How Do I Hate Thee?
Caldwell, Christopher
How Do I Hate Thee? The global anti-American Left and what makes them tick BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL Florence As tens of thousands of anti-globalization activists began converging on the European...
...As a result of free trade, for instance, very few countries today are self-sufficient in food production, which is why Bove's peasant group and others at the Forum held so many seminars on achieving "food sovereignty" for Europe...
...This logic has the potential to make the movement considerably more violent...
...most nights before collapsing into their sleeping bags, a Dutch group was parked in a rented tour bus...
...Susan George, an economist who works for Attac, warned the gathering two days after the U.S...
...The crowd went berserk with applause...
...The filmmaker Franco Zeffirelli, who has moved increasingly rightward over the years, called the gathering "disgusting...
...The only two portrait-posters visible besides the bin Laden one featured the Kurdish terrorist Abdullah Ogalan and Carlo Giuliani, the protester killed while attacking the police in the Genoa demonstration...
...They claimed to come in peace, in the name of "universal rights and democracy...
...Only two bars had stayed open in the entire vast swath of the city through which the protesters had tramped, and when the proprietors returned they found mass-produced fliers pasted to their front doors reading: Chiuso per estremo egois-mo—"Closed on account of extreme egotism...
...This decontextualization of left-wing violence was the rule...
...Two hundred injuries resulted in Naples in March 2001, and a protest in Goteborg, Sweden, three months later led to 96 arrests...
...The police, panicking, drove their vehicle into a wall...
...In January 2001, police in Davos, Switzerland, used tear gas and rubber bullets to protect an annual conclave of New Economy gurus...
...But on a second look, you realized that it was a picture not of Che but of Osama bin Laden...
...All the groups at the Fortezza da Basso traveled in the name of pacifism, but the only people they enjoined to follow the pacifist path were governments and institutions facing armed insurgencies...
...The 11th of September gave Bush the perfect opportunity to put his politics into action," and the midterms left her certain that Bush would seek to establish a "new worldwide empire...
...When Palestinian spokesman Mustafa Barghouti told a gathering inside the Fortezza da Basso that he would make "a promise to you," one expected some boilerplate about living up to the noble pacifist ideals of his hosts...
...Zero...
...In the early days, unions shunned anti-global-ist gatherings...
...If there was no violence at the Florence events, it was still a close-run thing...
...His colleague Francesco Caruso was more specific: "The moment the first bomb falls, all groups will march on the consulates and embassies, laying siege to them...
...A small delegation at the Camp Darby march was agitating in favor of the elected dictatorship of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez...
...Note: As we go to press on November 15, Caruso has just been arrested by Italian police for instigating violence...
...The facts show that not all pacifists have acted peacefully...
...This gloating is decidedly premature...
...Occupying that role tempts it to take unfair advantage of other countries...
...Clearly, the shopkeepers of Florence didn't take them at their word, and neither did the police and carabinieri...
...Because I thought about how many hundreds of young men like my brother would be there...
...Only as a non-cause...
...Take non-governmental organizations...
...Mobs of kids, with their omnipresent Palestinian keffiyehs and laboriously grown dreadlocks, linked arms, drank wine out of the bottle, roused their spirits by endlessly crooning "Bella Ciao" (a song of the old anti-Mussolini partigiani that sounds like "You Are My Sunshine" in a minor key), and laughed at off-color chants like Quando guardo i miei coglioni / Vedo Bush e Berlusconi ("When I look at my balls / I see Bush and Berlusconi...
...These differences rested not just on politics but on an assessment of the potential for violence...
...Army base at Camp Darby in Pisa— this was a kind of sideshow that drew about 3,000 of the hard-liners floating around the fringe of the Social Forum—there was a representative of a group called Cam-po Antiimperialista...
...They put on white ski masks and trash a place, as they did the border post at Italy's Slovenian border...
