AlterNet: “Do We Need a Militant Movement to Save the Planet (and Ourselves)?”

Most of the examples deal with the destruction of property, for example: attack the energy infrastructure to bring the U.S. economy to a halt:

LK: Political change happens because it is forced upon the powerful, and the question that comes much later is, are you going to use violence to exert that force or something else? But you have to acknowledge that this is always a question of force. It does not happen by personal ephipany or persuasion or rational argument but by power. And usually what you’re up against is a pretty sociopathic kind of system. I think about the French labor strikes that happened last October, where, in about three weeks, they had shut down the entire French economy simply by blockading the oil depots. No one got hurt. Yhey used human bodies and burning tires and trucks, and they blockaded the oil depots and the refineries. They stopped the basic energy from coming into the country, so that in three weeks, it was pretty much grinding to a halt. Given a realistic assessment of what we do have, the only strategy that matches the scale of the problem in the time frame that we have left to us, which is maybe 50 years, is direct attacks on infrastructure, so that’s the strategy we are proposing. If you can show me a million people who are willing to blockade oil depots day after day and willing to block roads into West Virginia to stop mountaintop removal day after day after day, we can talk about using nonviolence, because I think it’s a very elegant political technique.

But there is this:

TL: Derrick, you wrote that all the people associated with the Gulf Spill should be executed. That’s going a little beyond property destruction.
DJ: If I were to write that now, I would take out the word “all” and put in the word “many.” A couple of jokes I used to tell that aren’t that funny: What do you get when you cross a long drug habit, a quick temper and a gun? The answer is two life terms for murder, earliest release date 2026. On the other hand, what do you get when you cross two nation states, a large corporation, three tons of poison and 8,000 dead human beings? The answer is, retirement with full pay and benefits. Years ago, I was doing a benefit for a group trying to keep a toxic waste dump out of their community in Mexico. It was a poor Hispanic community. Many of the people who were blockading were being arrested by their neighbors, so the cops would protect distant economic interests over the health of their community. So we started having this conversation about what would happen if the police actually enforced cancer-free zones. Or the police actually enforced rape-free zones. What if the police enforced monopoly-free zones? And we all laughed, because we knew that was never going to happen. And then we thought, what if we had community police forces that were actually set up to enforce rape-free zones, toxic-free zones, that would not allow corporations to come in and poison our homes. And what would it look like to have a community defense force that is allowed to do that? Well, what that looks like is revolution. My point is that if those in power are not going to protect us from the Tony Haywards, then we in our communities need to protect ourselves from the Tony Haywards and the corporations they wield as tools.