Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Battle of Seattle

WYTS: Seattle Seahawks. Original post here.

This is it. The final riot. I hope you had fun with everything. If you had a favorite of these 32, sound off in the comments. I just managed to get all of these reposted within minutes of the Broncos kick-off. Phew. Somehow all this history is why football teams are bad... I think we lost the plot somewhere. We conclude with The Battle of Seattle.

On January 26th, 1856, a coalition of Spokane, Yakama, Nisqually, and other tribes attacked the new settlement of Seattle. The town had been named in honor of a half-Suquamish and half-Duwamish native leader, Chief Seattle. But relations between the tribes and the increasing numbers of white settlers turned sour and there was war all across the Washington Territory through the 1850s. The Battle of Seattle was a short engagement, where the Natives were quickly repelled by land artillery and the guns of the nearby sloop, The Decatur. By the end, the pioneers had lost three men, mostly to friendly fire, while the enemy coalition had lost maybe 28. Their commander, Chief Leschi, was hanged in 1858. The Puget Sound and the rest of Washington was firmly in American hands forever after.

Anyway, that's one Battle of Seattle. There was another. I actually want to talk about the 1999 anti-globalism protest that was a big rallying cry for the political left for awhile. But we need context. Always we need context.

So, it's the 1940s, World War II is over, and we won, congratulations! After that, the United States had the opportunity to remake the global order in whatever form it wanted. At various conferences like Bretton Woods, Britain was sat down and politely told to retire as the global superpower. There's a new sheriff in town. The US had already been the economic powerhouse of the world since about 1890, and thanks to its European rivals destroying themselves in a couple big wars, it would rule the rest of recorded history unquestioned. Sure, there was the USSR... but the Cold War was never an even fight, economically. The important point of the post-war consensus is that old colonial empires were the past. You could try to hold on desperately to Vietnam if you were France, but you’d just end up getting Dien Bien Phu’d. The smart bet was in decolonizing now, such as with Britain and India. And if the old European powers got too big for their britches, America would simply remind the old guys of the pecking order, such as in the Suez Crisis of 1956. This new global empire would not need colonies. This was a post-modern empire, with sophisticated ideas like self-determination and globalization, and of course, free trade.

Also, it was very unsophisticated when it came to opposing Communism. Don't you fucking dare self-determine that your country wants Communism. We'll murder you and your whole family and a lot of priests too if you're in Latin America.

I can't explain the entire macroeconomic history of American hegemony because A) it’s too big, B) frankly I'm exhausted after 32 of these, and C) economics is uninteresting to me. Didn't care about the gold standard in the 1890s, don't care about the Nixon shock either. What is interesting to me is the effects of power, not the fancy graphs with the curves or whatever. I’ll greatly over-simply all of this.

Anyway, the US creates a system where the global economy would be ruled peacefully by non-state actors, a bunch of boring technocrats, all related to the UN. These are things like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and something called the "General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade". That last one will later be reborn as the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995. People use a very slippery term called "neoliberalism" around these organizations, which is a clue that nobody likes them. Whatever “neoliberalism” means, it’s bad, basically. All I remember out of the one PolySci course I took was that the IMF is an instrument of pure evil. It forces austerity and privatization upon the third world, keeping up the first world's neocolonial dominance. Somehow despite decades of IMF loans, things keep going badly for many countries, especially Argentina.

Now the issue of "Free Trade" is a rather thorny one. Back in the 1990s, the politics on this stuff was exactly in the opposite direction of where it is now. The global left was pushing for protectionism for labor, environmentalism, and human rights, while the entire mainstream political spectrum, Republican and Democratic, loved globalization and NAFTA and all that jazz. Most dominant powers through history want to have free trade because it is to their benefit, they have all the money and most of the goods, so let us knock down these barriers and get richer.

Is free trade good? I don't know, is gasoline good? Yeah, it could set me on fire, and might destroy the world in a few decades, but at this very second I need to go to work, so I dunno. It's good that we all have access to anime, it's bad that copyright protections extend infinitely and forever, backed up by limitless violence. Maybe if you’re an arch-racist you end up in the ballpark of the right answer for the wrong reason. But let’s get back to the 90s, *Smash Mouth riff plays*.

So, it’s the 1990s, the Cold War is over, and we won, congratulations! Communism is dead. Francis Fukuyama is telling a one-year-old me that it’s the End of History, while post-modern leftists such as Hardt & Negri are imagining this is the final phase of capitalism called Empire. Empire is so infinitely powerful that it is inescapable like gravity. Politics are not real anymore. The right choices have already been for us. We’re just pushing a few buttons and adjusting some dials to have free capitalism and democracy and goodness for everybody forever.

Except already people are unhappy with the End of History or Empire. Labor in the US has been losing ground for decades, in India free trade means Monsanto has IP control over their entire seed stock, and somehow after fifty years of American beneficence, most of the third world is still very poor. The WTO becomes instantly the corrupt Cryptid to be blamed for all these miseries.

