Kipling in five great poems (and one awful one)

Can a Progressive like Kipling?

Well I do, and so did George Orwell, and evidently so did the person who scrawled the last verse of The Secret of the Machines on the wall of the footpath under Manchester Airport's first runway during the protest against the second (right).

So here's my pocket guide to Kipling for the left-of-centre reader.

First, the worst.


The White Man's Burden (1898)

Take up the White Man's burden,
And reap his old reward--
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard--

Here's Kipling as most people know him.

It's difficult to know where to begin with being offended by this poem, although the description of subject races as "Half devil and half child" is probably as good a place as any.

Written after the USA decided to get in on the empire building game by nicking Cuba and the Philippines off the Spanish, this is Kipling at his imperialistic worst.

But as Orwell pointed out, the real objection this poem is not the lack of morality in the message, but the grand delusion of what the Empire was all about. The British Empire was many things, but at its heart it was never the armed evangelistic crusade that Kipling imagined.

Kipling admired the soldiers, engineers and governors of the Empire, and shared the disdain of his class for the 'boxwallahs', the traders and businessmen. He would be amazed as much as anything to discover that it was the boxwallahs, or rather their financial backers, who really pulled the strings.

But whilst this poem may be extremely objectionable, it can't be denied, as Orwell also pointed out, that it is actually a very good description of how a significant proportion of the population of this country saw the mission of Empire.

Arithmetic on the Frontier

A scrimmage in a Border Station --
A canter down some dark defile --
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail --

But if Kipling was deluded about why we had an empire, he was more informed than many about what the reality of imperial administration actually involved.

Kipling before 1914 is often accused of glorifying was, but that's unfair. Compare this poem to The Charge of the Light Brigade by Tennyson, who never went anywhere near Afghanistan. You'd never catch Kipling writing guff about "was there a man dismay'd" - he knew that British soldiers always go into battle grumbling about their officers.

And it is the ordinary soldier who is the hero of Kipling's military poems, not the war.

Others may suggest that the minor wars of Empire were simply a case of "We have got the Gatling Gun ... and they have not", but Kipling knew that for ever Battle of Omdurman there were a thousand scrimmages at Border Stations and that, then as now, the odds favour the guerrilla.

If- (1895)

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

How to be a man by Rudyard Kipling.

As you might expect from such a character as Kipling there not a lot of room for compassion or empathy here, but lets not be too negative.

It's a hymn to Stoicism, the unofficial religion of the era and as Melvyn Bragg has pointed out it's a remarkably classless depiction of British virtues, including" Upper Class aloofness, Middle Class stiff upper lip and Working Class grit".

If- isn't just the morality of the ruling class, it also inspired the Working Class that formed the Labour Party and that would go on to found the Welfare State. And, as Dennis Hopper's reading above shows, it can even inspire the Beat Generation and modern rebels.

What strikes me though is that how, by modern standards, it is so un-macho. For Kipling, being a man was not about not being a woman, but about not being a boy.

Today's New Lads should read it and learn.

Recessional (1897)

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

This, remarkably, was Kipling's contribution to Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, a late substitution for The White Man's Burden.

1897 is generally regarded as the high water mark of British Imperialism, so Kipling's poem stands out like Darcus Howe at a Monday Club bash.

However a century and a bit later his words seem so much more prescient than the rubbish that everyone else was putting out at the time.

As representatives of a hundred grateful colonies and dependencies trooped down Whitehall, and a hundred iron hulls steamed up the Solent, few people, including Kipling, could imagine it would all disappear, but it did.

After all, when you've reached the top, the only way is down.


A Tree Song (1906)

Oh, do not tell the Priest our plight,
Or he would call it a sin;
But--we have been out in the woods all night,
A-conjuring Summer in!

Having lived most of his adult life in India, Kipling returned to England in the final years of the nineteenth century. Looking beyond, or just not seeing, a century of Enclosures and an Agricultural Revolution, he imagined a land unchanged since the days of the pagans - apart from a slight hiccup called the Reformation.

The result was the book Pook of Pook's Hill, which includes this poem.

Modern Pagans, or at least Wiccans, may recognise some of it as it's the only poetry to make it into Gerald Gardner's Book of Shadows.

