As the June 11th day of Solidarity with long-term anarchist political prisoners approaches, The Final Straw will be addressing the Green Scare over the next two shows.
I’m happy to bring you an interview with Will Potter, author of the new book, “Green is the New Red” and founder of GreenIsTheNewRed.com , a blog where Will follows the suppression of free speech and activists working to end animal cruelty and the destruction of our natural environment.
Next week, The Final Straw will bring you an interview with members of the support committees for long-term anarchist political prisoners Marie Mason and Eric McDavid (respectively).
Soundtrack for this week’s episode was taken from Filastine’s album, Burn It, which was pressed by CrimethInc to benefit the legal defenses of victims of Operation Backfire and the Green Scare.
Free all prisoners!
For more info on these shows, check out:
- http://www.greenisthenewred.org
- http://www.june11.org
- http://supporteric.org
- http://www.supportmariemason.org
- http://breakthechains.info/
. … . ..
Transcription
TFSR: Will, the term Red Scare describes the suppression of immigrants, political radicals, and those suspected of radical tendencies during the Palmer Raids in 1919, 1920, and later during the McCarthy period of the 1950s and after. What is the Green Scare, and why the comparison?
Will Potter: I use that term not to imply that what’s going on right now with environmentalists and animal rights activists is the same as what happened during the ‘20s and also the ‘40s and ‘50s in the US. But I think it’s really useful to draw comparisons between previous eras of government repression and the tactics being used today. I think when you look specifically at how the Red Scare operated, how the most notorious era of government repression in US history came about, was manufactured, was able to thrive and endure, it really has some striking implications for how we think about the tactics that are nearly identical in place today in labeling animal rights and environmental activists as communists but as so-called eco-terrorists.
TFSR: In the book you talk about the chilling effect and go into more detail on that with the idea of conflating above-ground activism with below-ground, underground destruction of property, calls for boycotts, and things like that. You mentioned that in terms of a chilling effect, and you say that’s an actual part of legalese. It’s a recognized term in the legal infrastructure. Can you go into detail about that idea?
Will Potter: One of the main ways that the Red Scare operated was through fear. It wasn’t always through kicking down doors and arresting people, although quite a bit of that happened. The true danger of the Red Scare was instilling fear and making people afraid of who they associate with and afraid of speaking up. One of the earliest uses I found of the term chilling effect was actually from a case during the Red Scare, ultimately called Lamont v. Postmaster General.
The case involved a law on the books that didn’t make it illegal to send or receive communist political propaganda and didn’t make it illegal to be a communist but said that anyone who wanted to send or receive that material had to go down the post office and sign for it. Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled that just because it wasn’t an outright prohibition, it still had an effect on people’s First Amendment rights, because any reasonable person paying attention would think twice about using that. They would think twice about putting their name on such a list. The court called this a chilling effect. It didn’t ban speech. It chilled it. It slowed it. It made people wonder if they should really speak up for what they believe and use their civil liberties.
I think we need think about this in the same way as the terrorism rhetoric. The use of that word terrorism has come up in court cases, and it’s come up in legislation, and I talk about this quite a bit in the book, that through all of that, it’s fundamentally about fear. It’s about demonizing people because of their political beliefs and sending a message to the wider movements that are paying attention, the other activists who are paying attention, and making them think twice about speaking up lest they also can be labeled as terrorists. That’s the chilling effect taking place.
TFSR: The two main narratives in your book, Green is the New Red, tend to focus on the people who were caught up in the SHAC 7 case and the Operation Backfire of the FBI. Could you talk a little bit about those specific cases for any listeners who aren’t familiar with those two things?
Will Potter: Sure. Operation Backfire was the government’s roundup of environmentalists who were charged with some serious property crimes in the name of the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front. Nobody was charged with harming a human being or murdering anyone, but they did cause a significant amount of property destruction and profit loss to the corporations that they targeted. Often, many of these cases involved arson.
