Mr. Smith nodded and rose to his feet. “My clients are private individuals, allied in some senses with the Antarctic World Park Emergency Rescue Action, and with more than a hundred other mainstream and grassroots environmental groups concerned at the nonrenewal of the Antarctic Treaty and the flagrant violations of its principles in the last two years. Other than that my clients wish to remain anonymous. They undertook to temporarily impair certain of the most egregious examples of Treaty breaking, to protest these operations and draw the world’s attention to them. They wish no harm to anyone, they took great pains to ensure that no one would be injured or killed, and they were successful in that goal, for which they are thankful, aware that in Antarctic the destruction of property will always bring some risk to life.”
“That’s for damn sure,” someone said, among other various mutterings. There were a lot of fierce looks directed at Mr. Smith from Carlos’s contingent especially, but Sylvia kept her focus on him, and he looked at her as he continued, oblivious to the others.
“Now of course they are aware that they are the subjects of a vast manhunt on the part of governmental authorities, and this does not surprise them, but they would like to point out that this is typical of law enforcement, to pursue very vigorously individuals performing civil disobedience or other protest actions, while allowing hundreds or even thousands of corporate executives to comprehensively break the laws without obstruction, or even with so-called law enforcement’s help and protection. Corporations and governments from many countries have been despoiling this last wilderness continent in complete contempt for international law, and so for the U.S. Navy and the FBI now to come here searching for my clients is a travesty, the equivalent of arresting the protesters of a crime while the criminals stand right at hand. It makes them not a police but rather a private security force, which might as well take its pay directly from the foreign governments and transnational corporations it is serving. As private security for corporations it makes sense to overlook gross malfeasance while brutally pursuing small individual protest actions, which to corporations are indeed the more dangerous of the two. The small spontaneous protests of individuals suggest after all that democracy might be a real thing, rather than just a cover story told to people to keep them in their places in the economic hierarchy. And of course the idea that democracy might be real is much too dangerous a notion to allow it to spread very far, for if it did, and if everyone acted on truly democratic principles, including protesting obvious crimes against the law, then social control would be impossible and the gross inequities of the current economic order, in which five percent of the world’s population own ninety percent of the world’s wealth, would be revealed for the hypocritical environment-devastating injustice that it is. Democracy in the United States and most of the rest of the industrial West is therefore a false front on a rich man’s mansion, a sham in which people are given a political vote but then clock in each day to an economic system in which their entire lives are regimented by a small group of executives busily downsizing whatever workplace rights people had gained in centuries of struggle. So people can vote, yes, but for politicians all funded by the corporations in control of the system, meaning you can either vote for the part of the owner class that believes in treating its employees well, or for the part that believes in taking as much as possible from its employees, but in any case you have to vote for the continuation of the system and therefore of the owner class. So the right to vote is meaningless. And in such a situation, a nondemocratic situation, civil disobedience and direct nonlethal resistance are the only true options to co-optation within the owner system. And thus as the only true options for resistance these are of course ruthlessly extirpated by the authorities wherever they appear, with the idea of discouraging the spread of protest by rank intimidation. And in the past this has usually worked, for very few want their lives shattered in order to protest an injustice that is massively entrenched and made to appear the natural order of things, and unlikely to fall to any individual act.
“So the only answer at this point is to use modern technology to act at a distance, and with perfect anonymity. And that is the course my clients have taken. The way they have structured their action makes it impossible for them to be identified, and you can be sure that I will keep their confidentiality, not only as a matter of legal ethics but also from the practical consideration that I myself do not know who they are. I only know that they wish to announce to you that in the current state of materials science, and the balkanization of communication technology, the means now exist to act in ways that encrypt and sequester the identity of the actors so watertightly that no one will ever know who they were. And this will be true in future protest actions as well, if they happen. That being the case, the views of the disenfranchised are going to have to be listened to again, and the environment and the world’s disenfranchised people are going to have to be re-enfranchised by the dominant order, which is going to have to change, or else anonymous and untraceable nonviolent protests and ecotage will crash the system. The last week in Antarctica is an announcement and demonstration of this fact.”
He paused to take a breath and Sylvia held up a hand. “Thank you, Mr. Smith! Perhaps we can give someone else a chance to speak now, in response perhaps for a moment or two, and then we’ll get back to you.”
“Fine,” Mr. Smith said, unperturbed. He sat down.
“Carlos? You and your colleagues in the Southern Club Antarctic Group were the people most affected by Mr. Smith’s clients’ ecotage. Would you like to make a response to Mr. Smith’s, um, remarks?”
Carlos popped to his feet. “My pleasure to speak! Contrary to what Mr. Smith has been saying, although there are some of his general remarks that I can agree with, there is no question that our oil and gas exploration, and the extraction of oil and methane hydrates from the polar cap, is both legal and environmentally safe!”
He waved a finger at Mr. Smith, who was a most unlikely-looking object of anyone’s scorn. “The Antarctic Treaty forbade mineral exploration, yes, but Japan and Russia never ratified the 1991 environmental protocol, and oil companies based in Treaty countries have looked for oil anyway. And now the Antarctic Treaty has expired and renewal has been held up, as everyone knows, mostly because of opposition to the Treaty from corporations based in the United States, using their allies in the American government to hold off approval of the Treaty until it has been altered to allow some exploration rights to them. So for the last two years we have been operating in a vacuum. And the Southern Club Antarctic Group, a group composed of nations in the southern hemisphere who never signed the Antarctic Treaty, and were never invited to join the Treaty conferences—they decided unanimously to pursue the path of clean extraction of important resources, especially methane hydrates, whenever this was deemed technically possible without harming the Antarctic environment in any way. There has been some protest from environmentalist groups in the North about this policy, but these protests come from nations who are using up the world’s resources at five to twenty times the rate of the members of the Southern Club Antarctic Group, so I personally feel that it is very presumptuous for these people of the North to protest when in effect the North has historically conquered the South, taken everything portable back to the North with them, destroyed the southern landscape and left the people of the South in misery, thus prospering so greatly that they can afford to have an upper class at leisure to order the environmental ethics of the countries that they have so shattered and left behind! The hypocrisy of the North, on this as on so many other issues, is endless, and beyond defense. It has beggared our language. It is the major fact in the history of the world in the last five centuries, colonialism that has never really ended, but merely changed formats.”