Red Affront

National Review Online, October 3, 2000

In some senses, Prague got off lightly. In London, after all, "anti-capitalist" demonstrators had recently spray-painted the Cenotaph with the suggestion that Britain's principal war memorial would make a good place to urinate. The mainly foreign protesters in Prague last week were far more refined. They merely chose to march into town under red flags and the hammer and sickle, symbols of a regime that not so long ago was murdering and imprisoning tens of thousands of Czechs.

The occasion, of course, was the joint annual meeting of the World Bank and the IMF. Such events now attract the protests of another set of anti-capitalists, the vicious travelling circus of the anti-globalization movement, and the intimidation and violence that it brings with it. This was the case in Seattle and Melbourne. Now it was Prague's turn.

Anti-globalization is the latest manifestation of the Left's seemingly indefatigable attempts to mess things up for the rest of us. Undaunted by the economic, environmental, and human disaster of socialism's last hundred years, they have now turned their angry attention onto free trade, and the supposedly sinister forces behind it, the World Bank and the IMF. There are, of course, differences from the past. This new Left is not as monolithic as its predecessors. The iron discipline of the Comintern has been replaced by a plethora of tiny cells, connected, strengthened, and somehow amplified by the power of an Internet able to create an impression of size even where none exists. So, the Prague action was meant to be supported by demonstrations across the globe, each of which was excitedly previewed on the web. In Melbourne, C.A.C.T.U.S. (Campaign Against Corporate Tyranny United in Struggle) was planning a carnival, while in Bangladesh the Garment Workers Unity Forum and the Revolutionary Unity Front intended "to make a demonstration waving black flags." In these United States, steelworkers in Chicago were apparently preparing to confront Harris Bank with a puppet show.

Harris Bank was left intact. Prague was not so lucky. Six or seven thousand protesters arrived from abroad, determined to shut down the city in the name of their version of global justice. Naturally, they were quick to move on Wenceslas Square, a sacred place for many Czechs, the heart of their Velvet Revolution, but a site of tragedy too: the spot where, in 1969, Jan Palach, a young student who really understood what idealism was, burned himself to death in protest against an earlier generation of invaders that had come to this city. Then, of course, it was the Soviet Army, but, as we have seen, the symbols of the anti-globalizers, those red flags, that hammer and sickle, they are just the same. And so was the message: "Do it our way, or there will be violence."

Of course, no one was ever that explicit. Most of the protesters were quick to come out with statements rejecting any violence, but their websites gave them away. One of the most prominent contained a list of suggested activities that included "occupations of offices, blockades and shutdowns, appropriating and disposing of luxury consumer goods, sabotaging, wrecking or interfering with capitalist infrastructure, appropriating capitalist wealth and returning it to the working people." That does not sound entirely peaceful to me.

The producers of www.destroyimf.org were more straightforward, running with the slogan "Turn Prague into Seattle." Many protesters tried to do just that. In the process they cost the people of what is still a poor country a great deal of money. Demonstrators fought with police, ripped up sidewalks, threw Molotov cocktails, and, in what is rapidly becoming an irritating cliché, stormed McDonalds, the franchised Winter Palace of their gimcrack revolution. The comrades at www.destroyimf.org could barely conceal their excitement at the drama of it all, a re-run, it seemed, of the glorious days of the Bolshevik rising. To one John Reed wannabe, September 26 had been "the day the IMF died." Judging by the breathless commentary on their website, it had been eleven hours that shook the world: "1215: Fighting begins; anarchist column takes the railway below the bridge. 1400: Protest columns fan out to the south and east. 1900: Column surrounds opera house. 2300: Minor running battles and windows smashed."

It seems that the revolutionaries were, at least in part, successful. The IMF and World Bank proceedings wound up a day early, the organizers unconvincingly claiming that they had completed all the work that they had come to Prague to do. Even if that were true, they should have stayed put, sipping champagne to pass the time and to make their point, occasionally, perhaps, hurling a few stale canapés into the baying mob below. The early retreat was a sign of weakness, and it was not the first from the supranational financial institutions. Since the whole anti-globalization movement started gathering pace, official reaction has been a blend of appeasement and apology. We caught a glimpse of this approach at Seattle in Bill Clinton's shifty "defense" of free trade, and we have seen plenty of it since then.

This is strange. It is not as if the foes of globalization have much intellectual force behind them. Their arguments are a blend of Al Gore greenery and Maoist economics, all wrapped up in a sort of sickly sentimentalism about the Third World that would, in fact, further impoverish that luckless part of the world. Bogus, economically illiterate, and potentially catastrophic, it is not a case that should be difficult to rebut, but none of our leaders seems to be trying hard to do so. Instead we see shame-faced equivocations or worse, the Uriah Heep-like pandering of those such as World Bank President Wolfensohn, a man pleased to pronounce that we live in a world "scarred by inequality." In between their bouts of savagery, the protesters in Prague were, he noted, "asking legitimate questions."

What nonsense. Here and there, you may find a true believer. There was the British schoolteacher who confided to Reuters that she was in Prague because her clearly rather odd child "often woke up in the middle of the night, frightened about global warming." For the most part, however, the game being played in the Czech capital was of a different, much nastier kind. It was partly about violence, the sheer Clockwork Orange fun that a punch-up can bring, and it was all about power, the right to boss everybody else around.

For all the talk about the working classes, the dispossessed seamstresses of Latin America, and the impoverished women farmers of Africa, the demonstrators tended to be Western European and university-educated. For such people, protests of this nature reinforce their bourgeois sense of moral and social superiority over the lower orders, the class they feel born to rule. As one of the organizers, Martin Shaw, a "Nottingham University graduate and anarchist" explained to the London Daily Telegraph, "Working people do not have the benefits of an educational system and they are afraid of losing their jobs." Not only that, but these blue-collar saps are couch potatoes, sitting back "in front of their televisions," grumbled another activist, rather than joining the battle against world capitalism. The corollary of this is that the "working people" need the Martin Shaws of this world to put things right for them. If you think that this sounds like the early 20th-century revolutionaries, you would be right. There is the same apocalyptic language, the same overweening sense of self-importance, the same absence of a paying job.

Unfortunately, too, there are the same prospects of some very real success. For, at bottom, these protesters are speaking the language of those very organizations that they claim to oppose. To take one, closely related, example: Environmental activists used to perform the same outsider role as the anti-globalizers do today, but much of their belief in regulation and control proved appealing to the soft-left consensus that prevails in our international institutions. And so, to their barely concealed delight, environmentalists found themselves co-opted into the global bureaucratic process. Their unelected, unaccountable pressure groups were magically transformed into "Non-Governmental Organizations." Better funded, but still unelected and still unaccountable, these NGOs were given consultative seats at the supranational legislative table. The result, at least in part, was the ludicrous Kyoto treaty.

A similar future beckons for some appropriately house-trained anti-globalizers. The cluttered WTO agenda in Seattle was evidence that officialdom is open to some of their ideas, an impression that Mr. Wolfensohn's platitudes will have done nothing to contradict. In Prague, indeed, certain pressure groups were invited to meet and debate with the IMF/World Bank delegates. This will only be the beginning of a prolonged courtship and, as for those other Non-Governmental Organizations, you and me, well, you can be sure that we will not be invited along.