When Kipling met W.B.Yeats it was no surprise that the Arch-Imperialist and Irish Rebel didn't get on, but despite this there is a lot http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifof similarity in their work. Both looked to a mystical past and, not finding one to their liking, decided to make up their own.

Gethsemane (1919)

And all the time we halted there
I prayed my cup might pass.

It didn’t pass—it didn’t pass-
It didn’t pass from me.
I drank it when we met the gas
Beyond Gethsemane!

Kipling is my favourite First World War poet, which may be a minority position but not an entirely unique one.

His Epitaphs of War sums up the horror and futility of the war in just a handful of words.

The war was both a personal and a political disaster for Kipling. As well as the death of his son, the entire world of benign imperialism had fallen apart. How could any sane person now believe that Europeans were worthy, let alone capable, of bearing the White Man's Burden?

This makes these lines almost unbearably sad.

Was Kipling in part responsible for sending a generation to their deaths?

Perhaps, but if so, at least he realised where that guilt lay. That is the response of a great artist.

Top Five Modern Pagan Folk Songs

This was a hard list.

Thanks to an explosion in pagan folk groups at home and abroad, and mainstream rock bands dabbling in folk sounding tracks I could have easily done a top 20 or top 50.

I've limited myself to one track per artist, and disqualified Jethro Tull, Nightwish and the Waterboys for being technically rock not folk-rock, and have had to miss out Telling the Bees, Skyclad, Druidicca, The Dolmen, Mad Magdalen, The Moon and the Nightspirit, Jim Faupel, Seize the Day or Paul Gill (who's Whisper in the Breeze is the best song to come out of the 1990s road protest movement) and many more. Sorry guys.

But what I'm left with are five songs I really love. Curiously only two are by artists that describe themselves as Pagan, which just shows how the zeitgeist works.

You just can't stop a folky being pagan.

5. Hunting Song by Pentangle


You can debate exactly how pagan the Arthurian legends are, but this song about a magical hunting horn, written by John Renbourne, contains the sort of allusions that make the Arthurian tales so enchanting. It is also a fantastic song by one of the great pioneering folk acts at the height of their powers.

Bert Jansch, I hope you're strumming this now in the Otherworld.

4. Herne by Clannad

For some people Eroll Flynn is the only true Robin Hood, but I suspect for people of my age it's Michael Praed.

Well made, well acted and dark and pagan enough to enrage Mary Whitehouse, it was essential viewing for any teenager who played Dungeons and Dragons. This song, dedicated to Herne the Hunter, sums up the whole thing.

And Clannad's music was sublime. A band from Donegal steeped in Ireland's Trad. scene, at some point they stopped being folk, but it's not entirely clear when, so I'll count them as folk act.

Along the way they lost some of their creative spark and departing member Enya eventually eclipsed them with her own solo career, but they remained a terrific live act up until their eventual semi-retirement.

3. Maypole by Paul Giovanni

Saruman the White, alias Count Dooku, alias Christopher Lee thinks The Wicker Man had the best use of music of any film he knew. Not the best music, he qualifies himself, but the best use of it.

Certainly Paul Giovanni sets the tone of Summerisle perfectly. The best song in Gently Johnny, but as it's basically just about shagging the Maypole song gets the nod as being slightly more pagan.

Really this soundtrack is what started the whole Pagan-folk thing in the first place, and if they'd gone with different music we may now all be Goths instead.

2. The Morrigan by Omnia

'cos they're Dutch I've never had any close connection with Omnia, who seem to be a bunch of heavy metal headbangers who've forgotten to plug their instruments in.

They certainly take the Pagan thing seriously - perhaps someone should tell them it's only a laugh really?

The only problem with putting them in this list is choosing a favourite track.

1. Spirit of Albion by Damh the Bard



Well there could only be one winner couldn't there?

What can we say about our greatest living Pagan songsmith?

Well not alot, but as I'm fairly sure it was him who woke me up one morning years ago at a PF mid-west bash by playing a medley of Fairport Convention songs when I was trying to sleep off a hangover, I suppose I should say I forgive him.

