Date:Sat, 12 Aug 2000 12:08:27 -0700
From: John Johnson <change@pacbell.net>
Reply-To:change-links@egroups.com
"It struck me as fishy, and I wondered who paid for flying all these
people up here,"
Zerzan said of Hayden's visit. "Other people were kind of eating it up."
http://chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/article/0,2669,SAV-0008120203,FF.html
OREGON CITY IS CRADLE TO LATEST GENERATION OF
ANARCHIST PROTESTERS
By Flynn McRoberts
Tribune Staff Writer
August 12, 2000
EUGENE, Ore. -- For a place known as the informal capital of anarchy in
America, this wooded city
along the Willamette River is unusually tidy and polite.
The streets are clean. Drivers don't cut you off in traffic. The mayor
is a Republican.
So how did a community renowned as a birthplace of the nation's running
craze become better known
as a laboratory for revolutionaries bent on knocking the legs out from
under modern society?
How did this home of ancient forests also grow a movement that disrupted
the World Trade
Organization conference last fall and has officials in Los Angeles, site
of next week's Democratic
National Convention, on edge.
One answer can be found inside a small wood-frame house, along a gravel
alley in Eugene. There,
amid the musty smell of books neatly lining makeshift bookcases, lives
John Zerzan.
At 56, Zerzan fits nicely into Eugene's college-town feel with his
carefully trimmed beard and
wire-frame glasses. But looks can deceive: He also is a bard to a new
generation of radicals.
Green anarchists, some call themselves, and they believe humankind ought
to return to the Stone
Age. The high-tech globalized economy is destroying the planet, they
argue, while impoverishing most
of its citizens morally and financially.
Some of anarchy's old guard dismisses their sometimes violent methods as
misanthropic nihilism--an
approach that has alienated more mainstream activists as well as the public.
But Zerzan and his like-minded young associates believe that subtler
forms of protest have
accomplished little.
"All the carrying of signs and trying to have a rational dialogue about
it doesn't change a thing," said
Zerzan, a Stanford graduate who worked as a taxi driver and a social
worker in San Francisco before
moving back home to Oregon in 1981.
As if validating Eugene's newfound reputation as a seedbed of mayhem
makers, Tom Hayden, the
former '60s activist turned California legislator, visited just last weekend.
He brought several community activists from Los Angeles to dissuade
Eugene's anarchists from
causing trouble at the Democrats' party.
"It struck me as fishy, and I wondered who paid for flying all these
people up here," Zerzan said of
Hayden's visit. "Other people were kind of eating it up."
Originally a Marxist, Zerzan got turned off traditional American trade
unionism in the 1970s when
members of an established union hassled him for trying to help form an
independent union.
Now, he's adamantly "anti-authoritarian," having struck up a
correspondence with Ted Kaczynski, the
imprisoned Unabomber whose Luddite views Zerzan describes as "extremely sound."
To so-called anarcho-primitivists such as Zerzan, the wonders of high
technology and the Internet
actually are creating a population alienated from nature, hooked on
Ritalin and Prozac, and headed for
disaster.
Children as young as 2 are being prescribed medication "to drug them
into compliance," he argues,
"and they might still go to school and ... start shooting people."
Zerzan spoke earlier this week before leaving for Los Angeles, not just
for the Democratic convention
but also for the concurrent North American Anarchist Conference. Such a
formalized conclave is not
an oxymoron, he insists, explaining, "We're good at organizing," just
not top-down.
But like many activists who watched Philadelphia police arrest nearly
400 demonstrators during the
Republican convention--holding some on bonds as high as $1 million for misdemeanor
charges--Zerzan is tempering his calls for property-damage-as-political-message.
He won't denounce such methods, but won't call for any explicit
destruction either. Recently, he
consulted a lawyer, asking, "How likely is it that I'm going to be
arrested as soon as I get off the train [in
L.A.]?"
The mix of bravado and paranoia that marks many Eugene anarchists is
partly the product of the series
of street protests and riots that began in this Oregon college town on
June 1, 1997.
That's when the city set off what Mayor Jim Torrey calls "a tremendous
uprising" when it removed a
stand of about 40 old oak trees to make room for a market-rate housing development.
Led by masked anarchists, an angry crowd clashed with police in a scene
that marked a break from
Eugene's usual fare of good old-fashioned sign-waving demonstrations.
In fact, that long history of civic dissent may be a root cause of the
more violent activism now equated
with Eugene.
"This community is very, very tolerant," Torrey said. So "it creates a
higher hurdle if they want their
message heard."
The mayor estimates that his city of more than 136,000 has a couple of
dozen "activist" anarchists;
those involved in the movement say there are four times as many, with
more than 1,000 proclaiming
such views without taking part in protests.
The activist core made its presence felt again on June 18, 1999, during
demonstrations timed to coincide
with a meeting of the major industrialized nations in Cologne, Germany.
The windows of several
stores were broken as demonstrators clashed with police.
Less than six months later, a number of Eugene anarchists helped make
protest history in the streets of
Seattle.
Through it all, Eugene's police have struggled with how best to deal
with such incidents. But Torrey,
who kept a level head after a protester once vomited on him at a City
Council session, believes the key
is convincing officers to "keep your cool."
"If you are prepared, you can allow the expression of opinion on the
issues without having the
destruction," he said.
Torrey even disagrees with those who think the federal government should
investigate the "ring
leaders" of the protests at recent major economic and political
gatherings. "I would err on the side of
preparing, but not assuming the worst," he said.
As for Zerzan, he plans to speak Saturday at the anarchists' conference
in Los Angeles. The topic: Can
traditional leftist organizing work, or should it be dropped in favor of anarcho-primitivism.
Before society is taken back to the Stone Age, however, Zerzan and his
associates have a more pressing
concern in L.A. "We're just hoping," he said, "to come out of there alive."
John Johnson
Change-Links Progressive Newspaper
change@pacbell.net
http://www.labridge.com/change-links/
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