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TechnoratiThe Impact of the 'Battle In Seattle'
Nine years after the World Trade Organization came to Seattle, a new feature film sets out to dramatize the historic protests that the institution's meetings provoked. The issue that Battle in Seattle filmmaker Stuart Townsend seeks to raise, as he recently stated, is "[what it takes] to create real and meaningful change."
The question is notoriously difficult. In the film, characters like Martin Henderson's Jay, a veteran environmental campaigner driven by a tragedy experienced on a past logging campaign, and Michelle Rodriguez's Lou, a hard-bitten animal rights activist, debate the effectiveness of protest. Even as they take to Seattle's streets, staring down armor-clad cops (Woody Harrelson, Channing Tatum) commanded by a tormented and indecisive mayor (Ray Liotta), they wonder whether their actions can have an impact.
Generally speaking, the response of many Americans is to dismiss protests out of hand-arguing that demonstrators are just blowing off steam and won't make a difference. But if any case can be held as a counter-example, Seattle is it.
The 1999 mobilization against the World Trade Organization has never been free from criticism. As Andre 3000's character in the movie quips, even the label "Battle in Seattle" makes the protests sound less like a serious political event and more "like a Monster Truck show." While the demonstrations were still playing out and police were busy arresting some 600 people, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman issued his now-famous edict stating that deluded activists were just "looking for their 1960s fix." This type of disregard has continued with the release of the film. A review in the Seattle Weekly dismissively asked, "Remind me again what those demonstrations against the WTO actually accomplished."
While cynicism comes cheap, those concerned about global poverty, sweatshop labor, outsourced jobs, and threats to the environment can witness remarkable changes on the international scene. Today, trade talks at the WTO are in shambles, sister institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are now shriveled versions of their once-imposing selves, and the ideology of neoliberal corporate globalization is under intense fire, with mainstream economists defecting from its ranks and entire regions such as Latin America in outright revolt. As global justice advocates have long argued, the forces that created these changes "did not start in Seattle." Yet few trade observers would deny that the week of protest late in the last millennium marked a critical turning point.
What Happened in Seattle?
Battle in Seattle accurately depicts the mainstream media as being overwhelmingly focused on the smashed windows of Starbucks and Niketown--property destruction carried out by a small minority of protesters. In the past two decades, the editorial boards of major U.S. newspapers have been more dogged than even many pro-corporate legislators in pushing the "free trade" agenda. Yet, remarkably, acknowledgement of the WTO protests' impact on globalization politics could be found even in their pages. Shortly after the event, the Los Angeles Times wrote, "On the tear-gas shrouded streets of Seattle, the unruly forces of democracy collided with the elite world of trade policy. And when the meeting ended in failure... the elitists had lost and [the] debate was changed forever."
Seattle was supposed to be a moment of crowning achievement for corporate globalization. Big-business sponsors of the Seattle Ministerial (donors of $75,000 or more included Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, Weyerhaeuser, Boeing and GM) invested millions to make it a showcase of "New Economy" grandeur. Any student of public relations could see that the debacle they experienced instead could hardly be less desirable for advancing their agenda.
Rarely do protesters have the satisfaction of achieving their immediate goals, especially when their stated aims are as grandiose as shutting down a major trade meeting. Yet the direct action in Seattle did just that on its first day, with activists chained around the conference center forcing the WTO to cancel its opening ceremonies.
By the end of the week, negotiations had collapsed altogether. Trade representatives from the global South, emboldened by the push from civil society, launched their own revolt from within the conference. Jumping between scenes of street protest and depictions of the ministers' trade debate, Townsend's film illustrates this inside-outside dynamic. Dialogue at one point in the movie for actor Isaach De Bankole, who plays an African trade minister, could have been pulled almost verbatim from a real statement released that week by the Organization of African Unity. The ministers railed against "being marginalized and generally excluded on issues of vital importance for our peoples and their future."
The demands of the developing countries' governments were not always the same as those of the outside protesters. However, the diverse forces agreed on some key points. Expressing his disgust for how the WTO negotiations had been conducted, Sir Shridath Ramphal, the chief Caribbean negotiator, argued, "This should not be a game about enhancing corporate profits. This should not be a time when big countries, strong countries, the world's wealthiest countries, are setting about a process designed to enrich themselves."
Given that less powerful countries had typically been bullied into compliance at trade ministerials, this was highly unusual stuff. Yet it would become increasingly normal. Seattle launched a series of setbacks for the WTO and, to this day, the institution has yet to recover. Efforts to expand the reach of the WTO have repeatedly failed, and the overtly unilateralist Bush White House has been even less effective than the "cooperative" Clinton administration at getting its way in negotiations.
This past summer analyst Walden Bello dubbed the current round of WTO talks the "Dracula Round" because it lives in an undead state. No matter how many times elites try to revive the round, it seems destined to suffer a new death--as it did most recently in late July. Other agreements, such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas, which aimed to extend NAFTA throughout the hemisphere, and which drew protests in places like Quebec City and Miami, have since been abandoned altogether.
"We Care Too"
The altered fate of the WTO is itself very significant. But this is only part of a wider series of transformations that the global justice protests of the Seattle era helped to usher in. Toward the end of Battle In Seattle, Andre 3000's character, an activist who spends a decent part of the film dressed as a sea turtle, makes a key point: "A week ago nobody knew what the WTO was," he says. "Now... they still don't know what it is. But at least they know it's bad."
The Seattle protests launched thousands of conversations about what type of global society we want to live in. While they have often been depicted as mindless rioters, activists were able to push their message through. A poll published in Business Week in late December 1999 showed that 52 percent of respondents were sympathetic with the protesters, compared with 39 percent who were not. Seventy-two percent agreed that the United States should "strengthen labor, environmental, and endangered species protection standards" in international treaties, while only 21 percent disagreed.
A wave of increased sympathy and awareness dramatically changed the climate for long-time campaigners. People who had been quietly laboring in obscurity for years suddenly found themselves amid a huge surge of popular energy, resources, and legitimacy. Obviously, the majority of Americans did not drop everything to become trade experts. But an impressive number, especially on college campuses and in union halls, did take time to learn more--about sweatshops and corporate power, about global access to water and the need for local food systems, about the connection between job loss at home and exploitation abroad.
With the protests that took place in the wake of Seattle, finance ministers who had grown accustomed to meeting in secretive sessions behind closed doors were suddenly forced to defend their positions before the public. Often, official spokespeople hardly offered a defense of WTO, IMF, and World Bank policies at all. Instead they spent most of their time trying to convince audiences that they, too, cared about poverty. In particular, the elites who gather annually in the Swiss Alps for the exclusive World Economic Forum became obsessed with branding themselves as defenders of the world's poor. The Washington Post noted of the 2002 Forum, "The titles of workshops read like headlines from the Nation: ‘Understanding Global Anger,' ‘Bridging the Digital Divide,' and ‘The Politics of Apology.'"
Joseph Stiglitz, a former chief economist of the World Bank who was purged after he outspokenly criticized the IMF, perhaps most clearly described the remarkable shift in elite discussion that has taken place since global justice protests first captured the media spotlight. In a 2006 book, he wrote:
I have been going to the annual meetings [in Davos, Switzerland] for many years, and had always heard globalization spoken of with great enthusiasm. What was fascinating... was the speed at which views had shifted [by 2004].... This change is emblematic of the massive change in thinking about globalization that has taken place in the last five years all around the world. In the 1990s, the discussion at Davos had been about the virtues of opening international markets. By the early years of the millennium, it centered on poverty reduction, human rights, and the need for fairer trade arrangements.
