The Other Whaling Industry
Cashing in on the Suffering and Death of the Great Whales
Commentary by Captain Paul Watson
On Board the Sea Shepherd ship Steve Irwin
“It does not matter what
is true, it only matters what people believe is true.”
— Dr. Patrick Moore, President of Greenpeace Canada 1981
As the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society struggles to borrow
and raise enough funds to return to the Southern Ocean, we
feel incredibly frustrated by the fact that tens of millions
of dollars have already been raised to defend the whales
yet this money is not being spent for that purpose and it
will not help put fuel in our tanks to resume our defense
of the whales.
Enough is enough. The Greenpeace fraud about saving the whales
must be exposed. For years, I have been tolerating their
pretense of action and watching them turn their ocean posing
photo ops into tremendous profits from whaling. And now they
say they can’t return to the Southern Oceans with their
ship the Esperanza because they don’t have the budget
for it and because they are going to direct their energies
into lobbying for change inside Japan.
Yet they still continue to collect money to save the whales.
Greenpeace has booked all online advertising in the major
Australian and New Zealand newspapers. Their ads are splashed
across the internet from Google to MySpace. Send money, send
more money. Television ads, millions of pieces of direct
mail.
Greenpeace International raised 127 Million Euros last year.
Greenpeace Australia has about 18 million dollars in the
bank. Greenpeace USA sits on tens of millions of dollars.
Yet they claim they do not have the budget to return to the
Southern Oceans yet they also claim they stopped the whalers
for two weeks in January, and if such a claim is true then
they should go back and stop them again.
But they will not. They have surrendered the Whale Sanctuary
to the whalers yet the ads keep popping up and the contributions
keep flowing into the Greenpeace coffers. It is incredibly
frustrating to see stories about Sea Shepherd’s successful
interventions against illegal Japanese whaling usually sprinkled
with criticisms by Greenpeace about our methods. And right
beside these articles pops up an ad asking the public to
send money to support Greenpeace. Even if Sea Shepherd wanted
to invest in these ads, we cannot because Greenpeace has
booked all the ad space for three months.
Greenpeace makes more money from anti-whaling than Norway
and Iceland combined make from whaling. In both cases, the
whales die and someone profits. We continue to receive reports
from people who have received highly emotional appeals from
Greenpeace for money to save the whales including appeals
to help refuel their ship.
This is simply out and out fraud.
Greenpeace ocean campaigners, are begging for money saying
they will be fighting to help the whales escape and they
claim that for every dollar donated they will be able to
stay out another hour, another day, or another week “saving” whales.
Their success will depend on YOU sending a donation NOW.
Of course the word success means something different to Greenpeace.
The Greenpeace campaign is not stopping whaling ships. Success
to Greenpeace is about recruiting memberships and raising
money.
What the fund-raising appeals do not say is that Greenpeace
has already raised tens of millions of dollars this year
to “save” the whales, and tens of millions of
dollars the year before, and the year before that. In fact,
Greenpeace has raised a mind-boggling hundreds of millions
of dollars pretending to save whales over the years and yet
they have not stopped the Japanese from killing whales.
Last year Nathan Santray described himself as the Action
Director for Greenpeace. He reported that he was instrumental
in saving the whales and that he would be heading back to
the Southern Oceans to defend the whales again. BUT he can’t
do it without your support so please send him a donation
right away. They absolutely must raise $50,000 by the end
of the year.
What he did not say was that Greenpeace raises more than
$50,000 in donations every day. But Nathan assured us that
he would be there “fighting to save every whale we
can and we urgently need your help.”
Nathan and his crewmates maneuvered their little rubber Greenpeace
boats into the path of the fire hoses where they were filmed
being “attacked” with high power hoses. They
did that for hours and it looked very dramatic. But it was
all just ocean posing. My crew quite easily avoided the fire
hoses. In fact, the only way they could have been hit would
have been to steer directly into the path of the water. The
Japanese whalers stupidly participated in the charade not
realizing that they were playing right into Greenpeace’s
hands. They haven’t realized yet that the best tactic
to deploy against Greenpeace is to simply ignore them because
they are harmless.
