Comments below...
Ian Murray wrote:
>
> NEWS ANALYSIS War Transforms the Anti-Globalization Crowd
> John Vinocur International Herald Tribune
> Friday, November 2, 2001
>
> PARIS After its sudden rise, anti-globalization activism has been
> stunned into a phase of relative quiet by the terrorist attacks on New
> York and Washington.
The movement hasn't been stunned into quiet--we're currently between big protests. We had an anti-capitalist protest here in Washington on September 29th and there were recently protests in Ontario that involved many anti-glob movement activists.
> But the movement is looking for a second wind, and it may find it in
> recasting itself - partly and for the time being at least - as a force
> linked to protests against the American military response in
> Afghanistan.
I'm not sure how the movements could be characterized as looking for a second wind, since it is an international movement that isn't just limited to North America. It could be argued that Washington, DC anti-globalization activists are looking for a second wind, since we have just come off an exhausting 6 months of organizing for the World Bank and IMF meetings. Plans are underway around the world for future anti-glob actions, including the WTO meeting this month, the G8 meeting next year in Alberta, and the WEF meetings in February.
> As an example of their retrenchment, organizers called off
> counter-capitalism demonstrations they hoped would bring tens of
> thousands of militants to challenge the policies of the International
> Monetary Fund and the World Bank at their annual meetings in
> Washington in September.
Of course, it isn't mentioned that the IMF and World Bank postponed their meetings. This statement is also false because the "counter-capitalism" demonstrations were never called off. The Anti-Capitalist Convergence changed its plans for the weekend of S29, but the Mobilization For Global Justice, which announced that *all* protests had been cancelled, can hardly be described as a coalition against capitalism.
The Mobilization was criticized several times over the Summer for using language that attempted to put itself forward as the "umbrella" organization for the protests. This false description was further conveyed in late September when the Mobe announced that all protests had been called off. The spokespersons for the Mobe had forgotten that other coalitions existed, such as the ACC and ANSWER, who were going ahead with protests.
> Also scratched: a gathering of leaders of
> Europe's Socialist-led governments who planned to spend a day together
> in Stockholm analyzing (or perhaps laying plans to co-opt) what seemed
> then like a potentially significant new political movement.
The movement wasn't "potentially significant," it was actually significant. This is evident in how the business press reacted to the movement. As many of you know, the Economist went ahead last month with a special feature criticizing the anti-globalization arguments, which had obviously been intended to counter the World Bank protests.
Let's not forget that the police were estimating that 100,000 were going to show up for the protests. Many think that figure was too high, but I was telling people to prepare for 50,000 to 75,000 protestors.
The "Seattle that didn't happen" is going to be a bitter activist pill that I will taste for the rest of my life. There was so much hard work that went into these protests that will never be appreciated.
> Essentially, the problem for the globalization movement had suddenly
> become its focus of anger and energy against the United States and
> other rich countries at a time when those countries are engaged in a
> widely supported, mortal struggle with terrorism.
> Moreover,geographically at least, terrorism is based in the Third
> World that the globalization activists say they seek to defend.
This is a bizarre effort to link the anti-globalization movement with terrorism.
> These days, Mobilization for Global Justice, a U.S.-based advocacy
> group that was planning the demonstrations in Washington, describes
> itself as centering its activities on its old mission, including a
> demonstration Nov. 9 against the World Trade Organization, but with
> "new colors and shades" that reflect its members' preoccupation with
> terrorism and the Afghanistan conflict.
Correction: The Mobilization for Global Justice is a D.C.-based anti-globalization group. It would be news to me that the Mobe was thinking of itself as a national group.
> One of the first of the
> anti-globalization groups in the United States, Global Exchange, has
> taken a position summed up in a statement on its Web site called "No
> More Innocent Victims." It asserts "Retaliation, we believe, will
> offer no consolation."
One of the untold stories of the "Seattle That Didn't Happen" is how Global Exchange was involved in the Mobe's decision to not do anything. Danaher and company have done irreparable damage to the movement since then, by simply providing these journalists with cannor fodder to shoot down the movement.