Changing Policy
Of course, much of the shift at Davos is just talk. But the wider political changes go far beyond rhetoric. As Stiglitz noted, "Even the IMF now agrees that capital market liberalization has contributed neither to growth nor to stability." Grassroots activity has translated into concrete change on other levels as well. Even some critics of the global justice movement have noted that activists have scored a number of significant policy victories. In a September 2000 editorial entitled "Angry and Effective," The Economist reported that the movement
already has changed things -- and not just the cocktail schedule for the upcoming meetings. Protests... succeeded in scuttling the [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's] planned Multilateral Agreement on Investment in 1998; then came the greater victory in Seattle, where the hoped-for launch of global trade talks was aborted.... This has dramatically increased the influence of mainstream NGOs, such as the World Wide Fund for Nature and Oxfam.... Assaulted by unruly protesters, firms and governments are suddenly eager to do business with the respectable face of dissent.
Various combinations of "respectable" negotiators and "unruly" dissidents have forced shifts on a wide range of issues. It is not glamorous work to trace the issue-by-issue changes that activists have eked out--whether it's compelling multinational pharmaceutical companies to drop intellectual property lawsuits against African governments seeking to provide affordable AIDS drugs for their citizens, or creating a congressional ban on World Bank loans that impose user fees on basic health care and education for the poor, or persuading administrators at more than 140 colleges to make their institutions take part in the anti-sweatshop Worker's Rights Consortium. Yet these changes affect many lives.
Take just one demand: debt relief. For decades, countries whose people suffer tremendous deprivation have been forced to send billions of dollars to Washington in payment for past debts--many of which were accumulated by dictators overthrown years ago. Debt relief advocates were among the thousands who joined the Seattle mobilization, and they saw their cause quickly gain mainstream respectability in the altered climate that followed. In 2005, the world's wealthiest countries agreed to a breakthrough debt cancellation agreement that, while imperfect, shifted roughly $1 billion per year in resources back to the global South.
In early 2007, Imani Countess, national coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee Africa Program, noted that the impact of the deal has been profound:
In Ghana, the money saved is being used for basic infrastructure, including rural feeder roads, as well as increased expenditure on education and health care.
In Burundi, elimination of school fees in 2005 allowed an additional 300,000 children to enroll.
In Zambia, since March 31, 2006, free basic health care has been provided for all [along with] a pledge to recruit 800 medical personnel and slightly over 4,000 teachers.
In Cameroon, [the government made] a pledge to recruit some 30,000 new teachers by the year 2015 and to construct some 1,000 health facilities within the next six years.
"They won the verbal and policy battle," said Gary Hufbauer, a "pro-globalization" economist at the Institute for International Economics in 2002, speaking of the groups that have organized major globalization protests. "They did shift policy. Are they happy that they shifted it enough? No, they're not ever going to be totally happy, because they're always pushing."
A Crisis of Legitimacy
In its review of Battle in Seattle, the Hollywood industry publication Variety notes that "the post-9/11 war on terror did a great deal to bury [the] momentum" of the global justice movement. This idea has become a well-worn trope; however, it is only partially true. In the wake of 9/11, activists did shift attention to opposing the Bush administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq. But, especially in the global South, protesters combined a condemnation of U.S. militarism with a critique of "Washington Consensus" economic policies. In the post-Seattle era, these polices have faced a crisis of legitimacy throughout much of the world.
Privatization, deregulation, and corporate market access have failed to reduce inequality or create sustained growth in developing countries. This has led an increasing number of mainstream economists, Stiglitz most prominent among them, to question some of the most cherished tenets of neoliberal "free trade" economics. Not only are the intellectual foundations of neoliberal doctrine under assault, the supposed beneficiaries of these economic prescriptions are now walking away. Throughout Latin America, waves of popular opposition to Washington Consensus policies have forced conservative governments from power. In election after election since the turn of the millennium, the people have put left-of-center leaders in office.
The Asian financial crisis, which occurred shortly before Seattle, and the collapse of Argentina's economy, which took place shortly afterwards, starkly illustrated the risks of linking a country's future to the whims of international financial speculators. Those Asian countries hammered in 1997 and 1998 have now stockpiled massive currency reserves so that the White House and the IMF will not be able to dictate their economic policies in the future. Similarly, Latin American nations have paid off IMF loans early so as to escape the institution's control.
The result has been swift and decisive. In 2004, the IMF's loan portfolio was roughly $100 billion. Today it has fallen to around $10 billion, rendering the institution almost impotent. As economist Mark Weisbrot notes, "the IMF's loss of influence is probably the most important change in the international financial system in more than half a century."
Currently, the United States is experiencing its own crisis of deregulation and financial gambling. We are now afforded the rare sight of Sen. John McCain blasting "Wall Street greed" and accusing financiers of "[treating] the American economy like a casino." Meanwhile, Sen. Barack Obama decries the removal of government oversight on markets and the doctrine of trickle-down prosperity as "an economic philosophy that has completely failed." In each case, their words might have been plucked from Seattle's teach-ins and protest signs.
Townsend's film ends with the admonition that "the battle continues." The struggle in the coming years will be to compel those in power to transform campaign-trail rhetoric into a real rejection of corporate globalization. The White House would still like to pass ever-newer "free trade" agreements. And the WTO, while bruised and battered, has not been eliminated entirely. Because its original mandate is still intact, the institution has considerable power in dictating the terms of economic development in much of the world. Opposing this will require continued grassroots pressure.
On a broader level, huge challenges of global poverty, inequality, militarism, and environmental degradation remain. Few, if any, participants in the 1999 mobilization believed that a single demonstration would eliminate these problems in one tidy swoop, and I very much doubt that anyone involved with the Battle in Seattle thinks a single film will solve them either. But the coming fight will be easier if the spirit that drove those protests animates a new surge of citizen activism in the post-Bush era.
70 Comments so far
Show AllI hate to get off topic and back to the article, but I do have a couple of observations. I was recovering from surgery and could hardly walk, so didn't go down to Seattle. However, we did watch the coverage closely, and saw how much of it was twisted and spun even in that evening's news.
Live coverage showed protesters sitting down and being maced by police. There was even one shot of a shopper coming out of a store and getting sprayed in the face. The evening news had the police valiantly subduing violent protesters.
It was interesting that, though the police covered the protest like a blanket, the small cadre of masked "anarchists" that did the damage to property were always where the police weren't. They got great coverage by the "news." At the time, my wife and I thought they were probably agents provocateur, put in place by either the police, or the security forces for WTO to create negative publicity for the actual protest. As more recent events have shown, that is not an unheard of operation.
Going back to Vietnam, we were in the largest protest in San Francisco protesting the war. The march began on the San Francisco waterfront, went up Market Street, then out Oak (I think) and eventually to Kezar Stadium in Golden Gate Park. The streets were full, gutter to gutter, with well wishers lining the sidewalks. When the first people were entering Kezar, they were still coming off Market Street!
You couldn't have put another person in the stadium with a shoe horn. Thousands were in the parking lots listening to the speakers.
During the march, we happened to be near the "Stanford Physicians Against the War" contingent. A way back, there was a flatbed truck with a hippy jug band playing on it. A news cameraman was standing there with the lens cap on his camera. I asked him, "Why aren't you filming the Stanford Physicians?" He just shook his head. He took a long detailed filming of the jug band. That was what appeared on TV that evening, along with some film at the close of the rally when Kezar was nearly empty. The news reported a demonstration of a few thousand against the war had been held that day in addition to similar small demonstrations around the country.
It was at that point I truly realized that the press was nothing but a propaganda arm of the establishment.
I have seen nothing since except evidence that the techniques have been refined.
I find it interesting that we are now a culture that produces fictional film versions of events less than a decade in the past.
Will Andre 3000's turtle constume reinforce my memory of my friend Andrew's turtle costume, or replace it?
Will depiction of these recent events allow those who weren't there to understand them, or will it allow them to THINK they understand the EVENTS when really they merely understand the film ABOUT the events?
Strange territory we are in.
There be dragons here.
