Jonny Ablewhite
30.09.2011 Jonny Ablewhite has been released today!!
Jonny’s last letter, September 2011
My dear Vegan friends,
Here is my last group letter and my last ever pseudo-intellectual rant from prison.
Hallelujah! Admittedly, like so many of us, I have always held an extremely gloomy opinion about what humanity is and about what it means to be a member of our strange, post-primate species. I have thought about little else over these last six years, desperately hoping some ecological or evolutionary epiphany would strike me down and I would see clearly how harmony could be achieved with such a rapacious and voracious plague species as our own. The vision never came. The bolts of lightning were a fantasy. As my six year journey now draws tentatively to a close, my mind sluggish and grieving the recent loss of my mum, my realisation is such less dramatic but much more clear. It is grounded not on fantasies, hopes or visions but on knowledge, on the fact that not an hour or day or week has passed by over this six long years when I didn’t feel loved or supported by an international community of compassioned Vegans. I don’t need bolts of lightning: I know there is a world of caring activists out there: organising, strategising and living their struggle for animal and earth liberation on a daily basis! How do I know this? Because for six years you’ve all been writing to me and telling me!
The cumulative experience of this wonderful bombardment has taught me that veganism and altruism are synonymous and symbolic, each constantly stimulating the other, each evolving and extending global compassion for benefit of all life. In this rejection of all domination and oppression, veganism becomes a permanent opportunity for change – a political, ecological and ethical platform that regenerates and reaffirms altruism in the hearts and minds of all those who practice it. Every time we reject the consumption of animal flesh or animal tested products, we are asking and enacting broader questions about the relationship between humans, plants and other animals. And, as you know, Vegans strive for harmony and equally in these relationships and remain vociferous and determined and forthright when harmony is exploited or attacked. That’s because veganism is a moral commitment to the principle of liberty, a natural and evolved expression of freedom! We persistently challenge all forms of speciesism for the sake of individual animals and for the bruised and beleaguered planet that remains their home. Be loud! Be proud! Be Vegan!
Six years on, a six year epic saga nearly behind me, and I live with this verified and assured appreciation that we vegans are all getting it right in our own different and complex and diverse ways. Every letter, email and visit I’ve received – from friends old and new, near and far – was written with a pioneering seal, with an indomitable resolve that reminds me so much of my mum, a tenacity that refuses to accept injustice and cares so tenderly for all the victims of abuse and oppression. You have all been so overwhelmingly loving and generous and you have all kept my head above water when it has so often felt I’d be better off on the seabed. I thank you with every cell and molecule for that. One day very soon my mitochondria will be joyously primed again and I’ll be ready to celebrate my mum’s life and my own liberation and I’ll remember agelessly what magnificent and powerful and dear vegan friends I have – the world over!
For the innocent, objectified, tortured, persecuted and murdered animals – who so desperately need our help, everyday.
For my mum, Peggy Ablewhite, who made me and loved me.
I will cherish her memory with a glad heart.
For you all, my Dear Vegans Friends,
Jonny x
Letter from Jonny, 7th July 2010
My dear Vegan Friends,
The VPSG continues to be of fundamental support in maintaining a consistently healthy prison diet. I’m not doing cartwheels over the daily flavours our “chefs” cook up in HMP Hewell, but, once a week, I do get a curry which is truly delicious. What it really needs is a side order of hummus and olives! I’ve been waiting for hummus and olives ever since leaving lavish Lowdham Grange and – finally – on this Saturday the 10th I’ll be cramming as much of that illustrious combo into my orifice as is physically feasible.
Yes – I’ve finally been granted the first of the D cat treats: nine hours of complete freedom! After five freakin’ years I can finally spend time with my family and friends outside any institutional confines! I can, simply, begin to taste liberty! (and hummus!) I’m getting surges of a sensation that I imagined had left me forever: excitement!
