Not In My Name? Nice Sentiment, Shame About the Slogan
William MacDougall
Guardian columnist Catherine Bennett recently asked "Is this the silliest slogan ever?" (23/01/03). You might have been excused for thinking that Bennett was about to launch into a humourous hatchet job on the more ridiculous advertising and marketing excesses that punctuate much of today's media. But no. The target of Bennett's ire is the phrase which has come to dominate opposition to the now seemingly inevitable war in Iraq. Not In My Name.
Not for Bennett questions of the rights or wrongs of Tony Blair's dogged insistence on following Bush down the blind alley of Iraqi "regime change". Instead, the truly pressing question of the day is the validity of the slogan used by the anti-war lobby and the alleged pomposity and sanctimony that underpins it. Not in my name indeed. Who do they think they are?
"Compared to the anti-war slogans of the past, NIMN sends out a piqued, self-regarding sort of message that seems more suited to use by picky consumers who define themselves, say, by their disapproval of GM foods, or boycotting of Starbucks rather than by a mass movement aiming to change the views of legitimate government in whose actions everyone, assuming they have a vote, is implicated whether they like it or not. 'Not in My Name' is just a more fatuously self-important version of 'I'm against it'. So what? Loads of us are against it. We've all got names."
Fatuously self important? It's hard to know whether Bennett is proposing that all prospective opponents to Blair's imminent political folly take a crash course in ego sublimation or retire to the relatively more sedate pastures of Gap and Starbucks where they can bash away till their merry little hearts are content. Where are the focus groups when you need them? Doubtless the same criticisms apply to Not In My Name, the American based Jewish peace group formed in 2000 who call for an end to Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Nice sentiment, shame about the slogan. The American Not In Our Name campaign may be more to Bennett's sensibilities - then again maybe not, as it is supported by Noam Chomsky, Edward Said and Howard Zinn to name but a few of the much maligned radical anti-war brigade.
Not only is the slogan stupidly self aggrandising, it relies on the sort of dumb emotional levers and pulleys that draw disparate and diametrically opposite strands together under the pretence of an umbrella movement:
"Still, putting feelings before arguments is one way of uniting the unpersuaded with the fanatics, of snuggling the views of Major General Cordingley alongside those of George Galloway, Tony Benn and all the other speakers whose presence on an anti-war platform make marching such an ordeal for the unpractised protester."
The phrase, much to Bennett's chagrin, has been adopted by a diverse number of groups and individuals in their respective attempts at derailing the Bush/Blair war train before it reaches its potentially calamitous destination. The Daily Mirror put it on its front page to draw readers attention to an anti-war petition it intends to send to Downing Street. Bennett very thoughtfully provides what she imagines Blair's response to any such petition would be: "It's not in your name, you conceited twerp. It's in the whole country's." That, as the thousands who intend to stage mass anti-war demonstrations in Belfast, Glasgow and London on 15 February might argue, is debatable. She goes on to facetiously suggest that "if dissasociation rather than downright disapproval of the war is their motive, his [Blair's] critics probably ought to write directly to Saddam Hussein, making it clear that whatever missiles might shortly be coming his way, they most certainly do not hail from the blameless environs of No 10 Acacia Avenue." Mr and Mrs Jones at The Beechings might be moved to consider penning something in a similar vein.
Lest we forget, Bennett writes for the selfsame newspaper that only last month decided to emblazon the front page of its daily G2 supplement (07/01/03) with the legend "Fuck Cilla Black" as part of its week of front covers designed by notable artists including David Hockney (former Turner Prize winner Gillian Wearing was responsible for the offending "fuck"). Cilla Black, for the less informed among you, is a former sixties songstress and stalwart of British light entertainment television programming.
Guardian Features Editor Ian Katz defended Wearing's cover thus:
"It was obviously shocking, but it also seemed to synthesise, in three short words, the point we were trying to make. This wasn't Wearing saying fuck Cilla or the Guardian saying fuck Cilla, but the voice of Mean TV passing judgment on a cuddly matriarch from another age of television."
