Well. Depending on how expansive one's notion of "singularity" is, it _was_ a singularity. And why shouldn't our notion of "singularity" be expansive? (As Baudelaire wrote, "For doesn't anyone known to you, me, and our friends justly deserve to be known as _famous_?" Or something like that.)
It's understandable, if unfortunate, that to many of the protesters and their friends the story of Seattle was all about the protests. That's the flashy part; that's the part they participated in. Many of the protesters knew little about the WTO and its internal dynamics. Nonetheless, they walked on the stage of history, and I don't see any reason not to celebrate that. Not long after Seattle there was a conference in Bangkok of NGOs working on trade, mainly Thai groups. Some of the students there came up to me and said, "I heard you were in Seattle." Like, you were at Woodstock. So that seems to me like some good evidence for "singularity." As I listened to their conversations - not speaking any Thai - it seemed to me they were saying - "Blah blah blah - Seattle. Blah blah blah - Seattle." Not long after Seattle I had a meeting in Washington with an activist from the Rainforest Action Network. A number of us had put out a call for a demonstration at the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings, as "the next big thing" after Seattle, and RAN was considering throwing in with us, and was checking out who these people were who were calling for this demo and did they have a clue what they were doing. I remember two things from this conversation. He said: "Before Seattle, no-one in the U.S. knew what the WTO was." He laughed. "Now, they still don't know what the WTO is, but they know it's bad." And he said, "If you think it's a good idea to bring thousands of people to town who don't really know your issue, then you should do this." Of course, my answer was, "I'll have some of that." I take a half-full view of these things. A lot of us spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the multitude a little bit engaged with the issues we care about. So from that point of view, I'd say, Seattle was a singularity. On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 10:51 PM, ravi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Aug 21, 2008, at 7:01 PM, Robert Naiman wrote: >> >> That might be a fair criticism, ravi, if "Seattle" were, or were >> construed to be, a "northern" event; but it wasn't, and there is no >> reason to construe it so. It was the culmination of many events and >> forces, many of which took place in the South. "Seattle" wasn't just >> the protests of Northern activists, but also what went on inside. It >> was the resistance of the Southern countries, in large measure, that >> broke the WTO round. If the round had gone forward, the story of >> "Seattle" would be very different. >> > > That seems a very fair context. Unfortunately, not the one I see in either > the movie trailer or in the claims of Western activists (I offered Chuck on > LBO as an example, but I have seen similar claims on the web, also). Often, > "Seattle" is presented as some sort of singularity. > > --ravi > > > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > -- Robert Naiman Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ambassador Pickering on Iran Talks and Multinational Enrichment http://youtube.com/watch?v=kGZFrFxVg8A _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
