sea shepherd finds japanese whaling fleet
We have them!
The crew of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s ship, the Steve Irwin, have found the Japanese whaling fleet, less than a week after leaving Hobart, Tasmania. The Yushin Maru # 2 was caught unaware today in dense fog and in heavy ice. The Sea Shepherd crew immediately launched a strike on the vessel with rotten butter bombs.
The Japanese whalers have been caught hunting whales inside the Australian Antarctic territorial waters in blatant contempt of a January 2008 Australian Federal Court Order prohibiting them from whaling in the Australian Economic Exclusion Zone.
Sea Shepherd intends to enforce this Order and other international conservation laws protecting endangered whale species in an established whale sanctuary in violation of the international moratorium on commercial whaling. We do so in accordance with the principles established by the United Nations World Charter for Nature.
And always in activist life, those with whom you have the most in common are those with whom your feuds run the deepest. Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd both: grow the fuck up, k?
“We passionately want to stop whaling, and will do so peacefully. That’s why we won’t help Sea Shepherd. Greenpeace is committed to non-violence and we’ll never, ever, change that; not for anything. If we helped Sea Shepherd to find the whaling fleet we’d be responsible for anything they did having got that information, and history shows that they’ve used violence in the past, in the most dangerous seas on Earth. For us, non-violence is a non-negotiable, precious principle. Greenpeace will continue to act to defend the whales, but will never attack or endanger the whalers,” the release adds.
I’m not a big proponent of political violence, but the fetishization of self-righteous non-violence is a luxury for those who can still hold theory above practice. Judging by the Whale Wars tv show, Sea Shepherd has taken some stupid risks, although more with their own lives than with those of the whalers. To equate risky behavior on the high seas with direct forms of violence, however, is a cop-out and a moral abdication.