> "As we in the United States endure our suffering, we must pledge
> ourselves not to visit similar suffering in others," it says.
Global Exchange is an NGO player in the anti-globalization movement in the States.
>The
> biggest European anti-globalization group, Attac, in a current
> newsletter, now makes a link between trade liberalization and war.
> "Despite bombing, anthrax, despair and death," the newsletter says,
> "trade must go on. In all the political tools used, war is in the
> forefront of further liberalization around the world."
Well, shit, at least somebody is making a connection between capitalism and war.
> Focus on the Global South, described as a Bangkok-based advocacy group
> that had concentrated on globalization issues, goes further in
> directly identifying the United States as the source of its own grief
> with terrorism. In an article, its executive director says "that
> terrorists like Osama bin Laden, an ex-CIA protégé, have learned their
> lessons on the strategic targeting of the civilian population from
> Washington's traditional strategy of total warfare where damage to the
> civilian population is not simply seen as collateral but as
> essential."
>
> >From all this, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a Greens member of the European
> Parliament and a member of Attac, says he believes the
> anti-globalization groups "are beginning to see themselves a little as
> a Peace Movement II." But because the anti-globalization forces, a
> loose network of groups with similar views of imposing a tax on
> financial transactions or a re-regulation of international trade or
> Third World debt relief, have no single organizational center or
> recognized spokesman, it is difficult to characterize the movement's
> attitudes with certainty.
Oh god, would somebody please send Cohn-Bendit back into 1960s obscurity?
Do any of these people quoted understand that one of the rules of messaging the media is that you don't give them the rope to hang you with?
> Speaking for Mobilization for Global Justice, Robert Weissman said: "A
> lot of people who are involved in the movement against corporate
> globalization are active in opposing the war. But I think there is no
> exact identity between the movement and the anti-war people."
>
> In reporting on a meeting of activists and campaigners in London, the
> Bretton Woods Project, a British foundation close to the
> anti-globalization movement, said the group "expressed fear that the
> globalization-resistance movement built up since Seattle, Prague and
> Genoa may now start to lose momentum."
>
> "Many felt that the movement, which had been gaining a decent level of
> legitimacy, may now be undermined," it said.
>
> The report described "civil society groups and globalization
> watchdogs" as not knowing how to position themselves in what was
> acknowledged as a new political context. It suggested they had been
> destabilized by "the general tone of global cooperation rhetoric
> employed by Western leaders," and told of some campaigners who "have
> decided to suspend or spike campaigns which appear to be
> 'anti-American.'"
>
> In the last weeks, some of the component groups appear to have
> attempted to knit together the idea that Third World poverty, when not
> American imperialism, is responsible for terrorism and that,
> therefore, terrorism could not be uprooted by a military response.
>
> Mr. Cohn-Bendit described the anti-globalization activists in Europe
> as being divided between backers of the "old, ultra-left ideologies
> that are hiding inside" the movement, and young people who are in
> favor of democratization of the market economy at a time when "the
> American political class still only half understands that looking at
> the world's economic imbalance is a very reasonable thing to do." "The
> big weakness of the movement," Mr. Cohn-Bendit said in an interview,
> "is that it counts up all the errors of American policy and turns that
> into its single decoding of the world. But to say that it's the same
> United States that represents freedom in the great historical moments
> when security is threatened - they don't see that."
Can Cohn-Bendit just shut up? What the hell is he talking about? Did this reporter find him drunk at some pub, or what? Let's hear what some European participants in the anti-glob movement actually think!
On the same line,
> one of the emblematic figures of the European peace movement of the
> 1980s, the Dutch political activist Mient Jan Farber, asked why he was
> not joining anti-war demonstrators, said last weekend that terrorism
> had to be combated. In a television appearance, Mr. Farber, who is a
> participant in the Netherlands Inter-Church Peace Council, described
> the American action in Afghanistan as defense, not revenge.
>
> What effect this kind of argument will have on the anti-globalization
> movement is far from clear. Last month, Attac sprouted a chapter in
> Germany that invited Oskar Lafontaine, the former German finance
> minister, to its first public meeting. Almost reflexively, speculation
> followed that Mr. Lafontaine, who fell out with Chancellor Gerhard
> Schroeder in 1999 and left the government, might be regarding the
> movement as a lever for a return to active politics in a zone without
> a clear leadership figure. Still, Mr. Lafontaine was in very much the
> margins for the time being.
