Juli Burchill on the Anti-War Movement

Saturday March 29, 2003 20:22

by Avi H.

Don't take my name in vain - JB's article in the Guardian

Someone once said to me that "depression is just extreme vanity", and
though obviously I don't think that everyone who's depressed is a wuss,
I'm starting to think there's something to it.
Some people have genuinely had their brain chemicals go wrong, for
whatever reason; they've got a right to be depressed. Also, I think that
people who were abused, sexually or otherwise, as children must suffer
despair and sorrow in their adult lives to a degree the rest of us cannot
begin to comprehend; they've got a right to be depressed. But I also
think that a lot of so-called depression comes from people having no
perspective on their problems - vanity, if you will.

It's all about me!

Sorrow is no more depression than a stubbed toe is an amputated leg.

Depressive writers (usually women, I'm sorry to say) routinely compare
their off-days to the experience of Jews during the Shoah, and for some
reason no one ever stands up and points out that this obscenity -
Holocaust appropriation - is just as bad as Holocaust denial. And as for
those terminally sad soap opera actors who plan to exercise their new
"right" to professional counselling if involved in a "traumatic" storyline
- well, I'm sure our underworked, overpaid nurses and firefighters
won't begrudge them it one bit. Face it, it's a dog's life having to raid
the dressing-up box for a living.

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.

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! 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. For instance, what about the loony
who offered to be crucified on live TV if George Bush promised not to
invade Iraq? "Send your troops home and take me," she wrote to the White
House, adding later, "I don't want to appear as some nutter." 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. But even those
whose anti-war protests started in good faith now know that when Saddam's
regime comes tumbling down, thousands of Iraqis will dance and sing
with joy before the TV cameras, and thank our armed forces for giving them
back their lives.

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!