St. Kitts Declaration is an Insight into Human
Ecological Insanity - Commentary by Captain Paul
Watson
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 16:56:52 -0700
St. Kitts Declaration is an Insight into Human
Ecological Insanity
Commentary by Captain Paul Watson
The first motion Japan has introduced in 20 years that
has been passed by the International Whaling
Commission is bizarre and reflects just how out of
touch with ecological realities Japan and their puppet
sycophantic nations are.
The motion passed by just one vote and that vote was
cast by Denmark which now has the distinction of
casting the deciding vote that has strengthened the
hand of the whalers.
Fortunately the declaration was passed by a simple
majority of one vote and did not even get close to the
required two-thirds majority needed to overturn the
global moratorium.
A look at the wording is revealing.
The declaration states that whaling is necessary for
developing nations to diversify their agriculture. In
other words whales are being considered as domestic
crops to be harvested.
The only nations that are demanding the overturn of
the global moratorium are Japan, Norway and Iceland
and these three nations can hardly be classified as
developing nations and certainly not poor nations.
The declaration then states that whales eat huge
quantities of fish and therefore are responsible for
the world's dwindling resources of fish. The
declaration suggests that the IWC is being
irresponsible in allowing these whales to continue to
eat all of the fish which Japan believes belongs to
the Japanese people.
According to the declaration, humanity having
destroyed more than 90% of the fish in the sea, are
now blaming the whales for the demise of these same
fish and suggesting that the whales must be destroyed
in the name of fish conservation. This argument has
not a shred of scientific validity and has been
constructed to serve the commercial self interests of
Japan and Norway.
St. Kitts may have introduced the declaration, but St.
Kitts is not an independent nation. It is a country
that has been economically invaded and has surrendered
its integrity and honour in exchange for paltry
Japanese hand-outs.
The declaration then specifically targets anti-whaling
groups as "threats" to whaling and suggests that the
IWC label these groups as unacceptable and disallow
their participation at IWC meetings. The declaration
unabashedly states that NGO's that oppose whaling have
a self interested agenda that interferes with the
agenda of those who wish to profit from the killing of
whales and suggests that whaling is not motivated by
self-interest. In other words if a profit is to be
made from killing whales than that is not a
self-interested position, and those who save whales
without profit must therefore be acting in self
interest.
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is not worried
about this part of the declaration. We have been
banned from the IWC since 1986 because we confess that
we are indeed a threat to whaling. The declaration
could hoever throw even the moderate conservationists
NGO's out of the meeting although pro-killing NGO's
like the High North Alliance would be allowed to stay
because their condoning of whaling is of course not
motivated by self-interest.
The declaration states that the IWC should be
"normalized". This is the Newspeak term for the
resumption of whale killing. The Japanese argue that
since the IWC was set up to manage whaling that it
obligated to promote whaling. Yet the objectives of
the IWC have been changed over the last three decades
by the participating member nations and the IWC has
evolved from a whale killing to a whale conservation
organization. Japan finds this evolution to be
unacceptable and has chosen to negate this majority
position by recruiting puppet nations through bribery
to force the IWC to turn the calendar back to before
1947 when the IWC was pro-whaling. Japan would like to
turn the calendar back on many issues prior to 1946
when it failed to dominate and subjugate Asia through
brutality and violence. Today Japan is hoping to
achieve through economic power and bribery what it
could not achieve through military thuggery.
Japan claims to be killing whales for scientific
research yet they have not produced any credible
scientific papers to justify this bogus research.
After killing 17,000 whales the only research they
have to show for it is marketing and product
development efforts. Japan also claims that they have
not influenced any nations to vote in their favor. Yet
Guatemala arrived late at St. Kitts to pay their IWC
membership fee in Japanese Yen.
The fact is that the nations voting a straight yes to
all of Japan's resolutions have together received over
$400 million in Japanese foreign aid packages
including tens of thousands of Japanese cars dumped
cheaply or for free onto Caribbean and Pacific
islands. Thanks to Japan, St. Lucia has traffic jams
and every car is a Japanese model.