I made this post in another thread, but I made it a bit late, so I don;t think anyone ever read it. Here it is again:
I happen to be in the middle of reading "When The Corporations Rule The World" by David Korten [now finished]. He wrote the first edition back in 1995, and it is now considered a classic. Wow! How poignant and appropriate for this whole dang scenario. The whole book might as well be a Cliff Notes reader for the economic disaster and "bailout" proposal happening at this very moment. In fact, check out this quote from page 188: "Speculation is another form of extractive investment. The financial speculator is engaged in little more than a sophisticated form of gambling - betting on the rise and fall of selected prices. When a speculator wins, he or she is simply capturing claims to wealth created by others. When a large speculator funded with borrowed money loses, the survival of major financial institutions may be placed at risk, resulting in demands for a public bailout to save the financial system from collapse. In either instance, the public loses. Rarely does a speculator's activity contribute to the wealth or well-being of society."
I highly recommend this book. Part V of the book is entitled "Reclaiming Our Power", and it offers fantastic, practical and empowering ideas on how the people can take back the power that was stolen from them by the corporations. As an example, he suggests we need to strip the corporations of their "personhood" that was essentially given to them with the 1890 something Supreme Court decision of Pacific Railroad vs. Santa Clara County. Part VI offers ideas as well.
As an addendum to THIS post, I would also point out that Korten frequently refers to the Seattle meetings and the hope and inspiration he felt as a result of the demonstrations there. Get a copy of this book!
Blessings,
John
T More and Toast - that has got to be the longest e-discourse I've read on protesting tactics. I'm curious what your thoughts are on Scott Ritter's book - The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement?
I don't see how anyopne can credibly state that the protests were ineffective or that the WTO/IMF/World Bank have not been massively slowed, indeed held to a standstill, by what began to be called "the antiglobalization movement" by the media after Seattle, though it called itself the global justice movement.
According to the IFG, which put on a three-day Teach-In in Seattle which over 1000 people attended--and which I believe was one key to the success of the protest--some third world delegates told them that it was 50,000 people in the streets that week that gave them the backbone to finally say no. They came to Seattle pissed off at the marginalization, at the game wherein all the talk about consensus turned into a reality of favored nations making the real decisions in private meetings and then bullying the delegates from third-world countries into agreement one at a time. But they'd always caved before. This time, the sight and sound of an international group objecting to the antidemocratic decision-making of the WTO led them to say, "If the US doesn't even have their own people on board, why should we go along with this?" And both the African and Caribbean groups wrote up statements refusing the agreement.
For me, the week I spent in Seattle was the high point of my life. My lifelong dream of all the world's people working cooperatively for a better world was manifest on Earth for a whole week. I learned things at the IFG Teach-In I'd not been aware of before, like the threat to the world's water and the dangers of GMOs. I went to a meeting where a woman from Malaysia talked about the turtle-excluders from the viewpoint of Asian fisher-people. I talked to a Cuban man at a bus stop who told me that he was afraid we would have a revolution in the US because the powers that be are able to stop reform from happening--and real revolution is not pretty, he said. He hoped never to see it again. A Danish man we met while walking back to the apartment my buddy and I lucked into, agreed that "those hooligans" hadn't helped our cause--meaning the few dozen supposed anarchists, Black Bloc, or agents provacateur who had smashed windows and spray painted walls on Tuesday for an hour or so--actions well filmed by the media, of course, which ran little else, barely mentioning the 40,000 mostly union marchers in the streets at the same time. I remember a Chinese man who spoke at a Blue-Green dinner--he hadn't been on the program, and he spoke no English, but he had been living in France since the Tianenmen Square protest, on the lam from the Chinese government, and he could speak French. A French union guy translated his words into English--about how Chinese workers have no rights at all and desperately need the rest of us to stick up for them.
Monday night there was a gala dinner, attended by few delegates to the WTO because a human chain formed around the gathering place, in a vigil to cancel odious Third World debt. On opening day, Tuesday, so few delegates got into the meeting venue that they didn't even try to meet. Wednesday, Seattle became a Constitution-free zone, with cops randomly arrestiong anyone with a backpack or buttons--we had a lot of meetings in churches, which increased the feeling of being in a war-torn central American country. That was the day Clinton came in. Thursday there was a march to the jail to demand freedom for the hundreds arrested Wednesday, as well as a rally by the Longshoreman's union, which had shut down every West Coast port in solidarity with the protests. There were at least a hundred workshops and conferences and nonviolence trainings, there were concerts...and then, Friday morning, our flight back to West Virginia, carrying a copy of the Seattle paper with the headlines about the meeting breaking down with no agreement. It was perhaps the best day of my life, certainly beating the day I got married. I had been involved in antiwar and antinuclear and pro environment demonstrations for decades, and have in the years since--but a time of clear cut victory like that is very rare.
Awesome! Thank you.
You say you want a revolution, wee-ee-ll, ya know, we all wanna change the world. ;)
Excellent Report, it is heartening to read a follow up that doesn't paint the action as a waste of time, in this case cause for jubillation. I saw the movie I think they should have used the real people's names, jaggi for instance.
Power to the people!
Why not ABOLISH the World Bank, IMF, and Federal Reserve ?!? At least that's where I can agree with the Libertarians. This phoney agencies aren't worth the keeps as they're a major burden on taxpayers and a menace to the planet !
This article is good, but it misses the point that Seattle also changed the larger culture of the global left. Although that change was coming, Seattle--an unruly mobilization in the belly of the beast--gave a huge impetus to the coming together of forces for social change in the World Social Forum a couple of years later. I think it was every bit as important as the Zapatista uprising in reawakening the world left. The networked, diverse style of activism brilliantly on display there has been permanently influential, even if the US peace movement has largely retreated from its insights.
I don't think he missed 'changed larger culture of the global left.' It seemed spread out, woven into his writing.
As far as "...an unruly mobilization in the belly of the beast...," well, the use of the military and the local police was rather 'unruly' as was proven who was instigating what. Perhaps that was what you meant, or not.
Ultimately you are correct, however. And that might be the weakness of this article, in acknowledging the success via a mass media movie as proof as an introduction ties up in knots all his subsequent paragraphs of contextual history, or really, his narrative. But then his real impetus is 'can you see this reality, it's cumulative effect through nine tears?' (my opinion) And that he does quite well, and it is observable, ten times over.
Personally, I was proud of those 10s of thousands of people in their 'celebration of life' protest, that being the point. The assigned term by corporate media and corporate shills of 'anarchy in the streets,' is tired, bankrupt of truth, manipulative, and arrogantly stupid words from shitbags responsible for where we are now.
Privatization can be very good or very bad, depending on who benefits from it. I think that the only way the people will benefit from privatization is if the people themselves set the conditions direct democratically, instead of the multinational banks and corporations of the oligarchy through their bought politicians.
In my opinion, the only condition the people need to establish is a cap on the net worth of every person, high enough to preserve the profit motive but low enough to prevent the extreme concentration of wealth and power that forms oligarchic or hegemonic dictatorships.
Beautiful and inspiring article. It obviously borrows much from "The Shock Doctrine".
Last night, Maher's guest Woodward suggested that the relative calm in Iraq is not due to the surge, but to a secret weapon.
A program on the History, Science, or NG channel, showed the newest crowd control weapons. One very effective one was a truck mounted sound generator that disperses crowds from a long distance with unbearable noise.
This article and the movie reinforce my almost lost belief that demonstrations are effective even when not covered by the MSM.
Multinational banks and corporations will not easily give up the neo-liberal, neocon plans to destroy democratic gains here and abroad.
We may have to wear ear protectors and tin-foil hats as well as gas masks when we take to the streets as we must.
I watched Maher last night, also. Woodward was alluding to the known loss of hundreds of billions of dollars that was used to buy the reduction of violence during the implementation of and after the 'surge.'
By Jove, you're right! That's campaigning for McCain/Palin/Republicans with public money.
Whatever people might think of church based activism, there are alliances on line against torture, pro renewable energy, social justice - and thats just in the US.
