Why I *Don't* Support the Russian Greenpeace Action

Greenland, summer 2005 - In the summer of 2005 the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise
(ship's weblog) traveled the coast of Greenland, documenting the effects of rapid Arctic warming as part of Project Thin Ice. Photo by Greenpeace/ADavies.

This is going to be a very unpopular view, but that's how it is.

I don't support the Greenpeace action in Russia, and I don't believe that we should demand their release on human rights grounds.

Principles are important, and I respect that the Greenpeace activists act out of conviction and not opportunism, but I don't share their idealism and don't support their means of action. I think those supporting them in the human rights movement are departing from some important long-time principles of non-violence and non-coercion and lawful action that have bad consequences for the movement in the long term -- and for the kind of society that results if they succeed.

I also don't have a problem with the environmental cause, as I live in Flood Zone A in New York City, I've been repeatedly evacuated and lost weeks of electricity and heat from floods, and I get it about "climate change". I also appreciate polar bears, having seen them in their native habitat in Churchill, Manitoba by the Arctic Circle. But debate about the policies in response to these issues is what keeps democracy viable, and methods matter.

The human rights movement used to distinguish its rights-based methods of litigation or campaigns of publicizing of victims and perpetrators -- "naming and shaming"  -- from the "direct action" or civil disobedience of other kinds of movements -- radical revolutionary movements, solidarity movements, movements of conscience that were willing to deploy these forceful methods.

And in the old days, there wasn't the whining and even shrieking we hear nowadays of unwillingness to "do the time if you have done the crime". There was an implicit understanding that if you pounded a Triden missile, spilled blood on files, trespassed on army bases, scaled walls and unfurled banners that you would do time for trespassing, destruction of government property and so on. You wouldn't complain and try to edge-case yourself out of jail.

But today, instead there is a great effort to somehow decriminalize what are in fact are acts legitimately made criminal in a liberal democratic society. Worse, there's a great effort to stress that "our community" and its needs as it performs its virtuous works trump all (as I explained about the evening with Frank La Rue).

Sorry, but I disagree. You can't scale ships and put up signs in the New York harbour, if for no other reason than reasons of safety. Trespassing is a legitimate concept. If the ship were in some kind of oil drilling zone, there might be additional lawyers of laws about hazards of government property.

If you don't like oil drilling rigs in the Arctic, I totally get it -- who does, really? Obviously, it would be better to leave polar bears along to have their cute babies, not do anything to harm or warm the ice caps, and reduce dependency on fossil fuels. As somebody who constantly puts on a sweater in our building's optional energy savings plan, where the heat is shut off during the day, and as somebody who doesn't own a car, who walks a lot and rides the bus and recycles, I get this. And I realize that this isn't enough.

But if you let radicals decide policy for you by their willingness to engage in direct, coercive and sometimes even violent action breaking even legitimate law, you don't have a liberal democracy society. You have an anarchists' haven in which other people's rights are suppressed.

The Greenpeace activists going into Russia were not dummies. They knew full well what to expect from any Greenpeace ship expedition anywhere, given all the trouble they've had over the years (see France); they also knew, given that some were Russians, what to expect from the oppressive Putin government. So they had to be willing to face the consequences -- which they knew inevitably had to result in arrest and some kind of jail term.

The question is what is "fair" to expect for such a jail term for civil disobedience. In some countries, this might be a detention and release with a desk appearance ticket; in others in might be 30 days. it's turning out to be 60 days in Russia just for the pre-trial detention, apparently. The investigation is under the article "piracy" because that's the article that fits for people crawling up over the side of a boat to do something.

And while all the activists are wildly screeching about how this is unfair and it's not pirate, the wily Vladimir Putin has undercut their outrage machine by saying himself, matter-of-factly, that they're certainly not pirates, but they do have to be tried under some law.

To which activists then cry that not even knowing what law you're going to try somebody under sure sounds suspect and you should just let them go -- except trepassing on a government petroleum company's ship in the Arctic does involve some kind of violation of some property and safety law and possibly they'll add some "disturbance of public order" charge to it.

And frankly, that's life in the big city and the chilly Arctic. Governments drill for oil and gas and provide it to their citizens to drive and cook with. I think it would be great if we could all live on farms in upstate New York with horses and cows and goats, but I don't know who's going to organize and pay for us to do that en masse in any practical way.

A Soviet-era dissident who approached me about "doing something for Dima" was shocked and even angered that I was "stubborn" and refused to "come around" and "do something for the community" because I wouldn't race to sign petitions to Russian officials, raise money, and try to agitate various Western officials to speak out. I simply said "no," because I don't support this form of action. I oppose this form of action.