Come again? You can take the boy out of Hoxton but you can't take Hoxton out of the boy. Better instead to say that a big boy did it and ran away. Or better still, call Jean Baudrillard. Bennett's column and the offending Wearing G2 cover are in no way related, nor can Bennett be held responsibl e for commissioning Wearing's rather tired G2 front page, but the old adage about people living in glass houses not throwing stones hardly seems more apposite. The sentiment expressed by the "Not In My Name" slogan may appear trite to some eyes, even hopelessly and outdatedly idealistic to others, but a legitimate and timely sentiment nonetheless. Bennett's carping might only be the latest example of a journalist tilting at windmills, but it says plenty that today's journalists are more interested in mocking the all too earnest entreaties of a group trying to avert a bloody war than in questioning the motives of a prime minister who is prepared to fiddle while Baghdad burns.
Perhaps the duffel-coated hordes who have expressed their disquiet at the bare-faced political casuitry currently being played out in London and Washington would be better served employing the semantic armoury of The Guardian and Gillian Wearing. FUCK WAR anybody?
Another Guardian and Observer columnist, David Aaronovitch, stoops to question the muddled thinking that underpins the anti-war positions of many. Comparing an idealistic young anti-war campaigner who is prepared to march off to Baghdad in order to act as a human shield with his younger anti-Vietnam War crusading self ("A few inconvenient facts about Saddam", The Guardian, 08/01/03), Aaronovitch concludes that the "lovely looking bloke from Sussex, with long plaited hair, who plays the electric guitar" has got it wrong because "we had wispy-bearded Uncle Ho. Matt, on the other hand, has Saddam Hussein."
Unless you were left in any doubt, Aaronovitch is an unashamed and fully paid-up member of the Christopher Hitchens vanguard of "reformed-but-better-informed" leftists. Bearing more restrained echoes of Hitchens' recent "Chew On This My Leftist Comrades" article in The Stranger (16/01/03), Aaronovitch's most recent Observer column (02/02/03) was dedicated to telling us "Why the Left is wrong on Saddam".
With suitably Hitchens-like chutzpah, Aaronovitch contrives to conflate opposition to bombing Iraq with an implicit endorsement of the Butcher of Baghdad's dictatorship. Australian journalist John Pilger - a recurring Aaronovitch bete noir - receives a dressing down for daring to question the Observer's agreement with Iraqi regime change by force in what Aaronovitch quaintly refers to as one of his all too numerous "Pilgeriads" (© D. Aaronovitch 2002):
"In last week's edition of the New Statesman, one of the latter, John Pilger, takes this newspaper to task for allowing that it might be right to depose the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, by force. Even suggesting such a thing, he said, was a betrayal of the great traditions of the newspaper [The Observer]. Pilger, of course, has a way of turning disagreements with him into betrayals of the entire human race. But for many of us, this has become the most difficult and painful judgment to make. It is the kind of issue that divides families and friends.
Nothing about Iraq is hard for Pilger. He was opposed to using force to get Iraq out of Kuwait, opposed to the containment of Saddam through the enforcement of the no-fly zones, dismissive of the threats to the Kurdish people of the North. Many in his camp were in a favour of sanctions when the alternative was force, and were against sanctions when the alternative was nothing." The dubious legality of the enforced no-fly zones is not in question, nor is the shape and nature of the economic sanctions imposed on a people who, proponents of war argue, have suffered enough. But hold on, here comes the cavalry: "George Bush's "administration really does have a view that it is necessary to remove Saddam pour décourager les autres. It will, they have convinced themselves, show resolve, deter state terrorism, discourage proliferation and permit the building of a rare non-tyranny in the Arab world. There is something to be said for all this." This sounds uncannily like Hitchens' support for Bush based on Dubya's unquestionable commitment to prosecuting what Hitchens has called "the war on theocratic terrorism". In a recent interview with the Americas Future Foundation ("Conservatism faces two critical hurdles: training the next generation of leaders and winning the hearts and minds of young Americans - America's Future Foundation exists to address both of these challenges"), Hitchens put it more colourfully. The song, though, remains the same: "The root cause is the political slum that the U.S. has been running in the Middle East for a long time, and the answer is to clear it out and install some friends with democratic leanings." The words "pot", "kettle" and "black" come to mind, given Aaronovitch's writing off of most, if not all, anti-war voices as the banal sound and fury of the chronically politically naïve. Not content simply to berate his sadly confused and misguided brethren, Aaronovitch turns his hand to comedy in Tuesday's Guardian (04/02/03) with a mock-up transcript of veteran parliamentarian Tony Benn's recent interview with Saddam Hussein. Benn is portrayed as a doddering old man being played for a fool by an anglophile Saddam:
Tony Benn (switches on tape recorder): I'll just mark this. It is now Sunday February 2, the year is 2003. I'm with President Saddam Hussein somewhere in Baghdad, and I'm on a peace mission.