If you weren't part of the WTO demonstrations in Seattle in 1999, you wouldn't understand the power of LARGE NUMBERS of people from all over the world marching together, chanting "This is what Democracy looks like" and with LARGE unions marching in concert with various West Coast "interesting" people.
Especially the Longshoremen's unions were powerful, and called their own protests after the initial HUGE protests - - and no police or army troops came near the massive crowds, only the young people running in the streets at night got police attention early in the week. Later we were all targets.
Imagine - here we were in the downtown Hostel watching out the windows (or being out there, too) as police and U.S. Army, Seals, special Forces, et al tear-gassed and beat unarmed young people, including residents, just for being there. It was quite a learning experience about what the powerful will do to get their way.
We were blocked in Downtown Seattle without food supplies for days - but Hostel employees knew back ways out of downtown and sneaked out and brought back supplies for huge pots of soup, which hundreds of us shared.
There were hundreds of us in the Hostel from all over the world - many had come just for the WTO demonstrations - and we made alliances which carry over even now.
And guess which current PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE WAS THERE ALL WEEK LONG - IN THE STREETS WITH US AND SPEAKING AT WORKSHOPS AND RALLIES standing up for the people of the world?
RALPH NADER, of course! http://www.votenader.org Which is any I'll always support him.
He and Vandana Shiva and Jim Hightower and others all week long in the streets and at other venues as we held workshops and classes on what was happening in the world - and how we could combat capital's war to drive down our standard of living all over the world - basically make us slaves for their insatiable and vile greed.
Reminded me of 1968-1969 when we took over the universities in this country and held workshops and free classes on the war on Vietnam, women's rights, people of color's rights, gay rights, disabled people's rights, and THAT'S WHERE THOSE MOVEMENTS BEGAN - excepting the Black movement which started questioning how society treated people much earlier, even before the March on Washington in 1963.
Those were interesting and exciting times - and if you weren't there at those HUGE - we had over a million people in the streets of D.C. more than once against the war in Vietnam and treatment of people in the 60's - demonstrations so that you KNOW the power and freedom of feeling part of hundreds of thousands of people peacefully demanding what's right, then you really don't know what it's about.
Ridicule is easy - coming up with better ways to get the powerful to do what's right is a lot harder.
And, besides, coming from the East Coast to Seattle and hanging out in the streets with all these wonderful people from all over the world - despite being in a tear-gas miasma all week, was great fun - - - and VERY empowering.
Sorry, I was in Viet Nam and missed all the excitement and power.
From the article:
"Few, if any, participants in the 1999 mobilization believed that a single demonstration would eliminate these problems in one tidy swoop, and I very much doubt that anyone involved with the Battle in Seattle thinks a single film will solve them either."
From Thomas More: "Sorry, I was in Viet Nam and missed all the excitement and power."
What were you doing in Vietnam in 1999?
-- EKATON --
I beg your pardon. That was commenting on "Cleanearth October 4th, 2008 1:19 pm" talking about what fun it was in the sixties protesting.
"in the 60's - demonstrations so that you KNOW the power and freedom of feeling part of hundreds of thousands of people peacefully demanding what's right, then you really don't know what it's about.
Ridicule is easy - coming up with better ways to get the powerful to do what's right is a lot harder.
And, besides, coming from the East Coast to Seattle and hanging out in the streets with all these wonderful people from all over the world - despite being in a tear-gas miasma all week, was great fun - - - and VERY empowering."
That stuff stll rankles. only 2 million of us went to Viet Nam and when we came back we were spit on and treated like dirt by people that had no idea what we did, what it was like, what was really going on.
Many of my friends were still there since we couldnt find enough parts to fill ac body bag and to come back and find these pepople putting on airs about their bravery, what they had done, what murderers we were.....and those that still take that attitude piss me off.
And this is nothing against Cleanearth, I'm not saying she/he was one of the cowards or self gratification seekers involved. It just struck a nerve. I really shold have put it another way. My fault. My apologies.
T. More,
'Cleanearth' is running off at the mouth about 'we did this and we did that.' This site is full of adolescent mental masturbation. This guy would have you think he is fucking 'Abbie Hoffman,' a 'Huey Newton, Black Panther,' the founding father of SDS, the 'Weathermen,' 'Martin Luther King's brother,' and Jesus all rolled into his own fantasy self.
When, in actuality, he wasn't even born yet. His reality formed by his bedroom, in mommy and daddy's house, with a computer and connection.
How else could you explain it?:)
He is not alone in your characterization.
T. More,
Don't keep doing this to yourself, man. You know my history, at least that which I cared to share. If you still doubt my authenticity, well, that's cool.
But you gotta see the truth, not the tears in your eyes...
Peace
It's interesting that you quoted all but the part of her post that she used to describe that time period to her:
"Those were interesting and exciting times".
And they were. That you would want to twist that to serve your own interests is very telling. It was also many other things as well, but it was certainly interesting and exciting.
The same kinds of political movements that forged change during that period can easily act as models for the kind of actions that we need to take today to affect real change... and I believe it is that which most "irritates" you.
And yes... those actions are interesting and exciting as well if you believe in the process participatory democracy.
Why do you "need" to live in the past? It completely colors your "present".
Urban Myth. There was not a single documented case of a Vietnam vet being spat upon. The very concept doesn't even pass the credibility test.
he was unsuccessfully attempting to diminish "Cleanearth's" recollection of earlier organized protests... and simultaneously provide himself with a bit of much needed credibility.
Failure.
You really are a little toad aren't you? I'm really sorry you couldn't be with us in our "dirty little war"
ha! You don't believe that I served in Vietnam??? Okay... no time to waste on self-delusion. You WERE the only one there! See how accommodating I can be??
I will say that both before and after I was there, I was an active protestor... participating in every march I could... leafleting near the base entrance... doing everything legal that I could to stop that illegal war. I suppose that really irritates you as well.
... and that's the thing for which I am most proud. I helped shut it down.
"Sorry, I was in Viet Nam..."
Only a tool would make a claim like that just to desperately garner some small modicum of authority. Do you really think others of us didn't fight the dirty little war?
You are pathetic in your attempt to come off as someone who is not a complete fool.
And of course, you imply that because you were in the service, that you had no opportunity to protest or join activist organizations against the war. Complete crap. Only those who were shipped to Nam from boot and were killed before completing tour (or totally incapacitated), never had the opportunity to protest. Are you trying to tell us you spent your entire enlistment in Vietnam? If so, you did so by choice... and that speaks volumes.
You chose NOT to protest.
I can tell you that there was a sizable percentage of the forces who were also activists when stateside. I marched with many of them. It was legal if out of uniform, off base and off duty. It was your right to do so.
So why don't you just drop all the pretense?
Tool.
No one was sent to 'Nam after boot. AIT, maybe.
I will say to you since you asked that I spent approximately 14 months in combat and 17 months in Viet Nam. I believe I have the knowledge top speak rationally about this subject. I also have many, many friends that did not come back. So understand when people disrespect them I'd like to tear their heads off as they aren't worthy of speaking their names, let alone judging them or me.
Little recognition has been given in this country of how brutal the war was for those who fought it on the ground and how well our military performed. Dropped onto terrain 12,000 miles away from home, America’s soldiers performed with a tenacity and quality that some simply cannot understand. Those who believe the war was fought incompetently on a tactical level should consider the enormous casualties to which the communists now admit. And those who believe that it was a “dirty little war” where the bombs did all the work might contemplate that it was the most costly war the U.S. Marine Corps has ever fought. Five times as many Marines died in Vietnam as in World War I, three times as many as in Korea. And the Marines suffered more total casualties, killed and wounded, in Vietnam than in all of World War II.
And an American military that located itself halfway around the world to take on a determined enemy on the terrain of the enemy’s choosing was hardly the incompetent, demoralized and confused force that so many antiwar professors, journalists and filmmakers love to portray. Nor were we "Animal Mother" which so many like to believe for their own personal satisfaction and to prove their moral superiority. It's a self deception on a grand scale of course. You have no superiority, moral or otherwise.