The Five Most Pagan Traditional Folk Songs

With all their merry deeds all in the month of May, it is easy to imagine folk music being the most pagan of art forms.

However, whilst there are now plenty of modern, pagan folkies about the number of actual trad. songs which can claim to be pagan in some way is pretty small.

Part of the problem is that there really aren't many folk songs that we have that date back even two centuries. most of the repertoire was only collected in late Victorian times by a visiting American Doctor.

5. King Henry

One of those songs was this one, about a hideous hag who after a night of passion with the titular monarch turns into a beautiful maiden. When this happens it's usually a sign of Otherworldy forces being at work, whereas the opposite is generally the result of drinking too much.

The 'loathly lady' appears in both Celtic myth and the Northern Tradition, and appears to be connected with sovereignty of the land. It appears in Arthurian legend in the story of Gawaine and Dame Ragnelle, in which the knight shows his loyalty to the King by bedding a right minger on his behalf - which is the sort of loyalty only Arthur could command.

4. The Wife of Usher's Well

Another of the good Doctor's collections was this one.

Superficially this is a conventional story of returning ghosts, in this case the three children of a woman who has mourned them for longer than the prescribed time of a year and a day. The sons are now ghosts, unable to enter paradise until mum moves on.

So far so ordinary, but what makes this song interesting is the date the events happen.

In the words of the song "It fell about the Martinmas" and at night. Martinmas is the 11th November, but in 1752 we adopted the Gregorian Calendar and lopped 11 days off the year. Hence for anyone who forgot to reset their watches the 11th November would be the 31st October - Samhain, when the veil between the world's is thin and the Otherworld can come visiting.

All of which hints that there may be a real pagan survival here, and that some people continued to follow the Old Ways on the Old Calendar up to the nineteenth century.

Maybe modern pagans should all move their rituals forward a week and half? If nothing else it gives you an excuse for forgetting your Sabbat, and can certainly help in getting one up on the Traditionals.

3. John Barleycorn

So far we've had sex and death so all we need for a full house if pagan themes is drink.

Made famous by Traffic in 1970, the song dates back to at least 1568. We can't be sure it's a real pagan survival or the product of a Late Medieval imagination, but who cares.

In Steve Winwood's stoned version seems to go on for ever, but I've heard some pretty raucous versions from Irish musicians, memorably Ron Kavangh, and I've a Fairport Convention live version where Simon Nicol gets the words jumbled up, both of which probably better resemble the way it was performed in Days of Yore.

A classic amongst drinking songs. Wassail!

2. Thomas the Rhymer

Older though by at least three centuries is this song about a legendary Scottish prophet and his trip under the Eildon hills.

Thomas allegedly met the Queen of Elfland whilst sunbathing and was offered the classic choice of the wide road to Hell, the narrow road to Heaven or "the bonny road which winds about the fernie brae" to Elfland where he and she can tootle off for seven years of fun and frolics. Smart lad, he chose to go with the pagans.

As a parting gift he is offered the choice of becoming a musician or a prophet. He chose the latter and is said to have successfully predicted the death of the King of Scotland and a localised Credit Crunch, making him far more famous than if he'd chosen the harp. Once again, smart lad.

1. Tam Lin

Frustratingly this song was only written down the sixteenth century, so we don't know if it was derived from the above, or is a record of separate tradition.

Certainly it is richer fair for pagans. We have hints of the Faery Lover, having his wicked way with maidens who wander through the forest of Carterhaugh, the reversal of the Persephone legend, with a woman rescuing the man for a change, and a bit of shape shifting thrown in for good measure.

Maybe it only gets to number one because I prefer Sandy Denny to Maddy Prior, but I find it an enchanting tale, and all the more interesting for being so enigmatic.

Who was Ned Ludd?

Two hundred years ago today the well known womaniser and occasional poet Lord Byron made his maiden speech in the House of Lords.

His chosen subject was not the relative charms of Greek versus Turkish women, nor was it the relative intoxicating effects of laudanum vis a vis opium. Instead it was the rights of men as opposed to machines.

