Against Civil Disobedience. ⓐⓡ⊞ⓘⓞ

in this video in a somewhat spontaneous
and light-hearted way I try to bring together thoughts on a serious issue that have appeared in other videos here and there in passing over the last four years to make a simple direct statement about why it is I'm actually opposed to civil disobedience an idea that's so hallowed on the left and the right across the political spectrum there's so many romanticized quotes attached to it I think many people would just be shocked shocked to know that someone who sincerely cares about politics about getting organized and pursuing political change would dare to question this this hallowed tradition but you know one of the disadvantages of doing a video like this in such a spontaneous way is that watching it back afterwards it occurred to me I missed one of the most important points that I have made repeatedly in my criticisms of some of my contemporary vegan leaders other vegan activists it's a simple point but it's one that has I think so much importance that I wanted to stop now and add this at the start of what is admittedly a longer video than I'd intended it to be guys if you make these excuses for illegal activities if you make these excuses for civil disobedience please try to imagine what your life would be like if your worst enemies took the same liberties and engage in the same tactics if you think it's okay for direct action everywhere to climb over the barrier and interrupt Bernie Sanders in the name of veganism if you're gonna bring out these quotations from Martin Luther King jr. and Mahatma Gandhi and say oh well it's in the name of challenging and unjust law therefore breaking the laws is is is justified guess what the neo-nazis would see things exactly the same way from the perspective of the vast majority of the population the position that vegans are self-righteously trying to pursue is just as laughable just as irrational just as extreme as what the neo-nazis are trying to pursue okay I'm not just saying this to make you feel bad about being vegan I mean the point is either you believe in the pursuit of competing political ends and the free market of ideas Democratic contacts for debate and discourse or you believe in civil disobedience for everyone not just for the people who happen to agree with your own idiosyncratic sense of justice your own idiosyncratic sense of what's right and wrong your own idiosyncratic sense also of priority because what other people see as an emergency you may see as business as usual what other people see as a calamity threatening Western civilization itself you may see us as no big deal I think you all know and whether you look at the far left or the far right there are people who think that business as usual at the banks is is a crime against God there are Muslim fundamentalists who are fundamentally opposed to banking the charging of interest usury they want to tear down the banks there are neo-nazis who want to kick out all the immigrants there are all kinds of people who from their perspective are acting in the pursuit of something just and honorable and they'll very gladly step over that line between the legal definition no matter how arbitrary of what's right and wrong if you think it's okay for direct action everywhere or for vegan extremists or veep for vegan activists to kick down the doors and break into laboratories then you believe it's okay for Catholic fundamentalists to do it at abortion clinics if this is permissible for us it's permissible for everyone so when you make excuses for Wayans young breaking into a laboratory and destroying scientific experiments the name of veganism will you extend this same glorification of civil disobedience to Catholics Muslims I don't know maybe just Protestants who are anti-abortion breaking into abortion clinics how about hippies who are anti VAX breaking into vachs in clinics and destroying chemicals used to inoculate people against diseases all this stuff is out there and you can google it and see just how sincere and passionate those people are in their own convictions just as we as vegans are sincere and passionate ours ok sincerity can't be the criterion here passion can't be the criterion the fact that something's an injustice the fact that a given law from your perspective is illegitimate therefore you think it's okay to use illegal force to protest against it okay no the ethic I promote on this channel is one of doing the best you can and I don't believe that the best you can do is to engage in theft vandalism Breaking and Entering terrorism bombs I just don't believe that sure if you look back over the history of the whole world you can find some scenario where the political situation is so extreme that people have no no choice but to resort to violence in their own self-defense sure you can find that but if you think that's the situation today in Berkeley California in the name of animal rights and veganism then you're just as deluded as the neo-nazis the anti-vaxxers and the people who blow up abortion clinics if you can't see that you're on the same side they're on you really need to stop and reconsider this romanticized notion of civil disobedience baddest yen civil disobedience is one of the most hallowed and romanticized concepts in the Western political lexicon what does it really mean pissing off the cops getting beaten up and go into prison that's that's what it means so it really does take it's quite a challenge for the poets and creative writers and filmmakers of our time to come up with a way to romanticize is this this approach to political activism this is something I've discussed maybe three years ago or more on this channel it's come up in passing from time to time but I can't remember recently having a video that really stated what my position on this was and you know again I'm very happy to have a few supporters like Mary Ann who had just recorded a video with a record in the video the context for this video now being made was my fellow Canadian aspiring vegan activist Mary Ann flew away to attend a major animal rights conference in Berkeley California came back and I got his impressions of it and in that video I didn't cross-examine him too much I wasn't too harsh or too hard on the notorious group direct action everywhere who would turned out really were the main organizers behind that that conference