The Greenpeace pleas state that, “only Greenpeace stands
between the harpoons and the whales.” And “Greenpeace
is the only hope for the whales.” This, of course,
is a direct slap in the face to my international volunteers
who have been actually physically intervening against illegal
Japanese whaling. Unlike the paid Greenpeace crew, the Sea
Shepherd volunteers did not go down to the Southern Oceans
to take pictures of whales dying, they went down to there
to stop illegal whaling activities.
Greenpeace simply ignores the efforts of other groups opposing
whaling including Sea Shepherd, the only organization to
have actually shut down whaling operations. The fact that
Sea Shepherd chased the Japanese whalers away last year while
Greenpeace was filming the whales dying seems to have been
forgotten. That was where Greenpeace turned off their cameras.
This year’s annual appeal to save whales by Greenpeace
is just the latest public relations strategy in a global
campaign to fleece money from people of good conscience.
The Greenpeace Foundation, of which I was a co-founder back
in 1972, is today simply a multi-million dollar feel-good
organization. They are selling the illusion of making a difference
to a gullible public.
Greenpeace is a major international corporation. Over the
years, those of us who envisioned and founded Greenpeace
way back when, have watched in frustration and anger as faceless
bureaucrats turned ideals into profits, secure in their understanding
that the media myth of Greenpeace cannot be tarnished irreparably
within the mass media culture. For every person who gets
wise to their scam, two more are recruited. Greenpeace is
a massive direct mail publicity machine utilizing media and
psychology to part people from their money.
Together many of us from the early days feel like modern-day
Dr. Frankensteins. We created a large green corporate monster
that has forgotten where it came from and is now busy feeding
frantically at the trough of public guilt. Greenpeace has
become the world's largest multinational "feel-good" corporation.
People join to feel that they are a part of the solution
and not part of the problem. So Greenpeace hangs banners,
calls boycotts, knocks on doors, and sends out direct mail
solicitations. Consequently, they haul in tons of cash, supporting
an army of eco-bureaucrats and fueling a global public relations
campaign which postures on the myth that Greenpeace is saving
the world.
Greenpeace is posing and marketing the illusion of saving
the planet and they have an army of gullible volunteers and
paid canvassers who have been talked into believing that
Greenpeace is really, really saving the environment and saving
whales in particular. When I left Greenpeace in 1977, I could
have set up another knock-on-the-door-direct-mail- telephone-soliciting
group to chase the green dollars. The problem is that I left
Greenpeace to actually do something and that meant taking
to the high seas to directly intervene against the slaughter
of whales and the destruction of the ocean. The last time
I saw a whale die in agony before my eyes was on my last
Greenpeace whale campaign in 1976. When Sea Shepherd shows
up, the killing stops and the whalers run. We don’t
look for photo opportunities; we look for opportunities to
shut down illegal whaling operations. We have shut down whaling
ships permanently in Portugal, Spain, South Africa, Iceland,
and Norway. We’ve sunk nine of them without injuring
anyone and without being convicted of a single felony. The
reason is that our targets are criminal operations.
Greenpeace does not even oppose whaling. These are actual
quotes from Greenpeace spokespersons: “Greenpeace is
not opposed to whaling in principle.”
- John Frizell, Director of Greenpeace International. From
the Greenpeace Policy Paper 1994. "As a natural scientist
I cannot accept that Greenpeace is opposed to whaling. One
must be allowed to harvest a renewable resource. To
me, this is an important principle."
- Leif Ryvarden, former Chairman of Greenpeace Norway. From
an interview with Dagbladet, August 2, 1991 "The 1993 Minke whale harvest did not constitute
a threat to the stock."
- Ingrid Bertinussen, Greenpeace Norway Director. From an
interview on Norwegian radio (NRK), October 22, 1993 "The Norwegian catch is not a threat to
the Minke whale stock,"
- Kalle Hesstvedt of Greenpeace Norway in a remarkable interview
with the Norwegian newspaper, "Nordlys" on May 21. Hesstvedt does not rule out the possibility
that Greenpeace might accept commercial whaling when catch quotas are allocated
by the International Whaling Commission (IWC). He repeated the statement on
Norwegian radio (NRK) on the same day.
