this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Eco-fascists unite, huh?
How long do any of you idiots upvoting this think it'll be until these (so-called) "rangers" start selling rhino horn themselves? That is... if they haven't already and this is really just them clearing out the competition?
You're telling on yourself with all that projection...
No. You are. This meme demonstrates how easily first-worlders will slavishly applaud fascist terrorism in the third-world as long as you wrap it up in green capitalism first.
The only thing these privatised death-squads you call "rangers" are doing is waging unrestricted warfare on impoverished brown people while (at best) doing absolutely nothing to hinder the mass-slaughter of wild life or (at worst) simply monopolizing it for their own profit - but you get your "eco-friendly" revenge-porn in exchange, so everything's cool, right?
I actually don't disagree with your general point, but the idea (and the fact that your fist thought was) that the rangers will turn around and start poaching rhinos themselves seems like a really odd argument to be making if your aim is the capitalists who create and uphold the industry in the first place.
E: like, you focusing on the rangers is exactly the same as other people focusing on the poachers - neither are in charge and both are there making money for people who would never get their hands dirty.
I'm Indian, although I live hundreds of kilometres away from the place in question. My very first thought was that these rangers are going to kill innocent people and frame them as poachers. My second thought was that at least a few of them might start poaching themselves.
I hope I'm wrong, maybe this is one of the few such programmes that actually works out, but the history of the Indian forest department does not inspire much confidence. The Forest department was created by the British to protect game from local people, and even today far too many officials treat the indigenous tribals as enemies, rather than as allies in conservation.
If you think I'm being too cynical or melodramatic, you are welcome to read articles and books by Indian ecologists, historians and conservationists such as Madhav Gadgil, Ullas Karanth and Ram Guha.
You're not.
None of this is difficult to understand - it's no different than the right-wing death squads the US trained to fight their little "War On Drugs" suddenly and not-so-mysteriously ending up the biggest players in the drug-smuggling business.
Who did you think these "rangers" work for? They are pigs - that's what they are. And like all pigs, profiting from the illegal things they are (supposedly) "preventing" is merely one of the unspoken but universal perks of the job. As long as their violence serves the capitalists that wants to exclusively loot and pillage natural resources, everybody in power will turn a blind eye. And it's not just the trade in animal parts - don't be surprised when it's discovered that these privatized goon squads being lauded in the media for their (supposed) "anti-poaching" activities take their orders from multi-national mining corporations or companies that want to exploit local populations as cheap labor.
Why would they do that I presume they like the rhinos because they are killing people on their behalf
Corruption? Indian rangers are basically police. They're uniformed and armed, and apparently have orders to kill. ACAB
I was in a car once when the driver accidentally went into a restricted forest area, and he just gave the guards a bribe to let us out without punishment. They're presumably better than the actual police generally, but in the tribal areas they can be just as bad.
taking a bribe because someone kinda broke the law without causing harm is not the same as killing the animals you are supposed to protect, like whole orders of magnitude different.
Yeah I'm not saying those two are the same things. However I read some articles where tribal people and villagers claimed to be shot on sight for wandering into parks, then tortured for protesting this.
My point was just that the sentiment for forest rangers in the US or elsewhere doesn't necessarily apply to India. The forest department might be more like the Bureau of Indian Affairs in some cases
that's interesting. much more compelling than the other things.
Think about the kind of person that would sign up to murder other people.
You think they wouldn’t shoot an innocent person for fun?
Yanks must like oil corporations - after all, they are killing people on their behalf.
They do like oil corporations yes.
That's like what the US is known for. Liking them so much they invade countries
Right? What a bizarre attempt at a dunk
Or even just do straight up high seas piracy of oil tankers, like with Venezuela and Iran
Protecting the environment by shooting back at people actively destroying it
State power murdering overwhelmingly poor people for a crime that should be a fine at most.
Yes, that is fascism.
Can you give one single reason why this can't be handled with jail at most? They can't hunt from inside a jail.
They HAVE to die?
Killing poor people to take heat away from rich people is fascism. The heat is coming from people with eco interests. This is eco fascism.
Oh look... somebody who thought Captain Planet cartoons were actually documentaries!
Yeah this is a fucking stupid take. I bet those native americans are just trying to dump oil on the land themselves.
Yeah we have this in South Africa and now some of the "rangers" as you say, are campaigning to sell rhino horn themselves to flood and devalue the market. They say it's all obtained ethically and all, or captured from the poachers, but I have my doubts.
Pig is as pig does. There is no reason for doubts.
Did you mean "eco-terrorism?"
Nope.
That would have made slightly more sense...
This is state power being used to murder undesirables.
That’s fascism. Terrorism would be non state actors
Didn't know that, thanks for the info and thanks to the person who posted that other article.
My confusion with the OCommenter was due to that.
That's not true... the term "terrorism" was originally used to describe the actions of states - it's only due to the media that, for rather obvious reasons, states have been "absolved" from the vastly greater levels of terrorism they commit in contrast to the comparatively minor levels committed by non-state actors.
So yes, this is terrorism. I't s not "eco-terrorism" (which is mostly a non-issue invented by the media) - it's bog-standard, common-or-garden-variety fascist terrorism. The kind the media goes out of it's way to never call terrorism.
Nope. It wouldn't.