I'm anti-something, I know that...
If you've read much of his weblog, you're probably aware that Brendan O'Neill feels he's too good for the anti-war movement.
He's written several versions of this column over the past year. Allow me to summarize: Brendan is opposed to imperialism, by which he means any country interfering in the affairs of any other country for any reason (hey-- a lost cause is better than no cause!); he opposes this war; he opposes War; but he thinks the contemporary "anti-war movement" is frivolous and ineffectual. If the frivolity and ineffectualness continue, Brendan wants the anti-war movement to count him out. He can't work under these conditions.
I can't argue with him on the point about the frivolity and solipsism embodied in the slogan "not in our name." What I can never figure out, though, is what he thinks the alternative is. Does he really imagine that any kind of anti-war movement, even one that he himself were allowed to design, organize and call all the shots for, would be any more effective at Stopping War than the one he's stuck with and finds so deficient? Could an anti-war movement, purged of tastelessness, pomposity, and silly slogans, so aesthetically unobjectionable that it could get the Brendan O'Neill seal of approval-- could such an anti-war movement ever have any real prospect of "stop[ping] America's and Europe's warmongers in their tracks," or to "get Bush and Blair quaking in their boots"?
Not likely. Another way of asking the question is: could any type of gesture or demonstration of opposition, even one flawlessly conceived or phrased, solve any of the problems that the prospective war is supposed to attempt to address, the problems that many believe make a war necessary and probably inevitable? I suppose Brendan thinks that there are no problems of this kind. That's the case that the Brendan O'Neill Anti-War Movement would have to make. I'm sure he believes he can make this case, and more power to him. Yet it seems to me that No Interference by Any Country in Any other Country's Affairs is no more realistic than No War, and it would be a lot harder to fit into the "hey hey ho ho" pattern. Or maybe NIBACINAOCA is even less realistic, since fostering or contriving the absence of war is itself a kind of interference. So is merely opting out of the conflict, leaving it for a future administration, for example. That, at least, happens sometimes. You can make an argument against this war without declaring that it is immoral and illegitimate for any state to have a foreign policy at all. It's a much more difficult standard. I can't see non-interference at all costs becoming a mass movement, at any rate. For one thing, how would you make a puppet of it?
Brendan O'Neill may have to get used to standing alone. Elegantly.
Posted by Dr. Frank at December 15, 2002 12:58 PM | TrackBack