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5 Days That Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond

Amazon.com Price:  $18.27 (as of 03/05/2019 03:08 PST- Details)

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“In the annals of popular protest in The us, these have been shining hours, achieved entirely outside the conventional arena of orderly protest, white paper activism and the timid bleats of the professional leadership of big labor establishment greens. This actually was an insurgency from below in which all those who strove to moderate and deflect the turbulent flood of popular outrage managed only to humiliate themselves.”
The 1999 World Trade Organization protests will without end be associated with violence. But, outside of Seattle, where the event has been debated with no sign of ending, the cause, sufferers, and perpetrators of that violence have been lost to a haze of media-generated moments that simplified an inspired, multifaceted, and normally nonviolent event. Through eyewitness chronicles of the events in Seattle and demonstrations in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, muckrakers Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, as well as a handful of other contributing journalists, vividly relive the opening salvos of a new radical movement in The us. At the same time as they are understandably effusive about the success of the actions, which clearly placed the issues of anti-globalization and economic justice onto the national and international political agendas, the book’s emphasis–and its have an effect on–is on what they see as a national trend towards the violent criminalization of protest and the increasing use of paramilitary forces in law enforcement.

In Seattle, which was transformed from a street festival to a police state in a matter of hours, St. Clair mingles at the cafés and warehouses that acted as staging areas for direct actions, and walks the streets where dancing, drumming, and peaceful sit-ins were punctuated by shocking acts of police brutality–unprovoked attacks with rubber bullets and concussion grenades, a waitress pepper-sprayed At the same time as leaving her shift, her boyfriend beaten and arrested, copies of the Bill of Rights confiscated, Christmas carolers tear-gassed. In D.C., the police break into homes of opposition leaders, spy on their activities, pressure print shops to close, and make illegal sweep arrests. But Cockburn and St. Clair are not satisfied with excoriating the police; they also turn their vitriolic pens against those within the protest movement who are not as radical as they, from labor unions to “establishment greens.” The authors would have done better to devote the space to a more articulated explanation of exactly why they were protesting against the WTO than to causing divisiveness between those on the same side. –Lesley Reed

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