um however in numerous videos over the last four years in this channel I have stated well my position this is and occurs to be now especially in the context of my having done a relatively flattering video of talking to someone else at hearing his perspective on direct action everywhere and their their use of illegal and low-key violent activism and getting themselves charged with crimes and going to prison and their rhetoric surrounding civil disobedience that I should come out and make a short concise direct video stating why it is not only I don't preach civil disobedience I don't practice civil disagreements I don't encourage others to do it either look guys the rhetoric surrounding civil disobedience including what Marion's sort of quoted to me from that conference just now within the vegan movement it sort of attempts to relocate the question from you and what you're doing and what difference you can make to abstract ideological concepts like the goodness of the law itself so I noticed he used a you know kind of hackneyed phrase and saying well if laws are illegitimate then using illegal force or illegal tactics to challenge the law is justified and so on you hear this kind of rhetoric quite a bit but the question we should be engaged in is actually not the formal validity of the law it's about you and me and what kind of lives we want to live and what kind of difference we can make and what is the best way to go about doing it and it's it's really quite dangerous I mean even though it seems like a harmless way to approach it just as you know if we're talking about warfare we can't you know shift the discussion to the instruments being used to the bullets and the blades we can't disassociate the questions from human lives human motivations and and and real human outcomes now I think the most important thing to stress here is that this approach if it pretends to make judgments on the law it pretends to pass judgments on the authorities it pretends to pass judgments on the morality of society at large but what it really rests on are a series of judgments about you and I about the activists who are making these decisions suppose we were to take the same kind of examples we're using from the protection everywhere from current vegan protest movements and instead of the person beneath the mask being an anonymous punk from California which is often how these protesters portray themselves the sort of stereotype will a LF radical left-wing Animal Liberation extremist radical or ecological reticle what if the man underneath the mask is a medical doctor right away you might say oh what a waste why is he breaking and entering damaging public property sabotaging a factory why is he getting himself put in prison for either stealing animals or say burning down a farm or sabotaging a first or something why isn't he using his position of power and influence and privilege and education as a medical doctor why isn't he advocating Veen ism 10 different ways now what if the man under the mask let's say it's a hunt saboteur or a laboratory saboteur or someone else who's quote-unquote civil disobedience breaking the law and Cohen show what if they take off the mask and instead there were nutritionists what if instead they're an architect what if instead they're just a talented and reasonably successful musician maybe it's a musician you know yeah I remember a couple albums from that guy why would he get himself put in prison like this why would he do this rather than supporting or advocating the vegan cause in in some other way there is a judgment on the people involved here and implicitly but we don't want to examine is that you're presuming to say these people are so powerless so voiceless so utterly without recourse to making a constructive difference in a democratic society that they have nothing better they have no choice left other than to throw themselves in the train tracks throw themselves in prison throw themselves at the police throw themselves against the impassive edifice of the society that doesn't care their opinions to self-destructively you know lay themselves nail in his sacrificial lambs so the progress the moment now I don't think that's good even if it were true I mean when I take the mass off these people and I meet them face to face I think look you're you're not such a scumbag you're not such a bad guy you're not so terrible you have something to offer whether you're a musician or a cook or a janitor so I have action met some janitors who are quite intelligent resourceful people and I've met some people with PhDs who were complete msl's that's what you see as you go through this life I mean you know each of us in our way has the same kind of responsibility as a medical doctor and you may not realize it whether it's that you're a parent or a policeman or you know what whatever it is you take on your life and even if you don't yet and when you watch this video I don't care if you're 15 years old you're 55 you can take all those responsibilities you can expand your scope of responsibilities you can take on responsibilities more important than efforts doctor you're capable of more long-term especially if you're building up and the impact of this kind of civil disobedience when you look at it over a 10-year period say and I alluded to that briefly my manager view with with Marian it's so negative that it makes almost any of the other options seem positive by contrast including what I'm doing right now coming on coming on YouTube and trying to be a kind of theory of the movement now if I had made this same video years ago I'm not gonna stress specify a specific number of years I would have made the following contrast and now I'm I'm not gonna do it I'm gonna expose this I would have said years ago look I know what it's like to be involved in politics in Laos Cambodia Thailand China and and by reading about it to a lesser extent other dictatorships around the world political science is my field I've also lived and worked in that humanitarian work and you know what there are some situations where you just totally lack the options and opportunities we take for granted in a democratic society like Canada or like California where you really just don't have any choice other than to engage in illegal acts of civil disobedience and if you have to go to prison you know maybe that's what that entails