The 'Taste of Leeds' Interview With Dr Steve Best

In a recent edition of 'A Taste of Leeds', they published a piece by Dr Steve Best on his road to veganism. Dr Steven Best is an Associate Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Texas, El Paso . He works in areas of philosophy, social and political theory, cultural studies, animal rights, and environmentalism among others, he has written and edited 8 books and published over 100 articles and reviews. Here we asked about his position on animal rights, the environment and his new book!

Dr. Steve Best

First published in "A Taste Of Leeds" Reprint with kind permission.

	Click here to read Claudette Vaughan's review of Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (edited by Steve Best & Anthony J.Nocella, II)
	Click here to read Claudette Vaughan's interview with Dr Steve Best

You were banned from entering the UK , do you want to say a little about this, and do you know if your ban to the UK is going to be reviewed at some point in the near future? It would be great to see you back here.

I'd love to be back. I miss Trafalgar Square , Hyde Park, and the great activists I met in England . But I don't see the Home Office giving me a green light anytime soon. They are hardening not softening their position toward animal rights.

A few years ago, I decided to take a public and very controversial stand in support of the Animal Liberation Front. I came out in favor of the ALF because after careful study of their history, arguments, and results, I concluded that their actions are effective, necessary, and just. Governments, animal exploitation industries, and most mass media characterize the ALF as violent terrorists, but I see them as freedom fighters and counter -terrorists. The ALF is a new justice movement defending innocent beings under attack and fighting the real terrorists who torture and kill animals without justification.

I believe that no door, no law, no profit margin, no government, and no cop should ever stand in the way between an animal and its freedom. I wish that legal methods of animal liberation were adequate to free animals from their oppressors, but unfortunately they are not. Governments are corrupt and speciesist and serve their corporate masters. Animals are too important a resource and commodity for corporations to voluntarily free them, and so animal liberation requires militant tactics such as raids to rescue animals and property destruction to weaken, cripple, or eliminate oppressors.

By using sabotage and high-pressure tactics, the animal rights movement has become a major threat to the global vivisection industry. Biomedical and pharmaceutical industries are the third largest contributor to the British economy, and the government wants the UK to be an epicenter for such research. Consequently, they take any threat to the interests of these industries as a threat to the UK as a whole. Having closed down numerous lab breeders since the 1990s, and stopped production of new research facilities at Cambridge and Oxford universities, the animal liberation movement has thus emerged as Public Enemy #1.

After the 7/7 bombings, Home Office Secretary Charles Clarke stated that the "rules of the game have changed." The Home Office drafted new "rules of unacceptable speech" that apply to any non-UK citizen alleged to promote, defend, justify, or advocate "violence" or "terrorism" in any way. These rules grant the Home Office the authority to ban any non-UK citizen for "unacceptable speech" in a lecture, printed essay, or website. Blair began arguing that terrorism is a problem not only of those committing terrorist acts, but also those defending it. In November they drafted new laws that allow them to jail citizens who support "terrorism" for up to six years, as they seek the right to hold potential subversives in custody for up to six months.

In August 2005, I received a letter from the Home Office that condemned me for supporting the ALF, accused me of promoting violence and terrorism, declared me to be a threat to the "public order," and banned me from the entire UK . I was the first person the Home Office used the new "rules of unacceptable speech" against. This means that rules allegedly drafted to combat Muslim extremism were first applied against a foreign animal rights advocate; they were first exercised not against a Muslim cleric, but against a philosophy professor who lives in a desert with his 9 rescue cats.

If we accept their definitions and terms of the debate, which define the ALF as terrorist and proscribe supporting terrorist groups, I am guilty as charged. By its own newly minted legal definitions, the UK has the right to ban me, but it is the right reserved to a closed society and a police state threatened by the views with which it disagrees.

I define terrorism as any intentional act of violence toward an innocent sentient being in order to advance an ideological, political, and economic agenda . It is a strange kind of terrorist who has never injured a single person, who is compassionate toward the suffering of others, and who risks his or her own freedom to save another from harm, violence, and death. It is not the ALF who are violent terrorists, but rather the British government, vivisectionists, and all facets of the animal exploitation industry. They are terrorists on the grounds that they intentionally harm and kill innocent living beings for ideological, political, and economic goals.

I detect more than a bit of hypocrisy on the part of the British government in denouncing violence and terrorism when they are a key ally to the US in a terrorist war against Iraq that has claimed over 100,000 innocent lives and caused untold suffering and chaos. Rooted in lies and deception, the Iraq war is unjust and violates every key principle of international law. With their long history of war, imperialism, and violence, the UK and US are the leading terrorist forces on the planet. Bush and Blair have thrown the world into chaos and inflicted serious damage to international institutions such as the Geneva convention that provide a bit of civilization amidst Western barbarism.

Nor is there any logical consistency or coherence to UK policies. The Home Office has allowed into the UK brutal dictators like August Pinochet and Palestinians who endorse suicide bombings in Israel, but they ban US doctors, housewives, and philosophy professors for defending animal rights.

Moreover, as long as the Home Office is in the game of banning philosophers, why just ban me? Why not Tom Regan , for he wrote an essay for one of my books entitled "How to Defend Violence"? Why not Peter Singer, for he advocates euthanasia and infanticide? Are they not on a dangerous slippery slope, once they begin to ban philosophers?

The only method in their madness is their commitment to defend the profits of the animal research and pharmaceutical industries.

Animal rights activists are not a threat to the public order in the UK , but Tony Blair and his support for the Iraq war clearly is. Animal rights people are not a cause of violence but rather an effect of response to it. Where there are compassionate people in a society, a disturbance in the animal world will inevitably bring a disturbance in the human world. Thus, if the Home Office wants peace, it must grant justice to animals .

