date: August 20, 2018 Language: en Topics: ecology, green scare, Environmentalism, prisoner support Source: Retrieved on 17th June 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2018/08/20/we-dont-forget-support-joseph-dibee-environmentalist-accused-of-sabotage
After 12 years of fruitless searching, federal agents have captured
Joseph Dibee, accused participant in the Earth Liberation Front. Dibee
is charged with arson and conspiracy. The following statement from our
collective, It’s Going Down, and a network of anti-fascist groups
explores why his case matters today.
In the 1990s, environmentalists and animal rights activists engaged in
campaigns to put a stop to climate change, animal exploitation, and the
destruction of biodiversity. They shut down board meetings, interrupted
construction projects, organized demonstrations and sit-ins, held public
outreach events at punk shows and vegan potlucks, liberated animals from
captivity, and occasionally utilized vandalism, sabotage, and arson
against corporations involved in particularly egregious behavior. Across
the world, informally organized groups claimed anonymous actions in the
names of the Animal and Earth Liberation Fronts.
International networks grew out of these movements. Struggles emerged
against superhighways, gold mines, luxury ski resorts, old-growth
logging, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and animal testing
facilities on several continents. For years, corporate profiteers had
cause to fear that they would face consequences when they perpetrated
ecological harm. At that time, it was still possible to imagine that
humanity could avert the catastrophe that is unfolding today in the form
of ever-rising temperatures, hurricanes, droughts, forest fires, and
mass extinctions.
At the turn of the century, federal authorities counterattacked,
launching a campaign of repression to crush the Earth Liberation Front
and subdue environmental movements of all kinds. Their goal was to
protect business interests at any expense—even if that meant making the
world uninhabitable. At the same time, increasing attention on climate
change from the likes of Al Gore served to professionalize environmental
activism, imposing the logic of the non-profit industry and bribing
activists to moderate their tactics and targets in return for salaries.
This two-pronged assault set back environmental movements a full
generation or more.
The cataclysm that is unfolding today can be laid at the doorstep of the
law enforcement agencies that have paved the way for it by making it so
difficult for ordinary people to defend themselves against ecological
devastation. If we don’t stop them, they will frogmarch us directly into
the apocalypse, profiting all the way—and when the last well is poisoned
and the last forest burns up, they will be the last to die.
At the end of 2005, the FBI escalated its assault on earth and animal
liberation movements with a new wave of indictments. This offensive,
dubbed Operation Backfire, was intended to obtain convictions for many
of the unsolved Earth Liberation Front arsons of the preceding ten
years.
Of those arrested in Operation Backfire, 12 of the accused became
federal informants, collaborating with the authorities against their
former comrades and the struggle against catastrophic climate change.
The collaborators arrested include Stanislas Meyerhoff, Kevin Tubbs,
Chelsea Dawn Gerlach, Suzanne Savoie, Kendall Tankersley, Jennifer
Kolar, Lacey Phillabaum, Darren Thurston, and, much later, Briana
Waters. Daniel McGowan, Jonathan Paul, Nathan Block, Joyanna Zacher,
Justin Solondz, and Rebecca Rubin all refused to collaborate. William
“Avalon” Rodgers passed away in an apparent suicide following his
arrest.
This case took place alongside a variety of similar operations,
including the proseuctions of Marius Mason, who is still serving a
22-year sentence for environmental sabotage of a GMO facility, Eric
McDavid, who served 9 years of a two-decade sentence before a judge
threw out his conviction because the prosecution had withheld thousands
of pages of exonerating evidence, and other earth and animal liberation
prisoners, including Rod Coronado, Jeff “Free” Luers, and Chrisopher
McIntosh. The campaign “Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty” faced multiple
waves of repression, including the infamous SHAC 7 case, in which all
six of the accused served up to six years in prison for maintaining a
website. Other people refused to testify before grand juries, a commonly
used tool for repressing autonomous movements, and served time for
resisting FBI fishing expeditions against environmental activists.
For many years, federal authorities ranked anarchist environmental
activism over white supremacist mass shootings and abortion clinic
bombings as the number one domestic threat—even though it involved no
injuries to human beings whatsoever. Yet despite all the resources they
invested in this witch hunt, it took the FBI decades to capture some of
their targets. Operation Backfire target Joseph Dibee remained free
until August 9, 2018. As of this writing, one of the accused remains at
liberty. Our thoughts are with them, wherever they are.