His courageous and lonely stand was against the Frame Breaking Act, by which the government sought the right to put a rope round a man's neck if he damaged commercial property. It was grotesquely unjust piece of legislation, although I suspect even its architects would regard it as less draconian than sending a mum to jail for five months for receiving a pair of looted shorts off her lodger.

The reason for this was that it was kicking off big style in the Midlands and industrial North of England.

Luddites they called themselves, and although there had been protests and machine breaking before, what started at Samhain 1811 was something altogether more organised than what had gone before.

The government reacted by passing new laws, sending in the army (more soldiers headed north to fight the Luddites than sailed to Spain with Wellington) and in another act with modern echoes, sending in infiltrators to pose as Luddites to discredit the cause. Indeed, in one raid at Westhoughton in April 1812 everyone arrested afterwards turned out to be a paid informant - the real Luddites having gone home beforehand, only to return four days later to finish the job and got clean away.

Spies and the army weren't the only weapons used by the authorities - God was turned on them as well. After one raid a dying Luddite was first denied medical care until he informed on his fellow conspirators, and then a Priest was called who solemnly told him that if he died without confessing he would surely go to hell. As he coughed his last the man beckoned the Man of God nearer. "Can you keep a secret?" he asked. "Yes," lied the Minister. "So can I," said the Luddite, and died.

Because of this devotion to death we know very little about the Luddites. Those who told their story did not do so for another 50 years when, in the age of the Chartists and the first Trade Unions, they were happy to style themselves early Working Class heroes.

In truth there was no Working Class in 1812 and the Luddites, formed in close knit weaving communities with their initiation rituals and secret passwords seem in many ways more like the Friendly Societies that were the successors of the Medieval Guilds. They may have been more the last gasp of the old order rather the first stirrings of the new.

Certainly there code of secrecy was very successful, and the only records of the time we have are those of the authorities, who report prisoners who won't talk and intelligence based on nothing but rumour. What, for example, was The Black Lamp? A secret group Yorkshire based group that had the authorities vexed and which has disappeared back into the ether leaving historians baffled.

Even the name is a mystery.

A story at the time was that there was a boy called Edward or Ned Ludd or Ludham who had a row with his dad and smashed up a frame, hence generating the expression "to Ned Ludd it".

If this was a serious academic blog I'd stop here, for as we can't prove this never happened we should stick with the story. However, indulge me a little longer if you will.

Other explanations are that the name is Notts dialect, or in some way derives from a place name like Ludlow or Ludbrook. But is also possible to look for more legendary origins.

In Geoffrey of Monmouth 12 century classic History of the Kings of Britain, the book that gave us King Lear and which first merged the stories of Arthur and Merlin, we have the story of the Three Plagues of Lud's Town. Here the king fights off spectral foes and in turns gives his name to the town that became London.

Lud in turn probably had his origin in the Celtic god known in Ireland as Lludd or Nudd in welsh, Nodens in Pre-Roman Britain and Nuada in Ireland. As Nodens he turns up across England from Gloucestershire to Lancashire.

He may also have given his name to Lud's Church, the chasm in Derbyshire that may have been the Green Chapel where Sir Gawaine went to meet his Nemesis and where various renegades from Robin Hood to Bonnie Prince Charlie are said to have hidden.

If so then it was a Celtic God that led these rebels against the future and that's certainly worth a toast - although I fear I'm clear out of laudanum.

Five books that made Glastonbury Avalon

Anyone who's walked down Glastonbury High Street, otherwise known as Diagon Alley, immediately knows that this is no ordinary English market town. Apparently when the current King Arthur Pendragon first "came out" and turned up in the town complete with Excalibur to announce his reincarnation he was told he was the second one that day.

Despite being the site of an dissolute monastery, a hill topped with a medieval tower and a natural spring pumping forth reddish water, there was little to suggest the sleepy Somerset town would eventually become "the spaghetti junction of the spiritual journey" (Stone). until late Victorian time.

Then in 1886 efforts were made to restore the Tor and open the Abbey to visitors. At the same time stories that Joseph or Arimathia had hidden the Cup from the Last Supper somewhere nearby started to circulate and the place became popular with Christian mystics.

