Editorial

The Armchair Terrorists

As irresponsible and intellectually flawed as the Insurgent may be, they still deserve to retain their funding.

On a campus with a memory so short that unruly stoners can storm Johnson Hall for one reason this year, a different one last year, and for yet another next year, some controversies never quite get resolved. One is over the Insurgent, at one time known as the Student Insurgent, a student-funded magazine providing the missing link between the liberal tendencies of the ASUO and the radical Eugene activist community.

At one time or another throughout its existence, it has been nearly defunded, it has not published for months, had its budget frozen, its board dissolved, its editors suspended and jailed. On Tuesday, Jan. 23, the Programs Finance Committee put the Insurgent's funding for next year on hold, pending the outcome of yet another controversy. The Insurgent's December edition ran the "Animal Liberation Front Primer," eight pages of instructions on how to cause property damage and get away with it in the name of saving the poor, oppressed animals of medical research facilities everywhere. As if that wasn't a recipe enough for debate, they included on the same pages the names and contact information of animal researchers at the UO for good measure. This is what passes for noble these days.

Liberal isn't the proper word: the Insurgent is so radical that it makes The Nation look like a mouthpiece of the vast right-wing conspiracy. Their barbs are not reserved merely for the corporate establishment or mainstream politicians, but for Ralph Nader and for activists themselves. They can't even get along with John "I met the Unibomber so I must be dangerous" Zerzan, who appears in the newspaper's pages, alternately praised and condemned.

This oddity underscores an important fact about the left: as much as they complain about consumer capitalism and bourgeois apathy for the current lack of meaningful change, they are their own worst enemies.

Should recycling be encouraged, or should we boycott companies that don't recycle? Or, should we firebomb those companies instead? The left may agree on some core values, but there is no consensus on method, and more often than not, the result is infighting. In the broadest of terms, this could be seen in the struggle between Al Gore and Ralph Nader for the hearts and votes of liberals across the country. In more specific terms, to a hard core vegan, vegetarians are as bad as anyone else, because even if they don't eat animals, they still use them for their own purposes.

The Insurgent is certainly a good armchair introduction to the leftist persuasion, but not entirely for the reasons they intend.

Obviously, they don't want to be taken seriously; all they really want is for everyone to know how pissed off they are about things. The recent campaign to save a handful of historic buildings along Moss and Villard Streets, ran out of Suite One, was all posters and nothing to back it up. Originally, phone numbers were printed at the bottom of the fliers - a few days later, the posters continued, but the phone numbers had disappeared.

On an aesthetic level, it reads more like a parody of itself, a grab-bag of mindless rants, dialectical arguments and unmitigated hypocrisy. It's ugly, poorly edited and barely laid out. The spelling is wrong, the graphics are pointless, the headlines are non sequiturs, the content is reprinted filler and the logic is circular. There really is no need to continue with empirical evidence of the Insurgent's shortcomings as a credible, entertaining or valid publication.

That said, the Insurgent does not, by any means, deserve to lose its funding, not this year at least. If the PFC really is afraid of a lawsuit against the Insurgent "jeopardizing the fee," as so many student government wonks often dread, they're just not familiar with the First Amendment case law. Nothing really separates the Insurgent's content in this situation from, let's say, "The Anarchist's Cookbook," which is still widely available. Nothing except that the Insurgent is funded by ASUO incidental fees, something debated and to some degree resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Board of Regents vs. Southworth. Under last year's ruling, programs are virtually guaranteed so long as they are germane to the mission staement of a university. Though arguments could be made on either side, the Insurgent has a pretty good case. While extreme, their beliefs are relevant to much of the curriculum, from sociology to biology and women's studies. In the short run, Frohnmayer could rule otherwise and the tradition of allowing unpopular political speech in the court system would reverse the outcome.

Most importantly, it cannot be considered an incitement to violence, as it does not explicitly call for the harassment of the "guilty" professors. Readers must make their own judgement, and while Tab A is close to Tab B the Insurgent does not tell you to insert one into the other. All of the information is available elsewhere (the professor info is on SETA's website); juxtaposition blurs the lines a little.

That said, the Insurgent's decision to print the ALF primer next to the names of "guilty" professors was flatly irresponsible and an act of political cowardice. If the point was to raise a dialogue on the ethics of "animal rights," they have failed, and this is a good thing. What they have suceeded at is offering an armchair introduction to the animal liberation movement: they have no persuasive arguments, only violent tactics.