The government pushed for what’s called a terrorism enhancement penalty. It is the first time it’s been used against environmentalists in any kind of case like this. Ultimately many of these people were convicted as terrorists for acts of sabotage. It was a very high-profile and politically motivated case that spanned many years of investigation and law enforcement resources.
The other main thread and narrative in the book that I used to guide the story is the SHAC 7. They were part of a campaign called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty. It was an international movement that brought a notorious animal testing laboratory called Huntingdon Life Sciences to its collapse. These people were not charged with burning SUVs. They were not charged with freeing animals from laboratories or anything like that. The government said that they were part of a conspiracy because they, in their words, supported those tactics, in addition to supporting people who protested, distributed leaflets, made phone calls and sent emails, and their own controversial website, in which they voiced their support for all of those things and also published publicly available and sometimes personal information about the corporations and executives that they were protesting and targeting. Because of that, they were convicted of conspiracy to commit Animal Enterprise Terrorism, in addition to stalking and conspiracy to stalk, and were sentenced to between one and six years in prison.
The reason I focused on those two sets of cases to drive the story is that I think it really reflects the breadth of how far this so-called War on Terrorism is going against these movements. If you listen to the corporations, it’s just about these extremists who are destroying property, and one day they might harm human beings. In actuality, that’s not the case at all. This rhetoric and these laws and these court cases are expanding more and more and targeting an ever-wider group of people.
TFSR: I have to say, I really appreciate the narrative that you offer in the book of the history of the effectiveness of the SHAC campaigns in the UK. The story about the animals actually being liberated from the Beagle farm in the pre-SHAC organization is just totally inspirational. You point to how effective the SHAC campaign is, besides the lobbying attempts of the government by the private corporations, the fur industry, the animal testing industry, and everything else. It really is amazing to see it broken down, to see how above-ground calls for boycotts, and information being exposed about these companies, have totally knocked the corporation off of Wall Street, basically.
At the end of the book you make the very succinct point about how a simple reading of the Green Scare could bring someone to the conclusion that this is just about economics, that it’s about industries protecting their interests and lobbying government to have them impose extra special protections for their industry and for their business. But you take it a step further, I think correctly, and point out that it’s what one could describe as a culture war. The main interest behind the government’s activity is not necessarily just to protect industries and the people that are putting them into office with their campaign funding, but also because a lot of the concepts that are inherent in calling for animal welfare, animal liberation, or abolition actually challenge some of the basic tenets and understandings of the liberal society that we live in. Could you speak to that?
Will Potter: Absolutely, I think you put that very clearly. One thing I might add is, as I was tied back to that Red Scare analogy we were talking about earlier, one of the things that was really useful to me in spending so much time researching those past eras of government repression, or particularly the Red Scare, is that I came to recognize that that occurred because there seemed to be two distinct types of threats. One of them was a direct threat during the Red Scare. It was people infiltrating the top levels of government. It was the threat of communists sneaking away with briefcases full of national security secrets. It was truly disrupting the operations of government.
Similarly, there’s a very direct threat posed by the Animal Liberation Front, Earth Liberation Front, SHAC, and even more mainstream and above-ground groups, all contributing to this threat of attacking corporate profits. They’ve been very successful, and government and corporations have both acknowledged this in court, in legislation, congressional hearings, and FBI memos. It’s all very clear.
But during the Red Scare, it went further there, because the real guiding principle was not just about the direct threat, it was about the indirect threat, the culture war that took place. It was about the fear that if these values took root, they would fundamentally throw into question the entire so-called American way of life, of capitalism, individualism, Western values, and imperialism. Everyone was quite blunt about this in many FBI documents. I mean, that’s part of the reason they labeled It’s A Wonderful Life, the classic holiday movie, as communist political propaganda, because people thought that the anti-bank and anti-corporate message of the movie could affect wide groups of people and throw these beliefs into question.