>
> Rather, reports from correspondents in attendance for both the
> Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany and Le Monde in France
> clearly indicated that it was focused on the American involvement in
> Afghanistan.
>
> For the conservative German newspaper, "anti-American reflexes
> predominated at the convention." In parallel, the left-of-center Le
> Monde gave this description of the proceedings:
>
> "Everyone insisted that they were not anti-American and that they were
> horrified by terrorism, but the long and constant repetition of the
> U.S. Army's interventions in the world over the last 50 years limited
> the effect of these statements while responsibility was clearly
> designated: The single party responsible for what has happened to the
> United States is the United States itself and the globalization it has
> imposed."
>
> This portrayal of the meeting's dominant tone enraged Bernard Cassen,
> the president of Attac-France, who attended the event in Berlin.
>
> "Since Sept. 11, there has been an attempt to say that
> anti-globalization equals anti-Americanism," Mr. Cassen said from
> Brazil in a telephone interview. "That's repulsive. That's using
> cadavers to attack a movement."
>
> "In fact," Mr. Cassen said, referring to the current effort to control
> international financial transactions that could benefit terrorism,
> "Bush was never as close to Attac as he is now. With a little effort,
> maybe he could become a member."
>
> As for a cautious American view of how the anti-globalization movement
> was changing, Mr. Weissman, said, "anti-globalization has several
> strands. The different strands react in their own way."
You tell him Rob!
> Far from being muted, Mr. Cassen said the anti-globalization movement
> in Europe would be involved in major demonstrations to coincide with a
> meeting Nov. 10 of the World Trade Organization and a summit gathering
> on Dec. 15 of the European Union. And he played down Mr. Lafontaine's
> role, or the organization's own in upcoming European elections,
> saying, "The movement is hostile to personalization."
Thank you. Now, get on the phone and tell Cohn-Bendit that.
> A German official, who has followed the evolution of the
> anti-globalization groups, also minimized Mr. Lafontaine's prospects.
>
> Rather, the official expected the further implantation of
> anti-globalization ideology in both the extreme left and extreme
> right, which he said naturally fed into anti-United States rhetoric.
> In some countries susceptible to ideology and conspiracy theories, he
> saw little chance the movement would die out soon.
Implantation? Like tulips?
> But in Germany, he went on, where exports accounted for a significant
> part of its economy, there was instinctive understanding of the
> importance of free trade, which the globalization critics abhor. In
> contrast, the official said, Mr. Schroeder often stressed that Germany
> had to be made fit for globalization, and not try to run away from it.
>
> Perhaps a more finely tuned gauge of the movement's political potency
> was likely to appear in France, where Attac claims 30,000 members.
>
> Before Sept. 11, it was expected that the Socialist Party campaign for
> the presidency next May would make use of anti-globalization rhetoric
> to coat its platform with a left-wing ideological veneer attractive to
> elements of a floating electorate.
>
> Now the movement in France is reported to be increasingly aligned with
> the thinking of Jean-Pierre Chevenement, an independent presidential
> candidate and one-time Socialist defense minister who quit that post
> to protest France's alignment with the United States in the Gulf War.
> Mr. Chevenement's campaign is one of left-wing nationalism and strong
> calls for the preservation of French identity.
>
> For Mr. Cohn-Bendit, if the globalization movement became more clearly
> a political vehicle, and less obviously a transmission belt for
> international public opinion, its implosion would become a risk.
>
> With its developing role as a megaphone for opponents of the U.S.-led
> anti-terrorism campaign in Afghanistan, that transformation could be
> at hand.
I think this reporter should spend more time speaking to grassroots members of the movements.
Vinocur has done a poor job of reporting on the current anti-globalization movement, which is much broader and diverse than the few reformists that are interviewed here. It's also a mistake to judge the movement's current "mood" based on large protests, when much of the movement is rooted in local struggles.
Chuck0