Few Americans who grew up after the war know that a large part of this dissent movement was already in place before the Vietnam War began. Many who wished for revolutionary changes in America had pushed for them through the vehicles of groups such as the ban-the-bomb movement in the 1950s and the civil-rights movement of the early and mid-1960s. In this regard, it is interesting to note that the infamous antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society was created at the University of Michigan through the Port Huron Statement in 1962 – three full years before American ground troops landed at Da Nang. The SDS hoped to bring revolution to America through the issue of race. They and other extremist groups soon found more fertile soil on the issue of the war. It was a tool just as the current war is being used by some fior the same purpose.
Former communist colonel Bui Tin, a highly placed propaganda officer during the war, published a memoir in which he specifically admitted a truth that was assumed by American fighting men for years. The Hanoi government assumed from the beginning that the United States would never prevail in Vietnam so long as the dissent movement, which they called “the Rear Front,” was successful at home. Many top leaders of this movement coordinated efforts directly with Vietnamese communist officials in Hanoi. Such coordination often included visiting the North Vietnamese capital – for instance, during the planning stages for the October 1967 march on the Pentagon – a few weeks before the siege of Khe Sanh kicked into high gear and a few months before the Tet Offensive.
We made errors, although nowhere on the scale alleged by those who have a stake in disparaging our soldiers and Marines. Fighting a well-trained enemy who seeks cover in highly contested populated areas where civilians often assist the other side is the most difficult form of warfare. The most important distinction is that the deliberate killing of innocent civilians was a crime in the U.S. military. We held ourselves accountable for My Lai. And yet we are still waiting for the communists to take responsibility for the thousands of civilians deliberately killed by their political cadre as a matter of policy. A good place for them to start holding their own forces accountable would be Hue, where during the 1968 Tet Offensive more than 2,000 locals were systematically executed during the brief communist takeover of the city.
Only fools would think you can subsist in this world without a decent military service and no cause is served by proving yourself a fool. Everytime some Code Pink group goes out looking for self gratification in their costumes, they damage the cause they say they want to help. Every time you attack a Marine or soldier understand that except for the last few generations most families have military ties or served, that really helps to attack them.
Think what you like, but understand that there is no validity to your opinions because you will believe people like the "Winter Soldiers" and their tales. Just remember one of the leaders turned out to have flown mail to the carriers, not the combat missions he claimed. You'd find many of these folks are the same I suspect. You take the word of people that didn't do anything but shout platitudes without knowing anything about it. Thats what makes most Vets angry. People that want to judge others without being in their shoes. That is the judgement of a child.
For those of you that honestly disagree with me, my respects. For those that wish to destroy America, go straight to hell.
This is my last word on the subject.
And I bet all those innocent villagers got themselves massacred on purpose just so they could rile up those crazy protesters in the US who would help them win the war. Pathetic.
This T. More, a fellow vet, just gave you his accounting of this false charge you vomit up from the safety of your masturbatory existence. You ignore the truth with a simplistic logical fallacy. STFU, moron. And don't give me any shit about demeaning 'special people.'
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
A self-serving sophist wrapped in the glory of his own self-aggrandizing militarism. He was plausible in this little screed of his until he started inserting his propaganda hooks. From many Americans' points of view, including many who served in Vietnam, the extremists with regard to Vietnam were the U.S. militarists and those who, like MacNamara, finally admitted decades too late that Vietnam wasn't a barracade against falling dominoes in the Dominoe Theory but a civil war upon which we intruded and helped to incompetently escalate.
Thomas More lumps all the anti-bomb, civil rights, anti-war protest groups "and other extremists" together and applies a Communist North Vietnamese General's label to them as the "Rear Front" to which More adds the dumb-down label "dissent movement"--as if they were all just ignorant hot-heads protesting for protest's sake. In fact, they were a hell of a lot better informed on the issues of their time than most anti-war activists their age are these days [I say this having worked with 20-something activists over the last 5 years. I asked them to read some of the manifestos of the SDS including the Port Huron statement, and their clarity, incisiveness and intelligence astonished them]. More criticizes the SDS for being on the lookout for "tools" to use to provoke revolution (as if militarists and their media toadies aren't always on the lookout for "tools" to promote their wars--just or unjust) and ignores the logic that conscious activists looking to improve their country's government would logically also turn against an unnecessary, brutal and incompetently run war like Vietnam--especially when the generation of the SDS was liable to be drafted into the Vietnam travesty.
If many top protest leaders of the '60s "coordinated efforts directly with Vietnamese communist officials in Hanoi" (and I wonder how many), a whole hell of a lot of them had nothing to do with communist officials in Vietnam or elsewhere and More's assertion here still doesn't cleanse the Vietnam War of its blot on American history or its general stench.
More really goes off the track when he claims that "we held ourselves accountable for My Lai." Lt. William Calley never served a day in jail regarding his conduct during the well-evidenced My Lai massacre and returned home unpunished to work in his daddy's jewelry store down in Columbus, GA. Research this More canard for yourselves, folks. The Pentagon's ugly track record of whitewashing U.S. military massacres of civilians and outrageous lies and distortions regarding incidents of "collateral damage" in Iraq and Afghanistan tracks its motis operandi straight back to the bogus body counts and sundry little blood baths of Vietnam. Strictly for domestic consumption of brainwashed dupes like More, these accounts--now compounded by the civilian murders of our lawless mercenaries (read: Blackwater) are well-known around the world and contribute directly to the present disgust and alienation which so many people feel now toward the Bush's "Idiot America."
Because the Communist North Vietnamese killed so many Vietnamese in the South is no reason to lower our military to--or compare our military to--their standards of abuse of civilians. First, if More and his fellow militarists had competently prosecuted the war the Communists wouldn't have been in a position to carry out so many murders of civilians, and second, because the militarists failed to secure the South, the U.S. had no control whatsoever over how the Communists treated the civilian population in the South. But U.S. military did have control of our U.S. forces treated the civilian population--or should have had that control, the lack of which also reflects on their incompetence.
Thomas More's duplicitous and vague gibberish about Code Pink (characterizing them simply as looking for self-gratification in their costumes and ignoring the justness of their causes) and "every time you attack a Marine or soldier" you are attacking their families is melodramatic psychobabble without clear case or example. Criticizing the war, war policies, or specific outrageous abuses of civilians carried out by some of troops is not the same thing as criticizing ALL the troops or ANY of their families. Another Vietnam era right-wing militarist canard that America can't get past, so that it can't learn from its mistakes and must endlessly repeat them in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon, Pakistan, etc. ad nausea. If more of the troops in these places questioned these abuses and examined the falsified reasons and conditions for America's military presence in these places, they might not be so willing to so cheaply give up their lives for so many false, crony capitalist-serving causes. The ones who are participating in these wars out of economic desperation--THAT is the most damning comment on liberals, progressives and right-wing Americans of ALL political stripes: That our country which has more wealth concentrated in the richest 1% than at any other point in American history will not provide better peaceful, civilian jobs for its own people so that its own children must be sacrificed mentally and physically for wars of oil hegemony.
If many of the Winter Soldiers lied, and I've seen no evidence of this, what about the other "many" who didn't? Militarists like More are the ones who shout down or prevaricate the loudest when vets against war try to tell the truth. And militarists like More never mention the numbers of psychologically destroyed Vietnam vets who dominated the ranks of America's homeless for over 20 years, or the numerous attempts of Republicans over the decades to slash VA and other benefits for the vets--especially during the first 6 years of George W. Bush--just as they ignore the growing ranks of Iraq War vets who are homeless and will require $Trillions of dollars of long-term care. Vets like More are self-serving crybabies who need to get over their fairytales of themselves and their sacred war in Southeast Asia. The country has bigger problems to confront and your ilk just hold this country back with all your whining, handwringing, posturing and prideful false revisions of a glorious, righteous Vietnam war history that never was.