I realize that Dmitry Litvinov comes from a fine pedigree of dissenters. He is the grandsom of Lev Kopelev, the grand Russian writer whom I knew, and the step-son of Pavel Litvinov, the dissident who went out in Red Square in 1968 to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Pavel himself is the grandsom of Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Foreign Minister. Dmitry Litvinov, who spent four years in exile with his father as a little boy --  years the state never gave back to this family -- obviously is a fine man of conscience doing what he thinks is the most important thing now on our planet. He has Swedish and American citizenship and works in the international work of Greenpeace, but he made the decision to go on this Russian trip despite his wife's objections out of a sense of duty to his fellow Greenpeace members and their cause.

So while it is indeed unfortunate that Dima has wound up in a Russian jail just like his step-father, it's for the same kind of convictions that also drove his father and for which Pavel Litvinov was willing to suffer the consequences -- but the means were decidedly different.

Some literalist might say that people like Pavel Litvinov broke laws, too -- as the old joke goes, you are free to demonstrate in Red Square, you just can't remain free after you demonstrate. Some might say he performed a kind of civil disobedience, and therefore we shouldn't distinguish between their actions and the Greenpeace actions.

I totally disagree. The right to peaceful assembly to redress grievances is a universal human right, it has limitations to maintain public order in a democratic society even under the UN covenants, wich means that states can restrict it as to time, place and manner, say, in the United States even under the First Amendment. Because it is a fundamental right, the punishment for the violation of some restriction on it has to be reasonable --- and years of exile or labor camp is not reasonable. The invasion of Czechoslovakia was a gross violation of international law and resulted in massive human rights abuses.

The "right" to trespass and scale or damage government or corporate property or interfere with commerce or take dangerous actions is not secured in international law.

Some might feel that laws protecting private property or punishing the scaling of an oil rig in a government or corporate drilling zone are also "unlawful" and that violating them is "justice" in some larger, metaphysical sense. I disagree. If you don't like capitalist (or state capitalist systems) with oil drilling programs, understood, but these are the consensus of most people in democratic societies.

I'm not aware of even a democratic socialist society that has banished extraction because all countries are dependent on it. I'm not aware of one liberal democratic society that thinks trespassing on corporate or government property and interfering with operations is lawful. Your ideals against these things are understood, but the means you choose to go about them matter -- I don't want to live in a society where handfuls of extreme activists get to decide policy and impose their will by force (which is why I oppose Edward Snowden and Julian Assange).

Now there's the question of Denis Sinyakov, the photographer who accompanied the Greenpeace activists on the ship to photograph them. Shouldn't I support him as a journalist?

No, I don't support his cause as a human rights matter because he was hired by Greenpeace to photograph them while they were staging their action. By becoming a paid member of the Greenpeace team, he joined their activism and can't continue to claim that he had only a journalist's role.

Committee to Protect Journalists doesn't care about this distinction and writes about Sinyakov's case (although I think it did care more in the past); for them, it's a guild matter and a politically-correct matter to back Sinyakov as one of their own. But then they had the bad judgement to pick up Barrett Brown's case, although he is jailed for hacking, not journalism.

I vigorously oppose the blurring of the lines between journalism and activism, which is of course what Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras have been zealously working toward in the Snowden affair, even trying to supply journalistic cover to the hacker Jacob Appelbaum who helped with encryption and communications in this caper, but then expects to be exonerated from any charges by penning a piece or two for Der Spiegel. The new game for all the radicals is to get themselves bylines so they can gain the journalistic cloak. That's exactly what Laura Poitras has been up to at the New York Times and they've unfortunately indulged her in this in part because she's a gatekeeper on the Snowden files.

To be sure, Sinyakov was said to be on assignment from Lenta.ru as well. But evidently, this letter from the editor of Lenta.ru sent to the court room as the Greenpeace activists faced a Russian judge, tacked on the assignment after the fact -- evidently as a form of solidarity because Sinyakov has worked for Lenta.ru and a number of other outlets before, and had previously worked at Reuters. I totally get it that he is a professional photojournalist; that he has a distinguished career; that his photos are important; that he is said to be impartial and even the Taliban thought so.

But the reality is, he accepted a gig from a nonprofit activist group bent on committing civil disobedience, and that means he forfeits his right to expect to have states protest his arrest on human rights grounds.

Of course, some states and groups can find other grounds to protest the arrest -- that he is their citizen and they should just expel him; that they should not use excessive force or excessive punishment for what was a symbolic action. Understood. But that's not the human rights cause, which is more narrow and should stay more narrow.

