A-Infos (en) Australia, Sydney, anarchist zine Mutiny #32 - Reviews: Battle In Seattle (2008) (Film) Directed by Stuart Townsend

Upon the brink of the new millennium, Seattle became a nest of thorns as people 
turned out in their thousands to protest against the atrocities committed by the 
WTO. Despite the attempts of Seattle Police Department to keep the rich in 
positions of power by hosing, tear gassing and shooting protesters with rubber 
bullets, the WTO was successfully shut down and didn't reconvene until 2001 in 
Doha, Quatar. ---- Almost ten years later, as I watch Stuart Townsend's Battle 
In Seattle, I feel the weight of something different on my shoulders. Its not 
just the romanticized tale of Jay valiantly leading the protesters off to 
"non-violent" battle by "consensus" or that his brother was shot by cops at a 
forest demo which fuels his desire for a better world.

Its not even the cop played by Woody Harrelson,
who apologises to Jay after beating the
crap out of him during a moment of
`my wife lost our unborn child because
she was beaten by a cop and its all your
fault you smelly hippie' rage, nor the
heart wrenching story of Seattle Mayor
Paul Schell torn between his promise
to allow both the protests and the WTO
to go ahead unhampered. The weight
on my face today is something more
than just holding witness to another
important historical peoples event being
lost to the system of corporate profit.
It was something I was thinking whilst
watching the closing scenes which might
be the only part of the film actually worth
watching. "Governments would never
again be caught off guard" "Two mile
exclusion zones would become normal at
international meetings such as WTO and
G8 summits, further restricting peoples
right to dissent" I don't think we have
learned as much from this event as the
police have.
There are some anarchists portrayed in
the film too but after reading this review
I don't expect you'll be rushing off to the
movies to watch it any time soon. I suggest
using sock puppets to make your own Battle in
Seattle at home. If you must see this
movie watch it in a room with 20 other
anarchists and turn it into a drinking
game.
                                    Mambutu

Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007)  (Book) By Naomi Klein
While Naomi Klein's most recent book
is two years old, reading it just recently
­ in this time of economic crisis ­ was
somewhat eye opening. `Shock Doctrine'
is mostly a book about economics that
traces how the absolutist laissez-faire
ideologies of Milton Friedman and
the Chicago School have pervaded the
highest echelons of US government and
business and their application has been
refined over a number of situations over
the last three decades.
The premise that Klein uses is that
multiple applications of `shock tactics/
therapy' through torture (upon an
individual's mind and body) and the
destruction of war (upon the collective
body of the masses and the infrastructure
they require to survive) reduce the population's
ability to resist the implementation of the
economists' dream triumvirate of privatisation,
deregulation, and cutbacks to public
spending. She starts with the example
of the Pinochet coup in Chile where
brutal violence and torture enacted upon
the people allowed the dictator and
his Chicago School trained-cronies to
implement free market policies.
The idea is that over the decades, these
economic ideologues started to realise
that their unpopular policies could
only be implemented on the back of a
crisis that would render a population
incapacitated, or put them into shock, if
you will. Klein looks at the example of
Russia in the early 90's, where over the
corpse of communism a battle was waged
over whether to gradually introduce a
more social democratic-style capitalism
or to go the whole way with free-market
extremism. What ended up happening
was termed `economic shock therapy',
where an incredibly fast process of
privatization, along with massive layoffs,
deregulation and cutbacks to crucial
social services left most of the population
decimated while creating a tiny elite of
the super rich.
What really brought the book together
and up to date for me, were the chapters
on Iraq (and `the war on terror' in
general) and New Orleans. In both
of these, Klein manages to produce
anecdotes and information I'd never
read before despite how much has been
written on these topics. To summarise
simplistically, she looks at how these two
very different crises and the decimated
populations they created were capitalised
(hah!) upon, turning both regions into
testing-labs for free-market experiments
and Chicago School ideology.
`Shock Doctrine' is incredibly well
researched and easy to read ­ something
I think is quite an accomplishment
considering its rather complicated
premise (which I haven't given full
justice to here). It is not an inaccessible
piece of academic wank. Apart from
the examples I've already mentioned
there's also in depth case-studies from
Thatcherite Britain, post-apartheid South
Africa, capitalist communism in China,
post-tsumani Sri Lanka and more. While
all this is exceptionally informative,
it's also hella-scary with one failing
of the book being that it's attempts to
find how this implementation of right-
wing capitalism can be resisted seeming
like an after-thought and not all that
satisfactory.
                                   SourDough

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