More is guilty of judging ALL protest movements he lumps together in his little screed "without being in any of their shoes," and that is the condescending misjudgment of a sophistic demagogue.
And this highly articulate narrative, I would not say historically accurate, rant of yours is not sophist? Your pretension is laughable, even as I agree with a lot of what you write. How else do organizations I respect, and your writing reflects, exist without veteran participation? Your first assumption is based on a falsehood. Correct or incorrect, our presence began under Eisenhower honoring the treaties that ended WWII. Simply, France was entitled to its 'colonial territory.' The confusion of this fact is one of the great losses and reasons for a better solution. Perhaps if Kennedy had not been assassinated the rightful conduct would have prevailed, even with his increasing our military presence. The diplomacy was open. Until Johnson and subsequent 'thieves of democracy.' So spare all of us the propaganda of 'civil war.' Sure it evolved into that, if you want to believe that Viet Nam as a whole wanted Communist China as a surrogate ruler. After all, China has wanted to conquer Viet Nam for thousands of years without success. But that is one of those inconvenient historical facts of 'colonial expansion' we can ignore. Nixon and Kissinger were the scum who facilitated that revision of history. T. More is factually correct of the North Vietnamese position and statement to their American 'Rear Guard.' That this is overlooked is not my concern, it stands on its own.
The rest of your rant...well, I could argue you may be more concerned about money than any idealistic position given your concern that veterans are costing us trillions of dollars in health care and benefits. But I won't, I don't need to.
As for me? I won't respond to anything you might write, henceforth. I have, in Cheney's words, better things to do.
' So spare all of us the propaganda of 'civil war.' Sure it evolved into that..."
NO!!! It was pushed into that arena... intentionally. You had me until you tried that revisionism.
... and no Vietnamese who I ever had any real dialog with ever said anything but that they resented America for doing that to their country.
Don't try to spin into "We were there to help them" territory.
Total. baldface. lie.
To Dog Leg:
Your claim that Eisenhower's reason for the U.S. involving itself in Vietnam was due to a post-WWII treaty that somehow obligated the U.S. to maintain French "entitlement" to colonial territory is laughable on its face. By that illogic, Britain would have been entitled to all its pre-war colonial territory, including India, and the "Empire where the sun never sets" would still be with us in all its Gloriana. You ignore the MONEY motivation to protect the rubber plantations owned by the French (including the Michelin family) in Vietnam from the rebels in Vietnam who wanted land reform (among other things). Ho Chi Minh as a young man was an admirer of Woodrow Wilson and his League of Nations, and was naive enough to believe that America really believed in democratic self-determination (as opposed to colonialism) for other nations without imperialist qualifiers. He first sought aid in his revolution against the French colonial imperialists from Eisenhower, and when he was scorned he turned to the large communist States in the region for arms and money-- first China and then the USSR. That was Eisenhower's lack of judgement: He made of Vietnam a convenient domino for successive administrations of U.S. militarists to exploit where it needn't have been one.
The civil war was between Ho's rebels and the South Vietnamese plantation owners' puppet governments (with increasing aid from the U.S.) and it pre-dated America's military escalation in the early 1960s. The false justification for that escalation provided by U.S. military commanders was that Vietnam was another domino that must be protected from communist regional expansion by the U.S. as a message to the USSR and Red China. Soviet and Chinese communists and U.S. capitalists all injected their overarching global agendas into what was originally an anti-imperialist, anti-colonial civil war and even former Sec. State Robert MacNamarra finally admitted that 30+ years too late.
Ho gradually disdained Chinese attempts to more strongly influence his revolution than he cared for and so he soon turned to the Soviets and they sent in Soviet military advisers. He never wanted China as a surrogate ruler and wanted to control his own revolution and its political aftermath as much as possible. DogLeg's argle-bargle about "if you want to believe that Viet Nam as a whole wanted Communist China as a surrogate ruler" presents a false characterization of Ho's options and ignores his later preference for Soviet military aid.
I never denied the factual correctness of T. More's assertion "of the North Vietnamese position and statement to their American 'Rear Guard.'" I do deny that it was as significant a component of the overall anti-war movement of the era that he seems to believe it was. Most of the kids I knew protesting then did it simply because they'd heard some of the horror stories of jungle combat brought back from the war by family members and other folks they knew and they didn't understand the need for that war; didn't believe what Johnson and Nixon were putting out as justifications for it, and didn't want to get drafted into it.
Regarding DogLeg's remarks that he "could argue you may be more concerned about money than any idealistic position given your concern that veterans are costing us trillions of dollars in health care and benefits" I reply: First, what idealistic position are you on about here? Eisenhower's alleged post-WWII obligation to use U.S. military force to maintain French "entitlement" to pre-war colonial territories? Second, what I object to is American military personnel being put into the position of being maimed and killed in such specious wars in the first place--so that their long-term care (which we truly ARE obligated to give them) ends up costing our nation $Trillions of dollars of lost economic potential to solve more important problems than dubious or illegal wars we should never have jumped into in the first place. Trying to suggest that I was somehow blaming the troops for their injuries or the cost of their treatment, or that I would not want them to be treated despite the expense is like claiming I hate the troops because I hate the Iraq War. Utter drivel on DogLeg's part.
Thomas,
You resemble a German WW2 veteran who is still trying to defend Naziism in order to preserve their self esteem. The US intervention in Vietnam was a profoundly immoral and unjust act. You risked you life over there serving an evil agenda. Please try to find a way to accept this fact so you can find closure and move on.
Bend.
Way around...
So, I guess you needed to remind her that what you did for "her" demanded a response to her "disrespect"???
What a joke.
My opinion and that of millions of other Americans in good standing was that the Vietnam War was a corruption of power. I can now understand your opposition to protests... and I can say with complete honesty that I am happy to have had the opportunity to prove you wrong. Those Vietnam War protests stopped the corruption that centered around Vietnam. That's not opinion.
That you *choose* to see it differently is your right... but that does not give your choice any more credence than mine. And again, you are not the only one to have served there, so you do not have a monopoly on opinion.
You have no authority that washes with me. Yes, those who serve honorably in service should be commended for the job they perform, if it is not criminal.
However... that philosophy does not apply to those who manufacture war for empire... for profit... for corrupt goals that are counter to American democratic ideals.
And those who believe that, are entitled to speak out with conviction... to protest in the street, and should NOT be sentenced to HELL for their beliefs.
You are a tool.
... and yes, it's very apparent you had that text in a drawer and just dusted it off for us... for one thing, it didn't have your trademark spelling errors.
Toast, give your keyboard a rest.
ha! thanks... I'm done for the day... took some time off to recover from being entirely pissed at the state of our union.
...was not going to let the tool be as completely dismissive of my backyard as he usually is, however. Apologies for being front burner.
PTSD is a tragic disorder. It can last for decades... especially if reinforced.
Mr. More,
Regarding all your remarks here, will you please take your negativity, delivered with your usual pontificating tone, to another forum?
Since you are a lady, I will be polite. You shopuld really read what is said before you make a judgement. My remarks are positive unless you simply want to have a particular mindset. Or it tickles your fancy to believe someting is the way you want it.
As for your invitation to leave the forum. You must be in the wrong place, try Dailey Kos where only one opinon is allowed
You have proposed no alternatives to Code Pink or street-theater tactics, insultingly calling them "clownish". Would you prefer less colownish, and more serious tactics - vandalism or other traditional anarcho-propaganda-of-the-deed tactics? No, I suspect you would be even more opposed that too, in fact, you seem to be opposed to any form of street protest. Your role here in commondremas seems to support the pathetic status quo.
Penelope October 4th, 2008 12:37 pm
You make some good points that I hadn't considered like "that in simply PLANNING the street theater actions, mass marches and other events that took place in Seattle-new relationships were formed."
And finally someone else that understands what I've been trying to say about the clownish antics of Code Pink and others like them.
