Seattle riots reveal where the real
threats are coming fromFOR RELEASE Friday, December 3, 1999
After several years of the FBI's pother about the
dire threat of "terrorism from the right," a rather
more real terrorism from the left descended upon
the city of Seattle this week with a fury.Ever since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995,
the FBI and the Clinton-Reno Justice Department
have muttered and moaned about the slaughter
and destruction the "extreme right" was getting
ready to inflict upon the country. Only last month
the Bureau released a near-hysterical report on
the danger the country faces from right-wingers
who worry about a "New World Order" and the
approaching millennium.But while the Bureau and its political masters
have obsessed over the right, the real danger
started smashing windows in Seattle this week,
where the World Trade Organization was trying to
hold a meeting. There are indeed many aspects
of the WTO that correctly worry people on the
right, but you don't have to be J. Edgar Hoover to
deduce that the characters causing violence in
Seattle were not from the right at all.To judge from the news reports, just about every
weirdo and whacko and wigged-out eco-freak
this side of the moons of Neptune arrived in
Seattle to caper and cavort about his, her or its
favorite bogey-man, to smash windows and throw
whatever could be lifted and hurled in protest of
whatever it was they were protesting.Crackpots dressed up as what the Washington
Post described as "pigs, turtles, clowns,
Superman, vegetables, fish and butterflies" to
dramatize the supposed threat the WTO
represents to all these creatures, entities and
fictitious beings. Others, perhaps a bit more
serious, dressed up in "black clothes and ski
masks" and threw newspaper vending machines
into the streets, while still others sacked a
MacDonald's, symbol of corporate power, and
then looted a Starbuck's, which, one supposes, is
guilty of genocide against coffee beans.Anarchists as well as members of the Wicca cult
were there too, but nowhere do the news reports
tell of any militia members, "white supremacists,"
Christian fundamentalists or other adherents of
what is now routinely lumped together as the "Far
Right."Yet those groups have at least as much reason to
object to the WTO as their counterparts on the left
do. The fact that the fruitier side of the right was
conspicuous by its absence in Seattle ought to
tell us (if not the FBI) something important: The
strength, as well as the danger, of such groups
has been grotesquely overrated. The Bureau and
its "terrorist expert" munchkins need to go back
to their drawing boards and try to figure out
where the real threat of violence is coming from
before other cities get their windows smashed
like Seattle.The real danger the WTO represents in fact quite
sails past the heads of the window-smashers.
The real danger is that the WTO threatens both
national sovereignty and local self-government,
as well as the economic and cultural
underpinnings of nationality. It is no small irony of
the left-wing ranting about the WTO that what the
left demands as a corrective would in fact
intensify the WTO's dangers.What the left demands is that environmental,
health, labor and other regulatory rules be written
into the WTO's charter, with the result that these
rules would then themselves become part of the
globalized world state. What the crazies and
crackpots of the left want, in other words, is more
of what is wrong with the WTO in the first place.By contrast, the right-wing objection to the WTO
is that its very structure is an invasion of national
sovereignty -- by enforcing bureaucratically
formulated (not constitutionally enacted) rules that
govern what a nation can produce and sell -- and
that in practice the WTO has enforced those rules
against the interests of the United States and its
businesses and workers.WTO Director General Michael Moore said this
week the attack on his organization is part of "a
broader assault on internationalism -- on
foreigners, immigration, a more pluralistic and
integrated world." Allowing for some
exaggeration and tendentiousness in his
comment, he's right. The WTO represents the
New World Order, the effort to "integrate" the
whole planet into a single dominant bureaucratic
framework that overrides national and local
governments, throws away sovereignty and
disintegrates cultural, racial, and institutional
fabrics. Those who resist it for the right reasons
do so because it endangers their identities, their
ways of life.It will take a good deal more than smashing a few
windows and dressing up like vegetables and
butterflies to stop the threat that the WTO's
globalization represents. More than anything
else, it will take a deeper understanding of what
nationality -- and liberty -- mean than anyone on
the left or most people on the right seem today to
possess.