Prt THE circus in Seattle should go down in his- tory, or “should I say in social studies, not as a resurgence of a vibrant mass movement, but as an emblem of a fake society. . A recent multi-authored gem of a best-seller entitled _ Faking It, put forward the _ thesis that ours is a society whose every facet is permeat- ed with phony sentimentali id with the elevation in very sphere of “feeling, image.an d spontaneity, over “reason, reality and restraint.” + Writing about cultural ‘products from education, to micdia, to public’ policy, the ... authors underscore the fact the fraud and the poseur re the, run of our instity- To this category belong the ‘protesters-at the aborted WTO convention in Seattle. -Ohe among these énviron- ~- daily 10% of the po ulation is now infected wit . mentalists, union groups, . anafchists and opponents of. trade, spoke for the poorest of the Poor, the ‘developing eter obniise folk; who, with and tosh, compared the uses hake the 1960s with the le more cerebral agility than ob ‘ind its diviners, was ig Starbucks for creat in underdeveloped : to compare with: manufacturing napalm for bombs? A mass movement to stop President Clinton from .Wagging the Dog over Yugoslavia earlier this year would have qualified as a comparable act of moral sua- sion, But a fake society seldcin rails against real injustice. Instead it inveighs again: sexy, amorphous targets like “corporate globalization,” or “patriarchal oppression.” I spent most of my life in Africa in a country where, at one stage, 40 children died from hunger, and where: I saw grit, digni proud subsistence o ania throu; sp and some of it very ¢ and. very young. . n defere nce to my Affican frente who knew not the luxury ‘of unions or welfare, but who would have balked at the efforts of ersatz, humani- tarians to prevent them from placing food on the rable, let “me say this: Never before have I seen such onanism as that of these sated, well-fed ~. dilettantes who flocked to Seattle... - Their protest arises in the context of the culture of enti- tlement; their cant completely divorced from real rights and freedoms. Let me move on to the economics of it all before the gag-reflex gets the better of me. T agree with the Ludwig Von Mises Institute scholar Llewellyn H. Rockwell who contends that the WTC is already a bureaucracy that doesn’t favour the classical ideal of free trade devoid of central management. Had the WTO not incor- porated the legai mechanisms for regulating the world econ- omy rather than freeing its markets, surmises Rockwell, the Clinton administration would not have supported its creation. The modus operandi of the WTO thus far seems to consist in cach country push- ing for other countries to abandon “trade distorting domestic support programs,” while insisting on its nght to keep subsidies and alive in its own. That is not free trade. In fact, i it resembles the protesters’ ignorant veision of a planned economy. The two solitudes: the WTO suits and the protesting bandannas, may be ideologi caily closer than the fatter would like. . And if the circus in Seattle is any harbinger 7:f things to come, the WTO, in time, will absorb into its fold every self- anoinzed non-governmental organization, labour o - ‘tion and other forms of defi- ciency so that it will come to resemble the UN, The UN's as iliiberal and - centralized an organization as the protesters would have you believe the wroi is. With the exception that the UN pro- motes, with zeal and disre- gard for the sovereignty of nations, a politically correct kind of coercion and ideolo- *Y Notwithstanding that he would welcome incest between the WTO and the UN, Sceretary General of the UN Kofi Annan, managed to articulate the need for freer trade rather well. Writing in The Wall Street Journal last week, Annan decried the rich nation prac- tice of imposing high tariffs - on goods imported from developing countries, and using quotas and anti-dump- ing penalties to curb the sell- ing of products below market prices so as to kecp Third World imports out of First 1637 Lonsdale Ave., N. Van. 984-6700 1730 Marine Drive, in Seatt W, Van. 926-7105 Friday, December 10, 1999 — North Shore News - 7 World markets. Complete free trade sans protectionism and regulations, the kind protest- ers were decrying, would allow developing nations to compete with western nations, especially in the real of agriculture and tex- tile manufacturing. When Clinton called for sanctions on developing countries that fail to adhere to “labour standards,” he Ict posturing against corpora- tions, and pandering to the armchair ‘rebels’ take the place of guarding people’s freedom to gain advantage through the use of the only resource they have, their labour. ~arromeDaticanada. mee miibox Election cail needed now Dear Editor: The historical crushing NDP defeat in Delta South was not just another message for the party to pull up its socks, but clearly a demand to pull up stakes and call an immediate election. Any more delay will only further dispiay their abysmal ignorance and total self-. interest, increasingly at their, peril, and ultimately at ours — begone foul Spot. — Denis Mason West Vancouver includes up to5 litres. of 1 ‘Owse Quakerstete 1362 Masins Drive 980-9115 © MorySat 800am-600pm, Sun. 8:00am-500pm Expires Dec. 15/998 12pm to Sym -“Stue Time FOR CHRESTMAS ORDERS" : wy West 3rd Street, : North Vancouver .. 988-9215, - December 1 42, 1999 ‘at. our ‘etydlo.