Yettaw, 53, a former military serviceman from Falcon, Missouri, was sentenced last week for a May 3 incident when he swam across a lake to the house of Suu Kyi and stayed, uninvited, for two days. Myanmar's government said Yettaw's presence at Suu Kyi's compound violated the terms of the house arrest she was under at the time. Yettaw testified in court that God had sent him to Myanmar to protect the opposition leader because he dreamed that a terrorist group would assassinate her.
Fully story is here.
Lucky for him, the US government went to bat and he's not spending the next 7 years in a Myanmar jail. To be clear, I don't believe he belongs in jail, although he probably should see a therapist of some sort. Was this really a good idea? Most of us can look at this story and say no. Why? Because we're not emotionally wound up in it. Myanmar (formerly Burma) is a place that most of us don't know much about and have little emotional investment in. The social justice movement in Burma doesn't provide us with anything we need and so we can look at what James Yettaw has done and agree that this was a generally bad idea.
Were the justifications for his actions clear? No. Were they even in vague touch with reality? Not really. If he had said it was a message from Yaweh that the Myanmar government was going to execute Suu Kyi, that might be marginally more plausible, but terrorists? Were the tactics he chose even closely aligned with whatever his strategy was? The guy swam across a lake, apparently unarmed, in the middle of a military dictatorship, and snuck into a major political figure's house while she was under house arrest. I'd say that's a no.
To be clear, I'm not personally attacking him. He seems well-intended if misguided. I'm grateful that he won't spend the next 7 years in a Myanmar jail. He's older. He has diabetes. I hope he's home, safe and well very soon. But was his action in any way helpful to the opposition in Myamar? They say no. We should seriously listen.
One of the most common, if somewhat overly facile, arguments made in the various attempts to shut down criticism of certain direct actions is: would you say the same thing if it were a human being? This question is meant to be rhetorical. It's meant to provoke some sort of really thoughtful soul searching, some sort of head scratching perhaps, but what this kind of question is really intended to provoke is moral shame and silence. It is a kind of thinly veiled paternalism that implies that anyone who's not willing to cheerlead moronically every action of every kind for the animals (from chicken suits to assassinations) is somehow being a speciesist by pointing out someone else's strategic and tactical errors.
For me, it's never had this affect. What it tells me immediately is that someone has never actually been involved in a militant organization and doesn't know much about them. I also don't have a soul to search, and my head is more of a paperweight. But I've also worked in social justice, in militant groups, and in adult social struggle for going on 20 years now. I wasn't palling around with my friends, breaking windows to show The Man, having a high five-fest, and then going to a Burger King to see how many burgers I could cram down. As someone who has been engaged in militant work, I know how valuable criticism and self-criticism are to that work.
So, my answer to this question is always and unquestionably: yes. I would absolutely pursue the exact same course of action for a human animal as a nonhuman animal: whatever was most maximal to rendering justice unto their rights within the broader context of furthering the rights of all animals not to be used as property. Even if militancy were the solution to the problem of the property status of nonhuman animals, and it cannot be, adventurism has absolutely no place in a militant organization, period.
The romantic notion that we should go with our intuition and appoint ourselves vigilantes for the animals may sound noble, but it's deeply problematic. It proposes we violate the rights of some in order to further the rights of others. Perhaps it's a coincidence, but that's also exactly how the Brown Shirts saw themselves. Further, it proposes that we consider what we emotionally need over what we should do to help those with whom we should be in solidarity. It leads us into rights conflicts with others that cannot be justified. It promotes disorganization and a lack of clarity as to what animal rights advocates should be doing. Perhaps worst of all, it often hurts those we are seeking to help. Their lives depend on us taking their needs more seriously than our emotional needs to break stuff, to fulfil our emotional needs to feel like we're making a difference, our emotional need for media attention, our emotional need to feel heroic, our emotional need to see our names in the papers. I hope the pattern is clear here.
It's not about what the oppressed owe us; real solidarity work is rationally understood, organized, motivated and carried out with the discipline, good faith, and dedication required to deliver the justice that we owe them.
The best thing anyone can do for the Myanmar opposition is to engage in creative nonviolent education about the situation in Myanmar and to lay the groundwork for mass movements that insist on change. Similarly, if we take nonhuman animals seriouly, the best thing any of us can do is to take the rights of nonhuman animals as property seriously, and to go, stay and say vegan as a baseline for taking those rights seriously. Should we wish to do more, then that is equally clear: we should promote the abolition, and not the regulation, of the property status of nonhuman animals, engage in creative, nonviolent education, and work to promote the adoption of the millions and millions of nonhuman animals whose lives can be saved through perfectly legal means.
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