(from PN December 1998)

Middle-class terrorists?

"Anonymous Bob" (are the authorities in such close pursuit of you that you can't even admit to writing such an anodyne article?) says that ploughshares uses acts of destruction (I'd say disarmament) "not as an end in themselves but as a means of influencing the state". I'd beg to differ. Seeds of Hope Ploughshares disarmed the Hawk warplane in order to prevent it being delivered to Indonesia. This is the aim of every ploughshares action - to take responsibility ourselves for disarmament, because history shows that we can't expect our governments to do it.

As for accountability, Anonymous Bob calls our decision to claim our action "frankly insane", and blames our insanity on our middle class backgrounds. Yes, I'm middle class - I can't help that and don't feel I need to apologise for it, or be abused for it. But isn't entering into the judicial system yourself one way of showing solidarity with people who are oppressed by that system? Of course we were sometimes treated differently from other prisoners (often worse, in fact) but that didn't take away from our shared experience and understanding of what it means to be in jail.

We took responsibility for our action because we knew it wasn't a crime; why should we run away from it? Most problems in society are caused precisely by a lack of accountability - mostly from governments and corporations as to the end results of their actions. British Aerospace sells weapons to Indonesia; people are killed in East Timor - well, bad luck for them, it's not our fault: they were in the way... By choosing accountability, we chose to reject that mindset, and to place ourselves in the real world where actions have consequences.

Further, consider what might have happened had we not claimed responsibility for disarming the Hawk. The whole thing would have been covered up, and we wouldn't have been able to risk publicising what had happened. How can you hope to make people active if you can't tell them about the issues? Alternatively, the relatively small group of people involved in direct action against the Hawk deal might have been harassed, had their houses raided and lives disrupted, in an attempt to find the perpetrators. That's not something I'm prepared to put other people through.

However, I'm not an accountability fundamentalist - I think there are times when covert actions are justified, and - yes - I've even done them myself once in a while, "Anonymous Bob" might be surprised to learn. Unlike "Bob", I'm not out to tell anyone else what to do - each person has to make up their own mind, and fundamentalists of either persuasion don't help the debate.

Andrea Needham,
Seeds of Hope Ploughshares,
128 Bethnal Green Road, London E2, England