While I disagree with your analysis... "respond like Pavlov's dogs to a pleasing, new visual symbol. A diversion. Something content-free. Whoopee!!" and.... "we are battling a new US-style fascism",...but I believe you are exactly correct in saying... " we need to get serious about how we present ourselves."
"It's too easy for a quick snapshot of women in pink, wearing bizarre head gear (as just one common example) to be distributed to mass newsmedia outlets as an encapsulation of what the U.S. Peace movement is about"
This is exactly the point. How anyone would expect average middle class or working class Americans to identify with something like that is beyond me. They simply think everyone connected with the peace movement, animal rights, anti-war, etc are a bunch of clownish loonies or dangerous terroists.
Thank you for saying this much better than I have been able to.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Big Media elevated Code Pink to its own "brand-all" status as representing the anti-war movement to the Amurkan viewing audience. One reason was that Code Pink courageously crashed so many televised hearings, Team Bush speaking events bloated with Bush/Cheney/Rummy/Condi/Addington lies and other neo-con "street theatre" to give pithy colorful critiques to what would have otherwise been unnoticed Republikanischer fascist claptrap. The other was that it was tougher for Team Bush, the Secret Schutzstaffel, er, Service and various cops to rough up and shove out a bunch of women than mixed sex groups of protesters or all male groups of protesters. Code Pink thus had lasting power and members of the media gradually formed relationships with many of them they soon knew by name. I think they've been wildly successful in raising consciousness among the 70% of Americans who want us out of the Iraq War. The subset of the "average middle class or working class Americans" More refers to who don't "identify with" the "antics" of groups like Code Pink wouldn't protest ANYTHING that didn't personally come up and kick in their own teeth anyway. That subset's intellectually arthritic, historically amnesiac mentality is what is the problem here, not the tradition of loud, proud and colorful street protests that dates back the Boston Tea Party and which has always been a part of American history.
BTW, you don't have to identify with a protest group in order to get a particular message they send if it's done concisely, accurately and well enough.
Ummm-- everyone in Code Pink that I know are average middle class or working class Americans. I say it is better than no pictures at all. If it weren't for Code Pink, how would anyone even know that there were people protesting this war? Which anti-war group of protsters do you agree with then? Have you ever even talked to people from Code Pink or looked at their website? Do you even know who Medea Benjamin is?
I know you were in the war against innocent Vietnamese and you think you deserve to be put on a pedastal for doing the bidding of a corrupt regime to make big money for defense contractors. All I can say is that I would never do that. I would never kill innocent people for anyone. I would know what I was being asked to do because I would study history and know how to tell the truth from lies (like I did for this war). I say this to you because you criticize my band of warriors, my "army", Code Pink. And FYI to you, some of Code Pink's closest allies in this war against these fascists are Iraq Veterans Against the War and Gold Star Families for Peace.
Don't you see these "clowns" mocking the system?
"Remind me again what those demonstrations against the WTO actually accomplished."
This comment illustrates how deaf, blind and numb capitalists can get in their self-defense.
"Any student of public relations could see that the debacle they experienced instead could hardly be less desirable for advancing their agenda"
Thank you Mr. Engler for pointing out rarely acknowledged points we can use to enlighten ourselves about the world around us.
'the overtly unilateralist Bush White House has been even less effective than the "cooperative" Clinton administration at getting its way in negotiations'
The Imperial Chimp regime succeeded only in isolating itself further into the most despised regime one the planet since the Nazis.
"Even the IMF now agrees that capital market liberalization has contributed neither to growth nor to stability."
Growth is not our part of our goal, though stability is. The progressive economic goal is to stabilize the economy at the minimum capacity necessary to sustain reasonable comfort and prosperity for all.
The protest by itself may not have made all of the changes mentioned here (though blocking the WTO's opening ceremonies is pretty significant, as is emboldening the African and Global south delegates within the conference!).
But the lively & colorful (turtles!) actions DID propel the issues into people's living rooms and discussion groups and onto the top of the agendas of social justice committees and organizations everywhere.
THAT is an effective use of protest. And it was a huge contributor to the slow work and eventual policy changes that this essay outlines.
The other angle that people seem to forget, is that in simply PLANNING the street theater actions, mass marches and other events that took place in Seattle-new relationships were formed. Alliances between church groups and faith communities who were already working on campaigns to end African debt, joined with labor unions and other activists.
Coalitions with diverse consitutencies were formed or strengthened.
Many of these groups had had no reason until the Seattle mobilization to work so closely together. Many got to know each other on the bus rides out to Seattle.
The budding, new, Indymedia outlets used that were so effective in Seattle also showed that we could actually 100% circumvent the MSM (or corporate) newsmedia to get real stories and issue facts out to much larger audiences.
All this being true, I have to agree that the time for circus-like (costumes, party atmosphere) mass marches and protests is over.
The coporate media are too good at using those images to discredit and marginalize our movement. We desperately need new strategies.
If we've learned ANYTHING from the Sarah Palin VP idiocy, it should be that the American people (and MSM) respond like Pavlov's dogs to a pleasing, new visual symbol. A diversion. Something content-free. Whoopee!!
I vote, then, that we stop with the silly pink costumes of you-know-who, and goofy protest signs and understand that we are battling a new US-style fascism and we need to get serious about how we present ourselves.
It's too easy for a quick snapshot of women in pink, wearing bizarre head gear (as just one common example) to be distributed to mass newsmedia outlets as an encapsulation of what the U.S. Peace movement is about.
We know that it's NOT!!! But does the average American?
The behind-the-scenes, unglamorous work that it takes to organize, (yes, organize!!) for social change is the real story.
How do we convey THAT in a one visual image?
It's something to think about.
So, what is the appropriate attire for protest? How do you dress to get the attention of the corporate-cheer leading media? How do you dress so that just a casual passer by would recognize instantly who you are, what you are doing and what you stand for?
How would you dress to stand up against police with chemical weapons and tasers just looking for any excuse to justify their use? How would you dress to oppose a regime that has the power to label anyone they feel like a terrorist and lock you up for life without trial? I am dead serious about that. Please post the pictures of yourselves in your oh-so effective protest gear. We would all love to see them!
Code Pink is brilliant. They are articulate, relentless, omnipresent. The pink says WE ARE WOMEN AGAINST THIS WAR AND OPPRESSIVE REGIME, the humor and irony makes it fun and not so scary to protest (it is hard enough to get people to do this -- it better be fun!), and infinitely safer for all involved. Don't forget, even dressed in so-called "ridiculous" (aka non-threatening) pink costumes, they have still been on the receiving end of police brutality.
I have always marched against the war under the Code Pink banner. As a brand, it is a huge success. Name one group who has been more successful in garnering media attention to the cause and raising awareness. And as a grassroots organization, they are extremely influential players in every major progressive coalition - national and international. There is a lot more to them than meets the eye. Those of you who put them down only demonstrate your ignorance about who's who in grassroots activism. LONG LIVE CODE PINK!
Why can't you see these "clowns" as mocking the system?
I do and I believe she makes clear she does. What we (I think), me especially think is that it is counterproductive Simple as that.
I believe he is giving the protest there far more credit than it deserves. Protests can be helpful, but not like that.
Protests that look like street theater are less than helpful in my opinion.
Thomas More, you jumped too quick on a subject that you are not very well informed about. Go to http://www.ifg.org/ the website for the International Forum on Globalization. Research this site. These demonstrations were very successful, unleashing a tremendous backlash throughout the world. It resulted in stopping the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF in their tracks and led to the foundation of the World Social Forum. I attended teach-ins by the IFG prior to the demonstrations in Seattle and the World Bank demonstrations in Washington, DC.and these activists were highly informed.
The demonstrators were dismissed as luddites and radicals in Seattle because the press was incapable of critiquing the forces of globalization at that time.
The demonstrators were dismissed as luddites and radicals in Seattle because the press was incapable of critiquing the forces of globalization at that time.
This is exactly my point. You see this from the inside in my opinion. But what the press reported was what I believe to be the way the majoerity percieve these types of demonstrations.