As the nineteenth century was drawing to a close, a certain Dr Goodchild, following a vision, allegedly purchased an antique glass bowl in Italy and buried it in a muddy field near Glastonbury, where it was recovered by fellow mystics six years later (Benham).

After that things developed rapidly. The recovered Chalice took up home at the newly restored chalice well, now owned by the Christian Socialist Alice Buckton, and a community of people of esoterica took up residence in the town. Others dropped by for the Glastonbury Festival, which was started in 1914 by the Atheist Socialist Rutland Boughton, took a break for the Great War, and then ran three times a year from 1920.

Supposedly there were long haired bohemians, advocates of free love, spiritualists and vegetarians, who were rumoured to visit the Tor after dark, get their kit off, and engage in idolatrous pagan rituals. Your regular night at the Moot really.

5. Avalon of the Heart by Dion Fortune (1930)

The chief chronicler of these early days wasn't one of the locals, but a weekender who popped over from London every now and again.

She said her regular journey from London, past Avebury and Stonehenge, "spans the breadth of England and leads from one world to another".

Her classic book paints a spiritual landscape that dates back to before "the era when the worship of the Son replaced that of the Sun." For Fortune the Abbey was for the Christians and the Chalice Well for the Pagans, with the Tor itself

Lovingly she paints a portrait of the town, a place where the veil is thin and where echoes of an ancient past reverberate in the quiet waters of Chalice Well or the still air atop the Tor.

Possibly because she never lives there, her Avalon is described as a place apart from the mundane world she leaves behind, and the book climaxes with a performance of The Immortal Hour at Boughton's festival.

King Arthur's Avalon: The Story of Glastonbury by Geoffrey Ashe (1957)

Boughton's Glastonbury Festivals came to an end in 1926, and it seemed that with that the sun started to sink on the embryonic esoteric scene in the town. However things were starting to stir in the academic realms of Arthurian studies.

Arthur had been going downhill for a century or so, being relegated from a bona fida Welsh hero to a shadowy from haunting the unknown regions of the Dark Ages. In 1936 one Professor Collingham tried to set him up as a Late Roman cavalryman, but the idea foundered on a lack of evidence.

Such problems though did not hold back the Christian mystic Ashe when he set forth his views in this the first of many books on the subject. Hitherto the Welsh had Arthur resident in Caerleon, and the historians tended to have him further north, but Asha put him squarely where the old monks had had him.

Their story of digging up his bones in 1192 had generally been regarded as bit of English colonial propaganda, stealing Wales's national hero in order to keep down the rebellious Celts across the Bristol Channel.

Ashe though, using the ruse that if it can't be conclusively proven to be false then it must be true, took the story and added to it, setting the whole Matter of Britain more or less within sight of the Tor.

Academics tolerated the book, and when Asha persuaded renowned archaeologist to dig up nearby Cadbury Castle, the resulting finds of a Dark Age fortress further added to the story.

The academics eventually rounded on Ashe and his woolly reasoning and he eventually departed Britain for the more convivial atmosphere of the USA, but for Arthur it didn't matter. He was now back in Avalon.

The View Over Atlantis by John Michell (1969)

Alfred Watkins is generally credited with the discovery, or invention, of Ley Lines. But whilst it's true that his 1921 book, The Old Straight Track, was a minor sensation and had people striding out across the countryside in search of ancient monuments, but there was never anything mystic about Watkins's idea of how ancient Brits got about and it was pretty soon forgotten.

The View Over Atlantis is The Old Straight Track on acid. No longer are Ley Lines there simply to get Bronze Age man home for tea, now they are channels of energy that thread their way around the planet. And at the hub of the radiating orgone energy was Glastonbury.

Visiting Glastonbury last year I struggled to find a second hand copy in the local bookshops, but about half of what they did sell from this book and Michell can probably claim to rate up there with John Lennon and Jefferson Airplane as someone who helped define what it meant to be a hippy.

That what he actually put in the book is pretty much wrong is really neither here nor there. Michell himself said "like all discoveries at Glastonbury, it came through revelation, which is not a popular medium among the professors" - which may be understating it a little.