Ultimately, I really came to firmly believe that the same thing is going on now. In the book, I go into much more detail with the rhetoric of these groups, and also the rhetoric of corporations, government, prosecutors, and everything pulled together. But in many ways, I think, these activists, animal rights and environmental movements, I think, more than any other social justice movement, fundamentally challenge what it means to be a human being. They threaten corporate property, sure, but through their beliefs, they also question everything about how we live our lives.
If you embrace animal rights in more radical environmental philosophy, it totally alters how we think about transportation, the pharmaceutical industry, and agriculture. Everything about how we interact with the natural world is thrown out of whack because no longer are human beings the center of the universe, and no longer do human beings have an unobstructive right to do whatever they want to any and every other species on the planet. And I think that, kind of the culture war that’s playing out right now, truly is the threat, and corporations have identified it as much. That’s the only way we can explain why groups like the Humane Society, which is actually attacked within the animal rights movement as being too moderate and condemns underground activists, condemns the ELF and ALF, is being labeled a terrorist organization. PETA, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, all of it is being wrapped up together because, in the minds of the opposition, they represent the threat of a different world.
TFSR: Because they threaten to put life ahead of profits, necessarily.
Will Potter: Absolutely. They threaten one of the long-unchallenged views that the interests of human beings are at the center of every political, corporate, and social issue that we address.
TFSR: Near the end of the book, in the last couple of chapters, you talk about what’s known about two Communications Management Units that are like an extension, almost a harsher or comparable version of a Special Housing Unit, the SHU, or Supermax Prison. You mentioned Daniel McGowan and another activist whose last name I really don’t want to mispronounce, one of the SHAC 7, having been housed there. Can you talk a little bit about the government creating these facilities and then afterwards trying to legally justify them?
Will Potter: These prison facilities are called Communications Management Units, and they were opened after a previous campaign by the government failed. They issued a proposal to create these special, experimental prison units, and it was met with serious opposition by the ACLU and religious groups and ultimately shut down. A few months later, the government decided to open them anyway, without any accountability process, without following the letter of the law in doing so. And right now, there are two Communications Management Units that we know of, one in Marion, Illinois, and the other in Terre Haute, Indiana. They overwhelmingly house Muslim prisoners, 70-80% [of inmates are Muslims]. For instance, Dr. Rafil A. Dhafir, who was convicted of violating the economic sanctions on Iraq by sending medical supplies to the children there, nothing that most reasonable people would ever consider as terrorism. They’re not the Zacarias Moussaouis of the world. They’re not the 9/11 hijackers, nothing like that.
This facility is also currently housing Daniel McGowan, who’s an Earth Liberation Front prisoner, and it had previously housed Andy Stepanian, who was an animal rights activist, part of the SHAC 7, convicted on terrorism charges for his role in that campaign.
The real danger of these special, secretive political prisons is that they radically restrict prisoner communication with the outside world to levels that meet or exceed some of the most extreme restrictions in the country, such as you mentioned the SHU or the Supermax. At the same time, the government provides no criteria as to how someone is transferred there, why they’re there, or how they can get out. The government won’t provide a list of who is actually there. So this level of secrecy and this lack of accountability leads many of the guards and the prisoners to call these places Little Guantanamo, of course, a reference to Guantanamo Bay, which is the notorious prison facility for international terrorists, where the US deprives them of basic rights to legal counsel.
The thread between all of this, and I think the reason that everyone should be concerned, is not that the people listening to this show might end up in one of these places, because it’s not going to happen. The real danger is the setting up of these parallel legal systems for people that the government labels in documents and has identified as “having inspirational significance.” In other words, they’re leaders. They’re political figures, they’re political prisoners, and singling out people like that because of their political beliefs, hiding them from the public, hiding them from the public spotlight in the press, and not allowing reporters there, and things like that, should really concern everyone.
TFSR: You document that the original attempts to form these sorts of secret political prisoner prisons first started in 1980, and then they were shut down by 1988. When were these new ones developed and implemented?
