5 Days That Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond [Paperback]

Alexander Cockburn (Author), Jeffrey St Clair (Author), Allan Sekula (Photographer), Jeffrey St. Clair (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2001

"In the annals of popular protest in America, these have been shining hours, achieved entirely outside the conventional arena of orderly protest, white paper activism and the timid bleats of the professional leadership of big labor establishment greens. This truly was an insurgency from below in which all those who strove to moderate and deflect the turbulent flood of popular outrage managed only to humiliate themselves."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The 1999 World Trade Organization protests will forever be associated with violence. But, outside of Seattle, where the event has been debated ad infinitum, the cause, victims, and perpetrators of that violence have been lost to a haze of media-generated moments that simplified an inspired, multifaceted, and generally nonviolent event. Through eyewitness chronicles of the events in Seattle and demonstrations in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, muckrakers Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, as well as a handful of other contributing journalists, vividly relive the opening salvos of a new radical movement in America. While they are understandably effusive about the success of the actions, which clearly placed the issues of anti-globalization and economic justice onto the national and international political agendas, the book's emphasis--and its impact--is on what they see as a national trend towards the violent criminalization of protest and the increasing use of paramilitary forces in law enforcement.

In Seattle, which was transformed from a street festival to a police state in a matter of hours, St. Clair mingles at the cafés and warehouses that acted as staging areas for direct actions, and walks the streets where dancing, drumming, and peaceful sit-ins were punctuated by shocking acts of police brutality--unprovoked attacks with rubber bullets and concussion grenades, a waitress pepper-sprayed while leaving her shift, her boyfriend beaten and arrested, copies of the Bill of Rights confiscated, Christmas carolers tear-gassed. In D.C., the police break into homes of opposition leaders, spy on their activities, pressure print shops to close, and make illegal sweep arrests. But Cockburn and St. Clair are not satisfied with excoriating the police; they also turn their vitriolic pens against those within the protest movement who aren't as radical as they, from labor unions to "establishment greens." The authors would have done better to devote the space to a more articulated explanation of exactly why they were protesting against the WTO than to causing divisiveness between those on the same side. --Lesley Reed

Review

This is movement reporting on a par with Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night. -- Peter Linebaugh, author of The Many-Headed Hydra

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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Verso (January 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 185984779X
• ISBN-13: 978-1859847794
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #887,020 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eye of the Storm, June 17, 2002

By 

J.W.K (Nagano, Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 5 Days That Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond (Paperback)

A wonderful blend of first-hand, eye-witness reporting and even-handed analysis. Jeremy St. Clair's 40 page "Seatle Diary" alone makes the book worthy of reading. Perhaps the best piece of journalism to emerge from the growing body of Seatle stories. Two clips involving WTO delegates (one pounching a black lady in the face, another waving his revolver at a protestor baracade) utterly blew me away. And in the spirit of the lively and diverse protesters, the book is also funny at times, as when a South Central LA youth named Thomas replies to St. Clair's question, "Why are you here?" He answers: "I like turtles and I hate that ... Bill Gates." To which Sinclair replies, "Good enough for me." You won't be able to put the book down. It has a very genuine, honest and human feel. Along the way, you will run into Brower, the famous French cheese-maker Jose Bove, some interesting college professors, Sierra Club's Carl Pope, many of the so-called "anarchists" which every major media venue categorized all protestors as, and many other important people who turned out for the "Battle in Seatle." The book will not only give you a comprehensive understanding of the issues surrounding the protests and the subsequent media storm, it will also make you feel like you were there. St. Clair's writing is that good.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Prescient book, given the Retaliatory Attack on America, September 17, 2001

By 

T. G. Hermach (Eugene, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: 5 Days That Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond (Paperback)

America had never seen anything like the mass movement that took over Seattle to confront the World Trade Organization in the fall of 2001: environmentalists, religious & human rights groups, farmers, civil rights organizations, ordinary people. They came with a message of peaceful protest. They were met with shock troops, billy clubs, rubber bullets and tear gas. 5 Days that Shook the World takes you onto the streets of Seattle and the protests in Washington, Philly and Los Angeles that followed during that remarkable year. But this book isn't about illusions or myths, but about the hard truths. St. Clair and Cockburn were eerily prescient in their prediction that the vaunted coalition of labor and greens would be difficult to hold together as the demands of political reality set in and as the corporate press and the government moved to counter and undermine the movement(s). Big labor and the big greens soon abandoned the cause by endorsing the campaign of pseudo-Democrat, Al Gore, the chief broker of NAFTA and the WTO treaties. Other leaders turned away from the protests following the bloody reprisals of the police in
Quebec and Genoa. But that doesn't mean the anti-globalization movement is dead. Cockburn and St. Clair point out the fakers, but they also show you where the true heart of the movement for global social and environmental justice beats. This book is a a much needed guide to what just may be the most important struggle of our times...

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Flawed with compensations, January 28, 2001

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[e-mail] (Claremont, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 5 Days That Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond (Paperback)

Despite the book's solid pedigree, I have real misgivings with the result. First, there is not much mention - notwithstanding an entire chapter - given over to Seattle's special cachet. Namely that this was the first major protest mobilized primarily through the internet, proving that this tool's worth indeed transcends traditional capitalist confines. Considering potential value to future efforts, this absence of organizational detail amounts to a serious omission.

Moreover, with the exception of the first two, the chapters of the book follow with little recognition of what has gone before. This is not merely a stylistic or editorial quibble. The absence of narrative continuity produces a disjointed result that fails to illuminate the movement's course from Seattle to LA. Thus events replace movement, direction is lost, and important insights into expectations and preparations versus results recedes. Linearity does have its value, and at the very least some bridging commentary would have been helpful. (Also, why does the chapter touching on Philadelphia follow that of LA when chronolgically it was the reverse, a pagination that only works to disorient the knowledgable reader.)

Despite these serious flaws, there is a strong upside. Jeffrey St. Clair's diary of clashes in Seattle is exciting and informative to one who wasn't there. The color photographs - a rare luxury for a progressive publication - are atmospheric; and the discussion of who won the battle is stimulating. Most important, credit for thwarting WTO is properly given to those couregeous folks who braved the iron heel, rejected liberal moderation, and shut down the elite's star chamber. Thanks to them, the smug world of global capitalism was truly shaken. Nevertheless, a more enlightening account remains to be written.