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What Happens When the Left Has to Choose Between Animals and Minorities?

Lefties pretend that their ideology is coherent and consistent. The reality is that it’s chock full of competing values and special interests, tribes and agendas, united only by manufacturing a common enemy in the form of some evanescent majority, white people, men, etc…

Examined closely, the whole thing starts teetering under its contradictions. And that occasionally happens.

Take this BuzzFeed hit piece which reveals that the WWF uses aggressive security forces to protect endangered species. The security forces do the sorts of things that counterterrorism forces do to stop local tribes for wiping out endangered species.

(Or at least are accused of it, since this is BuzzFeed, truth is the first casualty of reporting.)

But WWF has provided high-tech enforcement equipment, cash, and weapons to forces implicated in atrocities against indigenous communities. In the coming days, BuzzFeed News will reveal how the charity has continued funding and equipping rangers, even after higher-ups became aware of evidence of serious human rights abuses.

Rhinoceros horns can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars on the black market. Professional poachers offer a tiny portion to locals who assist them, which can be hard for impoverished residents of villages to turn down.

The next year, Kamal Jung Kunwar, one of the three officials charged in Shikharam’s death, wrote a memoir about his time at the park. In Four Years for the Rhino, which was published by a Nepalese nonprofit, Kunwar claims to have arrested over 150 poachers, brokers, and smugglers over a three-year period. He insisted he was innocent, claimed he was out of the country when Shikharam was detained, and speculated that the damning autopsy results were fabricated.

But Kunwar freely admitted that the forces he oversaw as coordinator of the park’s anti-poaching operation unit regularly beat suspects. He wrote about giving a suspect a “hard slap,” buying packets of chilli powder for sprinkling into suspects’ eyes, and watching as a fellow ranger punched a boy in the nose until it “started bleeding profusely.” In another, he described a Tibetan boy who refused to speak during interrogation until soldiers poured water into his nose and eyes — the same waterboarding technique Shikharam had described to his wife.

Read the full story from Front Page Mag


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