Cheers, Ken Hanly
Michael Pugliese wrote:
> Well, if the Washington Post, apparently, is leaning towards "sympathy",
> for the protests, the New Republic, is fulfilling it's usual role of
> policing the parameters of acceptable discourse, all in it's trademark,
> smirky style.
> Michael Pugliese
> ............................................................................
> .
>
> A woman dressed as a lamb stands atop a pile of debris, chanting into a
> bullhorn, "This is what anarchy looks like! This is what anarchy looks
> like!" She has a point. Everywhere you looked at last week's World
> Bank-International Monetary Fund protest there were anarchists. Thirty
> members of the Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Bloc, an anarchist cell, hurled
> pylons from a construction site onto the street. Three topless women in gas
> masks paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue with Magic Marker slogans on their
> backs urging protesters, smash the state. An anarchist pom-pom girl in a
> yellow sweater with an "A" tacked onto it danced in front of the Treasury
> Department. The small groups that wreaked havoc around Farragut and
> McPherson Squares were largely modeled on the anarchist brigades of the
> Spanish Civil War.
> Welcome to the New New Left. For close to a decade now, commentators have
> wondered what would define the post-cold-war generation of student
> activists. For a while, the answer was identity politics. But the movement
> for ethnic studies, affirmative action, sensitivity training, and speech
> codes lost steam years ago. Anarchism has filled the gap. In the last few
> years, anarchists have helped launch flashy websites and a slew of
> organizations that go by menacing names like Direct Action Network and the
> Ruckus Society. They have started anarchist soccer leagues and held an
> "Alternative Spring Break" in Florida, where students got to practice
> hurling banners off 60-foot structures. The Seattle and Washington, D.C.,
> protests were their coming-out parties.
> Why anarchism--a movement with deep roots in Italy and Spain but not in the
> United States? One reason, of course, is the demise of its competitors. The
> old socialist parties that used to haunt college campuses have fallen on
> hard times. Their long-standing advantage over anarchists--the existence of
> real-world Communist and socialist experiments--has been rendered a
> liability by the collapse of communism and the demise of leftist governments
> in Western Europe. At least anarchism hasn't had a chance to fail. And, if
> communism doesn't have anything new to say about the manic global capitalism
> of the 1990s, identity politics doesn't have anything to say at all; in
> fact, corporations long ago turned multiculturalism into just another
> marketing tool. (One result of the shift from identity politics to anarchism
> has been to make the activist left much more white; according to The Wall
> Street Journal, World Bank-IMF protesters even hired organizers to recruit
> African Americans, but it didn't work.)
> But anarchism is more than just a fallback ideology--it suits the moment. In
> fact, globalization's most vociferous critics share important assumptions
> with its biggest boosters. Like the Silicon Valley CEOs they disdain, the
> anarchists complain about overbearing government and champion
> decentralization. Like House Majority Leader Dick Armey and his libertarian
> cronies, they seethe with hostility toward the IMF and many of the other
> institutions that regulate the world economy.
>
> The rest at the below URL. (Have to say the illustration is pretty funny!)
>
> http://www.tnr.com/050100/foer050100.html