In short, Japan wants us to believe that whales must
be killed before they eat all the fish in the oceans
so that poor developing nations can have a way to
diversify their "agriculture" by harvesting whales.
This is an altruistic approach unlike those selfish
self-interested whale defending non-governmental
organizations who continue to embarrass Japan by
pointing out their reams of lies and their ridiculous
cultural pride that motivates their extermination of
the world's whales and dolphins because no one is
going to tell Japan what to do.
What Japan needs is an economic equivalent of the
Hiroshima bomb. Their last insane lust for power and
control ended in near suicidal horror as they
attempted to loot, plunder, slaughter and rape their
way through Asia. Today they are looting, plundering,
slaughtering and raping their way through the world's
oceans. Instead of victimizing innocent Chinese
citizens and raping their mothers, they are massacring
the world's innocent whales and dolphins and
systematically destroying entire populations of fish
and invertebrates in their commercial quest to feed an
appetite based on a cultural preference for living
beings from the sea, preferably raw, exotic and rare.
The sheer audacity of it is mind-numbing. One hundred
million sushi eating Japanese have the gall to accuse
the world's whales and dolphins of eating to many
fish. The nation that devolved racism into a cultural
pillar of their society where non-Japanese are
considered inferior now have the effrontery to accuse
conservationists defending whales of being racist.
This incredibly wealthy nation has the arrogance to
state that whales must be killed to appease poverty by
shipping the whale meat to the Tokyo fish market to be
sold at high prices to affluent Japanese citizens. In
return Japan will toss a few used cars onto remote
islands and construct a fish plant or two to help
locals plunder more fish to send to Japan.
The St. Kitts Declaration is ecological insanity
presented by a mindset that is so ruthlessly resource
exploitive in its priorities that all means are
justified to keep the madness of perpetual oceanic
resource extraction continually active.
To say that whales are abundant is ridiculous. To say
that whales are eating all the world's fish is
delusional. To say that the IWC can only be
"normalized" by a return to wholesale whale slaughter
is sadistically sociopathic. Empathy for the whales is
dismissed as "emotional".
Emotion is a human trait that is rejected only by
totalitarian systems. To dismiss emotion is to dismiss
humanity's greatest virtue and it's only hope for
survival.
It is madness to reject emotion in favor of cold
systematic utilitarian exploitation. It is the same
madness that sent the Nazi's on the march to horror
and self extermination and it is the same madness that
screamed Banzai as Japanese lopped off Australian
heads and starved American and British soldiers and
civilians in Southeast Asia only a generation ago, a
madness that was only stopped by the madness of
nuclear annihilation.
The St. Kitt's Declaration will go down in history as
one of the most bizarre and most incomprehensible
attempts at a regulatory document ever devised.
The sad part is that the little Japanese island pawn
nation of St. Kitts and Nevis will shoulder the
ridicule that future generations will heap upon it
because the name will implicate them for a document of
ridiculousness authored by the sushi samurai brigade
under the leadership of Joji Morishita whose idea of
honour is to wallow like a power drunken psychopath in
the hot spurting blood of intelligent sentient
creatures, as he prattles nonsense from a brain
riddled and addled from years of exposure to mercury.
We can only hope that when Morishita is drooling and
staring into space from a heavy-metaled assaulted
swiss cheesed brain that he will have failed to ignite
a pogrom of slaughter upon whalekind.
The St. Kitt's Declaration is good for one thing. It
has no effective power and it reveals the utter
ecological ignorance and arrogance of Japan and their
purchased rinky-dink finger puppet nations.
This commentary may be freely distributed and
published.
Full Text of the St. Kitts Declaration
St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin,
Cambodia, Cameroon, Cote dIvoire, Dominica, Gabon,
Gambia, Grenada, Republic of Guinea,
Iceland, Japan, Kiribati, Mali, Republic of the
Marshall Islands, Mauritania, Mongolia, Morocco,
Nauru, Nicaragua, Norway, Republic of
Palau, Russian Federation, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and
the Grenadines, Solomon Islands, Suriname, Tog,
Tuvalu.