Also, the 90s are a big decade for Seattle: Grunge, Starbucks, Sir Mix-a-lot, Ken Griffey Jr, Microsoft, Frasier, Boeing is still good at making planes, etc. etc. On November 30th, 1999, to finish the decade strong, it's even getting to host the 1999 WTO Ministerial Conference. Bill Clinton will be there!

Secretly this is already going poorly as the smaller economies have a lot of complaints about the richer ones. The third world wants to build their industries and protect their workers and maybe not give up their entire agricultural industry to Monsanto. And the first world wants them to shut up, privatize everything, and get back to making Nikes as cheaply and filthily as possible.

It's easy to come up with fantastic conspiracy theories about the WTO, especially when its meetings have terrifying-sounding names like "Ministerial Conference". That's bad branding, you sound like a Doctor Who villain. Something about unelected technocratic bureaucracies scare people across political lines. It is creepy to everybody from the AFL-CIO, to proper Bakunin-reading anarchists, to wacky Christian conservatives terrified of (((globalists))). Pat Buchanan will be on the same side as Ralph Nader on this one. There would be somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 protestors outside the WTO meeting at the Washington State Convention Center, a few blocks away from Pike Place Market. (Worth a visit!)

Seattle's police were unprepared on November 30th. There was no real leadership to this protest, it was all formless and “internet stuff”, which regular people were still safely sheltered from. Nobody really expected much of anything. Instead they got everything, all at once. The AFO-CIO might rally at 10 AM but meanwhile full-blown anarchists in black costumes would break Nike stores to cause trouble at 9 AM. This was not one protest but about a dozen happening at different places. Many protestors linked hands in chains to stop the proceedings inside, to make it as loud and clear as possible they were not happy with the direction the world was moving.

The police, lacking any good response, fired tear gas and pepper spray at the protesters, which turned mostly peaceful protests into frenzied chaos. (Nobody ever learns anything, do they? 32 of these and it is always the same damn song!) By the end of the day, the Mayor, Paul Schell, was calling a state of emergency. Bill Clinton had to sneak into the city at midnight. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright was stuck in her hotel room as streets were full of teargas. They had to cancel the big fancy opening ceremony on the 30th.

The next day of protests continued the same police vs activist frenzies on the street. The Seattle PD actually ran out of teargas. They came away looking like apes for corporate power and also completely incompetent at the same time.

The protests would continue for five days, the last of them focused on the Seattle PD. Many protesters were rightfully furious at the cops, demanding the 600 or so people arrested be freed. Inside the WTO conference, the discussions continued to go poorly. Being under siege never helps a tough conversation, see the 1968 Democratic Convention. Basically nothing had been achieved inside, and the protesters had made a big point: most people did not even know what the WTO was yet in 1999, and their introduction to it was mayhem in the Emerald City.

The WTO would reconvene in Qatar in 2001. That's in a petrol dictatorship, so there was no threat of protests this time. It still did not get much done. The organization still exists and can exert a lot of pressure on smaller nations, but its ambition of grand global trade deals seems like a lost cause now. The direction of the global marketplace today is just whatever an old man feels like. We haven’t yet boiled away the nation-state into transnational corporate rule as dreamed of by the villain from the movie Network.

Seattle's chief of police, Norm Stamper, resigned in March 2000. He was very apologetic about how his men acted, blaming himself for the chaos. Stamper became a big police reform guy in his retirement, opposing the death penalty and calling for drug legalization. Police departments did learn a lesson though: next time there were major urban riots, they needed to be much more aggressive and have a lot more army surplus heavy equipment.

In 1999, people thought the Battle of Seattle might be the first steps in shattering Hardt & Negri's Empire. Perhaps a real opposition could occur to neoliberalism and undemocratic corporate capture. Instead, the trends continued. Labor power continued to shrink, the environment continued to die, and "socialism" stayed a dirty word until right now, according to the US House of Representatives. The new left would try similar kinds of protests again in the 2010s with the Occupy Movement that... let's face it, failed. That battle against the 1% continues. Still, the Battle of Seattle had been demonstrated that online activism could affect change. Largely internet-based movements had indeed pushed the discussion in way neither political party would dare consider previously. And that went… great, right? How do we like our Twitter president?

Now in a quirk of history, the anti-free trade movement turned decidedly conservative. Any good leftist will still despise the IMF, of course. But post-modern imperialism was too complicated, people needed a more childish system of power, so now we have Trumpism. We've seen already the difficult line between foreign policy goals of open markets and hating foreigners, it's an incoherent position. But if you hate immigrants enough you'll choose to burn down free trade eventually, I guess. Tariffs are so back, baby! We've rewound that clock so far we're aiming for a 1700s mercantilism vision of global trade. (...Maybe? I'm probably assuming too much of an actual strategy or goal here.) The WTO, for all its faults, was meant to prevent big nations from shaking down their neighbors with trade warfare. And we decided that’s actually fine.

Nobody died in the Battle of Seattle. Not many injuries. A lot of arrests, but they did not stick. So, that’s a happy-ish note to end on.

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And now, Go Broncos!