Throughout 2000 my university plans and activism were very settled. I would be focusing on economic globalization academically and on the “alter globalization” movement – the organized and powerful mass-movement that sought to push back against this key process of neoliberal extractivism. But by early 2003 it was evident that our goose was cooked. 9/11 era security laws gave police unprecedented powers and many of the activists who had successfully disrupted international trade conferences previously were being scooped up as terrorists.

This process had begun before 9/11 – police shot Carlos Giuliani and ran over him with their car at the G8 summit in Genoa on July 20, 2001. Police dabbed his blood on a rock and tried to blame protesters for the death despite the bullet wounds. Susan Bendotti was killed a day later, struck by a vehicle whilst waiting at a bus stop. To my knowledge her killer was never identified.

But while explicit murder-by-police was already a threat that those of us fighting this fight had to face before September 11th, the paranoia and surveillance laws of the post 9/11 era made disruptions of international trade talks effectively impossible. The security net was impenetrable and the violence extreme.

Combined with the ramp-up to the Iraq war I saw the writing on the wall and realized, quite correctly that the peace movement would necessarily leech support away from these more violent economic clashes. Our battle against neoliberal out-sourcing of manufacture to the global south would be abandoned in the name of trying to stop a war. That the peace movement fit within the neoliberal hegemonic moral order more than economic protests meant, too, that the full fury of police violence was less likely. Simply put, if a police officer murdered an anarchist at a police riot most people didn’t stop to ask why there was a police riot going on. But cops murdering avowed pacifists calling for non-violence was less photogenic domination. If you lived in Canada or even the United States it was far safer to be a peace activist than it was to fight against global trade deals.

All this is to help explain why leftists of a certain age, that being those of us old enough to have got tear gassed in Quebec City in 2000 or to have got assaulted in Genoa in 2001 or to have been arrested for terrorism in the middle of a forest in Kannanaskis in 2002 or to have been thrown off a bridge by police on the frontier between France and Switzerland in 2003 have an especially high level of cynicism for saber-rattling among the creaky ranks of the hegemons. China didn’t do anything to deserve a war footing any more than Iraq did.

It’s just that the rulers of the global north learned 20 years ago that a war can derail any resistance to their economic order while granting them the extraordinary powers (the state of exception) necessary to do anything to anyone in the name of security. It is a moral good to refuse to participate in wars on foreign shore. But we must remember that our enemies within our own state, our REAL enemies, will instrumentalize resistance to war in service of their domestic aims. Despite the danger it’s important for the left in the imperial core to keep our eyes on the domestic fight: union struggles, dismantling of police powers and pushing back on resurgent fascism must not be abandoned in 2023 the way that the struggle against industrial out-sourcing was abandoned in 2003. But also we must crush the movement to create new external enemies because this will be used to sap our most active away from the local fights and to spread rumours of foreign influence to smear the reputations of the just.

This time, 20 years on, we must do both.