lunarfox22

a little fox typing on a keyboard

30 | I just wanna draw comics. Unfortunately I must live in a context.



margot
@margot

Lori Wallach: I learned about direct action and was radicalized by the notion that sometimes you just need to be fucking ungovernable. You must physically interrupt power. That methodology we learned from our Latin American partners. That was not where I came from. I came from a political culture of protesting to make people pay attention. That was also the Ralph Nader methodology—or you sue them. The Latin American methodology was that if you did any of those things, you may disappear. The first thing you do is fuck the place up! You start by smashing things, becoming ungovernable and scaring the living crap out of the elites so they realize they have to make settlements with you. You don't start by asking nicely. For many people around the world, there is still a very high cost to protest. Part of what led us to realize that Seattle had to be a moment was because it was, relatively speaking, safe to do it there. The likelihood that someone would be kidnapped or murdered to make examples of them, dropping someone from a helicopter, is not something we had to deal with. In so many other places, that was not the case. We felt an obligation because the U.S. had helped cause the problem of the WTO and we were in a safe place to take it down.

— from One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the WTO Protests, by DW Gibson (emphasis mine)


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