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You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2013/jun/26/reality-environmental-espionage-dramatic-the-east
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| The reality of environmental espionage is more dramatic than The East | The reality of environmental espionage is more dramatic than The East |
| (3 months later) | |
| How many people have ever been hurt by "eco-terrorism"? There is a long history of environmental campaigners being killed by government and corporate agents, but to my knowledge no one has ever murdered or even maimed anyone who has damaged nature. Terrible threats have been made, yes, trees have been spiked, ski resorts burned down, cars bombed, crops dug up and boats sabotaged, but a line has been pretty clearly drawn – in Britain, the US and Europe at least – between hurting people and property in the name of defending nature. | How many people have ever been hurt by "eco-terrorism"? There is a long history of environmental campaigners being killed by government and corporate agents, but to my knowledge no one has ever murdered or even maimed anyone who has damaged nature. Terrible threats have been made, yes, trees have been spiked, ski resorts burned down, cars bombed, crops dug up and boats sabotaged, but a line has been pretty clearly drawn – in Britain, the US and Europe at least – between hurting people and property in the name of defending nature. |
| So the first problem with the film The East, which opened at the Sundance festival this year and comes to Britain on Friday, is that we are asked to believe that a collective of messed-up young US runaways, living off-grid in the woods, should plot to poison and kill corporate leaders for their oil spills, pharmaceutical pollution and deforestation. Good Hollywood fun, then, but not much reality. The second problem with the film is more interesting. The other premise of just about all western environmental activism has been that the activism should be leaderless, with no central command and all decisions taken by the consensus of the group. The East overturns this premise and we find that the "eco terrorist" collective is being run as a cult, by a Saviour-like figure who talks in Biblical terms about taking "an eye for an eye" and who baptises cult members in a lake. | So the first problem with the film The East, which opened at the Sundance festival this year and comes to Britain on Friday, is that we are asked to believe that a collective of messed-up young US runaways, living off-grid in the woods, should plot to poison and kill corporate leaders for their oil spills, pharmaceutical pollution and deforestation. Good Hollywood fun, then, but not much reality. The second problem with the film is more interesting. The other premise of just about all western environmental activism has been that the activism should be leaderless, with no central command and all decisions taken by the consensus of the group. The East overturns this premise and we find that the "eco terrorist" collective is being run as a cult, by a Saviour-like figure who talks in Biblical terms about taking "an eye for an eye" and who baptises cult members in a lake. |
| Into this "family" of disciples comes a corporate spy who used to work for the FBI. Lo, she wears a cross round her neck and listens to Christian radio before she undergoes her personal conversion. I won't give the plot away but the rather heavy-handed Christian signs serve to leave us with a pretty unradical establishment message: that it takes a reformed grown-up sinner to save the environment and not some messed-up kids, and, by the way, extremists are easily manipulated, physical and mental misfits. | Into this "family" of disciples comes a corporate spy who used to work for the FBI. Lo, she wears a cross round her neck and listens to Christian radio before she undergoes her personal conversion. I won't give the plot away but the rather heavy-handed Christian signs serve to leave us with a pretty unradical establishment message: that it takes a reformed grown-up sinner to save the environment and not some messed-up kids, and, by the way, extremists are easily manipulated, physical and mental misfits. |
| I very much liked The East for its pace, filming and calm acting, and its arrival now in Britain is timed perfectly. In the past few weeks we have had the US and British states found to be spying on just about everyone and on Friday my colleagues Rob Evans and Paul Lewis exposed another nest of police spies infiltrating and then emotionally devastating environmental activists working with the small London Greenpeace group in the 1980s. | I very much liked The East for its pace, filming and calm acting, and its arrival now in Britain is timed perfectly. In the past few weeks we have had the US and British states found to be spying on just about everyone and on Friday my colleagues Rob Evans and Paul Lewis exposed another nest of police spies infiltrating and then emotionally devastating environmental activists working with the small London Greenpeace group in the 1980s. |
| If anything, the real-life exploits of these spies, who not only co-authored a pamphlet that was to be the cause of the longest trial in English civil court history, but who also stole the identity of dead children and had the children of activist women, is more extraordinary than any film. On Tuesday, Lewis and Evans published their investigative book on undercover police and it deserves to be made into a film, too. | If anything, the real-life exploits of these spies, who not only co-authored a pamphlet that was to be the cause of the longest trial in English civil court history, but who also stole the identity of dead children and had the children of activist women, is more extraordinary than any film. On Tuesday, Lewis and Evans published their investigative book on undercover police and it deserves to be made into a film, too. |
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