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This Ban Won't Stop Us: Brits try to Ban Anti-War Demos,

Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
The Guardian - Oct 6, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2184924,00.html

This ban will not stop us

Parliament might want to forget about Iraq, 
but we will march on Monday to remind them 

By Brian Eno

Our leaders would undoubtedly be happy if we "moved on" from Iraq. They
don't want to talk about it any more: it was a dreadful blunder, and
reflects little credit on any of them. Presumably this is why the
question has hardly been debated in parliament. Although the majority
of the public were always against the war, this was not reflected by
their elected representatives. The government behaved in a way that was
transparently undemocratic but the Conservatives won't call them on it,
for without their almost unanimous support the whole project couldn't
have happened.

But to conveniently forget Iraq now is to forfeit the only possible
benefit the war might have: the chance to rethink the dysfunctional
political system that got us into this hole. If we don't, we risk
digging a series of ever deeper holes. The Iraq adventure was justified
as the planting of a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Not only
did it utterly fail at that, it also undermined our democracy.
Appealing to our paranoia more than our vision, George Bush and Tony
Blair obtained restrictions on freedoms that had taken centuries to
evolve. They said these were necessary to ensure our security - a
device used by authoritarian leaders since time immemorial.

Civil liberties never seem important until you need them. But by
definition, that is the very time you won't be able to get them, so
they have to be in place in advance, like an insurance policy. In his
book Defying Hitler, the historian Sebastian Hafner describes how
Germany slid into nazism. At first people laughed at Hitler and played
along with what seemed trivial changes in the law. For most Germans it
was all rather abstract, and they were expecting things to return to
normal when Hitler faded back into obscurity. Only he didn't, and civil
liberties were so compromised there was no way to stop him.

If we don't stand up about Iraq then we tacitly sanction the next steps
in this deadly experiment of democratic evangelism. Those will likely
include an attack on Iran, a permanent force of occupation in Iraq
(probably always the intention), the complete militarisation of the
Middle East, and a revived nuclear future.

Stop the War Coalition planned a march from Trafalgar Square to
Parliament Square on Monday - the day parliament resumes - to draw
attention to the fact that a lot of us are still thinking about Iraq
and to call for the immediate withdrawal of troops. Using an archaic
law (the 1839 Metropolitan Police Act), that demonstration has now been
banned. Now why would that be? Stop the War Coalition has organised
dozens of such demonstrations, and as far as I know not one person has
been hurt. So it can't be public safety that's at stake.

No, it's the elephant in the room. This government wants to show itself
as clean and new, and doesn't want attention drawn to the elephant and
the mess it has left on the carpet. So it invokes an old law, to shave
a little more off the arrangements by which citizens communicate their
feelings to government (a process, by the way, called democracy).

It would take courage for Gordon Brown to say: "This war was a
catastrophe." It would take even greater courage to admit that the
seeds of the catastrophe were in its conception: it wasn't a good idea
badly done (the neocons' last refuge - "Blame it all on Rumsfeld"), but
a bad idea badly done. And it would take perhaps superhuman courage to
say: "And now we should withdraw and pay reparations to this poor
country."

I don't see it happening. But the demonstration will, legal or not: on
Monday Tony Benn will lead us as we exercise our right to remind our
representatives that, even if Iraq has slipped off their agenda, it's
still on ours. Please join us. 

For more info: http://www.stopwar.org.uk

Brian Eno is a musician
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Eno

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