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This ban will not stop us
Brian Eno
London
Guardian
Saturday October 06, 2007
Our leaders would undoubtedly be happy if we "moved
on" from Iraq. They don't want to talk about it any more:
it was a dreadful blunder, and reflects little credit on any of
them. Presumably this is why the question has hardly been debated
in parliament. Although the majority of the public were always
against the war, this was not reflected by their elected representatives.
The government behaved in a way that was transparently undemocratic
but the Conservatives won't call them on it, for without their
almost unanimous support the whole project couldn't have happened.
But to conveniently forget Iraq now is to forfeit the only possible
benefit the war might have: the chance to rethink the dysfunctional
political system that got us into this hole. If we don't, we risk
digging a series of ever deeper holes. The Iraq adventure was
justified as the planting of a beacon of democracy in the Middle
East. Not only did it utterly fail at that, it also undermined
our democracy. Appealing to our paranoia more than our vision,
George Bush and Tony Blair obtained restrictions on freedoms that
had taken centuries to evolve. They said these were necessary
to ensure our security - a device used by authoritarian leaders
since time immemorial.
(Article continues below)
Civil liberties never seem important until you need them. But
by definition, that is the very time you won't be able to get
them, so they have to be in place in advance, like an insurance
policy. In his book Defying Hitler, the historian Sebastian Hafner
describes how Germany slid into nazism. At first people laughed
at Hitler and played along with what seemed trivial changes in
the law. For most Germans it was all rather abstract, and they
were expecting things to return to normal when Hitler faded back
into obscurity. Only he didn't, and civil liberties were so compromised
there was no way to stop him.
If we don't stand up about Iraq then we tacitly sanction the
next steps in this deadly experiment of democratic evangelism.
Those will likely include an attack on Iran, a permanent force
of occupation in Iraq (probably always the intention), the complete
militarisation of the Middle East, and a revived nuclear future.
Stop the War Coalition planned a march from Trafalgar Square
to Parliament Square on Monday - the day parliament resumes -
to draw attention to the fact that a lot of us are still thinking
about Iraq and to call for the immediate withdrawal of troops.
Using an archaic law (the 1839 Metropolitan Police Act), that
demonstration has now been banned. Now why would that be? Stop
the War Coalition has organised dozens of such demonstrations,
and as far as I know not one person has been hurt. So it can't
be public safety that's at stake.
No, it's the elephant in the room. This government wants to show
itself as clean and new, and doesn't want attention drawn to the
elephant and the mess it has left on the carpet. So it invokes
an old law, to shave a little more off the arrangements by which
citizens communicate their feelings to government (a process,
by the way, called democracy).
It would take courage for Gordon Brown to say: "This war
was a catastrophe." It would take even greater courage to
admit that the seeds of the catastrophe were in its conception:
it wasn't a good idea badly done (the neocons' last refuge - "Blame
it all on Rumsfeld"), but a bad idea badly done. And it would
take perhaps superhuman courage to say: "And now we should
withdraw and pay reparations to this poor country."
I don't see it happening. But the demonstration will, legal or
not: on Monday Tony Benn will lead us as we exercise our right
to remind our representatives that, even if Iraq has slipped off
their agenda, it's still on ours. Please join us.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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