Evidence Of Things Unseen: The Rise of a New Movement

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The second strand is the global justice movement, which began with the Zapatistas on the day NAFTA took effect, then surfaced in Seattle in 1999. Those were called isolated events. Then came Genoa, Quebec City, Quito, Cancun, the world social forums in Porto Allegre. Far from isolated events, these were the historic battlegrounds of a new history being born.

Together these movements mount a challenge to an entire worldview. We are experiencing an enlargement of dignity, an enlargement of what we consider sacred and therefore off the table, not negotiable. The purported Masters of the Universe are becoming as obsolete as those who once claimed the divine right of kings. The earth and its people are not for sale; the environment is not just a storehouse of materials for utilitarian exploitation; and cultural identities can't be replaced as if they were commodities, whether the treasures of Babylon or the rainforests of the Amazon. This movement is saying that diversity will not be looted.

Why is this happening? No one really knows. Movements arise in mystery at the margins, eventually change the mainstream, are repressed or co-opted, and return to the oblivion we call official history.

One explanation is that the globalization of US military and economic power is globalizing an opposition. It's a dialectic and, as it swirls and intensifies it can even bring down George Bush.

This new globalization arises, some say, in response to a power vacuum after the Cold War which the US filled. But contrary to the end-of-history theorists, the failure and fall of communism did not mean the dialectic was dead and that the wretched of the earth would quietly go away.

But globalization was emerging long before the 90s, before NAFTA and the WTO, the World Bank and IMF. The settling of America itself was an act of colonization and "development." Then came Manifest Destiny, the defeat of the Indian tribes, the annexation of the western lands, the wars with Mexico, the seizure of Hawaii and the Philippines.

For indigenous people the Conquest is not over. Most of our foreign aid programs and social policies are only efforts to reform the Conquest, not end its invisible structure of power relations.

For Muslims, the Crusades are not over. We should ask if the Crusades are over for President Bush. There was the alleged slip of the tongue when he described the war on terrorism as a crusade. There was his Inaugural, blessed by Rev. Franklin Graham, who denounced Muslims and proudly presided over the quadrupling of missionaries in Iraq since the first Gulf War. This week there is the revelation of another Christian crusader at the pinnacle of the Pentagon, Gen. William Boykin.

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