...The suburban Sollicciano Prison relocated hundreds of its inmates to make room for fresh arrests...
...Never was Palestinian terrorism mentioned...
...And no Italian ones...
...At a meeting in Senegal in August 2001, Losson notes, Amnesty International changed its mandate for the first time—broadening its concerns from human rights to social and economic ones...
...But there appears to be something new about the radicalism that arises in the new economy...
...With a few exceptions, the many associations and groups that make up the no-global galaxy declare themselves pacifist," Ceri writes...
...and British consulates along the Arno), fifteen SWAT teams, five bulldozer units (for destroying barricades), and four helicopters...
...But I decided to put up a challenge to ignorance...
...The silence on these issues is an indication that they were only proxies in the first place, useful to a priori America-haters until they could find a more solid basis for their anti-Americanism...
...The Nobel prizewinner and longtime Communist Dario Fo was also delighted...
...as we walked home from the protest, one guy was banging the highway guardrails with his, and denting them...
...It wasn't...
...Casarini's larger goal was to put an end to the "buonismo" of the march...
...That is why there were so few American radicals at the meetings...
...This synthesis opened the way to what has become the central focus of the anti-globalists over the last three years: the inequality between "north" and "south," between the developed and the undeveloped world...
...The University of Florence sociologist Paolo Ceri, who has written several sympathetic books on the No-Global movement, has suggested an explanation...
...Between 1995 and 1999, these strands got bound together, into a politically correct exaltation of diversity—biodiversity and cultural diversity...
...At that moment, I denounced my government, which does not represent me...
...At the big Saturday march, people were chanting, "Palestina, terra e liberta / intifada vincera...
...In an interview with the daily La Stampa, Prodi added, "The kids who attended the Forum have been heard...
...This focus has made the movement narrower than it was ten—or even three—years ago...
...Down the street from "the Hub," the makeshift dorms in the Piazza della Liberta where young people danced until 3:00 a.m...
...The behavior of anti-establishment radicals at their own convention is likely to be a poor indicator of what their behavior will be when they next confront an institution they consider to belong to the "establishment"—say, the European Council at its meeting next month in Copenhagen, or the G-8, scheduled to meet next in June...
...A young policeman, already bleeding from a head wound, shot Giuliani in the head, killing him...
...The conference began with a series of letter bombs and continued with an unruly "march of the migrants...
...Border controls, eliminated under the European Union's Schengen treaties, had been temporarily reestablished for the March...
...zheem...
...For Ceri, the high-tech economy changes other systems—governmental, social, military—in a way that the old capitalist economy didn't...
...Hector Mondragon of Colombia's National Peasant Council, which opposes America's plans to eradicate cocaine in the Colombian highlands...
...sharpshooter units, five canine patrols, two frogman squads (to protect the U.S...
...If this is war, we will act...
...Even if one takes the reasonable-people-can-differ view of the Middle East conflict, the thoroughness with which the assembly welcomed every terrorist, guerrilla army, and freelance maimer of civilians could only be marveled at...
...Such reassurance is out of place...
...But it was at a meeting of the G-8 countries in Genoa, Italy, in July 2001, that the anti-globalists ran riot...
...The global anti-American Left and what makes them tick BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL Florence As tens of thousands of anti-globalization activists began converging on the European Social Forum on November 7, you could see small trucks trundling panes of corrugated steel and aluminum sheeting towards the center of Florence...
...Then we will enter the arms factories and try to stop production...
...Local authorities were supplemented by eight Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The problem, for anti-globalists, is not that America is "arrogant" because it is privileged, but that it is privileged because it is dishonest...
...Somewhat surprising is that so little was made at the Forum of the two great hobbyhorses of European anti-Americanism: the United States's failure to ratify the Kyoto treaty on greenhouse gases, and the continuing recourse of certain states to the death penalty...
...The anti-globalist groups were meeting in opposition to three things: "neoliberalism" (as they call capitalism), war (particularly the one they expect America to wage in Iraq), and racism...