Saddam Hussein: And welcome to you, my friend from England, Mr Bin Wedgwood. I trust your journey has been comfortable.
TB: It was an early start, Mr President, though I'm often up before dawn back in London. It's my age. And the drive seemed longer than the three hours it actually took because of the car windows being blacked out. But it's good finally to be here and to be able to talk about peace.
SH: Ah peace! What is more precious than peace? How do these wars get started? It is a mystery. Toffee?
Bin Wedgewood - that's priceless though. Why keep company with the righteous when you can write cracking jokes like that? However noble or misguided Benn's motives, he - like any number of journalists and politicians against war in Iraq - is reduced to mere parody in much the same way that MP George Galloway and journalist John Pilger are reduced time and time again to crude Saddam apologist caricatures. Benn also gets it in the neck from Bennett ("Why Tony Benn is an Ass", The Guardian, 06/02/03) who concludes that Michael Jackson would have saved himself from further paedophile and unfit father allegations had he, like Saddam, been interviewed by Benn and not Martin Bashir ( "May I ask you, your holiness," Benn might have begun, "how you felt when your baby attempted to leap from a balcony and was only through your own divine intervention saved from the ravening jaws of death?"). In fairness, not quite all of the Guardian's writers have firmly nailed their colours to the pro-war mast. Former Daily Mirror journalist and Guardian columnist Paul Foot even goes as far as to detail the rise of the shadowy Leftist Warmongers League (LWL). The LWL is a loosely afilliated network of academics and journalists whose sole purpose is the championing of the cause of urgent military intervention in Iraq to liberate a people whose human rights didn't seem to be of very much concern before 09/11. According to Foot, the guiding principle of the LWL is a simple one -"anyone who opposes such an invasion [armed invasion of Iraq by the US, Britain and any other willing participants] is a friend of Saddam Hussein and an enemy of the Iraqi people." LWL members can easily be identified by their over-dependence on the stock phrases which form the condensed vocabulary of the warhawks. Giveaway phrase include "regime change", "war against terrorism", "weapons of mass destruction" and the now ubiquitous "smoking gun". British journalists, thankfully, have a long way to go before they descend to the morally objectionable posturing adopted by the the likes of self-styled shoot-from-the-hip and tell-it-like-it-is republican political commentators like America's Ann Coulter or David Horowitz.
However, the widespread acceptance of war in Iraq as a fait accompli further flags up the desperate lack of a critical and questioning UK media voice outwith notable exceptions like Robert Fisk. Writing in The New Rulers of the World, veteran Australian journalist John Pilger ("one of journalism's best known polemicists", The Guardian, 13/01/03) contrasts the scriveners who populate today's paper tigers with one of the lions of British journalism, forrmer Observer editor David Astor. Astor was vehemently opposed to Anthony Eden's ultimately ill-fated Suez adventure of 1956. In a now legendary editorial, Astor famously wrote: "It is no longer possible to bomb countries because you fear that your trading interests will be harmed. Nowadays, a drowning man on a raft is the occasion for all shipping to be diverted to try to save him; this new feeling for the sanctity of human life is the best element in the modern world. It is the true distinction of the West. Our other distinction is our right of personal independence and responsibility in politics - a right that must be exercised. Nations are said to have the governments they deserve. Let us show that we deserve better."
The same might be said about newspapers whose columnists gleefully poke sticks in the eyes of their readers. Paying tribute to Astor who died during the bombing of Afghanistan, The Observer sought to compare the paper's current editorial strengths with those of The Observer under his stewardship,"the richness of the language and relevance of the sentiments resonate today." As Pilger notes, The Observer supported Blair's "endeavour" in Afghanistan. If Not In My Name really is the Baby on Board of political slogans, as Bennett argues, better instead to forgot all of this anti-war protesting rubbish.
"Mum's the word" has a certain ring to it.