World War II poster from the United States ELF used sabotage tactics often in loose coordination with other environmental activist movements to physically delay or destroy threats to wildlands as the political will developed to protect the targeted wild areas that ELF engaged. ![]() The image of the monkey wrench thrown into the moving parts of a machine to stop it from working was popularized by Edward Abbey in the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang and has been adopted by eco-activists to describe the destruction of earth damaging machinery.įrom 1992 to late 2007 a radical environmental activist movement known as ELF or Earth Liberation Front engaged in a near-constant campaign of decentralized sabotage of any construction projects near wildlands and extractive industries such as logging and even the burning down of a ski resort of Vail Colorado. Opponents, by contrast, point out that property owners and operators can indeed feel terror. Proponents argue that since property cannot feel terror, damage to property is more accurately described as sabotage. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other law enforcement agencies use the term eco-terrorist when applied to damage of property. Ĭertain groups turn to the destruction of property to stop environmental destruction or to make visible arguments against forms of modern technology they consider detrimental to the environment. įor the IWW, sabotage's meaning expanded to include the original use of the term: any withdrawal of efficiency, including the slowdown, the strike, working to rule, or creative bungling of job assignments. This tactic – the French called it "sabotage" – won the strikers their demands and impressed Bill Haywood. Freight bound for Paris was misdirected to Lyon or Marseille instead. Perishables sat for weeks, sidetracked and forgotten. Suddenly, they could not seem to do anything right. ![]() Undaunted, the workers carried their strike to the job. The French government responded by drafting the strikers into the army and then ordering them back to work. Tired of waiting for parliament to act on their demands, railroad workers walked off their jobs all across the country. The experience that had the most lasting impact on Haywood was witnessing a general strike on the French railroads. The IWW was shaped in part by the industrial unionism philosophy of Big Bill Haywood, and in 1910 Haywood was exposed to sabotage while touring Europe: Labor unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) have advocated sabotage as a means of self-defense and direct action against unfair working conditions. Unauthorized stencil urging sabotage and picketingĪt the inception of the Industrial Revolution, skilled workers such as the Luddites (1811–1812) used sabotage as a means of negotiation in labor disputes. In 1897, Émile Pouget, a famous syndicalist and anarchist wrote " action de saboter un travail" ('action of sabotaging or bungling a work') in Le Père Peinard and in 1911 he also wrote a book entitled Le Sabotage. It is at the end of the 19th century that it really began to be used with the meaning of 'deliberately and maliciously destroying property' or 'working slower'. Here it is defined mainly as 'making sabots, sabot maker'. The word sabotage is found in 1873–1874 in the Dictionnaire de la langue française of Émile Littré. In it the literal definition is to 'make noise with sabots' as well as 'bungle, jostle, hustle, haste'. One of the first appearances of saboter and saboteur in French literature is in the Dictionnaire du Bas-Langage ou manières de parler usitées parmi le peuple of d'Hautel, edited in 1808. A popular but incorrect account of the origin of the term's present meaning is the story that poor workers in the Belgian city of Liège would throw a wooden sabot into the machines to disrupt production. The English word derives from the French word saboter, meaning to "bungle, botch, wreck or sabotage" it was originally used to refer to labour disputes, in which workers wearing wooden shoes called sabots interrupted production through different means.
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