They’re baaack! The radical network that shut down the World Trade Organization in 1999’s “Battle of Seattle” is being reincarnated to shut down global fossil fuel production on April 20. “Aggressive protests and civil disobedience” will animate the “International Day of Direct Action Against Extraction” says protest organizer Rising Tide North America, a coalition of environmental, climate and “social justice” groups.
Marching orders are simple: “For a stable climate, clean air and water, we must stop the extraction of fossil fuels and other resources.” How? “Target government and corporations. Take it to the point of production: shut down a well site, occupy a mine, take over an office, blockade a bank.” Do that enough and the world stops.
Demands are simpler: “Immediate phaseout of fossil fuel extraction and transition to truly sustainable forms of energy.”
Rising Tide has a few add-ons: “Community control over natural resources, reparations from government and corporations for past damage, full health coverage, and sustainable livelihoods.”
Don’t you just feel like asking, “Would you like fries with that?”
Despite its Karl-Marx-for-first-graders rhetoric, Rising Tide isn’t the usual band of Big Green agitprop shock troops that infest Washington – in fact, the Riser mob curses Big Green for selling out to corporate interests. This ain’t your father’s environmental movement.
It’s an arrogant new animal strutting amok in the anti-capitalist zoo. Rising Tide is a combatant in “netwar,” the name two Rand scholars gave to an emerging 21st century type of unconventional war.
The battle style, say Rand’s John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, is common to three theaters of conflict: bomb-making terrorists, drug smuggling cartels and radical social activists.
Rising Tide’s network is like that of terrorists and drug smugglers, “with many groups actually being leaderless … operating in small, dispersed units that can deploy nimbly — anywhere, anytime. They know how to penetrate and disrupt, as well as elude and evade. All feature network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age,” as Arquilla and Ronfeldt wrote in their book “Networks and Netwars.”
Social radicals also rely on “swarming” – coming together quickly from out of nowhere in swarms to attack unprepared targets and baffle law enforcement, aided by smartphone warnings, Geographic Information Systems directions, and instant access to strategic webpages that can coordinate global attacks.
Recall the Battle of Seattle, when the cellphone was as good as it got: the Direct Action Network (a coalition of the Rainforest Action Network, the Ruckus Society and a group of giant street puppet makers) was the main organizer.
It recruited swarming networks, used cellphones to misdirect the cops with decoy marchers, and to guide mainline protesters to seize and block key streets to the World Trade Organization ministerial conference entry. There, they locked arms and roughed up delegates trying to get in, ending in the collapse of the ministerial meeting.
So don’t underestimate Rising Tide and its demands. Today’s technology is better and the goals have changed. Radicals no longer identify with their nations of origin, loyalties have shifted from the nation state to a “transnational level of global civil-society,” in Rand-speak.
Rising Tide and its minions are ferociously anti-capitalist, with their own private language to define the capitalist world as “empire” anywhere it may be – not the Empire, just empire. They long for an Edenlike world that never existed and don’t want to replace what they tear down.
Come April 20, don’t bother reminding Rising Tide that their smartphones work on electricity generated mostly by coal-fired power plants or natural gas. But you are allowed to chuckle at night when the protesters zoom home after piling into their big sport utility vehicle.
Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