In 1997, I had Greenpeace investigated by the National Marine
Fisheries Service of the United States for participating
in a whale hunt. Greenpeace crew on
the Arctic Sunrise actually towed a slaughtered bowhead whale to shore as a
favour for the Inupiat whalers in the Bering Sea. In doing so, they violated
both U.S. and international law. The incident was reported widely in the Alaskan
media and the whalers used the incident to ridicule Greenpeace at the 1997
International Whaling Commission meeting in Monaco.
And it is not just whales that Greenpeace is betraying. Melanie
Duchin of Greenpeace Alaska who also sent out a personal
appeal to raise money to “save” the
whales said last year that Greenpeace is not opposed to the hunting of polar
bears. She was quoted in the Alaskan media as saying, "If the species
of certain populations against the backdrop of global warming can sustain a
commercial hunt, than we're not going to oppose it."
And Greenpeace raises millions of dollars from people concerned
about the cruel slaughter of seals in Canada, yet Greenpeace
has not opposed the Canadian seal
hunt in more than two decades. The official Greenpeace position on the harp
seal slaughter, the largest massacre of marine mammals on the planet is that
the hunt is “sustainable.”
There are many who lament that it is a sad thing that different
groups cannot work together. Sad though it might be, it
is a fact. The objectives of an organization
with highly paid executives is far different from an organization of volunteers.
We have different objectives. While we look for whaling ships, Greenpeace looks
for memberships.
Nonetheless, I have approached Greenpeace for years with
offers to work in cooperation with them. They responded
with insults or simply ignored us. They
even tried to deny that I was a co-founder of their own organization.
A volunteer organization like Sea Shepherd is in business
to put ourselves out of business. A large eco-corporation
like Greenpeace is in business to
keep itself in business, and whaling, sealing, over-fishing, global warming,
and other assorted issues are simply the raw material that Greenpeace uses
to turn people’s concerns into profits.
I know that I am taking a risk in publicly exposing Greenpeace
as a fraud. I know it shatters people’s illusions, but some illusions need shattering.
The real strength of the environmental and conservation movements lies in the
diversity of individual activists and small grassroots organizations that large
corporate organizations like Greenpeace parasitically rob energy and support
from.
In my opinion, it is completely immoral for organizations
to be paying six-figure salaries to desk-bound bureaucrats
sitting in multi-million dollar office buildings
as real, dedicated activists struggle in the field to rescue injured animals
or to try and stop the horrific slaughter of seals, dolphins and whales. This
entire movement is held up on the blood, sweat, and tears of tens of thousands
of individuals struggling for ecological justice with minimal resources while
a small, elite group skims the vast amounts of money from the public purse
to be spent on large salaries, public relations posturing, and fund-raising.
It’s obscene, and it is high time that people woke up and saw Greenpeace
for what it really is - a high-powered public relation machines designed to
fleece the public. Greenpeace has secured their story and photos for this year.
No need for them to return. It would not be a cost effective strategy for them
to do so. They will accuse us of being eco-terrorists for intervening to defend
the whales as they continue to spend mega-bucks on TV ads, direct mail appeals,
and internet banner advertising. All this as the whales continued to die in
horrific agony, choking on their own blood as Greenpeace cameramen record every
emotional tear-jerking moment to beam back to the head office to aid in the
never-ending quest for money, money, and more money.
And to add insult to injury - when Sea Shepherd returns,
every news story that gets posted online will be accompanied
by Greenpeace ads asking for money.
Why return to the Southern Oceans when Sea Shepherd will be available to
generate stories to keep the online ads popping up.
As the Sea Shepherd ship Steve Irwin prepares to return
to the Southern Ocean alone to resume the pursuit of
the Japanese whaling fleet, Greenpeace will
be making trips to the bank to deposit millions of dollars raised under
the false pretense of saving whales. It is obscene, fraudulent
and scandalous.
Yet as long as whaling continues Greenpeace will continue to milk the issue
as a cash cow.
All the more reason for Sea Shepherd to shut down the Antarctic
whaling operation. We need to put the whalers out of
business and we need to put
the people
profiting from whaling out of business also.
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