Save the Seals—Skin the Rich

On March 19, 1979, several of us reached into the dustbin of history to resurrect the old Eat the Rich Gang and the Workers Revenge Group. The occasion was a Greenpeace anti-sealing demonstration in downtown Detroit that, as it turned out had as its demand only a one year moratorium on the Canadian hunt, to determine whether or not these beautiful creatures were an endangered species. The trap of this sort of logic is so bountifully clear that it’s surprising that even these weepy-eyed reformers fell for it—the Canadian government counts the seal heads, says, “Nope, not endangered,” and the slaughter begins anew next year, to provide furs for the rich. The ETR/WRG prepared the following leaflet which was distributed at the rally.

SAVE THE SEALS—SKIN THE RICH

The grisly spectacle of helpless seal cubs being butchered to satisfy the fashion whims of the rich is only one of a multitude of reasons for our unflagging hatred of this putrid society. The “American Way of Life” is a degenerative disease which is an insatiable compulsion to transform everything into commodities. The slaughter of harp seals is motivated solely by the demands of the affluent to turn a vital, living part of the world into a souvenir of their wealth. The planet is more impoverished by each of their incursions into it.

Hence, the wealthy are a fitting target for our rage, being at once the foremost recipients of this horrid assault, and the creators of a cultural standard based upon this pseudo-desire. Everything must be bulldozed, sanitized, “developed,” marketed and consumed by these vampires. Too bad for this or that wilderness, species, or tribe of “primitives” if these monsters decide to set up their lawn chairs and spew their filthy way of life upon the earth.

Before our own skins become the next fashion of the wealthy, we of the Workers Revenge Group/Eat the Rich Gang propose to turn the tables and offer a plan that would eliminate once and for all the source of this massacre and bring retribution for the killing of our innocent fellow creatures.

Rather than ineffective speeches of protest, let’s organize car caravans to the wealthy suburbs and shopping malls to locate the offspring of the affluent. There and then, these sprats could be dispatched with a short, stout club and quickly skinned on the spot with a large, sharp buck knife. These skins can easily be tailored into medium-weight Spring and Fall coats cut in the latest styles and distributed free of charge to the poor. These coats will not only provide warmth to a class of people unmercifully exploited by the rich, but will also cut short the ability of this wealthy class of parasites to reproduce itself, thus relieving the world of one of its mightiest burdens!

—Workers Revenge Group/Eat the Rich Gang,

March 1979