It’s been an interminable and arduous wait and it will feel so blissfully cathartic! Both my sister and aunty will be there – they have been blighted with cancer over the last year and I’m understandably desperate to see them. In fact, I’m desperate to see all my friends on such emancipated terms and that will now be possible over the last fourteen months of this ignominious prison sentence. Book now and bring hummus!
My heart goes out to you all, to the VPSG and to all the indomitable AR and ER prisoners across the world.
Vegan love and liberation,
Jonny
Letter from Jonny, 8th September 2009
My dear vegan friends
I was lately pondering the human condition, in an attempt to cheer up a friend from a bad bout of ‘cosmic meaninglessness’, and remembered a piece I recently wrote about ’altruism’. I decided to rewrite it to make it more accessible and thus to (possibly) cheer anybody else up who may be suffering from a similar attack of mental malaise.
The ’happy clappy’ proselytising premise to this wonderful hypothesis is: “Goodness is in our Genes!”‘Goodness’, in evolutionary and biological terms, is generally referred to as ‘altruism’ (could I be more patronising??) and, shock horror, altruism is embedded in our genes because it offers innumerable organisms many survival and reproductive advantages that lead to that organism’s genetic longevity and therefore success.
In evolutionary terms, I’m talking a species survival rate of hundreds of millions of years – not the measly hundred thousand years our species has been around!Anyhoo, two central categories of altruism have been identified:- ‘Kin altruism’ (see W. D. Hamilton): This manifests in cooperation among the same species to increase a family or groups’ life chances at the potential survival expense of a care-giving individual. e.g. the tireless and sacrificial nurturing of a mother towards her young. You will often see mothers of herding animals jeopardising their own safety by leaving the protection of the herd to protect their struggling calfs. Outside of the direct family kin altruism also manifests in an individual’s selfless behaviour to protect the survival of the group. e.g. a bird’s alarm call can alert the entire flock to a predator’s presence but by drawing attention to itself, it is potentially suicidal! However, this is such a well-tuned defence to predation that the bird rarely gets chomped anyway – so everybody’s happy!
There are countless other examples of such incredibly selfless behaviour in so many species that it defies belief!- ‘Reciprocal altruism’ (see R.L. Trivers): This manifests in cooperative behaviour between completely different species and is based on an evolutionary understanding that ‘You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours’; also known as ‘symbiosis’. There are also loads of examples of this type of inter-species cooperation. e.g. ox-pecker birds and cleaner fish. Cleaner fish are just the most daring of altruistic animals! A larger fish will open its gaping jaws and allow the cleaner fish to peck and feast off parasites, keeping his teeth sparkling and the cleaner fish’s belly full! Many of these cleaners are the same size of its host’s usual prey but altruism dictates that the larger fish do not chomp the cleaners! It’s the perfect underwater anarchist carwash!So altruism is everywhere! Goodness is omnipresent and mutual aid is endemic – an amazing evolutionary principle that works to promote family, herd, flock and total inter-species cooperation!! You just can’t get away from it whatever species you are – you just have to keep reminding yourself that it’s there!!
Obviously therefore altruism is embedded in our species too, as it is in all primate genes, because it’s been genetically inherited through the complete Tree of life: from apes, primates, mammals, tetrapods, vertebrates etc etc. This spans through the evolutionary history of 4 billion years of life on earth, back to those first altruistic acts which offered archaic cells the earliest forms of survival advantage. So, all that the great human visionaries have done (e.g. Kropotkin, Chomsky, Torres, Marx, Gandhi, Bookchin, Buddha, Rousseau, Godwin, Proudhon, the glorious Emma Goldman – and all Vegans of course!) is to vocalise altruism in to an uplifting call for mutual aid and cooperation.
Altruism is omniscient, indestructible and inevitable! It’s such a successful and well-tried out evolutionary tool for sustaining biodiversity that it will always triumph – until a better method of survival evolves, which is clearly not going to happen – at least not for the next four thousand million years!
Brightest Vegan Blessings, Jonny Ablewhite