Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism

'Historical materialism is the theory of the proletarian revolution.' Georg Lukács

Monday, November 05, 2007

Madeleine Bunting on the disaster of Iraq

Good article in today's Guardian:

Can we claim innocence of the chaotic violence of Iraq now normalised into the background of our lives? Suicide bombs have long since become routine radio noise. We're numbed to the atrocities; except for some stalwarts, the initial anti-war activism has been crowded out by other responsibilities. Life goes on, even if in Baghdad it frequently doesn't.

And to accompany the indifference is the creeping denial of responsibility. Government ministers now talk of Iraq as a tragedy, as if it was a natural disaster and they had no hand in its making.


Edited to add: The following letter in response to Bunting the next day:

Madeleine Bunting (Comment, November 5) overlooks some others who might examine their actions in the making of war on Iraq: the Stop the War Coalition. It is likely that Saddam Hussein saw TV news reports and used them to judge the popular mood around the world on his refusal to allow WMD inspections. And what would he have seen? Millions of people marching in support of Stop the War. Might he not have thought "they won't invade - their voters would never forgive them". In the latter he was right, but in the former most tragically wrong.
John Goldman
London


Lets get this right - so the people to blame for the criminal and disastrous war on Iraq were not the warmongers themselves but er, the millions who marched against the war on the grounds that it was not only criminal but would lead to disaster? I am sorry but words kind of fail me at this point...

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3 Comments:

At 4:37 am, Blogger Frank Partisan said...

I think it's time for a united antiwar movement, based around principled simple demands.

 
At 8:14 pm, Blogger FraVernero said...

Oh, people have light memories... our advertisement and consumer society has great difficulties in remembering yesterday's news, something which is helped by the fact that it is not your house that's being bombed, your neighbourhood assaulted by foreign soldiers and your friends put in torturing jails, I guess...

On the other hand (I know it's off-topic), what the hell is happening with Respect? Here in Spain and searching the Net I only find very confusing information... Another split? If I weren't an atheist, I'd believe in the perpetual curse of celular division which plagues Trotskyism...

 
At 3:04 pm, Blogger Snowball said...

Fraverno - with respect to Respect, the current issue of Socialist Worker has some info but things will be clearer after next weekend when the official Respect conference and Galloway's faction 'Respect Renewal' have met - but yes, a split now looks inevitable. This is not a split between revolutionaries or Trotskyists however but between those around Galloway wanting to narrow Respect's focus down to essentially the Muslim community for electoral reasons and those wanting to broaden Respect out to encompass the whole of the British working class. However, as I say, things will become clearer after November 17...

 

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