Green is the new Red - how animal rights activists are being targeted like 'commies' from the 1950's

Tuesday, December 27, 2011 by: PF Louis
Tags: animal rights, terrorists, FBI

(NaturalNews) Up is down; war is peace; pasteurized, denatured milk is good for you and raw milk is bad; protest is terrorism; and natural health protections and cures are dangerous. This has become the Orwellian rhetoric of our terrible times.

Get ready to add another: Green is Red. Green is the New Red: An Insiders Account of a Social Movement Under Siege is actually a new book by journalist and animal rights activist Will Potter.

Red refers to the old 1950s red (communist) scare that had Senator Joe McCarthy and the FBI going bonkers looking for commies in America while J. Edgar Hoover, the long time FBI head, denied there was such a thing as a Mafia or Casa Nostra crime syndicate.

Green refers to animal rights and environmental movement groups, activist/journalist Will Potter's main focus. When Will Potter was working as a journalist for the Chicago Tribune, he was arrested one day for handing out animal rights leaflets.

Shortly after his release, FBI agents came knocking on his apartment building door. The FBI agents let him know that if Potter didn't contact them, he would be "put on the domestic terrorist list." Following that incident, Will began digging to find out why he would be targeted and harassed by the FBI for such a seemingly-harmless activity.

His journey down that investigative rabbit hole led to networking with other environmental and animal rights activists. What he found was documents that show the FBI and other government agencies have declared war on even peaceful animal rights advocates.

His book combines impartial accurate journalism, personal adventure (reviews say it reads like a novel) and advocacy. Here's Will's short commentary (http://vimeo.com/20753052). The book is available through his site (source below) or from Amazon.

The importance of animal rights and environmental activism

Potter is now a freelance journalist residing in the belly of the beast, Washington DC. He has testified in Congress against the government tyranny that uses fighting terrorism as a cover for protecting corporate malfeasance against animals and the environment for profit.

Yet, most of the activities of these "terrorists" involve either sneaking or getting work at a factory farm or medical lab, and videotaping horrible conditions and sadistic activities. Occasionally, some animals are rescued, perhaps illegally, and occasionally some graffiti is sprayed or windows are broken. Those illegal but harmless incidents are rare.

But without exposure, without seeing what actually goes on in those facilities, how can there be a public outcry? There need to be human voices for these unfortunate creatures (https://www.naturalnews.com/034311_animal_tes...).

So government agencies use the terrorist tag, not only in the United States but in Europe, to jail activists and create public opinion against those who simply want to expose what's really going on in factory farms and medical research labs, get the proof, and occasionally rescue whatever animals they can.

Will thinks that government tyranny against activists goes a step further than just the obvious motive of protecting corporate interests. He explains that exposing actual factory farm and lab animal conditions rips into the very fabric of what sustains our economy, food production and the production of medical drugs and procedures, and the powers-that-be have strong, vested, political interests which they exercise with accusations of terrorism towards those who seemingly only care about unnecessary animal suffering.

If you wish to do anything or find out more about animal suffering and the persecution of those who try to expose it, go to Will's website below in the sources section. It's a very comprehensive, easy to view site.

Treating animals inhumanely leads to becoming less humane/human. Ignoring animals' suffering as a consequence of human greed, and ignorance contributes to this dark dynamic.

Sources for this article include:

Will Potter's site http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/

http://www.humanesociety.org/news/press_rele...