Will Potter: You’re right. There’s actually a long and pretty dark history in this country of special prison units for people because of their political beliefs. This latest round happened in about 2006, with these Communications Management Units. Like I said, initially, the proposal was defeated because of public outrage, then later it was opened in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act, and then the second facility was opened.
As a little bit of background—and not to go too much into the weeds here—this was all about the same time that there was a huge national scandal about prisoners in the Supermax in ADX Florence sending letters to what was described as a terrorist cell in Spain. The government and prison officials got a whole lot of heat for this. This was part of the response: opening these political prisons and these experimental prison facilities that radically restrict prisoner communications.
That’s how all this was pitched, right? It’s always pitched like, “Oh, you know, we have to do this for the interest of everyone’s national security.” In actuality, all the tools to restrict prisoner communications are already in place. All prisoners have their communications monitored, and these places are really about singling out specific prisoners because of their politics.
TFSR: You talk a lot in the book about the redefinition of terrorism and its usage, industries pushing for redefinitions, and government officials saying that the current definition doesn’t give them enough power to be able to really have an effect. What’s the current working definition that the federal and state governments are operating under when they accuse someone of being a terrorist at this point?
Will Potter: There isn’t one. That was actually one of the most difficult sections for me to research and write for the book, because some people have actually spent their entire careers as political scientists trying to come up with an adequate definition of terrorism. We use this word, and we allow it to be used by politicians and in the press without it ever having a definition. There’s no one definition used by law enforcement. There’s no one definition used by the states, and there’s no one definition used by the federal government and international governments. The United Nations still hasn’t come to an agreed-upon definition.
I tried in the book to identify some of the shared characteristics, but really, the most important takeaway is that the word is intended to be that fluid. It needs to be that malleable, because the purpose of that word throughout history has been to always demonize the other. It’s always about using it against your political opponents. It’s always about carving out some justification for why the actions of some people are freedom fighters—to use what has become a bit of a cliché—and the other actions of different groups of people with different politics is terrorism. Especially since 9/11 but even before that there have been campaigns by corporations and politicians to expand even further this nebulous term and to expand it to political activists by labeling them so-called eco-terrorists and to expand it to property destruction and non-violent civil disobedience.
TFSR: I thought it was very useful that you brought up the comparison in definition to pornography.
Will Potter: Right. For people that don’t know, there is a Supreme Court case in which ultimately Justice Stewart said that, “You know it when you see it.” It’s kind of become a joke in some ways in this culture: “Oh, you know it when you see it.” You know what porn is when you see it. That’s how you distinguish the difference between art and obscenity.
It’s really the same thing going on right now. There are no policies in place that really spell out how and why some people are being targeted because of their beliefs. As a result, you have law enforcement agencies around the country with very little training and even less oversight running wild using all these terrorism resources that have come down through the federal government and trying to make a name for themselves by investigating, for instance, in Pennsylvania, environmentalists who attended a film screening of the movie Gasland. There’s no consistency at all. I would argue these priorities just don’t match up with what most people think of instinctively as terrorism.
TFSR: So these law enforcement agencies actually get federal funding for trying to pigeonhole people locally as terrorists?
Will Potter: Sure. There have been millions of dollars that have flowed to the states since September 11th. They’ve gone to things like fusion centers, which are multi-law enforcement agencies that bring together all different groups of people to fight terrorists. They go to the Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which involve local police. And there haven’t been any real strings attached. There’s no accountability model. There are no checks and balances, and it’s really another parallel to what happened during the Red Scare. I mean, some of the worst abuses occurred at the local level by law enforcement who don’t have the proper training, and even if they did, they abuse their power to push a political agenda.
So that has seriously been a danger since September 11th, how this money has been distributed. And of course, everyone wants to get a piece of that pie, right? I mean, that should be self-explanatory. Law enforcement wants to make arrests in the war on terrorism. I talked to one former FBI agent who described it really well, as, you know, in the ‘80s, it was the war on drugs. Post-9/11, it’s terrorism. This is how, If you want to play the game, if you want to have a career, you need to focus on arresting terrorists. And as a result, that net has grown to encompass non-violent protesters.