EMPHASIZING that the use of cetaceans in many parts of
the world including the Caribbean, contributes to
sustainable coastal communities,
sustainable livelihoods, food security and poverty
reduction and that placing the use of whales outside
the context of the globally accepted
norm of science-based management and rule-making for
emotional reasons would set a bad precedent that risks
our use of fisheries and other
renewable resources;
FURTHER EMPHASIZING that the use of marine resources
as an integral part of development options is
critically important at this time for a number
of countries experiencing the need to diversify their
agriculture;
UNDERSTANDING that the purpose of the 1946
International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling
(ICRW) is to provide for the proper
conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible
the orderly development of the whaling industry
(quoted from the Preamble to the
Convention) and that the International Whaling
Commission (IWC) is therefore about managing whaling
to ensure whale stocks are not
over-harvested rather than protecting all whales
irrespective of their abundance;
NOTING that in 1982 the IWC adopted a moratorium on
commercial whaling (paragraph 10e of the Schedule to
the ICRW) without advice from the
Commissions Scientific Committee that such measure
was required for conservation purposes;
FURTHER NOTING that the moratorium which was clearly
intended as a temporary measure is no longer
necessary, that the Commission adopted a
robust and risk-averse procedure (RMP) for calculating
quotas for abundant stocks of baleen whales in 1994
and that the IWCs own
Scientific Committee has agreed that many species and
stocks of whales are abundant and sustainable whaling
is possible;
CONCERNED that after 14 years of discussion and
negotiation, the IWC has failed to complete and
implement a management regime to regulate
commercial whaling.
ACCEPTING that scientific research has shown that
whales consume huge quantities of fish making the
issue a matter of food security for
coastal nations and requiring that the issue of
management of whale stocks must be considered in a
broader context of ecosystem management
since eco-system management has now become an
international standard.
REJECTING as unacceptable that a number of
international NGOs with self-interest campaigns should
use threats in an attempt to direct
government policy on matters of sovereign rights
related to the use of resources for food security and
national development;
NOTING that the position of some members that are
opposed to the resumption of commercial whaling on a
sustainable basis irrespective of
the status of whale stocks is contrary to the object
and purpose of the International Convention for the
Regulation of Whaling;
UNDERSTANDING that the IWC can be saved from collapse
only by implementing conservation and management
measures which will allow
controlled and sustainable whaling which would not
mean a return to historic over-harvesting and that
continuing failure to do so serves
neither the interests of whale conservation nor
management;
NOW THEREFORE:
COMMISSIONERS express their concern that the IWC has
failed to meet its obligations under the terms of the
ICRW and, DECLARE our commitment to normalizing the
functions of the IWC based on the terms of the ICRW
and other relevant international law, respect for
cultural diversity and traditions of coastal peoples
and the fundamental principles of sustainable use of
resources, and the need for science-based policy and
rulemaking that are accepted as the world standard for
the management of marine resources.
Captain Paul Watson
Founder and President of the Sea Shepherd Conservation
Society (1977-
Co-Founder - The Greenpeace Foundation (1972)
Co-Founder - Greenpeace International (1979)
Director of the Sierra Club USA (2003-2006)
Director - The Farley Mowat Institute
Director - www.harpseals.org
Director - Ocean Outfall Group of California
Advisory Board Member - Telluride Mountain Film
Festival
Advisory Board Member - The Animals Voice Magazine
Whom when I asked from what place he came,
And how he hight, himselfe he did ycleepe,
The Shepheard of the Ocean by Name,
And said he came far from
the main-sea deepe.
- Edmund Spenser
A.C.E. 1590
www.Seashepherd.org
Tel: 360-370-5650
Fax: 360-370-5651
Address: P.O. Box 2616
Friday Harbor, Wa 98250 USA
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