Abstract
A commentary on “The Battle of Seattle” by Corey Robin, Theory & Event, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2000): In November of 1997, almost exactly two years prior to the Battle in Seattle, a group of world leaders met at the Asia Pacific Economic Council or APEC in Vancouver, Canada. The meeting was held on the campus of the University of British Columbia - a silly mistake that economic summit organizers would not make a second time. It was greeted by a significant protest - one that, I have always believed, in some sense paved the way for what would happen in Seattle a short time hence. I was a graduate student, a member of the teaching assistant union’s executive, and a budding leftist. But APEC was my first real political protest. To my naive astonishment, protest leaders were summarily arrested early in the day and detained for the duration. It seemed like anyone with a bullhorn got tackled and thrown into the back of a police car, never to be charged with any crime. Tensions mounted, but things remained relatively peaceful - until, that is, the very end of the day. At the time when the world leaders (including President Clinton) were expected to leave campus, small groups of protesters sat down to block each of the exits. A decision was made somewhere, and one of the exits was quickly cleared with a liberal dose of pepper spray and brute force. For a couple of months, the episode was a minor scandal in Canadian politics. The Prime Minister dismissed the protesters, and joked in public that he ‘put pepper on his plate’. The media dubbed the police officer in charge of the operation ‘Sargent Pepper’. The militants who had been arrested without charge, or harmed in some fashion during the day, got bogged down in juridical processes - investigations, committees, hearings, and the like. They splintered in various ways, and after a while, the whole thing blew over - the only lasting change being that, because of the event, a considerable number of people had become instantly radicalized, myself included.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 19-23 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Journal | Theory and Event |
Volume | 20 |
Issue number | 1 |
Publication status | Published - 2017 |
Keywords
- social history
- anti-globalization movement
- political activists