TFSR: So what’s your understanding of the actual impact on property destruction and Earth Liberation/Animal Liberation crimes since the passage of laws like the Animal Enterprise Protection Act and Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act?
Will Potter: It’s really hard to say for a lot of reasons. All parties involved have reasons for cooking the books and skewing their numbers. More radical animal rights and environmental groups obviously want to show that they haven’t been deterred and that these underground activities continue. Meanwhile, corporations and politicians want to, on the one hand, say the same thing, so they can get more laws and more protection. But at the same time, they want to show that it’s been successful, that their efforts have been worthwhile. So because of that, it was really difficult to find a common thread.
But one thing that has been abundantly clear in just going through the communiques of these underground groups, these draconian legislation, like the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, the arrests and Operation Backfire, outrageous prison sentences of people like Jeff Luers, who got 22 years and eight months for burning SUVs, all of these things have been cited by underground groups after they’ve done more property destruction. And in some ways, it’s motivating people to go even further. And that’s one of the questions I raise in the book, that from a non-activist perspective, from a law enforcement perspective, this just doesn’t work. It doesn’t lead to this roundup of underground activists. The only thing it’s led to is an ever growing net that’s wrapping up more mainstream people and more above ground people.
At the same time, people are led to wonder that if they can get the same amount of prison time—for instance in the case of Peter Young, who released Mink from prison, had about the same amount of time as some of the SHAC 7 defendants, who only publicly supported that type of activity—it sends a pretty mixed message to activists about what type of activism they should pursue.
TFSR: On page 30 of the book, you start the second paragraph describing the January 6, 2009 Third Circuit Court of Appeals. The quote of the US Attorney describing the motivations for the government in the case being discussed, the SHAC case, says, “This case was never fought on the basis of what actually happened by and large. This case was fought on the battleground of: ‘Should we be held responsible for what other people are doing?’” I think it’s a really interesting statement, and it directly points back to what you were just saying about the SHAC 7, that the government is actually coming out and saying, just like in the Haymarket trial in the United States, these people aren’t necessarily on trial. What’s on trial is anarchy.
Will Potter: It’s a movement on trial without a doubt. The people who were arrested as part of the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty case weren’t charged because they were some kind of ringleaders. They were all picked from different parts of the country, some of them with very little involvement in the actual campaign. They sent some emails or they attended a few protests. Then a couple of others visibly had a more leadership role, but the government clearly singled out people to make an example of them. And I think from the comment you just read from one of the prosecutors, it’s quite clear, and they’re not even attempting to hide that.
I think that’s one of the real serious dangers of this case. I mean, the SHAC 7 case was so pivotal because it goes against the entire body of First Amendment law in this country, which has actually been quite good at protecting radical speech. Of course, there have been horrible things that have happened over the years, but on the whole, the First Amendment has been used and upheld to protect vulgar, crass, controversial speech, the speech that happens on the fringes, because that’s where the First Amendment needs to be the most vigorously defended. But in this case, the government said, we should be able to hold someone accountable for the actions of other people that may or may not happen, and also for the actions of other people that are published on a website, if that makes sense. I think I just said that in a pretty convoluted way.
Another way of saying it is, you know, one key First Amendment case is the Bradenburg case, the incitement standard. So you have a right to say really controversial things up unto the point it incites imminent and lawless action. Well, in this case, some folks ran a website. There was no imminent lawless action. No one read a website posting and then ran out and did something illegal. The government never argued that. But they said it was part of the conspiracy. So clearly, this is a successful and really disturbing effort to expand who can be held responsible for underground crimes in the name of animal rights and environmental movements.
