Dear HCN,
Your article on alleged
“ecoterrorism” is misleading and perpetuates the propaganda of
polluting industry representatives who have already co-opted mass
media (HCN, 10/8/01: Terrorist attacks echo in the West). The Vail
fires of 1998, which are better categorized as sabotage, have
little to do with terrorism. Terrorism is “best defined as the use
of violence against noncombatants for political ends” (Fairness and
Accuracy in Reporting, December 1998). Those who burn or destroy
property are vandals or arsonists, not
terrorists.
Terrorist attacks take the form of,
for example, planting a fire bomb at a ranger station in Idaho’s
Targhee National Forest (believed to be a response to a government
plan to protect grizzly bear habitat), or an anti-logging protester
killed by a falling tree after a logger warned him, “Get out of
here! Otherwise I’ll make fucking sure I got a tree coming this
way” (The Nation, 10/26/98). These people are
terrorists, not those who damage property or construction plans.
Other media parrot similar misinformation * news reporters were 10
times more likely to label the Vail sabotage terrorism than the
assassination of a Buffalo, N.Y., physician, who was apparently
killed because he performed abortions (Fairness and Accuracy in
Reporting’s EXTRA update, December 1998). The latter was intended
to take a human life and to create a climate of fear among doctors,
while the former crime targeted property. The reader can decide
which is terrorism.
Who is driving this
deception? Industry figureheads actively shape media reporting. For
example, Ron Arnold was widely cited (ABC World News Tonight,
10/22/98; New York Times, 10/24/98) regarding
the Vail incident, and he is fond of labeling a wide range of
activities as “terrorism,” including peaceful sit-ins. These
outlets did not acknowledge his connections to extractive
industries. He is a former spokesperson for Dow and Union Carbide,
and his current group (Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise)
was started with money from Exxon, DuPont, Georgia Pacific and
Boise Cascade. He characterized his approach to the environmental
movement in the following way: “We’re out to kill the fuckers.
We’re simply trying to eliminate them. Our goal is to eliminate
environmentalism once and for all” (Common Ground, Fall/1992 –
cited in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’s EXTRA update,
December 1998).
Let’s end media complicity with
industry propaganda, and focus our attention on the violent attacks
on innocent civilians perpetrated by actual
terrorists.
Steven
Barger
Flagstaff, Arizona
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Sabotage isn’t terrorism.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
