• masquenox@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    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?

      • Fuckass [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        2 years ago

        It’s almost as if accountable killings being backed and cheered on by powerful governments and business interest attracts the wrong crowd. If Jeff Dahmer was stronger and smarter im sure he would’ve applied to similar organizations .

        https://newspaper.animalpeopleforum.org/1999/04/01/can-mercenary-management-stop-poaching-in-africa/

        Operation Lock was apparently the first major privately funded African antipoaching project, and may have been the most sinister, not least because poachers may have been among the major beneficiaries of it.

        “To implement Operation Lock,” Ellis wrote, “Dr. Hanks commissioned KAS Enterprises Ltd., whose chair was the late Sir David Stirling, the founder of the Special Air Services. Many of the KAS staff were former members of the SAS. The initial aim was to gather intelligence, but it developed into a more ambitious project to employ former SAS men for paramilitary anti-poaching work throughout Southern Africa, and bought equipment from the South African Defense Force. At least £75,000 of Prince Bernhard’s donation was used to buy rhino horn.” As Ellis added, even then it was no secret that “Many of the ivory and horn traffickers in southern Africa” were “also known to deal in drugs, weapons and ammunition, sometimes with the conivance of senior officers of the South African Defence Force.”

        Craig Van Note, executive vice president of the WWF subsidiary TRAFFIC, outlined what WWF already knew in a mid-1988 article for Earth Island Journal. “The South African military,” Van Note charged, “has cynically aided the virtual annihilation of the once great elephant herds of Angola. Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA rebel forces in Angola, largely supplied by South Africa, have killed perhaps 100,000 elephants to help finance the 12-year-old conflict. Most of the tusks have been carried out on South African air transports or trucks, although some move through Zaire and Burundi.”

      • masquenox@lemmy.ml
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        2 years ago

        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?

        • DessertStorms@kbin.social
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          2 years ago

          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.

          • masquenox@lemmy.ml
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            2 years ago

            that the rangers will turn around and start poaching rhinos themselves

            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.