TFSR: I want to mention something here. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but in Asheville on May 1st of last year, 11 people were arrested after a sort of reclaim the streets activity where some windows got broken. It was about $18,000 worth of property damaged in the downtown. No one was actually caught in the act, but 11 people were swept up and arrested for being young, wearing dark clothing, and being downtown afterwards. And each of them were given what amounted to $65,000 worth of bail each, which is pretty incredible. The next day, the press conference that the police held and that all the media outlets just latched on to, was talking about an international anarchist May Day movement that had the goal of just messing as much stuff up everywhere as possible and necessarily tying in these individuals as anarchists, despite none of them claiming to be anarchists. It’s just incredible.
Will Potter: Unfortunately, it’s not isolated at all. I think what’s common, not in that case, but in so many others, is really part of a bigger effort to redirect public attention from the people who are actually committing crimes and actually causing millions and billions of dollars of property loss. Nobody is hauling in CEOs who though through their reckless practices continue to receive bonuses and brought about a severe economic downturn that in fact directly impacted many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of real people. That’s not what’s on trial. I mean, the efforts to disproportionately focus on people like this. If these people actually did something like that, it’s clearly illegal. Breaking windows is illegal. Spraypainting is illegal. Everybody knows that. That’s not the question. The question is, what should be the focus of government resources? What should be the focus of law enforcement?
I don’t think you have to be an anarchist, a radical, a leftist, or whatever you want to call it to make the very obvious observation that it’s not a bunch of kids wearing black in the street that should be the target of government resources. It’s actually the people at the top who are causing these problems, who are causing this environmental destruction, who are causing this economic collapse. They should be the focus of current scrutiny, I would argue, and many other millions of people would argue. But that attention is all being redirected.
TFSR: You mentioned in the last couple of chapters how there was actually a good amount of government criticism that came from one of the internal balancing organizations. Do you want to go into that?
Will Potter: Sure. Part of the research on the book was a really glamorous task of combing through all these old Inspector General reports by the Justice Department. It’s really just horribly boring stuff, and most of it has no relation to any of this in any way. But in one of them, in an unrelated report, I found this section in which the Office of Inspector General, which is the auditing and oversight arm of the Justice Department, issued an audit and advised the FBI, as their chief recommendation in 2006, I believe, to shift focus and to stop classifying animal rights and environmental activists as terrorists. because doing so is a waste of law enforcement resources and could be better spent targeting people who are actually threatening human life. And this isn’t my talking points. This isn’t my observation. This isn’t some radical approach on this. This is coming from the Office of Inspector General of the Justice Department.
The FBI responded, No. They issued a very terse response and said, We believe that these people are domestic terrorists and that the best way to prosecute them is by investigating them as terrorists and using the appropriate resources to do so. And that was the end of the discussion. Fast forward to a few years later, and there’s another report that was similar to that about the FBI targeting social protesters. But what we’ve seen through all this time is that there are people, even within the government, who recognize that this shouldn’t be going on, that government resources shouldn’t be spent this way, that it’s targeting people because of their beliefs. But through either the orchestration of people in power or political pressure by corporations or a combination of a lot of factors, these policies continue.
TFSR: I played the trailer for your book, so this will be heard by everyone in the introduction, but the book starts with with you being basically visited at home by the FBI, the threat of being visited at work, and possibly having scholarships taken away from you and your partner because of a demonstration where you were handing out leaflets and putting up tags on the door of someone who worked for a company that was supporting Huntingdon Life Sciences. They threatened to actually put you on a terrorist list.
Will Potter: That’s right.
TFSR: You mention later on in the book also that a number of the people who you were protesting with when they were trying to cross borders, or when they were pulled over in their cars, that it did come up in the records of law enforcement that they were on a terrorist list.
Will Potter: Absolutely, yeah. I was threatened with that, and over the years, that really started this whole journey for me. It’s really the start of what became an obsession, in a lot of ways. It scared the crap out of me to start with. I was really ashamed of that fear for a bit. Once I came to terms with that and moved through it, I really became obsessed with finding out how people were being threatened with being placed on terrorist lists and visited by the FBI for leafletting, a Class C misdemeanor which was ultimately thrown out. I had never been arrested before, and at the time, I was working for the Chicago Tribune.
