Apathy, and Liberal Bravery in the Face of Peace. posted by Richard Seymour

It seems no insult to the public intelligence is low enough for the liberal hack. Henry McDonald in yesterday's Absurder managed to curtail a rather patronising article on Northern Ireland with a transparently self-serving outburst on Qadaffi, and a plug for his pro-war liberal chums. Northern Ireland first. The gist of the argument is this - Northern Ireland doesn't care about democracy as long as it has peace. That's why noone turned out to a demo called by Sinn Fein. As long as they can go shopping, they don't need a say in how they're governed. Henry might have missed it, but the whole reason for the absence of peace over some decades was precisely the absence of democracy. How he could have missed this obvious connection is beyond me, unless his head is stuck so far up his own intelligence that he can't see the shit for the brown stuff.

He then has a wee ramble about why Qadaffi isn't a courageous man, after all:

"While the Blair visit was justifiable in a world of shifting alliances and dangerous uncertainties, the idea of Gadaffi being 'courageous' is an insult to the victims of IRA terror as well as those who died at Lockerbie and outside the Libyan People's Bureau in London.

Furthermore, the notion that Libya's opening up to the West was brave is absurdly inaccurate. The real reason Gadaffi scrapped his WMD programme and renounced the use of terrorism is because he was simply afraid that he and his sordid regime would be next. He saw what had happened to Saddam Hussein and decided he didn't want to end up in a spider hole hiding from GIs. Whoever told Blair to describe the colonel as 'courageous' ought to be sacked."



Fair enough, courageous isn't the first word that would normally come to mind to describe a vain, pompous autocrat with about as much flair for the written word as an Observer hack. Nevertheless, the pretense that Qadaffi is simply reacting to the bombing of Iraq is perfectly absurd. Qadaffi had been attempting to negotiate with the West for years, but those attempts were simply rebuffed. Why did he attempt to negotiate? Sanctions might have something to do with it. Isn't this the reason why, for instance, the compensation Qadaffi has agreed to pay to relatives of the Lockerbie dead is to be tied to the lifting of specific sanctions. The first billion is set to be released when the UN sanctions that banned arm sales, air links, and froze Libyan assets are lifted, the second billion when US sanctions are lifted and the remainder when the US removes Libya from its list of terrorist sponsoring nations.

Henry McDonald might do well to acquaint himself with such elementary facts, and his editors should insist upon it before he is paid for another column inch. And they should certainly stop this:

"One of the few voices on the British Left who was prepared to support the toppling of Saddam will be in Belfast this week. My colleague, Nick Cohen, who has bravely spoken out in favour of military intervention in Iraq in order to free those living under the Baath Party's lash is to chair a talk by Francis Wheen..."

Since when was it "brave" to take the side of the government, the military, the US government, the Pentagon, the Conservative Party, the Sun newspaper, the Daily Telegraph and ... oddly, enough, the very same paper you work for?

Now, today's Guardian has another whine from the increasingly banausic Peter Preston. What's his bitch today? The public are just too apathetic. They want a referendum on Europe, but they can't even be arsed to vote. They tell opinion pollsters they intend not to vote very much any more. A lot of them don't even claim to have discussed politics or political news for over two years. The poll finding is of interest as much for what it doesn't say as for what it claims to say - polls show the bulk of people were against the war, are against PFI, are against tax cuts for the rich, favour renationalisation of the rails, consider asylum seekers a serious economic problem, etc. And that in large majorities. And we are to believe that those people haven't talked politics in a few years? Nah. They just haven't talked about parliament. Why? Because there ain't no politics there worth chatting about. Peter Preston's liberal smugness always misses this elementary common sense.