The Limits of the Anti-War sentiment
Last week the Liberal Democrats won the Brent East bye-election from Labour. According to party leader Charles Kennedy the victory owed much to the Liberals' 'anti-war' stance (in fact the party supported British troops once the shooting started). No doubt the constant trickle of doubt over the government's strategy in the press, and in Lord Hutton's enquiry into the suicide of Dr David Kelly, has entrenched disillusionment with the war against Iraq.
But this Saturday's anti-war demonstration did not match the mass mobilisations earlier in the year. The Stop the War Coalition hoped that the Prime Minister's low ratings would translate into popular activism. They were disappointed.
The sentiment behind the anti-war movement always looked more militant than it was. Though hundreds of thousands marched on the streets, their underlying mood was not political so much as anti-political. The war was the policy that the establishment was promoting, and anti-war protests were an expression of their disillusionment with mainstream politics.
But that disillusionment has not translated into radical activism. Instead it has been channelled into the proper outlets for middle class dissatisfaction: an official enquiry and a vote for the Liberal Democrats in Brent East.
WHAT EDWARD SAID
Palestinian academic and activist Edward Said died on 25 September from leukaemia. Said's status as a leading cultural theorist and professor at Columbia University, coupled his tireless advocacy did much to humanise the Palestinian cause in the eyes of western liberal opinion. In later years Said recognised the trap that the diplomatic road led to, and denounced the Oslo accords, and the phoney peace process that followed it. He criticised the repressive measures chairman Yasser Arafat adopted to secure the deal - risking the censorship of his works on the West Bank.
But wisdom came late to Said - he had been an advocate of compromise with Israel, even to the extent of helping draft the resolution to the Palestine National Congress advocating a 'two-state solution' (Malise Ruthven, Obituary, Guardian, 26 September 2003). In his 1985 essay 'An ideology of difference' Said hoped that '"difference" does not entail "domination"' - that Israelis and Palestinians could recognise each other's differences (The Politics of Dispossession, p100. But the pursuit of a 'two-state solution' proved to be an institutionalisation of difference, and, indeed, of domination. Later Said recoiled from the 'two-state solution' to criticise today's Palestinian leadership from the standpoint they had abandoned - equal citizenship in a 'one-state solution':
'The politics of separation can't work in the Middle East. The land's too small. Our history's so mixed.' (Maya Jaggi, Profile, Guardian, 11 September 1999)
But Said is probably even better remembered as a cultural theorist than a Palestinian nationalist. The publication of Orientalism: Western Concepts of the Orient in 1978. The book was celebrated for its explanation of the way that western scholarship had created an imaginary 'orient' that masked the real Middle East, loaded with stereotypes of indolence and lasciviousness, that said more about the holders of such views. It took Kenan Malik's Meaning of Race (1996) to explain that Said had falsely associated enlightenment rationalism with racial difference that was more characteristic of the subsequent romantic reaction against reason. Said helped to secure the postmodern prejudice that reason was synonymous with repression, when in fact it was enlightenment did most to establish the concept of equality.
Furthermore, Said's concept of the Other, that underlay his analysis of 'orientalism' was derived from the reaction against reason, specifically in the works of the existentialist philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre (see Heartfield, 'Hegel Dispirited: the reification of the Other in Kojève, DeBeauvoir and Sartre', http://www.static-ops.org/essay_3.htm). Again, it was only later that Said reacted against the project he helped to initiate, this time denouncing the celebration of cultural difference in postmodernism: 'tub-thumping about the glories of "our" culture or "our" history is not worthy of the intellectual's energy' (Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures, p69). Few could hope to live a life as full, honourable and creative as Edward Said's, but he was not always right, even if he got there in the end.
-- James Heartfield