Over the years, that fear resurfaced in different ways and at different times, wondering what the repercussions would be, wondering if I would get stopped at this or that, or when I testified before Congress, if I would be smeared as a terrorist. In the context of the book, I talk about the power of this is really not ever knowing. I talked about some of my co-defendants who confirmed they’re on a domestic terrorist list. One person was actually in a police car. He wasn’t arrested. A cop was giving him a ride, and kind of for fun to pass the time as they were waiting for a tow truck, swiped his license, and it pulled up that he was part of a domestic terrorist organization, animal rights extremists. My girlfriend at the time, when she renewed her driver’s license, squad cars and cops with guns drawn came, and they told her, Oh, it must have been some mistake. You triggered some kind of a warning system. Another friend of mine was stopped by police with guns at the airport and prohibited from flying, told she was on a terrorist list. So clearly there was some validity to these threats.
But ultimately, my takeaway and message from it, and what I really learned from that experience, was that it’s not so much that they actually did it. In some ways, it doesn’t matter if I was put on that list or not. It’s the fear that it instilled in me. And it really is intended, through FBI harassment like that, to make people think twice about using their rights, think twice about who they’re around and make people around you, and around me to think twice about who I am. Did I say anything to the cops? How well do we know Will? Is he actually an informant? Which is what the FBI agents told me I needed to do in order to avoid being placed on the list. Of course, that never even crossed my mind, but that’s all part of the campaign of fear.
TFSR: Near the end of the book, you also go into the idea of you questioning whether it’s good that you wrote the blog, that you wrote the book, and you’re actually talking and publicizing all these horrific things that the government and industries are doing to people who are using their voices and taking action. That’s a really powerful moment in the book, I think. Do you want to describe that?
Will Potter: Sure. In a lot of ways, fear was really a character in the book. It just keeps resurfacing. In mild way sometimes, but ultimately, it kind of came to a head when I was really just immersing myself non stop in this issue, especially around the time the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act and I was traveling the country and doing speaking events. I really started to wonder, based on emails and comments I was receiving from people, if I was doing more harm than good. I mean, if I believe what I’m saying, that the purpose of all of this is to instill fear, and I’m making more people aware of what’s going on in these outrageous cases that are legitimately pretty scary at times, is it just doing the job of corporations and politicians for them? I’ve wrestled with that on and off quite a bit over the last few years.
Ultimately, now I’ve come to really strongly believe that there’s power and empowerment in learning what’s going on, that one of the consequences of reading about things like this, or even reading a book, can be fear. But there’s also a very similar emotion that I think exists in all of us, alongside fear and very similar to it, that can also have that paralysis, that can also have that lack of control, and things like that. And that’s rage. I think that by learning about what’s going on, I’ve seen time and again in events across the country, and talking to people on shows like this, that when people learn about these things, at first, they’re afraid and they’re disturbed. But when you talk to people with like-minded views, a really incredible thing happens, and that fear turns to rage really quickly.
So even though I focus on some pretty dark stuff daily and just spend my Friday nights and weekends reading court documents and things like that, at the end of the day, I still come out of it in a lot of ways thinking more positively than I did when I was going in, because I’ve seen so many people take this information and be outraged by it and use it as an opportunity to build alliances with different social movements, to reevaluate their own tactics, to reinvigorate their own activism, for people that have been not that active the last couple years or been out of things for a while, and it’s been incredibly inspirational to see.
