The US government essentially lost to Lynne Stewart and her legal defense team at the sentencing level: the judge sentenced her to 28 months, "far less than the 30 years prosecutors wanted," and allowed her to remain free on bail pending appeals ("Attorney Gets 28 Months for Aiding Terrorists," <http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/10/16/terror.trial.ap/index.html>). Even in the post-9/11 age, the government doesn't necessarily get what it wants.
> 18 U.S.C. 2384
> "If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or
> in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United
> States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy
> by force the Government of the United States, or to
> levy war against them, or to oppose by force the
> authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or
> delay the execution of any law of the United States,
> or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of
> the United States contrary to the authority thereof,
> they shall each be fined under this title or
> imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both."
>
> It's still the law. And you can still go to jail -- or
> the case of USAPA violations for domestic terrorism,
> be put to death, if you violate it.
>
> Maybe the "best" way to oppose these laws is through
> mass civil disobedience. But we don't always get to do
> the best things. Where will you get the people to
> commit this mass civil disobedience? Are you keeping
> them in a hat?
The SOA Watch has never stopped its annual demonstration and civil disobedience at Fort Benning on account of post-9/11 anti-terrorism laws: <http://www.soaw.org/>. Nor has the government charged them with anything more than trespassing (you can read about the latest cases arising from the 2006 actions at their Web site). Due caution should be exercised, _and adventurism should be avoided_, but it doesn't help us to go all paranoid.
Despite what the media say, always feisty workers of Iran have never stopped strikes, protests, and even direct actions (such as burning down gas stations in response to rationing). Waves of strikes arose in Egypt despite its long-standing emergency rule. In Pakistan, lawyers and others engaged in protests that really rocked military dictatorship, whose days now appear to be numbered. Strikes and sabotages in Nigeria have been such that they often affected oil prices in recent years. The largest strike since the end of apartheid, of public-sector workers, took place in South Africa this year, auto parts workers will strike, and metal workers may also strike there as well. The royal dictatorship was overthrown in Nepal in 2006. Protests have risen in Burma, too. And so on and so forth. Despite various obstacles (from military dictatorship to corporatism to cooptation), it seems to me that commodity booms, due in large part to China's economic growth, have emboldened many working people of the South and inflation, especially rises in gas and food prices, has motivated an increasing number of them to assert themselves.
Activists and intellectuals in the West always say, we have to support unfortunate workers of the South, sign this petition or that petition, as if international solidarity were just an act of charity, handed out by the fortunate. I say it's the other way around. We should learn from examples set by peoples of the South, since the US government, as well as an increasing number of governments in the North, has begun to introduce laws and practices that have long been the norm in the South, especially in the US-backed states. Emergency rule in the South, frequently imposed there with the backing of the governments of the North, has become globalized and now begun to impinge on our lives in the North, beginning with the lives of Muslims and immigrants. In other words, our governments are now importing political products -- machineries of repression -- from the South that they used to export to the South . . . just like the globalization of production in general. Working people of the South know how to resist -- and sometimes defeat -- emergency rule. We can learn from them if we don't assume we are the ones who know better and instead study how they manage to do it. -- Yoshie