I'M JUST A FRIEND OF A FRIEND OF A FASCIST:

Pacifists Praising Fascists Killing Democrats (Phil Doré, 8/17/04, Butterflies and Wheels)

As someone who felt sufficiently opposed to the 2003 invasion of Iraq to join the protest marches and to attend Stop the War Coalition meetings, it is a source of great sadness to me what a shrivelled, irrelevant self-parody the British anti-war movement has become. It seems hard to believe it now, but for a couple of months in early 2003, the Stop the War Coalition seemed to be the vehicle for something huge. Schoolchildren were walking out of their classes in protest; between 750,000 and 2 million people (depending on whose estimates you believe) swarmed through the streets of London on February 15th; ordinary, middle-of the-road people - the kind you don’t normally see on a protest march - massed to vent their anger in virtually every city or major town in the UK. Celebrities like Ms Dynamite and Fran Healy queued up to go on stage at anti-war events.

By contrast, the Stop the War Coalition events you see occasionally in city centres these days are just plain embarrassing. Gone are the moderate, progressively minded individuals, leaving just an unsightly handful of dim-bulb Trotskyists, clapped-out Stalinists and Koran-thumping Islamists. The more respected campaigning organisations have either deserted them (e.g. Greenpeace) or had given them a wide berth from the beginning (e.g. Oxfam). STWC propositions rarely offer anything more intellectually complicated than shouting “Bliar!” and “End the occupation!” Their campaigns are uninspired and uninspiring, and the media stunts look increasingly cheap and desperate. You just walk pass them, put up your collar, try to avoid eye contact with them and no, I wouldn’t like a copy of the Socialist Worker, thank you very much.

The intellectual poverty of the Stop the War Coalition these days is staggering. Since so much of the STWC’s organisation now amounts to little more than a franchise of the Socialist Workers Party, they’ve adopted the SWP’s perennial habit of reducing complicated issues to placard-sized slogans. Hence, the cry on the street is not, “Develop an effective exit strategy that leaves a working democracy and a functioning civil society in Iraq!” but “End the occupation now!” The almost inevitable carnage and civil war that would follow the various foreign troops suddenly stopping whatever they’re doing and heading straight for the airport doesn’t appear to weigh all that heavily on the consciences of the protestors. If this is compassion for the people of Iraq, then it’s compassion that the Iraqi people could do without.

Naturally, none of this has the slightest impact on actual policy. One consequence of all those “Bliar” badges is that no non-awkward-squad Labour MP is going to have the slightest interest in what a STWC lobbyist has to say. But it does have the effect of cheapening discourse on Iraq within civil society - in our media, in our pubs and coffee shops, and in the streets and houses of Britain. The intellectual and moral bankruptcy reaches its absolute nadir with that section of the anti-war movement which romanticises and eulogises the various armed militias that have come to be dubbed “the Iraqi resistance.”

So here's the really troubling nettle that no one seems willing to grasp: if, as the relatively few decent folk on the Left have determined, there can be no Decent Left then what are they still doing over there? They're more than welcome over here--the neocons made the same journey for the same reasons.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 21, 2004 7:15 PM