Operation
At 4:53 pm, on August 9, 2018, Joseph Dibee, 50, was booked into the
Multnomah County Detention Center by federal agents. Detained by
authorities at an airport in Cuba, he was brought to Oregon via a
secretive international policing operation. The next day, Billy J.
Williams, US Attorney for Oregon, announced his arrest. Williams
received Donald Trump’s support in 2017 and advocates for even more
aggressive repression of undocumented immigrants.
Joseph Dibee is accused of participating in environmental direct action
in the 1990s with the Earth/Animal Liberation Front. Specifically, he is
accused of participating in the sabotage of a horse slaughtering
facility that resulted in the permanent closure of the company. His
charges include arson, conspiracy to commit arson, and destruction of an
energy facility.
He has been wanted by federal authorities for 12 years, during which he
is alleged to have traveled in Mexico, El Salvador, Cuba, Lebanon,
Syria, and Russia.
Why is the state still persecuting environmentalists nearly twenty years
after actions that never injured anyone? Because as the consequences of
resource accumulation and ecological collapse intensify, cracking down
on resistance is becoming an ever more urgent priority for the
authorities. In The Dawn, Friedrich Nietzsche suggests that you can
measure the health of a society according to the number of parasites it
can tolerate; today, the custodians of order know that they cannot
tolerate any resistance whatsoever, on pain of insurrection.
As prisoners across the country prepare for a nationwide strike against
forced labor and undignified conditions, the authorities are
preemptively cracking down on organizers. Many rebellious black
protesters are imprisoned for attempting to engage in proportionate
response to racist extrajudicial police murders in Ferguson, Baltimore,
Charlotte, Milwaukee, and elsewhere around the US. Indigenous and
non-native water protectors faced unprecedented violence from state
counterinsurgency forces and private security firms during the protests
against the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock, North Dakota. Over
200 anarchists and other anti-fascists faced eight or more felony
charges apiece in one of the largest conspiracy cases in US history on
account of participating in protests against the inauguration of
President Donald Trump, during which anarchists smashed the windows of
corporate storefronts, clashed with police, and burned a limousine.
Those charges were finally dropped in July after a year and a half of
punitive mass intimidation directed at the arrestees.
The state is pouring all its resources into repression at a time when
self-organized revolt and mutual aid are needed more than ever. Fascists
and neo-Nazis are targeting hurricane relief organizers while Facebook
and Google censor radical content online. Tech giants like Amazon and
Palantir are working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to
capture undocumented people while landlords and developers collaborate
with IBM and finance capitalists to reimagine cities emptied of the
working class, transforming vibrant and rebellious communities into
enclaves for the wealthy.
Joseph Dibee was arrested with the collaboration of Cuban authorities in
a coordination between rival authoritarian powers that would have been
unthinkable just a few years ago. As climate chaos, popular uprisings,
and economic uncertainty continue to shake the globe, we are witnessing
unprecedented collaboration between states in policing and extradition.
It remains to be seen what this means for other rebels from previous
eras—such as Assata Shakur, who has lived in Cuba for many decades
despite being at the top of the FBI’s “most wanted” list. What is clear
is that all who oppose the coordinated international suppression of
resistance must organize now to defend those who are currently being
targeted, lest the authorities be emboldened to expand their scope still
further.
The resurgence of street-level fascism in the US on the coattails of the
Trump campaign is merely the tip of the iceberg. Worldwide, we have seen
a wave of reactionary populism that will continue to circumscribe the
popular imagination for a number of years. As sea levels rise and
natural disasters continue to displace poor and working class people in
Latin America, the Middle East, Indochina, and Oceania, warlords,
right-wing gangs, xenophobic governments, and broad sections of the
wealthy and ruling classes will collaborate to produce fanatical
nationalist and life-denying discourses. Refugees from across the world
are already being denied safe passage into the gated communities of the
global north.
It is no longer realistic to imagine that climate change and ecological
chaos can be prevented. But this only makes it more paramount to defend
what wildness remains, impose consequences for the most environmentally
destructive activity, and defend those who take risks to make the world
hospitable for both human and nonhuman life. If we do not want to spend
the next century locked in ethno-nationalist, religious, and racial
warfare, we have to foster new struggles against climate change and
ecological destruction, we have to build mutual aid networks capable of
surviving in disaster zones, and we have to resolutely defend everyone
who fights for a world without cages. Free Joseph Dibee.