People had seen shapes in the landscape before. Doctor John Dee apparently found some sort of Zodiac and Dr Goodchild thought he'd seen the outline of a giant fish, but Michell, by splicing in Aboriginal 'song lines' and Chinese 'dragon lines' along with lashing of sacred geometry, expanded the idea exponentially.

The result was "a poetic rather than a scientific truth", but it was enough to touch off a mystical quest that opened the doors of perception for a lot of people.

Mysterious Britain by Janet and Colin Bord (1972)

Two years after Michell's book came out Michael Eavis relaunched the Glastonbury festivals on his farm in Pilton. Fairport Convention, Gong, Hawkwind and Arthur Brown played on the main stage, which was a pyramid built on a ley line based, after a phone consultation with Michell, on the proportions of Stonehenge.

But the tastes of the audience extended well beyond Michell's spiritual engineering and the Bords's book, which came out the next year reflected this smorgasbord of hitherto distinct subjects.

Ley lines were there, although the Bords noticed that many didn't actually touch the monuments they were actually supposed to be aligned with - which they put down to respect for their sanctity.

Added into the mix though were UFOs, which were so popular at that the Glastonbury Fayre had a space set aside for them to land.

As well as stone circles and holy wells, ghosts and King Arthur, the Bords included local customs that had been interpreted rightly or wrongly by folklorists (usually wrongly) as pagan survivals.

Here then is the true Re-enchantment of Britain. UFOs have now largely dropped out of the mix, but the publication of similar books persists - and it seems I own most of them.

Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley (1986)

Thanks to Michell and the Bords the seventies saw the New Age arrive in the town in force.

At first the locals were a bit standoffish and "No Hippies" signs adorned many of the B&Bs and hostelries. gradually though the barriers came down and peaceful coexistence was the order of the day.

The scene was very nearly complete by the end of the decade, and all it required was one great book to bring it all together.

Marion Zimmer Bradley turned out to be that author.

The role of the female in spirituality had been a theme of the developing Glastonbury New Age theme, from the trio of lady occultists that Goodchild put in charge of the Chalice to the feminists who attended the festival.

Bradley wove this into the mesh, giving us three strong and complex female characters in Egraine, Guinevere and most of all Morgan Le Fey, and giving us a weak Arthur, first seen as a toddler needing his old sister's care.

In Bradley's Avalon the Christian live in harmony with the deeper mysteries known only to the Priestesses of Avalon, and whilst Merlin drops by occasionally he is at most the equal of the Lady of the Lake.

It had been a long journey from a good Doctor dropping an old cup in a muddy pool. I suspect that Goodchild would not approve of the commercialism of modern Glastonbury, and may wonder where his Christian mysteries are now. But I suspect he would like Mists of Avalon and approved of Bradley, a woman who wrote of the sacred female but who died a Christian, and whose ashes now rest on the Tor.

References

The Avalonians by Patrick Benham (1993).
The Last of the Hippies by C J Stone (1999)
Glastonbury: A Very English Fair by George McKay (2000)
Witches, Druids and King Arthur by Ronald Hutton (2006)

Who put the 'Terror' into Eco-terrorism?

At the conclusion of the excellent film If A Tree Falls we learn that former Earth Liberation Front fire starter Daniel McGowan has successfully plea bargained his sentence down from life plus 330 years to seven years, but that the judge has classed his crime as 'terrorism', meaning he will be sent to a specially designed prison where contact with the outside world is severely restricted.

McGowan's group were well organised. They manufactured incendiary devices inside tents they'd erected indoor to avoid leaving traces of what they were up to. They recced their targets well and arrived in dead of night to set their fire bombs. They acted in other words pretty much like anyone would if they were bizarre enough to want to dress up and play at being terrorists for a day.

Properly speaking they were not terrorists but saboteurs. Edward Abbey, who literally wrote the book on environment sabotage defined it as "an act of force or violence against property". Most monkey wrenchers use controlled force; cutting fences, uprooting crops by hand, sugaring the tanks of diggers and so on, and stay well clear of arson as it is as difficult to control as an anarchist on Ketamine.

However such attacks, especially if they occur anonymously and in the night, often get labelled as terrorism. Indeed, Colorado's Summit Daily reported on June 20, 2003 that when the Police were trying to track down the Earth Liberation Front they first started by checking up on everyone who'd borrowed Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang from the local library.

