Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

It was bizarro-world last week in Sydney, Nova Scotia as supposedly macho baby seal killers recounted the "scariest moments of their life."

What a sight, sealers testifying how scared and frightened they were when they saw the Sea Shepherd ship Farley Mowat in the ice last year documenting the slaughter.

It was "Horror on the High Seas" as menacing baby seal defenders moved in on defenseless and innocent baby seal clubbers with dangerous cameras. The poor men were blinded by the lenses and traumatized by the sight of... my God, actual women out on the ice threatening their very masculinity and getting it all on camera to show to the world what barbaric and primitive A-holes they are.

The poor sealers in the courtroom were spared the stress and trauma of facing their worst nightmares in the flesh when both the "dastardly" Dutch Captain Alex Cornelissen and the "scary" Swedish 1st Officer Peter Hammarstedt of the Farley Mowat failed to materialize in the courtroom to defend their plea of not guilty of violating the Seal Protection Regulations by witnessing and documenting the slaughter of seal pups on the ice.

Irate citizens voiced their opinion about how the horrible seal lovers had victimized the defenseless baby butchers. It was like stepping through the looking glass into another dimension where morality has been reversed and the killers are the unfortunate victims of despicable acts of kindness.

The Canadian government had anticipated that some of the sealers would have an attack of the vapors if the two Sea Shepherd seal defenders had appeared, so they conveniently arranged it so that Alex and Peter were banned from returning to Canada for their trial.

Of course there was the added advantage of being able to seize the 5000 doubloons that I posted for them last year to satisfy the government ransom of $10,000 for their release.

It was a great scam. Force the defendants to post a $10,000 bail then bar them from returning to Canada to appear in court and then forfeit the bail. Absolutely brilliant!

Of course this is the kind of legal corruption one would expect from some banana republic, surely not from the true north strong and free.

Or is it?

 

The day that Alex and Peter were arrested was the beginning of the weirdness. They were out beyond the 12-mile limit onboard a Dutch registered ship going about their business of documenting the atrocities of the Canadian seal slaughter.

The government demanded that they produce a permit giving them permission to officially witness the slaughter or surrender the ship for violating the law which makes it illegal to document the killing of seals, to which Peter "the Hammer" Hammarstedt replied, "we don't need no stinking permit."

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police do not have a sense of humor that anyone is aware of and probably had failed to see the Treasure of the Sierra Madre so instead of laughing they took a page of patriotism from that great Canadian role model Kiefer Sutherland and stormed the ship ala "24" Hours style with automatic weapons in full swat team regalia.

Aside from conveniently roughing up and fondling one of the prettiest crewmembers on board, the boarding was uneventful and the keystone Mounties were quite frustrated that they did not get to shoot anyone or at least beat the crap out of someone.

Instead they took twenty prisoners and put them in irons and headed off to Sydney, Nova Scotia where 18 of the crew were kicked into the street without charges and without their personal possessions. The ship was seized without any charges and Captain Cornelissen and 1st Officer Peter Hammarstedt were whisked off to interrogation in some little dungeon cell somewhere in the middle of a barren frozen field surrounded by razor wire and looking like some Siberian gulag facility.

The interrogation tapes are hilarious, because Alex and Peter stuck to the rule that "nobody talks and everyone walks." For 12 solid hours they did not say a word, although it was difficult to keep from laughing especially considering this exchange:

Mountie to Peter: "You know what I see when I look at you boy? I see some 12-year-old kid with a pack of nails and explosives walking into a Tel Aviv marketplace. Are you that kid, boy, are you the next 9-11?"

Peter all the while thinking to himself, "Gee we took some pictures already, when did that become a federal offense?"

Of course in Canada taking pictures is a federal offense, if the subject is the witnessing of the murder of a baby seal. The Mounties were not taking any chances of letting someone as dangerous with a camera as Peter the Hammer walking the streets or ice floes of Eastern Canada snapping pictures of innocent baby seal killers.

So both Alex and Peter were ordered deported for life before their trial. Why wait for a trial to impose the sentence? Welcome to Canada where the head of security for the nation, a man named Stockwell Day, actually believes dinosaurs went extinct because they were too big to get on Noah's ark.

But the Judge and the Crown were not going to allow a little thing like the fact that there were no defendants and no defense to stand in the way of Canadian justice. These men had deliberately and with malicious intent made the decision to witness and document the horrific slaughter of the baby seals and that is not the kind of anti-social behavior that is tolerated in the Great White North.

No, sir. In Canada the law protects the baby killers and condemns their protectors. The Canadian government understands that bread and circuses are absolutely necessary to keep the Newfoundlanders and the Magaderthal Islanders complacent and in their place as mindless voters. Welfare and baby seal bashing are the perfect ticket. As long as the goofy Newfies and the morose Maggie Islanders are collecting the dole and smashing the heads of seal pups, they seem to be happy. This is really a case of inbred troglodytes with two digit IQ's making a three digit wage from baby-killing, so it's not like it is a necessity for the Canadian economy to have these club toting thugs plying their grisly trade.