in Cambodia where people now really have no democracy they have they have no way to change their country through elections so maybe they have to look at other options and you know what honestly I've matured today I wouldn't say that at all and I think there is actually a really kind of creeping racism or dehumanization of people on the other side because when you know those people face-to-face you know a sharp young man in Cambodia and he may be an architect and he may be a medical doctor and he may be a janitor but you know someone who's sharp and reads books and cares about politics and if you just look at two options a fork in the road like okay you can throw yourself against this brick wall you can throw yourself out you so you can throw yourself on the train tracks you can throw yourself at the police you can do this useless self sacrificial act of civil disobedience and spend ten years in prison or you can maybe cross the border into Thailand you know maybe you're gonna migrate to France or you know Vancouver Canada but let's say you just go a couple miles over the border in Thailand get yourself a job on a farm I'm assuming a totally minimum-wage job here get yourself an internet connection and spend your time writing articles and recording YouTube videos talking about politics in Cambodia and criticizing the establishment and calling for a change that's to come now when you look at that fork in the road you might think hey hey come on ISIL that's not very effective as a form of activism working on a farm and being a blogger and YouTube personality and writing articles may be getting your articles published in the newspaper from time to time that's not terribly effective for a lone activist but my point is compared to spending ten years in prison in Cambodia it's unbelievably effective and when you talk about civil disobedience this is the kind of comparison you have to make so examining the legal democratically permissible options you've got in Canada in California I see no excuse especially for the vegan movement to be engaging in these these illegal activities that I feel basically undermine the legitimacy of our own movement again I have a whole playlist of videos but you can see exactly what this is direct action everywhere as an example they run onto a baseball field and interrupt a baseball game in the name of veganism guess what of course you're accomplishing nothing they interrupt the baseball game for five minutes security pounces on them they go to jail great have a good time in jail getting a lawyer and paying the fines and now I'm not saying they're gonna do hard time for that it's a pretty minor crime but still nobody really wants that wants to deal with that but guess what you're also discrediting veganism you think this makes me look good with this kind of disruption they go into I mean I can list off all these examples they go on to Chipotle and break down weeping and scream at the employees they go into a butcher store and scream at the butcher why don't you kill me instead of the pig all this histrionic emotionally overwrought nonsense it's self-defeating on so many levels even if they don't get put in prison but now we've got Wayne song crying poor the leader of direct action never asking for your donations because he's facing ten years some people say possibly 30 years in prison for breaking and entering theft destruction of property etc etc because what he's been doing is illegal he hasn't been doing in secrecy he's been filming himself and posting film of him breaking along the Internet as veganism is number one Fame [ __ ] not just trying to break the law but trying to get famous and get donations doing it that's that's the game they've been playing okay so civil disobedience there's a romanticized literature for this in political science number one offer author and it really is Henry David Thoreau an American author this meme was picked up in India by Mohandas and totally transformed everyone likes to quote a book called non-violence and peace in war by Gandhi almost nobody reads it it doesn't say what you think it says his version of non-violence is it's war by other means it's actually quite violence is violence it's quite definitely Marie David Thoreau and there were a few other big names in there actually the Russian author Leo Tolstoy he was a major major author in the theory of non-violence and civil disobedience from a very strange religious perspective religious andean style perspective was a he had different periods of his life force positions anyway out of these I mean these are you know creative authors and intellectuals you know they each highly eccentric those three authors and they really tried to romanticize this and to some extent just as like a literary trope that's still haunting contemporary political discourse but from my part you know when I talk to people about this again and again in Canada I ask Oh have you ever been to City Hall have you ever given a deposition at City Hall have you actually been to Parliament have you ever spoken before the house of parliament have you ever looked at what it takes to get a bill put before Parliament have you got what it takes to get your opinion heard as an expert witness and the consideration of a case there are so many ways to have your voice heard in a democratic system and it's not the case that these people have exhausted those possibilities before resorting to violence before resorting to street protests for one thing yes but here we're not talking mystery buck tortoise we're actually talking with civil disobedience talking but intentionally breaking the law with us to burn something down break-in steal something you know etc etc um they in general I can't think of a single exception they haven't tried those things that haven't looked into them and you know I think we all know why it's because ultimately you know today the source of romanticization is exactly whatever gets donations whatever makes money here on YouTube at the end of the day you know sadly the Internet has turned political activism into a popularity contest as never before and I see direct action everywhere DXE and the current generation of people preaching and practicing nonviolent violence what else am I gonna call it you know so-called civil obedience I really do see you guys as the bottom of the barrel hit me up a bonus yell