I do not advocate violence or terrorism, nor am I a threat to the British "public order." I am however a threat to animal exploiters, as is any articulate person with a sense of justice and right. Truth is a threat to lies, justice is a threat to injustice, and rights are a threat to wrongs.

My speech may be unpopular, but free speech rights are designed precisely to protect controversial and unpopular speech, not mainstream or conformist speech. An open society respects and protects these rights; a closed society rejects and denies them. Unfortunately, the UK has become a closed society and police state.

I've heard that you have a new book coming out soon, can you tell us a little about it?

It's called Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth , and was released by AK Press on Earth Day, April 22. Edited by myself and Tony Nocella, Igniting a Revolution is a new anthology featuring over 40 radical voices addressing the global social-ecological crisis that threatens all life. The voices range from social ecology, deep ecology, Earth First!, ecofeminism, and anarcho-primitivism to Native Americans, Black liberationists, animal and earth liberationists, and political prisoners.

Similar to Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (which Tony and I edited and released with Lantern Book in 2004), Igniting a Revolution employs a boundary-transgressing and bridge-building approach. It brings together sundry people and positions that ordinarily never meet: academics and activists, scholars and prisoners, whites and people of color, men and women, and human and animal rights advocates. Each standpoint offers a crucial perspective on the nature and causes of social and environmental breakdown that contributes to an understanding of the whole.

An important task of Igniting a Revolution is to decouple environmentalism from white, male, privileged positions; dislodge it from a mainstream, single-issue pedestal; and diversify and radicalize it along class, gender, race, ethnic, and other lines. This broadens the environmental movement such that it addresses social justice issues; makes it larger, more diverse, and stronger; and brings to the table the crucial issues of race and class.

What would you say is the overarching argument or position of the book?

The book argues that a revolutionary environmentalism is necessary to the extent that ecological and social problems are systemic and inherent to capitalism or even "civilization" itself. Revolutionary environmentalists renounce reformist approaches that aim only to manage the symptoms of the global ecological crisis and never dare or think to probe its underlying dynamics and causes. Revolutionary environmentalists see "separate" problems as related to the larger system of global capitalism and reject the reformist notion of "green capitalism" as a naïve oxymoron. They seek to abolish all hierarchies, including the one whereby humans live as if they were separate from nature and pursue the deluded goal of mastery and control. The goal of an egalitarian, democratic, and ecological world cannot be realized within the present world system, and requires a rupture with it.

In the last three decades, there has been growing awareness that environmentalism cannot succeed without social justice and social justice cannot be realized without environmentalism. Such a holistic orientation is evident in the international Green network, the US . environmental justice movement, Earth First! efforts (as initiated by Judi Bari) to join with timber workers, alter-globalization channels, Zapatista coalition building, and often in the communiqués and actions of ALF and ELF activists. Examples of broad alliance politics are visible also in recent efforts to build bridges among animal, earth, and Black liberationists and anti-imperialists - such as are evident in Igniting a Revolution .

To be sure, defending forests and protecting whales are crucial actions to take, for they protect evolutionary processes and ecological systems vital to the planet and all species and peoples within it. Yet at the same time, it is also critical to fight side-by-side with oppressed peoples in order to address all forms of environmental destruction and build a movement far greater in numbers and strength than possible with a single-issue focus. From a broad perspective, revolutionary environmentalism is a class, race, gender, and culture war that aims to abolish every system of domination, including that of human beings over nature.

As the dynamics that brought about the ecological crisis are not reducible to any single factor or cause, all groups and orientations that can effectively challenge the ideologies and institutions implicated in domination and ecological destruction have a relevant role to play in the global social-environmental struggle. While each radical standpoint is important, none can accomplish systemic social transformation by itself. Working together, however, through a diversity of critiques and tactics that mobilize different communities, a flank of militant groups and positions can drive a battering ram into the structures of power and domination and open the door to a new future.

The environmental situation seems increasingly bleak; are there grounds for hope?

We need to be sober and honest, free of illusions, but committed for struggle. As Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci put it, "The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned."

This is a pivotal time in history, a crossroads for the future of life. Windows of opportunity are closing. The actions that human beings now collectively take or fail to take will determine whether the future is hopeful or bleak. While the result is horrible to contemplate, our species may not meet this challenge and drive itself into the same oblivion as it drove countless other species. There is no economic or technological fix for the crises we confront, the only solution lies in radical change at all levels.

Politics as usual just won't cut it anymore. We will always lose if we play by their rules rather than invent new forms of struggle, new social movements, and new sensibilities.

A new revolutionary politics will build on the achievements of democratic, libertarian socialist, and anarchist traditions. It will incorporate radical green, feminist, and indigenous struggles. It will merge animal, earth, and human standpoints in a total liberation struggle against global capitalism and its omnicidal grow-or-die logic.

Radical politics must reverse the growing power of the state, mass media, and corporations to promote egalitarianism and participatory democratization at all levels of society - political, cultural, and economic. It must dismantle all asymmetrical power relations and structures of hierarchy, including that of humans over animals and the earth. Radical politics is impossible without the revitalization of citizenship and the re-politicization of life, which begins with forms of education, communication, culture, and art that anger, awaken, inspire, and empower people toward action and change.

Clearly, there is no guarantee that Homo sapiens will survive in the near future, as the dystopian visions of films such as Mad Max or Waterworld may actually be realized. But nor is there is any promise that revolutionary environmentalism can or will arise, given problems such as the factionalism and egoism that typically tears political groups apart and/or the fierce political repression always directed against resistance movements.

Amidst so many doubts and uncertainties, there is nonetheless no question whatsoever that the quality of the future-if humanity and other imperiled species have one-depends on the strength of global resistance movements and the possibilities for revolutionary change.