As crime fighting techniques go that's pretty crude, and you wonder if the Colorado police ever had to track down some real terrorists they'd start by following everyone who'd rented a copy of 24 on DVD.

Tracking suspects via their reading matter may be a little suspect, labelling your suspects as terrorists is a useful tactic for the morally bankrupt. If the ELF appear to go out of their way to attract the label, other groups have ended up being tarred with the same brush for no readily apparent reason.

One example is the shadowy, and now apparently defunct, Center for Food and Agricultural Research, which described Greenpeace as under the control of 'left-wing anarchists willing to engage in campaigns of terrorism and intimidation'.

One such attack was described thus:“Greenpeace UK director Lord Peter Melchett pulled out and trampled GM crops on several British trial farm sites where Greenpeace activists commandeered the farmers tractors, crashed through fences and chased his family when they tried to stop them.”

Well I was on that action and I definitely remember that it was the farmers in the tractors and one of the people 'running like Penelope Pitstop' was me, but I guess it's easy to get these things mixed up in your mind.

But who was it who first came up with the idea of labelling environmental saboteurs as terrorists? The question turns out to be an interesting one.

Ron Arnold, veteran anti-environmental campaigner and founder of the Wise Use movement claims it was him, in a 1982 magazine article. However, as his claim comes in the form of a 2007 comment to an online article for the New York free newspaper The Indypendent this claim has to go down as unverified.

According to the article 'Hunting the "Green Menace"' by Chip Bertlet in the July/August issue of The Humanist security companies started listing eco-warriors as terrorists in 1988. Whether this was a political act or just a bit of cynical marketing though is unclear.

The first verifiable use of the term for political reasons appears to be in a leaked memo prepared by the Ketchum Public Relations company for the Clorox Corporation, who were starting to feel the heat from Greenpeace's campaign to phase out dangerous chlorine compounds.

Meanwhile claims had been circulating awhile in right wing circles that Fernando Pereira, the photographer killed when the Rainbow Warrior was bombed in 1986, was not a victim of a terrorists, but one himself, specifically the German anarchist group Movement 2 June, which was a seventies terrorist groups like November 17 and Black September. Like much else from the era, the names now sound dated.

This allegation eventually emerged into the public sphere on 11th November 1991 in an article in the respectable business journal (Sahara Club newsletter, No. 8, Winter 1991).

The group behind this appears to have been Lyndon LaRouche's self named organisation.

I regret I really don't have time to do justice to LaRouche, a former Marxist who flipped to the extreme right and who now believes that Prince Philip leads an international drugs cartel and that cosmic rays from the Crab Nebula are the cause of Global Warming.

In contrast to the lavishly funded Wise Use Movement, LaRouche's group is more like a sleazy cult, funding itself via personal loans taken out by his brainwashed supporters. (And that's not a pejorative term, there really is no other word for these conspiracy nutters.)

The two groups eventually teamed up in 1994 to publish the subscription journal Eco-terrorism Watch, written by Barry Clausen, a private investigator and Wise Use activist, and Roger Maduro, an editor who works for Lyndon LaRouche.

Clausen was a sort of early Mark Kennedy, hired by the logging industry to infiltrate Earth First! and was busy flogging a book about his activities. This was rather an unusual way for a spy to behave, and allegedly came about because the loggers had sacked him after he failed to turn up any terrorists for them.

By this time though things were getting serious. Former trade Wobbly activist Judi Bari had joined Earth First! and brought with her vast experience of labour issues. No longer could the struggle to prevent the clearcutting of old growth rainforest be stereotyped as lazy hippies versus honest workers, and the 1990 Redwood Summer may been Earth First!'s finest hour.


Bari had to be dealt with, and indeed she was - blown up by a bomb planted in her car.

For good measure she was then prosecuted by the FBI for possession of the bomb and it would take twelve years for a jury to decide that the feds had been in the wrong for treating her as a criminal and not a victim. By this time though Bari had died of natural causes, and so she never saw her name cleared.

