is a brash, arrogant, brilliant, ignorant, and menacing species that in a very short period of time has colonized the entire planet and left death, d… - Steven Best

Throughout the last ten thousand years of history, human empires rose and fall, crumbling into pebbles and dust. Over the last two hundred thousand years, an even larger empire began its mighty and perilous ascent. From its home base in Africa, it established its presence everywhere throughout the globe, expanding endlessly in all directions, growing exponentially in numbers, colonizing land, other species, and entire peoples. Insatiable in its consumption of natural resources, addicted to growth, it left death, extinction, and destruction everywhere in its wake. This vast conglomerate was not the Persian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Ottoman, English, or American empires, but the consequence and aggregate of all particular empires and unsustainable hierarchical societies, namely, the human empire.

In the battle over animal rights, negotiations are breaking down and boundaries are being erased on both sides. Government and industry thugs unleash violence on activists, while groups such as the Animal Rights Militia, the Justice Department, the Hunt Retribution Squad, and the Revolutionary Cells openly advocate violence against animal abusers. More and more activists grow tired of adhering to a nonviolent code of ethics while violence from the enemy increases. Realizing that non-violence against animal exploiters in fact is a pro-violence stance that tolerates their blood spilling without taking adequate measures to stop it, a new breed of freedom fighters has ditched Gandhi for Machiavelli and switched principled nonviolence with the amoral (not to be confused with immoral) pragmatism that embraces animal liberation "by any means necessary."

We consider this a case of how nonviolence leads to violence when pacifists refuse to intervene when violence is occurring, as the capitalist speciesist butchers bash the brains and carve up the planet knowing their violence is protected by the shield of nonviolence practiced by opponents with dulled instincts and a slave mentality, opponents who throw down their weapons before entering into battle. The fundamentalist pacifist argument is an ideal pertinent to communities of saints but not to a society of human beings rooted in both a social and biological past riddled with violence, murder and genocide. Nonviolence should be the first option, but not the only option.