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"Tear gas sucks"
I was minding my own business when the Seattle cops gassed me.
By Zach Works
[12/02/99]

If he can make it here ...
Arizona Sen. John McCain's toughest opponent in the New York primary is not George W. Bush, but the state's Byzantine process for qualifying for the ballot.
By Andrea Bernstein
[12/02/99]

Senator from the fourth estate
Adored by the national media, criticized at home, John McCain has turned his reputation for candor into political capital.
By Anthony York
[12/02/99]

WTO protesters go to the Web
Guerrilla journalists and webcams bring you all the tear-gassed excitement of Seattle's street protests.
By Fiona Morgan
[12/01/99]

Bare breasts, green condoms and rubber bullets
The WTO has united labor and the radical, countercultural left in a way the anti-war movement never could.
By David Moberg
[12/01/99]

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The police could have used a different method to clear the area, by simply arresting all of the blockaders. That's what most protesters expected to happen, and they had undergone extensive training by the nonviolent Direct Action Network to prepare themselves for jail.

But mass arrests of peaceful protesters are time-consuming and expensive, and often bad for public relations. Gassing a crowd is a quick and uncomplicated way to make it disperse. Of course, it's a controversial method, but not if the police and media make it seem like a response to rioting.

The splits on the streets in Seattle mirror divisions in direct action groups throughout the Northwest

In Seattle, some activists from Humboldt County, Calif. -- mostly young, many women -- engaged in what's called a "lock-down action," in which protesters use bicycle locks or other devices to create a human blockade. Lock-downs have been widely used by direct action movements throughout the 1990s, especially by Earth First and animal-rights groups. The devices allow protesters to hold a space -- an intersection, a logging road, an opponent's office -- for much longer than they otherwise could, because it takes considerable time and effort to cut them apart.

Two years ago in Humboldt County, police developed a new way of handling lock-downs: pepper spray. In the most widely publicized incident, four Earth First activists who were blockading Rep. Frank Riggs' office in Eureka had pepper spray applied directly to their eyes with cotton swabs.  

At Tuesday's WTO protest, 20 demonstrators from Humboldt County used lock boxes to link themselves in a circle. As supporters gathered around them, you could see thick clouds of tear gas at the next intersection down the hill, where police were dispersing a crowd. Calls went up for vinegar and rags to cover the faces of the blockaders, who calmly sat and waited.

An hour or so later, the police arrived and asked the blockaders to leave. When they refused, cops went around the circle, pepper-spraying the activists in the face. They didn't unlock. The police sprayed again. Still the blockaders stayed firm. After two more attempts, the police finally gave up, ceding the intersection to the protesters.

Obviously it takes extraordinary endurance and dedication to take that kind of punishment, and it's not clear that the gains exceed the costs. In Humboldt County, Earth First has been moving away from lock-downs and toward traditional Gandhi-style civil disobedience: sit-ins, human chains and the like.

But in the Eugene area, the advent of pepper spray has had a radicalizing effect. For about a year, activists have been questioning and abandoning nonviolence. I think the property-destroying tactics used on Tuesday were stupid and ineffective. It's not just testosterone-charged yahoos who are rejecting nonviolent styles of protest, some are seasoned activists who have several years of direct-action campaigning under their belts.

Among them are two young women I've had contact with in the past. I met one in connection with the direct-action campaign to preserve New York's community gardens, which I worked on for two years. I met the other at an Earth First forest encampment while doing research for a book. I didn't see either of them on Tuesday, but I thought about a manifesto that one passed on to me last week.

It read, "Let's not train the thousands of people who gather in Seattle to do no more than be herded by the police, hold signs and offer themselves up as sacrificial lock-down lambs. I'm not advocating a riot. The ground between violence and pacifism is wide, much larger than the ivory tower of either. Meet me there."
salon.com | Dec. 2, 1999

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