The same freedom. Reflections about animal liberation and anarchy - Asamblea Antiespecista de Madrid

it doesn’t seem like that will change despite the incarceration of some of its activists.

We would also like to mention the Animal Liberation Leagues, which had as there main objective to break into laboratories where experiments with animals were carried out in order to gain information and spread it. Their work was essential to let the English society, and therefore the world, know about what happens inside these laboratories. For anyone who wishe to know more about this there’s alot of information in the web and books published about the subject (Books: “Against all odds”, “R-209: The animal liberation Front Speaks”, “Lighting the fire of Revolutionary Environmentalism” Magazine Sombras y Cizallas. All these resources are available online at www.accionvegana.org.)Encendiendo la llama del ecologismo revolucionario”.

-Anarchism by its own essence is a set of ideas in constant evolution and being continually debated, never closed (or at least that should be the case). Some decades ago anarchists saw homosexuality as a deviation and masturbation as a perverted practice and unnatural. (See Anararchism and Homosexualit” by Richard Cleminson). In the end we all live in a specific moment in history with its own set of values which mark the way we understand life. And that is what gives us hope, we believe that the rejection our ideas produce in many is not so much because of the ideas or that they are nor sufficiently reasoned but because of the cultural conditions in which we operate. Therefore we see no reason to feel demoralized and continue to struggle, it has happened in other moments in history and will eventually happen again, ideas and culture evolve and change and anarchism is therefore subject to these changes and evolution as is any other aspect of life. Anarchism can also acquire ideas that maybe were not born inside the movement but fit in perfectly with the principle of anarchism which, to our understanding, happens with animal liberation.

-We consider that a debate about whether anarchism can exist without animal liberation or viceversa has no interest. We have our position and hope that it is clear enough but we believe that if certain debates are not carried out with delicacy and humility they end up being arrogance contests, trying to prove that my struggle is better than yours. For us Animal Liberation fits in perfectly in anarchist discourse, shared values and tactics plus many common enemies (prisons, authority, repression, domination, slavery) and also share a common objective: Freedom and autonomy for all individuals. Also we see that anar8