“We think [the Japanese] are re-enacting the Second World War,” Watson said on Saturday. “They see themselves as against the West and that no one will tell them what to do.”
But he freely admits damaging property. In a lifetime of confrontations beginning with Canadian sealers, he has used “prop foulers” to sabotage ships, boarded whaling vessels and sunk several in Iceland and Norway.
“We’re not a protest organization — we intervene against illegal activities, and as far as we’re concerned Japanese whalers are poachers. The oceans are being pillaged and we are the only organization out on the high seas trying to do something about it,” he says.
He told me he acted by a martial code culled from the methods of ancient Eastern and modern Western warfare, and that he expected to die for his cause. He quoted films, read widely, wrote poetry and books, laughed a lot.
Watson claims to have co-founded both Greenpeace and Greenpeace International in the early 1970s (something that Greenpeace disputes), but proved far too much for them.
“He was a great warrior brother, yet in terms of the Greenpeace gestalt he seemed possessed by too powerful a drive, too unrelenting a desire to push himself front and center, shouldering everyone else aside,” said his friend Robert Hunter, who died four years ago.
He sailed with Greenpeace many times and skippered one of its boats in 1972. But he severed all links with the organization in 1977 after being expelled from the Greenpeace board.
What he wrote in his autobiography 16 years ago holds just as true today, he says: “There are many people who say that what we do is futile, that there is no way to stop the rising tide of human-spawned destruction. There are many who condemn my crew and I for taking the law into our own hands and for taking on the barons of corporate profit. There are some who would like to see us jailed or even dead, so blinded are they to the conceit and folly of their own anthropomorphism.”
“I don’t care. I do what I do because it is the right thing to do. I am a warrior and it is the way of the warrior to fight superior odds,” he says.
RSS