TFSR: June 11th is a Day of Solidarity with Long-Term Anarchist Political Prisoners. It’s a continuation of the day of solidarity with Jeff “Free” Luers, who was given a sentence of 22 years, eight months, for burning three SUVs with one other person at a car lot in Eugene, Oregon, in 2000. This year, the organizers are focusing on the cases of Marius Mason and Eric McDavid. In future shows, I’ll be talking to guests about those two subjects in those two cases. Your book goes into detail about how you’ve actually grown real personal relationships with many of the defendants and their families from the SHAC 7 and Operation Backfire cases through your work detailing the Green Scare and the SHAC 7 case over the years. Can you speak to the importance on a personal and political level of supporting prisoners? How can we do that?
Will Potter: I think it’s a really important question, and it’s been inspiring to me in a lot of ways, even though it’s heartbreaking, to come to know so many of the people that have been affected by this and to see the strength of their family, their partners, their loved ones, and their friends in supporting them, and at the same time also seeing very clearly the impact that prison can have on people. Everything about the way these court cases in the prison system in general are set up is to make people feel isolated, alone, afraid, weak, and scared. It’s absolutely vital that people remember the people sitting in prison cells right now and that they need [support].
I’ve heard from countless current and former prisoners, that in some ways, the only flecks of light in the darkness on a really dark day is mail call or receiving that phone call or that book in the mail. And these are very simple things that I think we all overlook. I’ve certainly had my regrets of overlooking that and not paying enough attention to that over the years, but it’s incredibly important. So folks can go to the website for this. They can go to june11.org and find information about Eric McDavid and Marius Mason. They can also go to greenisthenewred.com where I list all the prison support sites for other political prisoners as well. Just take a minute to write them a letter. And if you have the resources, send $20 or send a book through Amazon, because it really makes a huge difference in how these people are surviving these ordeals.
Not to keep going on about this, but I think we also need to remember, in a lot of ways, the strength of a movement can be really evaluated by how political prisoners are treated when they come home. So as Daniel McGowan is going to be out not that long from now, by years, I think, and when Eric and Marius eventually get out and Kevin Jones of the SHAC 7 is released, people need to make sure that they have food, that they can find a job, that they can get housing, that they have sneakers, a cell phone, all the things we don’t think about how hard it is to start that life over once you come out of a really traumatic situation. So I think this is a good opportunity for people to start getting involved in that process.
TFSR: Not to bring the discussion back down, but it’s also kind of important to remember the stipulations that courts often put on people’s probations and paroles, like the case of Rod Coronado, who was recently threatened with and I think re-jailed because he was Facebook-friended by a former Earth Firster, and so the court deemed that to be a breaking of some of the stipulations of his probation, because he was relating to another anarchist or environmental activist.
Will Potter: Right. Talking to other prisoners that concern is always looming. Speaking for myself, I’ve never been to prison, and I can’t imagine what it’s like to come home and constantly be worried and in some ways threatened by probation officers or the FBI or whoever that you might be sent back. So I think activists in particular need to keep that in mind when people do come home. I’ve even seen on message boards, on different websites, people actually trying to attack former prisoners for not being active enough, for not being outspoken enough. The arrogance of saying something like that and the ignorance of it really speaks volumes. When people do come back home, there are restrictions, and just because someone isn’t out there with the same rhetoric and the same level of organizing they had before, that doesn’t mean their heart is still not there. But they have a very different set of circumstances they’re dealing with at the time, and people need to get supportive of that and help them find their place back in the movement.
TFSR: Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of need for healing at that point.
Will Potter: That’s a good way of saying that.
TFSR: Thank you so much for this conversation, Will. I cannot do a call to action, but I think that people would enjoy this book if they felt like picking it up. I know that they have copies at Firestorm Books and Cafe in Asheville. It’s where I got mine from. But, yeah, it’s a very good read. People should keep up on reading the blog: greenisthenewred.com, and I look forward to hopefully getting you to come and speak in town. I’ll be sure to announce it on the radio show if I hear about it.
Will Potter: Thanks so much for having me on the program. And yeah, I hope whether or not you get the book, you support places like Firestorm and get involved in June 11th of solidarity. And thanks so much for having me on the program.
TFSR: It’s my pleasure. Thanks a lot.