Reply #17: Who decides which "liberal and anti-war protests" are legitimate?

[Peace Patriot]

I'm an old lady and I've been in protests since 1967 (the first big anti-Vietnam War march), so I have a lot of experience of anti-war and other protests, and of corporate media handling of protests. And I was in Seattle in 1999 primarily to protest the WTO's illegitimate power over state/federal environmental regulations, and generally to protest the lack of democracy in the WTO, and lack of consultation with the American people in the signing of various global trade agreements. Others were there to protest the impacts of bad trade agreements on organized labor, and on other human rights issues. I and the 50,000 other peaceful protesters in Seattle--including the 10,000 people who entirely peacefully shut down the WTO meeting, by sitting down in Seattle's intersections, in a time-honored act of civil disobedience--were a "legitimate" protest, and one that the American people badly, badly needed to hear about. How this protest got portrayed as somehow "illegitimate" and violent is a study in our loss of all objective journalism in this country.

There was no violence on the day of the massive civil disobedience by any protestors until very late in the day--about 4-5 pm, after six straight hours of the ugliest police violence I have ever witnessed--for instance, pulling up this big blower machine to an intersection where hundreds of people were sitting peacefully, getting out a big hose, and hosing pepper spray directly at the heads and faces of seated protesters. Just before this started, I turned to one of the cops in the long Darth Vader line (I was a legal observer) and asked him, "What are you going to do to us?" His answer: "We're not going to kill you." Then they released cs gas over the whole region, and everyone ran to get out of it--with police chasing people and beating the crap out of them, and shooting them with rubber bullets.

By late in the afternoon, after hours of mayhem created by the police, the police then permitted a few "anarchist" youngsters to run wild, burning trash cans and breaking windows downtown. The real protesters tried to stop them. The police clearly sat back and let this vandalism proceed. And I was amazed, when I got home that night, to watch the evening news and the first thing they showed was a young "anarchist"'s foot going through a store window. The sequence of events had been reversed. The late in the day vandalism was being used as an excuse for the daylong police violence against peaceful protesters. The police proceeded to riot into the evening, tear-gassing and cs-gassing large swaths of the city, even into completely uninvolved neighborhoods. They even beat up a city councilman.

So, IF, as you say, the Seattle protests "delegitimized liberal and anti-war protests for years afterward," that delegitimization was a planned effect of the twisted-around 'news' reports by the corpo/fascist 'news' monopolies, in service to the global corporate predators who control them.

The peaceful shutdown of the WTO meeting was THE most amazing protest I have ever seen or heard of. It was a brilliant civil disobedience action. And if it's extremely important point--the lack of democracy in global trade decisions--had been objectively reported, and if more Americans had understood that protest, it is at least possible that we wouldn't be in the grave situation we are in today, with global corporate predators absolutely robbing us blind, and destroying our sovereignty as a people, our democracy, our economy and our planet.

The corporate powers-that-be had much reason to "de-legitimatize" the Seattle protest, and all protest. They had an oil war to pull off--and more jobs to outsource, and much more looting to do. Hell, they've even outsourced the manufacture of the very voting machines by which they steal our elections. (See "The Trouble With Touchscreens," by Dan Rather, www.HD.net .)

You are, unfortunately, buying into their line, that the Seattle protest was...wrong, non-mainstream, violent, "illegitimate." How many times do they have to lie to you, before you become skeptical of the self-serving impressions they give you about people and events? They were lying about Seattle, and they were soon lying about Iraq. Please, think hard about how you formed the impression that the Seattle protest was "illegitimate."