Nov.-Dec. 2001:
Drums of War, Voices for Peace
Pacifism in a Time of National Pain
Roots of Conflict
What’s Next for Global Justice?
Pentagon’s Blank Check
Our One-Dimensional Media
Countering Military Recruiting
The Constitution in Turmoil
A Nonmilitary Response
New Yorkers Against War

Homepages:
War Resisters League
The Nonviolent Activist

What Next for Global Justice?

by Geov Parrish

For the rapidly maturing global justice movement, the final weekend of September was to be a showcase and a showdown. As the IMF and World Bank met, Washington, DC, was bracing for violent street clashes—like those that took place earlier this year in Genoa and Quebec—between 40,000 or more protesters and a militarized police force of 6,000-plus. At the same time, strategists and advocates from around the world were coming for conferences, teach-ins, and the planning of the movement’s transition from street nuisance to policy force.

photo: David McReynolds

Then the planes hit, and everything changed.

Now, as the World Trade Organization meets in Qatar November 9-13—meetings widely described as a last-ditch effort to save the WTO after the hemorrhaging that began in Seattle in 1999—global justice advocates have a new imperative and a new opportunity. Once the immediate urge to retaliate for the September 11 attacks subsides, and the serious task of minimizing the chances of future terrorism begins, politicians and generals will have to confront the uncomfortable fact that a military response won’t work. That’s the global justice movement’s first imperative: to incorporate a discussion of militarism, using the current crisis to show that our military is poorly designed to defend our country precisely because it is organized instead as the ultimate enforcement tool of global capitalism.

And there is a second, even more direct connection between the global justice movement and the War on Terrorism. One can’t end terrorism without changing the circumstances that incubate in people (through whatever combination of faith, hatred and desperation) the will to take their own lives and those of many others. The violent, radical-fringe Sunni movement that spawned Osama bin Laden (and thousands of people around the world with similar beliefs) is inherently neither anti-Western, anti-capitalist, nor “evil.” In the view of its adherents, they are not launching an all-out war of Islam against the West; they are responding to a war they perceive the West, usually led by the United States, is waging against Islam. Activists tend to ascribe all of that war to America’s foreign policy sins, but Islam’s list of grievances is much broader. It includes wars where Muslims have borne the worst violence—in Chechnya, Bosnia, Azerbaijan, Kosovo/a, Kashmir and, of course, in Iran (when the West supported Iraq in the ’80s), Iraq (where sanctions have killed more than a million civilians) and Palestine; U.S. and Western support for brutal dictatorships in Iran (the Shah), Indonesia, Chad, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Algeria; and perceived desecration of Islamic holy sites by the U.S. military during its Gulf War deployment.

And, of course, widespread, crushing poverty. It is impossible to address terrorism fully without addressing the policies that lead young men to desperation in every part of the Islamic world from the Philippines to Morocco. It is impossible to convince fringe elements in the Muslim world that they are not being screwed by the West when, economically, they are. And that requires the exact same re-examination (and, hopefully, repudiation) of neo-liberalism that has attracted headlines from Seattle to Genoa.

Geov Parrish is a journalist and activist in Seattle.