Accountable, open and covert actions

Rowan Tilly, Spring 1998

Definitions

Accountability

Open actions

Examples of open / accountable actions

• 1649, St. George's Hill, The Diggers - open, accountable and slaughtered.

• genetiX snowball - various degrees of openness and fully accountable. Arrested, no charges. Injunctions from Monsanto.

• Trident 2000 Ploughshares - Open and accountable disarming of Trident. Some arrested and held on remand.

Accountability/openness is NOT about reporting other people's actions, i.e. shopping other activists! Although the outcome of an action that you do yourself will hopefully expose the wrong action of the opponent.

Covert actions

Examples

• The Resistance in World War II.

• People who hide others from ethnic cleansing; e.g. Jewish people in Germany in WWII, illegal immigrants in Britain.

• Fretellin Resistance - many killed, some still alive and resisting.

Grey areas

Examples

• You could be open but not be deliberately accountable. No hide, no tell.

• You could be accountable but not open. Secrecy initially, afterwards explain all. E.g. Seeds of Hope Ploughshares was covert up to the hammering of a Hawk jet, then accountable.

• Partly open - keep only the date or place secret.

• Partly accountable - e.g. explain your action and your group, but not your personal identity

Some advantages of accountability

1. Accountability is consistent with, and demonstrative of an idealogy of participative democracy, or anarchy or, in general terms, creating radical social change for the greater good. It is enacting (part of) a vision.

2. Because people make themselves vulnerable, i.e. risk prison, and because they take dramatic action, i.e. causing damage, the action speaks to people on a deeper level, from the heart/spirit.

3. If we refuse to be intimidated by prison and danger we become stronger because we remove the prison from within our own minds. "No prison can contain the freedom that we gain when we move through fear" (Shannon).

4. The court, and more particularly the jury, can be invited to examine what has happened and challenged to do justice. If we disagree with the legal system we can ignore it, but it won't ignore us! so we can confront unjust laws by being there ourselves, going right into the mouth of the monster, and challenging it - "speaking truth to power". The media and the public also get to examine the action and the legal system. Some accountable activists refuse to acknowledge the legal system by going to court; they get prison sentences.

5. Assuming that we want to challenge mindless obedience. If our sense of obedience is informed by the norms in society, then "running away" is the normal and obedient thing to do if you are guilty. Therefore it is more challenging to be accountable, indicating "innocence". Seeds of Hope Ploughshares may have been acquitted because the jury had been inspired to "accept the torch" - to be accountably disobedient and to profoundly rock the status quo.

6. The activists - with their names, faces, vulnerability - are accessible. It is easier for a cross-section of people to empathise and see them as ordinary people (like themselves) taking responsibility.

7. Since the activists are visible, accessible, a diversity of people can give practical support. (Covert activists are likely to get support only from known and trusted activists who are in the know.)

8. If the activists are imprisoned for a high profile action they can inspire other people, including prisoners, to get involved and take action (in the widest sense) - this has happened!

9. It exposes a crime that is being committed by the opponent in a way that is difficult to ignore. This poses the question: why isn't the opponent being (held to be) accountable/open?

10. The opponent, the law and the public are encouraged to trust the activists in dialogue and even co-operate with them because they know they will be consistently truthful. The activists themselves are challenged to keep on being consistently truthful, accountable, etc.

11. Activists are more likely to want their action to be nonviolent and sensible (!) if they are intending to account for it themselves.

12. Activists tend to prepare very thoroughly, keep the action under control, focused, creative and reflect a lot on the appropriateness of the action and the energy given to it because they will have to explain it afterwards.

13. It is more difficult for an opponent to deny that the action has been done. There may be every reason for the opponent to want to cover up the action in order to obscure their own crime; for example, to hide their production of torture equipment, the horrific results of genetic experiments, repeated release of toxic waste, etc.

14. The action can be explained more thoroughly to the people who need to know what was going on: the public, the media, the workers, and stimulates them to think about the situation.

15. It avoids or cuts through accusations of vandalism, terrorism and other violent images -which turn most people off - because the activists can explain why they did it.

16. It is unlikely that anyone else would be accused, much less convicted, of doing the action since the law has got "the culprits".

17. The jury might agree with the activists and therefore they will be found "not guilty", which raises the question: who is guilty?

18. The action takes and holds the moral high ground and exposes injustice.

19. The more the action is open/accountable, the less activists have reason to be paranoid.