...But there were plenty of thugs within the country...
...The No Globals in Bologna boarded their trains saying they were enacting an "auto-reduction" of fares, paying 5 euros instead of 20...
...His promise was that "we as Palestinians will never ever stop our struggle...
...The French Communist CGT trade union, a staple of the International in Cold War days, came to Florence in force...
...Christian Losson, who has covered the movement for years for the left-wing Paris daily Liberation, notes that people have been predicting the demise of the anti-globalists for years...
...It is tempting to view "anti-globalist" as little more than an umbrella description for those who seek to rein-vigorate the old hard Left...
...The McDonald's on via Cavour dismantled its plastic logos and put them in storage before battening down the windows...
...in the worst incident, rioters in balaclavas and motorcycle helmets chased a police Land Rover into a narrow alley off the central piazza Alimonda...
...So, yes, the groups are held together by an opposition to liberal capitalism...
...And even former Socialist prime minister Romano Prodi—who as the head of the European Commission is the most powerful politician in the European Union—says, "The words of the young have a meaning...
...The most prominent was probably Colleen Kelly, who lost a brother in the World Trade Center attacks and then founded a group called Peaceful Tomorrows, a committee of 50 families of victims of September 11—the only 50, one imagines, who weren't positively delighted to see the United States rain vengeance on the Taliban...
...Since the Doha conference of the WTO last year, Greenpeace has begun to attack international economic and banking institutions as well as polluters...
...But there were no violent incidents...
...This is why they despise the description "anti-globalist" (or "No-Global" as they're called in Italy...
...and several representatives of Attac, a French group active in 18 countries whose core issue is a tax on international currency trading...
...Even if that means everyone else should go into theirs...
...We should be listening to them, even if they sound strange to us, and translate them into politics: We should not condescend to them, nor should we be their adversaries...
...The most widespread is an ambivalent attitude towards violence...
...Nor was Domenici fazed when it looked like an anti-American peace march scheduled to close the week's events on Saturday would draw similarly unexpected crowds...
...The Goteborg event also showed how scrupulously such events were being policed: 56 cops but only 3 protesters were seriously injured...
...And a presiding hero of the gathering, his name on everyone's lips as a kind of spiritual founding father, was Comandante Marcos, leader of the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Mexico...
...The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which had been expressly banned from the first Porto Alegre Global Forum, had no official delegation, but all of their propaganda was being handed out by third parties...
...The Italian Left, gathered into a broad front called the Olive Tree for the past half decade, today faces problems strikingly similar to those of the Democratic party in the United States: Facing a strong premier (the opportunistic Silvio Berlusconi), they have run out of ideas, and the resulting lack of direction has left them mired in infighting...
...It has given the movement an agenda—in favor of Third World debt cancellation and against multinationals—that has made America the scapegoat for more concrete reasons...
...The ELA, the radical trade union that represents the Herri Batasuna terrorists in Spain's Basque country, was there...
...They also tried to stage a blitz at a Caterpillar tractor factory ("guilty of providing Israel with the tractors used to destroy Palestinian homes...
...The people lumped together as the anti-globalist movement are in fact neither anti-globalist nor a movement...
...The airspace over Florence was closed...
...The absence of old anti-American saws is a sign that this anti-Americanism is not of Communist origin...
...Piero Fassino, secretary of the Democratic Socialists, considers the movement one of "extraordinary interest...
...Paolo Ceri thinks the matter of violence is a tricky one...
...Tuscany's governor Claudio Martini is angry that the Olive Tree, to which he belongs, did not send an official delegation to the peace march...
...I Disobbedienti, a group led by a fellow named Luca Casarini, has perfected a protest technique called the "blitz...
...he offered the gathering's kickoff speech...
...Others at the Camp Darby march had brought motorcycle helmets...
...Only at Nice in 2000 did unions join the protests in large numbers...
