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Battle In Seattle: Never Surrender, Never Forget

realitycatcher-alapoet.blogspo… — By any objective account, the protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle in 1999 were one of the most significant political statements in the last three decades. "Battle In Seattle," the just-released fictionalized movie account of the Seattle protests, will go a long way toward keeping the memory of the event alive.

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  • yessuri, on 05/23/2008, -0/+4Keep the memory alive
  • Surferess, on 05/23/2008, -0/+5I had forgotten how hard-core this protest was.
  • spacewrangler, on 05/23/2008, -0/+3I wasn't living here yet but..Wow!
  • PolishLogic, on 05/23/2008, -1/+2So much coffee was spilled during the ferocious battle, that the streets were turned into a river of brown.
  • ryanlive, on 05/23/2008, -6/+1I was there and can authoritatively say it was lame. Just a bunch of militant communists getting their panties in a bunch.
  • jamesthewitch, on 05/24/2008, -0/+4Hey - I was THERE being tear-gassed by the cops in 1999. I went because I was compelled to do so and felt like I had to make a stand against the WTO, along with everyone else going to Seattle. For the record, I am not and have never been a communist nor do I wear panties. I am a radical Green and prefer boxers.

    It was very hard-core, organized peacefully, and was the largest and most successful civil disobedience in which I have EVER been involved. This is saying a lot, as I was an ACT-UP San Francisco activist and helped found it in its early days - not its later nutty version.

    The story is the Seattle PD ran out of tear gas and began to draw on the military's stock of CS-gas. Concussion grenades and flash bombs were used against people peacefully protesting all over the downtown. I personally witnessed numerous injuries from these devices that are meant to scare the living HELL out of you, trigger a panic response and make you run, and that are so loud they can actually knock you out if you are close enough to them.

    I am an RN, so I became a First Responder to help with all of the injuries. We discovered the cops were literally going after the First Responders and arresting us, so that we could not help people. Because it became a cat-and-mouse situation in the downtown, some of us took refuge in the lower level of Pike's Place Market. A security guard kept watch FOR US - I will never forget him! - and came down to tell us that the cops were on their way, so we had to evacuate the injured people. One of the injured was a young Canadian woman who was just a few feet away from one of the flash bomb-concussion grenades when it went off and she blacked out, pitched forward, and fell face down on her nose. We had to run to avoid capture, taking our wounded with us.

    I witness a cop on a motorcycle trying to run over a guy's leg, simply because he was blockading an intersection. What scared the BEJESUS out of the cops was that this was such a MASSIVE and well-executed protest that it freaked them out.

    Anyone who tells you anything else probably did not participate or has an error in reality-testing. I was there, it was real, and it was INCREDIBLE.
    • dleesgeetar, on 05/24/2008, -1/+1damn, that was the longest comment . . .
      • jamesthewitch, on 05/25/2008, -0/+1Yeah, sorry bout that! It started out as just a few lines and just grew.

        I actually wrote a longer version at my blog after inspiration from Steve aka alapoet, who shouted out about the new film.

        Please check out my eyewitness report from the frontlines at the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle at

        http://www.jimboland.com/2008/05/23/teamsters-and- ...

        I just added you as a friend, btw.

        Thanks.

        James
  • alapoet, on 05/24/2008, -0/+2jamesthewitch, thank you so much for sharing that. May I add your account to my blog post?

    ryanlive, are you sure it was the protest that was lame? Or maybe just the commentator?
  • dleesgeetar, on 05/24/2008, -0/+1i was . . . watching it on tv, but a couple miles away. the thing about these protests is that many protesters mean well, but punks take advantage of it for their own less respectable causes - i remember anarchist groups coming up from Oregon, then of course there are the straight up criminals who break windows and steal
  • LewP, on 05/25/2008, -0/+1Let me guess Poet, you were there?
  • debunkthelies, on 05/25/2008, -0/+2There must be an alternative to paying for law enforcement, especially since most are now nothing more than our own local mercenaries, they belong to their own gang, that is not there to Protect and to Serve, but to Persecute and Punish. The mindset of law enforcement is everyone is a criminal, except them, of course they do exactly the same things they arrest people for, but they have a badge so it's ok for them.
    I am so sick of hearing of the excessive force, the beatings, the taserings, the total lack of humanity in these 'thugs' with a badge.
    There must be a better way to manage our society.
  • jamesthewitch, on 05/25/2008, -0/+2Three observations about the Seattle protests in 1999: 1) the 'black-clad' anarchists issued the most singularly most eloquent and pointedly precise statements about the domination of our society by megacorporate interests and called them out, even challenging the middle-class organizers of the protests to be more assertive in demanding the elevation of human and civil rights over the interests of big business and 2) the anarchists that I met were not violent people and only a few smashed windows. An important note here: it was recognized that some people were smashing Starbucks windows, while leaving the mom-and-pop coffee shops alone and 3) yes, a few people took to rampaging and destroying property, after the strategic window-smashing, but that started only after the police began to savagely attack groups of peaceful protesters.

    Please do not overly focus on "anarchists": the anarchists that I know are the only ones that believe that the members of a civil society are the best ones to "police" and govern it, not elected officials or hired cops. Anarchy does not mean lawlessness, it means that individuals have a higher index of personal responsibility for all of the problems, needs, and issues in a society.
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