This question should indeed be of some concern to Greenpeace, which loves to portray the Wise Use Movement as a gang of Moonies, LaRouchians, Ku Klux Klanners and right wing extremists. With this fallacious portrait it then smears people.
The latest example is a leaflet published for this IWC meeting in which Greenpeace claims Steinar Bastesen, chairman of the Norwegian Small-Type Whalers Association, is networking with the Wise Use movement. Then Greenpeace links the Wise Use movement to the Moonies and armed militias and the Oklahoma bombers.
On the Tuna Dolphin Bill, Greenpeace has cooperated closely with the Fishermen’s Coalition which defines itself as a Wise Use organisation.
“Wise Use is a movement, in the same way as the Greens, not a club,” says Teresa Platt, founder and director of the Fishermen’s Coalition, to the Harpoon. Platt even received the 1993 Best New Activist of the Year award from the Wise Use leadership conference.
“There is no membership in the Wise Use movement, and we have no ability to exclude people. The majority of the groups that recognise themselves as Wise Use has signed on a statement condemning violence and urging people to work within the system. We are opposed to preservation and animal rights, and we support conservation and animal welfare.”
Platt says she finds it “entertaining” that Greenpeace, which has attacked everyone attached to the Wise Use movement and claimed that they are linked with people and organisations they view as wacko, now gets the same medicine from Earth Island Institute.
“It’s OK being in bed with Greenpeace,” she says, “as long as they behave decently, and they don’t mind all the Moonies and LaRouchians, Ku Klux Klanners, whalers and armed militiamen crawling around under the covers.”
Greenpeace Diatribe Incites Attack
Greenpeace must share responsibility for an assault on a Norwegian whaler on the opening day of the IWC by a Robert Pillar of Bedfordshire. At the same time as Pillar attacked Steinar Bastesen, Greenpeace was circulating the following diatribe, complete with a photo, claiming a link between Bastesen and the Oklahoma bombers.From the dock in court on Tuesday, Pillar shouted: “Norway is murdering scum. They are murdering whales out in the ocean. I am not sorry.”
The Harpoon would suggest that Pillar’s deranged behaviour, and in particular his use of the term murder, might also have been incited by recent campaign material from the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, which states: “Dress it up how you like — whaling is murder and murder is wrong!”
“Steinar Bastesen ... has been networking with the ‘Wise Use’ Movement in the USA for the last six years. ... ‘Our goal is to destroy, to eradicate the environmental movement,’ says Ron Arnold, the Wise Use Movement’s guru and key contact for Steinar Bastesen. Arnold’s partner is Alan Gottleib, whose local paper believes he could be the ‘most dangerous man in America.’ Both Gottleib and Arnold used to work for the American Freedom Coalition, a Moonie front group. Gottleib heads two of the most powerful pro-gun groups. (His wife edits the magazine Women and Guns!) He also resides on the board of governors of the Council for National Policy, a secretive organisation whose members have extreme racist, sexist and religious views.
“There is a cross-over in extreme rhetoric and members between the Wise Use movement and the armed militia movement. Both movements breed paranoia and hatred against the government and environmentalists. Militia members are widely seen as responsible for the Oklahoma bombing last April, which killed 168 people. As Norwegian whalers defy international public opinion they increasingly find themselves beyond the law and in the arms of ultra right-wing extremists.”
Greenpeace flyer, IWC 1996.