Interestingly, some Russian bloggers like "Idiot" are angry and accusing Sinyakov and Lenta.ru of lying because they didn't reveal the assignment until after the arrest. And Kashin is saying that the editors and supporters should lie because all means are just in gaining Sinyakov's release, as he's a good guy, and one of theirs. As "Idiot" writes:

Even so I would like to note that 27 September 2013 was the day when virtually the entire Russian journalists' corp signed under an outright lie in order to release one of their own. And completely forgot about all the others arrested along with Sinyakov. Simply because everybody knows Sinyakov and they don't know the rest.

And in the case of the human rights community, everybody knows Dima Litvinov and why wouldn't you be for releasing a good guy from a good family? Well, because principles matter.

I totally get that the Greenpeace detainees, like the Pussy Riot convicts, are going to be cause celebres and everyone who cares about the movement for democracy in Russia will rally behind them. And that few care about these fine distinctions between indirect and direct action, between peaceful action and coercive action, between the human rights approach and the revolutionary approach. But I do care about the kind of society that results when these lines are blurred, and it's the kind of society that results in the Bolsheviks in 1917.

 

Comments

[Alex K.]

I don't approve of Greenpeace's action either for a number of reasons, the first being the heightened risk of an accident this pro-environment demonstration brought about.

However Russian prosecutors are using the obviously inappropriate charge of piracy to justify the two-month pre-trial detention of the activists. The Russian criminal code defines piracy quite clearly, and since the platform is not a ship and the activists were not robbers, it cannot be piracy.

I'm as sure as one can be sure about anything happening in Russia that they will be tried for something else, less serious than piracy. As a result, they will probably receive time served, which by that time may be more than two months. But the practice of early overcharging to justify pre-trial detention is indefensible. It's not limited to Russia - look at Italy for similar abuses - but it's still wrong.

[brian]

interesting article, some goog points BUT:
'given that some were Russians, what to expect from the oppressive Putin government'

Putin govt is not oppressive, who has he oppressed?
1. Russia has given asylum to Edward Snowden., which since this actio weve seen Putin suddenly being a target by HR activists

2. Putin has acted to defuse tensions in the middle east by encouraging dialogue, rather than giving aid to terrorists or sending warships to make war..Syria is a case in point...its not russia engaged in belligerent acts of repression

Russia is tho a target for those who dont want russia to be a free and independent state, to which end they encourage dissidence, and seek ways to destabilise
http://www.globalresearch.ca/russian-opposition-

my view is Greenpeace, a recognised organisation with a certian credibility, is being used as a means to test the waters to bring HR pressure on Putin and turn people against him by making him look like repressive.

' I don't want to live in a society where handfuls of extreme activists get to decide policy and impose their will by force (which is why I oppose Edward Snowden and Julian Assange).'

here is where youve gone wrong Snowden likely, and Assange certainly are not 'extreme activists': Wikileaks is a tool to disseminate leaks from whistleblowers
How is Julkian Assange 'extreme'?

but your thesis that activists could be used (by states) to sow dissent and strengthen opposition is valid

[Catherine Fitzpatrick]

Brian, obviously you hew to the Kremlin line. Why do leftists still do this so mindlessly in our day and age?!

1. Putin's giving of asylum to Snowden is a profitable move for this KGB chief, not some act of humanitarianism. He has sheared this hairless pig down to the bone. If you can't see the Putin government actions against gays, dissidents, demonstrators, migrants, etc. as oppressive, you have something wrong with you. Oh, see my first point, you are hewing to the Moscow line long after it has been utterly discrediting for the left to do so.

2. Putin has only paid for mass murder ($1 billion in arms to Assad), he has enabled and excused it with this cunning "diplomacy". No killing has stopped, and the chemical weapons are not removed. The US doesn't "give aid to terrorists." It supports opposition to mass murder as well it should in good conscience. If some of these rebels radicalize to Al Qaeda or aid ends up in AQ hands, that's hardly the US' fault, it's Russia's fault for propping up this tyrant in the first place. Just as it was for invading Afghanistan in the first place.

Um nobody needs to "destabilize" Russia from outside, it does that all its own with its own aggressive and brutal policies.

You don't have to "make" Putin look oppressive; he *is* oppressive.

His actions against Greenpeace are fully consistent with his policy of cracking down brutally on any foreign relationship to internal dissent (also known as "international solidarity" -- which people like you think is just fine when it comes to the Gaza Strip and deliberately provoking the violence of Israeli military forces and causing people's death -- funny, that.)

Read Assange's latest book. It is filled with extreme views of overthrowin liberal Western governments and replacing them with some extreme brand of anarchist collectivism which is more totalitarian even than Russia itself. Which is why he finds an affinity with the Kremlin.

Putin has succeeded in exploiting both WikiLeaks and Snowden, both of whom think they are the ones using the Russians, most likely.

Democratic states have every right to assist oppositions abroad and make common cause with them. Russians do no less in supporting illiberal antiwestern causes.