It doesn't matter if they were well informed or what their intent was if the perception they generated was negative.
And I simply don't believe the failure in Seattle was caused by the demonstrators. Plus I don't see that the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF have been stopped in their tracks.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
The Amurkan public ALWAYS has a pathetically long learning curve because of the level of laissez-faire, anti-regulatory capitalist, militarist indoctrination in this country. That doesn't mean the Seattle protests were ineffective, just that Americans have taken an overlong time to learn about their ripple effects and medium to long-term repercussions. Most Amurkans are now so collectively ignorant that they usually only acknowledge such things when the aftershocks strike them personally. Even the labor unions bought into the NAFTA scam to begin with: Ask them what they think about NAFTA now. If you don't understand the impact of the Seattle protests in galvanizing global resistance to the WTO, World Bank and IMF, FTAA, CAFTA, etc. then you aren't paying attention. You should research the "success" of the various WTO talks since Seattle. The Globalist "free trade" movement is losing ground, not gaining it.
Metal,
Here is where we agree. What is overlooked is that Seattle was one of many global exercises of free speech. Cumulatively disemboweling the most neoliberal fascism since Hitler. I have followed and researched the follow ups. All the arcs of the globe are establishing treaties and economic agreements that leave the U.S. out. As is their right. The European rejection of an American 'missile defense' is a hopeful rejection of this country's overblown militarism and adolescent bullying. There is no negotiation when the threat of violence is the terror controlling the dialogue.
"This is exactly my point. You see this from the inside in my opinion. But what the press reported was what I believe to be the way the majoerity percieve these types of demonstrations."
Actually, what the majority perceive is what the media decides to show and tell them.
Let us hope that the internet can continue to get the rest of the message dispersed widely into the public domain.
"The demonstrators were dismissed as luddites and radicals in Seattle because the press was incapable of critiquing the forces of globalization at that time.
This is exactly my point. You see this from the inside in my opinion. But what the press reported was what I believe to be the way the [sic] majoerity [sic] percieve these types of demonstrations.
It doesn't matter if they were well informed or what their intent was if the perception they generated was negative.
And I simply don't believe the failure in Seattle was caused by the demonstrators."
Your twist is an outright lie tommyboy. It is a tool's lie.
The MSM press might have been incapable of reporting the truth (they were owned by the same corporatists that were part of the effort to "globalize")... but just because there were limits on the ability of the press to report... that doesn't mean that there was no talent within those organization who could *understand* the issues... and report on them if given the opportunity. If thousands in the street and scores of Independents understood them, you can bet that at least a few MSM reporters had a clue.
Professional journalists are not stupid... they are just mostly limited in their ability to report... by their ownership... and of course there's the paycheck.
A falsehood does not manifest simply because YOU don't WANT to believe a truth.
Try discrediting those of us who were there and see how far you get. There's a difference between stupidity and ignorance. You CHOOSE not to see. These are blinders of your own construction.
Time provides the ability to reveal the mechanics behind lies... and that produces real changes in perception. It's only a fool who then continues to believe a lie because he doesn't *want* to believe truth.
If thats what you want to believe...fine. I simply disagree with you. But don't question my integrity again. It truly irritates me.
Here's something that might help soothe that irritation... something that may have slipped your attention...
You are not forced to read my posts.
That you CHOOSE to do so, only convinces me beyond all doubt, that you WANT to read my posts.
I am NOT the source of your irritation... stop reading my posts.
moved to correct location
Were you there? No of course not... you just like to project some level of authority that you don't deserve. For someone who claims NOT to be a tool... you certainly go out of your way to act like one.
For you lame Democratic Party supporters... I will make this pledge to you.
I promise to vote for any Democrat of your choosing... if you can get the WTO to return to Seattle.
At times, people of good conviction need to make a meaningful stand. This was one of those times... and can be an example of our near future.
Most all who attended came with peaceful intent, with no more than a need to exercise their guaranteed rights. The Seattle Police Department and all the alphabet soup fed agencies were swarming through town nearly two weeks before the meeting, climbing over everything in an attempt to identify "high ground"... to insure that their tactical strategies of preventing free speech were effective.
The corralling of people to prevent open and peaceful dissent that was most prominent at the recent political conventions, was first attempted at Seattle WTO... and failed miserably. "We the People", acting lawfully, refused to be treated as if we were cattle and sheep. We would not let them steal our democratic right to exercise freedom of speech.
The MSM spin was that provocation was entirely instigated by demonstrators. They ignored the fact that police, supervised and prodded on by feds, deprived those protesters of their rights and forced an escalation that resulted in the clips and sound bite loops that most saw in a corporatist production style... endlessly, with only open condemnation for protest and with no attempt to investigate and report facts.
It was a disgusting show of force, made by those who did not believe we would stand up to them. Yes, there were some A-circle punks who got their adrenaline rush, but most of the real damage was initiated by the police and agency fascists against those who had every right to be there.
I have not yet seen the film... but the events are forever burned into my psyche. They represent to me, what people acting in good faith as envisioned by those who forged our nation's democratic foundation, can achieve when standing together... even if it means feeling the pain of the fascist boot heel. Exercise your rights or lose them.
Must be real dark in that place you conveniently keep your head tommyboy.
For my own curiosity, where did you get the idea I was a Democrat or supported the Democratic party? If you don't mind telling me?
Oh, I can see how you might have interpreted it that way... but I've never thought of YOU as a Democrat or a Democratic Party supporter. It just doesn't smell like that to me.
The point was in answer to your:
"I believe he is giving the protest there far more credit than it deserves."
The point was that many of us who might have been ardent Obama supporters now clearly see "The Party" for what it is... and some of that awareness was produced by the WTO protest in Seattle.
The protest deserves much more credit than was given in my opinion... and the result in part, is that many of us are now stridently working together for alternatives to America's one party rule.
So, show me some evidence that backs up your belief that he gave the protest "far more credit than it deserves"... I showed you my counter... WTO will NOT be coming back to Seattle ANY time soon... bet on it... and we have a movement for real change under way. It almost stood up to the corporatist greed, and will certainly play a much bigger role than your "do nothing that gets noticed" political philosophy.
Good points Toast and one of the few genuine posts on this thread.
I will not answer your insult except to say that you should put your silly comment where the monkey put the nuts. Makes about as much sense as your childish attempt to say I've got my head up my ass.
I can't find any attempt to project some level of authority I don't deserve as you say. I was simply stating my opinion.
If you think these demonstrations are valuable, go to it. I believe they are a waste of time and many times counterproductive.
You seem to see Faciasts behind every tree and conspiricies springing from the most mubndane facts. I don't remember commenting on that before. But if you don't care for a civil doscourse, fine with me.
"Protests can be helpful, but not like that."
Bullshit... where do you get off making that blanket statement? Where's your authority?
"If you think these demonstrations are valuable, go to it. I believe they are a waste of time and many times counterproductive.
And I believe that's a standard talking point used by authoritarian tools.
"You seem to see [sic] Faciasts behind every tree and [sic] conspiricies springing from the most [sic] mubndane facts."
One of the points I didn't make was related to a recent post by Amy Goodman... who recently experienced some of the fascist tactics herself while acting in a professional role as reporter, that you seem to so desperately want to ignore. And by the way, those fascist tactics are one of the reasons it's difficult for salient facts to get reported. The government actively thwarts those acting as reporters.
There was a response to the post by a CD member who provided a link to CheneyOilCo concentration camps that have recently been constructed. One of the WTO tactics was to mass arrest anyone within borders that would shift on their whim. They then put the protestors on buses and transported them to a concentration camp at Sand Point. They were illegally held long enough to thin out the protests in an effort to overwhelm those remaining.
That functional apparatus appears to be the model for which the rest have been designed... and sure enough, Sand Point is on the map with many others.
No, I don't see fascists behind every tree, but I can recognize a tool apologist when I read the crap he pretends has some value.
Open your eyes.