Who planted the bomb or exactly what the plot was has never been conclusively proved, but suspicion does seem point towards the FBI, either directly or indirectly.

As the Bari bombing pre-dates both the Ketchum memo and the emergence of LaRouche's smears against Greenpeace, the FBI can make a decent claim to have been the first to label peaceful protesters as 'terrorists'. If so, then it was the culmination of a decade of dirty tricks against Earth First! which included negative propaganda and entrapment - all tactics learnt in the battle against oragnised labour in the thirties.

As Bari was a former International Workers of the World activist, the attack on her can be seen as either the start of a new phase of the campaign against EF!, or a continuation of an old one against the IWW.

Not that things stopped here. The following year the Director of Greenpeace USA's science unit Pat Costner had her house burnt down, conveniently incinerating a report she was writing about incineration entitled, believe it or not, Playing With Fire.

An attack on a private house is something that McGowan's ELF never did, and whereas the elves were subject to a decade long investigation by a team of detectives, the the people who attacked Costner's house were enver caught, despite an eye witness spotting two suspicious looking ex-military types looking for her place.

This then was the background to events in northern California and Oregon when the first disgruntled EF! activists decided to form ELF cells.

Maybe it doesn't really matter who called who a terrorist first. However I suspect it's not just coincidence that people first labelled as terrorists themselves ended up becoming victims of state terror.

Further reading: Green Backlash by Andrew Rowell

After The Trees Fell

Two hundred years ago this week Lord Byron made an angry maiden speech in the House of Lords. The target of his ire was the Frame Breaking Act, which gave the government the right to put a noose round a man's neck if he damaged commercial property.

The United States could well do with a Byron now in its upper house, as the documentary If A Tree Falls, shown the other day on BBC4 shows. The film tells the story of the Earth Liberation Front and in particular Daniel McGowan, who faced life, plus three centuries or so, for arson attacks on environmental targets in which nobody was harmed.

McGowan seems a thoughtful sort of chap with a genuine passion for the trees, and you suspect he committed his crimes more in Thoreau than in anger.

He was radicalised in the Earth First! actions of the 1990s in Oregan, including the Cascadia Free State protests.

These actions were the US parallel of our own Road Protest Movement except that whilst we camped in 70 foot Oak Trees within sight of suburban houses, they camped in 700 year old Redwoods in the middle of nowhere. The key difference though was when you locked on in this country the authorities spent an hour chiseling you out, in the States they rubbed pepper spray in your eyes until you begged for mercy.

After being tear gassed in the Battle of Seattle McGowan and some other Earth First! radicals decided to form their own Earth Liberation Front cell to move beyond the hippy sit down protests and into the dubious realm of arson attacks.

It took the police some time to track them down, by which time they'd all moved on and settled down, and the best tip anyone trying anything similar can take from the story is; if you want your secret cell to stay secret a heroin addict with a large pentagram tattooed on his head is not the best choice of co-conspirator.

For activists, a lot can be learnt from the film, from the dangers of taking the law into your own hands to the radicalising power of a policeman's truncheon.

The success of the ELF shows how difficult it is for the authorities to stop small cells of activists. However it also shows the danger of such an approach, as the group torched what they thought was a nursery for GM trees only to find out afterwards it had been sold on to someone else. A broader based group would have found this out.

Arson is an uncontrolled force, as a separate cell found out when a fire meant to destroy a greenhouse of GM crops took out the university library as well.

But the danger wasn't just to innocent bystander's property, the actions of the elves ultimately wiped out the organisations the activists had themselves sprung from. The attacks split the activist community in Eugene and ultimate the ELF themselves, and suddenly an effective protest organisation was no more. Solidarity was eventually in pretty short supply in Oregan.

Finally, to many people, the attacks in many ways ended up justifying the crackdown that had ended the peaceful protests. When the police send someone like Mark Kennedy to infiltrate protesters it is in no small part because they want intelligence on those who may go on to form similar cells.

However history may end up judging McGowan and the ELF a lot less harshly than his peers. Malcolm X was more intolerant and less effective and the Suffragettes more violent and the Luddites outdid both in their time.

The question future generations may well ask is not why did they go so far, but why did the rest of us do so little?