But there is the issue of culture and when your father is a perverted baby-basher and his father before him was a deviant baby-basher and his father before him ad nauseum, then it is expected that you will also be a bloody baby bashing sadistic bastard also, especially if you're too damn dumb or lazy to go to school to get a real job.

It's a culture of ignorance and violence and it has no place in the 21st century but politics always cater to the ignorant and the weak, primarily because they are too ignorant to understand the nature of politics which is usually the case of every elected official for themselves.

Canadian members of Parliament have all taken courses in the Joseph Goebbels School of Propaganda and they stick obediently to the party line that the slaughter of baby seals is the "most humane, and most regulated slaughter of any animal species in the world."

Of course not one of them has seen the truth for themselves. As the Canadian consul to Los Angeles once told me, "I don't need to see the hunt, I have the assurances of my government that it is humane."

And for those of us who have actually seen the cruelty on the ice, they dismiss us as liars and charlatans, choosing to demonstrate more respect for a bunch of freeloading beer and screech guzzling goons from the out of touch out ports than from successful Canadians like myself, Rebecca Aldworth, Farley Mowat, Pamela Anderson, and many, many more. All of us appalled to be associated through nationality with one of the most brutally cruel animal massacres on the planet.

They have decided that seal bashing is to be a national pastime enshrined in the culture along with hockey, Tim Horton doughnuts, Celine Dion, and maple syrup.

In Canada there is one law for baby seal killers and another for baby seal defenders. This translates into unconditional defense of every act of cruelty on the ice by the killers and relentless prosecution of every act of defiance or opposition to the slaughter of the baby seals. Save a seal go to jail; kill a seal and the politicians will kiss your ass.

People say I exaggerate about Canada's extremism in defense of this despicable butchery.

Yet the former Liberal Minister of Natural Resources for Canada actually said:
"Mr. Speaker, I would like to see the six million, or whatever number is out there, killed or sold, or destroyed or burned. I do not care what happens to them. The fact is that the markets are not there to sell more seals. What they (the fishermen) wanted was to have the right to go out and kill the seals. They have that right, and the more they kill the better I will love it."

And let's see how their darling little seal clubbers describe what they do in their own words.

In The Living Ice by Pol Chantraine, this sealer describes how the first baby seal that is killed each year by each sealer is slit open and the beating heart removed. The sealer drinks the blood and paints a crucifix on his forehead in blood.

And Mickey Dwyer in his book Over The Side Mickey wrote:

"I had heard the anti-sealing protesters say that sealers were barbarians. They were right. You have to be a barbarian to survive it!... How barbaric one became depended on how long one was subjected to it. Once, after only a short time into the Hunt, I had saved up ten heads that we used for two hours to play 'head-ball.' It was like hockey but instead of using sticks, we used our hak-a-piks to try and shoot the head between two twitching corpses we used as goal posts. We all took turns in the net. By the time the game was over, eyeballs, teeth, fragments of skull bone and lower jawbones were scattered all over the rink. Darrell won but we all had a great deal of fun."

The trial ended last week and what a non-event it turned out to be. The Judge was there. The Crown Prosecutor was there. A bevy of bureaucrats and whining sealers were there. They had plenty of eight by ten glossy color pictures with the circles and arrows on the back of each one explaining what each one was about. All that was missing was the seeing eye dog, oh, and of course the two dastardly defendants and their lawyers.

The local media condemned Peter and Alex for not appearing despite the fact that the government prevented them from appearing. Canada told Captain Alex Cornelissen and 1st Officer Peter Hammarstedt that they were undesirable persons for daring to oppose the slaughter of seals. Animal defenders are not the kind of people Canada considers worthy of walking upon the soil of the "true north strong and free."

Last year, the Canadian government attacked me and I was vilified in the Canadian media for daring to say that the deaths of 4 sealers was a tragedy caused by the incompetence of the Canadian government but that the slaughter of 325,000 seals was a far greater tragedy. I was told that I had no respect for human life and how dare I make such a comparison.

I have no apologies of course for the statement but I find it interesting that recently the Premier of Newfoundland, Mr. Danny Williams, a staunch defender of the seal slaughter who called me a terrorist for what I said was asked recently about mistakes made by some bureaucrats in the Ministry of Health to which he answered "they should be shot."

And when the Premier of Newfoundland openly suggests that people be shot, the polls revealed that 60% of Newfoundlanders agreed with the Premier.

So much for respect for human life.

These sealers and the culture and politicians that support them are sadistic hypocrites. The slaughter of baby seals is a perversion and a crime against nature and humanity. Only the morally bankrupt and the willfully arrogant and ignorant human chauvinists can justify the bloody viciousness of the one of the most barbaric and cruelest wars ever waged on a species.

Alex and Peter, a Dutchman and a Swede, certainly received an education into the strange and ethically challenged area of the world where baby killers are glorified and kindness is rewarded with deportation, fines, and jail sentences.

O Canada!
Our cruel and sadistic land!
True jingoistic love to all our sons we command.
With evil hearts we club the baby seals,
The Great White North weak and enslaved!
From bloody coast to bloody coast, O Canada,
We kill at your command.
God is on our side as we gloriously slaughter!
O Canada, we kill the seals for thee.
O Canada, we kill the seals for thee.