<HTML>Comment from <a href=""></a>
<a href="[
argument.independent.co.uk] McElvoy</a>. This may be better directed towards the GHMB but it is about time we all realised that shouting at one another will not change the course of international events.
KRs,
Duncan
Anne McElvoy: The Cold War is on again. Count me out
23 September 2001
The more people tell me that on 11 September we entered a new era, the deeper my sinking feeling that we are slipping back into an old one. All the brooding on the radically changed world, the shifts in geo-politics, the unfamilar breed of super-terrorist, can't dispel the sense that this "newness" is just a thin patina of unfamiliarity.
Underneath it, we are slipping backward to an all too familiar clash. The ideological battles of the past are being refought under a differnt guise. The Cold War of words is on again. Yogi Berra would have recognized it as déja vu all over again. This may be 2001, but it feels damn like 1981 to me.
A conversation has resumed in the West: the one that was broken off the the day the Berlin Wall fell. Only the casus belli is different. It as if the aspic of the intervening years had suddenly dissolved. CND is marching again, Clare Short has remembered that she doesn't like Americans vaunting their "military muscle". Excuses are being drummed up for inexcusable behaviour. Tam Dalyell is prophesying wanton escalation, and very soon there will be a Billy Bragg concert. I can feel it coming.
We are returning to a world of mirror imagery. The world is no longer bi-polar in the sense of two great powers opposing each other, each with its sphere of influence. But it is divided again between those who believe, broadly speaking, that America is both justified and right to take the lead in an offensive on rogue states as the breeding ground of terrorism and those who are more scared of – or hostile – to America's projection of power across the globe. We find ourselves with the strangest bed-fellows.
My neighbour, fresh from an anti-war meeting, notes the tension between sober Quakers, alongside the "Support the Intifada" T-shirts, anti-capitalists shouting down Greens for being too moderate and so on. His account transported me to the Stanley, Co Durham, branch of CND 20 years ago. It would start off discussing disarmament, move on to an argument about the PLO and finish up with a discussion of how to Get Thatcher Out, with a final round on cultural imperialism.
The propaganda campaigns of that era came flooding back when I read some of the more lurid descriptions of the horrors of Nato's weaponry and the slightly fetishistic fascination with world war. The New Statesman in the immediate aftermath of the event ran a leading article which seemed to suggest that were facing an inevitable nuclear winter before President Bush had even had time to tell us that he was sad and angry. The assumption that America is about to "go mad" is rampant.
Even Downing Street can't resist spinning us the agreeable fantasy that Mr Blair has been "calming down" George Bush, just as Mrs Thatcher at the height of her delusion used to suggest that Ronald Reagan could hardly govern in Washington DC without consulting her first. If anyone calms down George, it will be Colin Powell, his lucid secretary of state. But as in the 1980s, we are in an era of instant mythmaking, a time when we are all inclined to believe what we want to believe and dismiss the alternative as rubbish or lies.
If you're over 30, you may remember all this from the first time round. If you're not, then lucky you. The early 1980s were a time when good and bad arguments got hopelessly jumbled and politics was an endless shouting match. It makes me sad, having harboured the progressive illusion that we had come a bit further than that, since they closed the Cold War Punch and Judy show.
Since then, as we have tried to construct a more stable world from the ruins of that conflict, I have found myself arguing for intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo and against America's policy of random bombings of Iraq, against equally convinced opponents. We have disagreed with one another passionately, but understood that the world is complex, that the results of interventions are far from guaranteed and that it is sometimes hard to know what to do for the best, even when you feel compelled to act.
This time though, it is different and far worse. The tone is raw and unforgiving. Cultural and intellectual tribes are at war again and reason will be the first casualty. The right is busily reviving its instinctive autocratic responses to any crisis – the desire to start hunting out the enemy within rears its head. Michael Ancram, the new Shadow Foreign Secretary, has said that there is no place for "idealistic" human rights legislation when there is a terrorist threat to hand. Beware politicians whisking away civil rights on the pretext that they are seeking to prevent some unspecified outrage.
Last week, I was talking to a columnist on another newspaper on a matter unrelated to the war. We have previously inhabited that bit of civilisation in which people of different views agree to differ. "Are you happy now? People like you?" he said, by way of a greeting. Some insults are so perverse that one just doesn't get the point. "'People like me' as in ... what?" I asked. He was shackled by a chain of inverted meta-logic according to which the liberal left was somehow responsible for being too nice to Arafat which meant supporting terrorists, which meant supporting the people who have slaughtered 6,000 innocent Americans. In short, it's them there Blairites who are to blame for Ground Zero.
I put down the phone only to overhear someone opposed to any form of military intervention summarising the position of those who do as "Nuke 'em all and bomb Afghanistan back to the Stone Age". Is there a stupidity virus going round which makes otherwise intelligent people argue like morons, all of a sudden?
Watch out too for the insinuation that patriotism wears one set of colours only. That is not a democratic argument. It is perfectly possible – indeed very common – to love one's own country and be a pacifist. It is just as possible to believe that the use of force is morally right to prevent even greater suffering.
The last thing we need is a lapse into squabbling Babel. That is the bit of the Eighties we shouldn't feel nostalgic about: the demonizing of your opponents as fascist bastards or fellow travellers – even the insults were programmatic. It's strange: so many people seem convinced that their viewpoint is being shouted down. Which only goes to show what a lot of shouting is going on.</HTML>
