In My Name - I've

In My Name - I've long detested the preening self-righteousness of Not In Our Name, the group for whom Susan Sarandon is currently flacking.

Their cause isn't so much anti-war...er, anti-Bush as it is salving the righteous egoes of its adherents. I've long wanted to figure out exactly what to write about these people.

But Julie Burchill, at the Guardian (far from a right-wing tool), did it first and best.

I've always thought that the last place you'd see the vanity of depression in action would be on a protest march, especially one against war in a foreign country, but I do believe that many of the anti-war antics currently taking place are totally egotistical. Those who demonstrated against US aggression in Vietnam and Cuba did so because they believed that those people should have more freedom, not less. But does the most hardened peacenik really believe that Iraqis currently enjoy more liberty and delight than they would if Saddam were brought down? If so, fair enough; if not, then they are marching about one thing - themselves. That's why so many luvvies are involved; this is simply showing off on a grand scale.

I've just heard a snippet of the most disgustingly me-me-me anti-war advert by Susan Sarandon, in which she intones, "Before our kids start coming home from Iraq in body bags, and women and children start dying in Baghdad, I need to know - what did Iraq do to us?" Well, if you mean what did Saddam do to America The Beautiful, not an awful lot - but to millions of his own people, torture and murder for a start. Don't they count?

Surely this is the most self-obsessed anti-war protest ever. NOT IN MY NAME! That's the giveaway. Who gives a stuff about their wet, white, western names? See how they write them so solemnly in a list on the bottom of the letters they send to the papers. And the ones that add their brats' names are the worst - a grotesque spin on Baby On Board, except they think that this gives them extra humanity points not just on the motorway, but in the whole wide weeping, striving, yearning world. We don't know the precious names of the countless numbers Saddam has killed. We're talking about a people - lots of them parents - subjected to an endless vista of death and torture, a country in which freedom can never be won without help from outside.

But for these people, it's not about anyone else's freedom - as, indeed, "Freedom" in Hollywood is usually about the half of the First Amendment that's about speech and press rights. I'd have to wonder how many Hollywood liberals know anything about the other half of the amendment?

Burchill also does the magnificent service of comparing the relative contributions of the principals on both sides of this conflict:

Contrasting British servicemen and women with the appeasers, it is hard not to laugh. Are these two sides even the same species, let alone the same nationality? On one hand the selflessness and internationalism of the soldiers; on the other the Whites-First isolationism of the protesters. Excuse me, who are the idealists here? And is it a total coincidence that those stars most prominent in the anti-war movement are the most notoriously "difficult"and vain - Streisand, Albarn, Michael, Madonna, Sean Penn? And Robin Cook! [Don't forget Michael Moore!] Why might anyone believe world peace can be secured by this motley bunch?

Anti-war nuts suffer from the usual mixture of egotism and self-loathing that often characterises recreational depression - an unholy alliance of Oprahism and Meldrewism in which you think you're scum, but also that you're terribly important, too...Similarly, there are the human shields - now limping homewards after being shocked to discover, bless 'em, that Saddam wanted to stick them in front of military installations as opposed to the hospitals and petting zoos that they'd fondly imagined they were going to defend.

What these supreme egotists achieve by putting themselves at the centre of every crisis is to make the Iraqi people effectively disappear. NOT IN MY NAME! is western imperialism of the sneakiest sort, putting our clean hands before the freedom of an enslaved people...

How embarrassing it will be for the peaceniks to have to explain to the celebrants how much better it would have been for them never to have been troubled by such joy!

Read, of course, the whole thing.

We know what the likes of Madonna, Sarandon and Penn want "in their names" or not. But the actions of those whose names we'll never know are usually more interesting. And telling.

Posted by Mitch at March 30, 2003 09:21 AM