Comrades!

When The Voice of the Turtle was founded in the summer of 1993 one would have been hard pressed to find any particular political significance in the journal's choice of name. Drawn from the Song of Solomon, it always appealed to the Editors of the Turtle, who were grateful for finding an alternative to the otherwise inevitable "Oxford Left Fabian Review", or its equally depressing equivalent. At century's end -- for this is the very last Bulletin of the Twentieth-Century Turtle -- all is changed, and the Name of the Turtle now reverberates with utterly appropriate resonances.

We were, for example, very proud when one of America's leading ideologists, Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times, published a dreadful (and sadly best-selling) book earlier this year, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which labelled as the "turtles" those poor misguided people who are not altogether keen on the excesses of the Global Free Market America First Post-Cold War New World Order. ("Have you ever read a book that's such a collection of clichés, generalizations, and superficial observations that you felt like you would choke?", asked Amitabh Pal, perceptively, at the start of his damning review of Friedman's book in The Progressive magazine).

And then again, this week in Seattle, hundreds of activists have dressed up in magnificent Sea-Turtle costumes in order to protest against the World Trade Organisation's attempts to destroy the environment, exploit the poor and trample on workers' rights worldwide. Why are Sea-Turtles such a powerful symbol? The 1989 United States Endangered Species Act required Turtle Excluder Devices to be placed on any shrimp nets whose shrimps were then to be imported into America, and Turtle Excluder Devices, which are fairly cheap, reduce the needless drowning of Sea-Turtles by an impressive ninety-seven per cent. The World Trade Organisation tribunal, after secret hearings, decided that this was an unfair restraint on international trade, and the international Sea-Turtle protection regime is now a shadow of its former self. An excellent cartoon by R. O. Blechman drew attention to this particular scandal in the New York Times on 29 November: its caption, "The Voice of the Turtle". (Lest you think that the Times had forgotten its role as the mouthpiece of the American ruling class, a rather stupid piece by Bill Gates extolling the virtues of the WTO's free trade regime appeared on the very same Op-Ed page).

It is therefore especially fitting that our Salute this month should go to the fifty thousand men, women and children who flocked into the streets of Seattle yesterday morning, who withstood tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullet attacks from the Seattle police, and who nevertheless succeeded in getting the opening session of the Third Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organisation cancelled -- or, in the euphemism of the hour, "indefinitely postponed". We'll have the official text of our December Salute up on the site before too long, after things have calmed down a bit out there in the Pacific North-West.

We can also reflect on a productive November at The Voice of the Turtle. The Autumn Books Special was launched on schedule, with juicy writing from Anne Rademacher, Brian Glenn, Caroline Brooke, Cathy Hume, Marc Mulholland, Peter Lowe and -- after a short pause -- Howie Reed. We have published another fine poem by Malinda Seneviratne, "Mumia Abu Jamal", a tribute to the spirit of a man who was -- until very recently -- due to die on 2 December, and whose case will now return to the Pennsylvania courts early next year. We have posted a fine and unusually long Dictionary Entry for French football hero Zinedine Zidane. And we have received a Letter From Cape Town, which marks the return of Simric Yarrow into our columns after an absence of approximately five years. Finally, Raj Patel has provided a beginner's guide to the protests at the WTO for us all to ponder.

Our subscription list continues to expand; our list of promised contributions grows ever longer; the Future of the Turtle is a bright one and the world, one day, will be ours. As the Non-Denominational Holiday Season approaches, do remember that even the scientific atheists at The Voice of the Turtle like receiving gifts, whether they take the form of articles, poems, Salutes, reviews, interviews, Dictionary Entries, drawings, dialogues, diatribes and dialectics...

"Nas Odpor Bude Nadnarodni Jako Je Kapital!" -- which is to say: "Rendiamo La Nostra Resistenza Transnazionale Come Il Capitale!" -- or to put it a little differently, "Our resistance will be as transnational as capital!"

The Editors