Friday, January 13, 2006
Who bashed who?
The conflab in the Antarctic Ocean between the Japanese whale meat processing ship Nisshin Maru and the Greenpeace monitoring/demonstration vessel Artic Sunrise has again got us chattering classes, well chattering.

The video evidence (available from both sides [ICR][Greenpeace]) is inconclusive, particularly when it has edited to not portray the whole incident (as is the case with the Japanese footage), or to not begin until a point minutes before the incident (as in the Greenpeace footage). Maritime ‘experts’ suggest that both vessels probably contravened ocean rules at some point; the Japanese perhaps more flagrantly than Greenpeace.

For me, the Japanese appeared to be playing a rather dangerous game of chicken on the high seas (with five thousand tone ships) and illegally (?) turned to starboard at speed across the bow of Artic Sunrise in an attempt to draw alongside another whaling vessel. The correct course of action should have been to slow down and turn behind the Arctic Sunrise, which was maintaining course at slow speed.

However, if a skipper deems that a collision will occur due to the incorrect actions of another ship, s/he is then bound to take action herself/himself to avoid such collision. From the video footage, the Greenpeace skipper only belatedly (and obviously too late) reversed the engines and turn hard to port.

But the Japanese weren’t done yet; just to make sure that the Arctic Sunrise had got the message, the Japanese ship then turned (wrongly) hard to port itself, enabling a second glancing blow off its stern.

Some analysis here:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/search/story.cfm?storyid=000AB29A-F71A-13C4-81BC83027AF1023A

In this knock-for-knock scenario, I guess it comes down to who you think occupies the moral high ground. Is it the Japanese whaler, collecting its ‘scientific’ catch in a whale sanctuary in Australian Antarctic waters, or is it Greenpeace, whose sole purpose out there is to harass, torment, peacefully obstruct and generally publicise the cynical and unsustainable antics of the Japanese whalers; something our own government is too spineless to do itself. (I guess it’s easy to interpret what I think.)

For me, regardless of who was at fault in this incident, I say go for it Greenpeace, ram them if you have to. Many brave and intelligent individuals have acted illegally to secure a change in law for the better….

The incident has also spurned discussion on media bias, the role of opinion in ‘news’ reporting and spin.

Pinko liberal media outlets, such as the ABC and Australian non-Murdoch owned papers, have been hammered by government and the less critical press for running stories which suggested that it was not clear from the evidence who rammed who. (‘Greenpeace accuses Japan over collision’)

Other reporters – dare I say those on the right – accuse Greenpeace of distributing misinformation. They are sure that Greenpeace is lying, for no other reason than it is Greenpeace.

Further, self-confessed commentators are also sure than Greenpeace is lying. Like all big organisations, Greenpeace has an interest in devising a narrative that supports their goals. Indeed, commentators of a certain persuasion [Jennifer Marohasy, Michael Crichton, Bob Carter] make no teleological distinction between Greenpeace, an organisation with no shareholders funded entirely by charitable donations, from any other multi-national corporation. Of course, profit-seeking corporations have totally benign reasons for maintaining expensive public relations units. Greenpeace has one to perpetrate lies.

While Greenpeace now employs advertisers every bit as slick as any other transnational organisation or government, to suggest that it shares similar motivations to a shareholder-owned, profit seeking corporation seems, at least, grossly disingenuous.

Without a thorough discourse on personal and professional motivation within a bureaucracy, I would hazard a guess that the primary goal of the organisational heads of Greenpeace is its disestablishment; as in job done, let’s go home.

This cannot be the case for a profit making corporation, whose managers’ legally binding duty is to protect shareholder wealth in perpetuity. And if this means muddying the waters on a potentially damaging incident, through the good offices of friendly media barons, think-tank Directors or political office, then so be it. Big Tobacco has been doing this for years, just as the asbestos industry did before them.

Debate over such issues inevitably degenerates into ‘who funds you’ cat-fights, which is the worst kind of cat-fight ‘environmentalists’ should get into, as it logically undermines their own position of (allegedly) passively sucking up the misinformation distributed by Greenpeace. Instead, those who care about whales or anthropogenic global warming should base their arguments on ‘values’ (not just evidence, which is far too utilitarian for my liking). Then we can start to change people’s voting habits.

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