...Such acts tend paradoxically to reassure bourgeois observers that the anti-globalization movement is a fringe phenomenon...
...and we [politicians] should come out of our bunkers...
...New Louis Vuitton and Fendi boutiques, scheduled to open days previously, had delayed their grand openings, and were totally encased...
...The Left was positively gloating at the march's suc-cess—a gloating that surely owed much to shock...
...Fourteen special trains and 430 busloads of young people arrived on Saturday for the march against the American war in Iraq, swelling it to 450,000 people (a million, according to its organizers...
...elections that "the world has changed since Tuesday...
...There's some truth to this...
...A better indicator is their ideology, as it has developed— and hardened—since September 11...
...He was handing out fliers that called for the formation of "international brigades" (like those formed by left-wing intellectuals to fight in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s) to travel to Iraq and defend it against American aggression...
...They were carrying flags attached to two-pound poles that doubled as blackjacks (an old demonstration trick...
...Palestinian liberation seemed at times to be the main purpose of the gathering, and anti-Israel sentiments threatened to drown out anti-American ones...
...The American attack on Afghanistan was mentioned in every single panel I attended, but the attacks of September 11 were never adduced as a cause...
...At a World Bank meeting in Prague in September 2000, protesters were throwing Molotov cocktails in the faces of police...
...Anti-globalists differ on when their movement got its start...
...Then there was the friendly group of "Ultras" I tagged along with at Camp Darby...
...This was typical...
...It is hard to believe nationalists like Pat Buchanan felt at home joining this band when it protested in Seattle...
...They—or at least the youths among them—delight in travel and mass immigration and the cultural variety (however short-term) that they provide...
...Dozens were injured and hundreds arrested in Nice in December of that year...
...Language is the surest indicator of this...
...Those who make plain their opposition to war through parades don't go far enough," he said...
...Ceri thinks that, until 1995, anti-globalization was a pretty straightforward "old politics" of protecting the environment and human rights...
...This critique is much more coherent and radical than the one that anti-capitalists were putting forward in the 1990s...
...Florentines were divided over the event...
...Domenici, the radical-chic mayor, sniffed, "There are a lot of people who should be offering apologies now...
...But no...
...But now, in Italy at least, even the old center-left parties want a piece of the new radical action...
...Some trace its beginnings to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, others to the foundation of the World Trade Organization in 1995, and others to San Francisco environmentalist Jerry Mander's founding in 1994 of the International Forum on Globalization, a kind of Internet clearinghouse that links these various groups...
...At the march on Camp Darby there were Israeli flags with sky-blue swastikas in place of the Star of David...
...What these groups have in common is opposition to either market capitalism or the United States, which serves more and more as a metonym for anything the groups oppose...
...So militaristic expansion and economic imperialism are, for the anti-globalists, two ways of saying the same thing...
...So they are now exceedingly inclined to clutch at anything on the left that appears to have energy...
...the pipe-smoking smasher of McDonald's, Jose Bove of the French Peasant Confederation...
...In this context, there is nothing surprising about their anti-Americanism...
...One of the masked attackers, a 23-year-old radical named Carlo Giuliani, picked up a fire extinguisher and tried to stave in the back of the vehicle...
...But it has also radicalized the movement...
...When Fausto Bertinotti, who leads Italy's Party of Communist Refoundation, took the stage in one of the giant halls in the Fortezza da Basso to announce that "War is the basis of the neoliberal economy, the same in essence as globalization," the crowd cheered him for five minutes...
...This is a hard-line Communist group drawn from supporters of the Livorno soccer team...
...The city's radical-chic mayor, Leonardo Domenici, welcomed the groups gathering for dozens of seminars and workshops in the city's Fortezza da Basso, even when attendance grew from an anticipated 10,000 to nearly 40,000...
...And writer Oriana Fal-laci wrote an "Open Letter to the Florentines" in Corriere della Sera, in which she urged her native city to resist the anti-glob-alists as it had the Nazis...
...At a march on the U.S...
...He bemoaned that Third-World countries see no difference between the United States and Europe, that "under the surface there is the same will to use globalization as an instrument of neocolonial imperialist domination of the world...
...And the more ardently these anti-globalists excoriate the American political class, the more likely they are to describe themselves as "culturally pro-American"—by which they generally mean they like movies and the blues...
...There are many ways of not being peaceful...
...And it has focused on values—on the categorical imperative of treating the underprivileged "fairly," through a sort of global income redistribution—that alter the logic of anti-Americanism...
...So when Florence was chosen last winter as the site of the first Europe-wide anti-globalist gathering, fears arose quite naturally that the gathering—and particularly the march that closed it—would be an occasion for more violence...
...Walking through the Piazza della Repubblica, you could hear the zheem...
...Sergio Cofferati, a prominent Italian labor leader, expressed his hopes that the Forum would convince the Third World that the First World was in fact split in two, and in a good way...
...Or take the labor movement...
...Nothing will break our will...
...Since anti-globalization protests first erupted at meetings of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in late 1999, the movement has grown steadily more radical and violent...
...Thanks to economies of scale, among other factors, the United States has become the West's specialist in warfare...
...September 11 put a damper on international conclaves, and has limited the occasions for organized protest...
...We are going to get more violence...
...This bus was covered in posters, one of which was the famous image of Che Guevara silhouetted in black on a red background...
...Protesters leapt onto the Land Rover, bashed in the windows, and began attacking the police with crowbars and clubs...
...There were no trade unions at Genoa, but at the Florence march, Italy's huge umbrella union, the CGIL, provided the security, and the European Confederation of Trade Unions was also represented...
...Another throwback at the Camp Darby march, this time to the sixties, was the Movi-mento Disoccupati—"Movement of the Unemployed"— who were holding their banners with one hand and passing joints with the other...
...The day that America began to bomb Afghanistan," Kelly told the Forum at a morning seminar, "I cried...
...of air wrenches riveting these barricades onto shop-fronts and department store windows...
...But assuming a start somewhere in the early 1990s, its transformation has been rapid...
...We have to go beyond that...
...One saw hundreds of Palestinian flags in the course of those five days in Florence...
...Palestinian spokesman Mustafa Barghouti...
...It does this by creating a specialization of roles in all walks of life...
...A day into the conference, wildly violent demonstrations against the police left 700 injured...
...April 2000 saw 650 arrests in Washington for an anti-IMF protest...
...But there are pacifists, and there are pacifists...
...But the effects of high-tech capitalism can be more complex...
...The tendencies gathered in Florence are coming to form a sort of globalized popular front...
...Years ago, only the Greens took part in No-Global events, and then only gingerly...
...The Palestinian struggle has become the issue of all free people in the world...
...The atmosphere was festive rather than menacing...
...Instead, the movement has broadened its base steadily, to the point where it is now—without "selling out"—assimi-lating huge parts of the old Left to its own agenda...
...And La Repubbli-ca, the national daily of the left intelligentsia, ran as a banner headline on page one: "Florence: A Celebration of Peace...
...The big guns at the Social Forum included the Italian environmentalist league Legambiente...
...Nor are they a movement so much as a group of left tendencies...
...Giuliani, shown in jogging pants, smiling sweetly and drinking a beer, was treated as a martyr, his death as an unprovoked aggression...
...Shell gas stations outside Florence did the same...
...Marco Manetti, a book dealer in via Ricasoli who had kept his shop open, said, "I got pressure to close my shop...
...Now it is the turn of the political parties to get absorbed...
...As Giovanni Berlinguer, son of the late Italian Communist leader Enrico Berlinguer, put it: "The lesson of September 11 is that the global market creates anger...
Vol. 8 • November 2002 • No. 11
