February 15 Demonstration in London. Photo: Adam Ma'anit

Among the throng of diverse, good-humoured, passionate people, I experienced an overwhelming sense of kinship. I felt proud to be British. And that has been a long time coming.

Proud not, of course, because of our military might; not because of our position in the league tables of the wealth of the world. Certainly not because of the steps we have made towards a less unequal or safer world. Even less because of the pomp and panoply of official Britain, the adulation of caste and the threadbare grimace of royalty; not the prowess of our wealth-creators, the need in a competitive world to pay million-dollar supplements to get topflight CEOs to head our companies; not the designer celebrities whose awesome consumption patterns are supposed to serve as example to us all. What was stirring that weekend, was a re-assertion of the power of Dissent.

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The event was haunted by the ghosts of the pamphleteers of early industrialism, the incarcerated of the Combination Laws, the victims of government spies and informers down the ages, deported trades unionists, people who had been told they would never again work in this or that town for their political activities, those who saw their livelihoods destroyed by their commitment to a cause, Chartists, all who hoped – sometimes with millennial fervour – for the better world, a travesty of which we are the inheritors. Also marching on Saturday were all who have ever defied power and privilege down the years, from the uncelebrated artisans and workers of the early industrial era, to the radicals and victims of Red scares and Cold War terror, from the handloom weavers to the sad emigrants from Britain who left this country in despair in the years before the First War and of the Depression, whose descendants from the USA, Canada or Australia may be seen any summer swarming over the graveyards of Lancashire, South Wales and Scotland, looking for traces of their vanished kinspeople.

Enough has been said about the range of people making up an ‘incoherent’ coalition united by nothing more than a detestation of war – as if that were not already sufficient to justify the event. But they shared a common instinct which is profoundly rooted in our people, the old CNDears as well as the Muslim youth, the middle-class families with their children and the hospital workers, the firefighters and the man who danced in front of the Hilton Hotel crying before its shocked patrons: ‘I want Bush’s head on a platter.’ And that instinct is to scrutinize critically what George Orwell called ‘the smelly little orthodoxies’ of official Britain.

That this upsets our ‘betters’ is inevitable, even when those betters no longer deck themselves out in the regalia of birth and the mystique of breeding, but masquerade as men and women of the people. Their right-thinking, Right thinking pieties are the same as those uttered by all the pompous custodians of our Britishness during the long imperial night of coercion and violence, and its parallel barbaric industrialism at home. Nothing that Britain ever practised against its captive peoples abroad had not already been tried and tested among its own population: whether the uprooting of ancient ways of life for the sake of more profitable sheep, the enclosure of the commons, the alienation of the property of the people, the use of the insignia of nationhood to bring people out to fight wars against the innocent in places they had never even heard of. Nothing that has been carried out in our name in remote parts of the world didn’t have its antecedents in these islands – no exploitation, in terms of brutalizing and degrading labour, no cold decision to instruct the military to turn their guns on civilians, from Peterloo in 1819 to Llanelli in 1911, from Bloody Sunday in Trafalgar Square in 1887 to a more recent Bloody Sunday in 1972, no willingness to use starvation as a weapon, from Ireland in 1846 to Bengal almost exactly a century later. In this context, ‘Not In Our Name’ has a resonance that echoes down the years.

The crude calculus that Dissent dies when a majority people in one country have full bellies and have a stake in a status quo which they will be unwilling to disturb; the cynicism that believes that contentment will stay silent in the presence of injustice and see the sweet reason of its superiors; the self-serving conviction that people are concerned only with ‘bread-and-butter’ issues (the bread of affliction and buttering up the influential), and that they have a declining interest in anything that goes on beyond these shores – these easy assumptions of privilege and power will have to be re-thought in the light of popular concern expressed for the people of Iraq.

This, then, is the other side of globalization. Let the great information conglomerates spread their messages of showy know-nothing conformism. Let the enormous concentrations of wealth pursue their secretive associations in island fortress or mountain eyrie to preserve the inequalities of the world. They cannot withstand the technology of instant communication, of the Net and the e-mail – that resurrection of the word-of-mouth, an oral tradition which they had believed decayed thanks to the saturation bombing of the people with one-way information, and the spiritual obesity of a diet of celebrity, glamour and money.

Dissent is alive! Of course, it always has been; only it slumbered for many years, ghettoized as the work of an insignificant minority, a few Leftists delivering their tracts on windy street corners like demented preachers in their deserted tabernacles. It looked as though we had been marginalized, silenced by the ‘opinion-formers’ and beaters of the bounds of the speakable; who had defined the ‘unthinkable’ for us, and expected us to duly banish it from our thoughts. Respectable dissent only occurred in totalitarian regimes; dissidents were banished to the gaols of tyrants. This couldn’t happen in our pluralist and open society. Those who claimed otherwise were branded with the scarlet letter of the 20th century, the E for Extremist and, as such, their views and values, no matter how humane and civilized, were banished from the dwindling political sphere from which the rich and powerful found it hard to imagine that anyone would want to stray.

It is a great historic irony that Dissent should be rekindled not by those who are happy to label themselves as conservative, even reactionary, but by the inheritors of a Labour Party that came into the world to mitigate the rigours of capitalism and looks like going out of the world defending them.

It is the flags of convenience of the false radicals that have summoned Dissent from its long sleep, to come out onto the streets once more and say we will not be cowed and browbeaten and will not return to sullen acquiescence and silence.

It is odd – outlandish even – that this should make me proud of my country in a way that I haven’t been for years. How strange, the joyful reconciliation with millions of others, who share a love of country; a love that shows itself in internationalism and a desire to protect the poor and the vulnerable from the vengeful temper of power.

February 15 Demonstration in London.
Photo: Adam Ma'anit

See our previous reports on the Feb. 15 activities.

For more info on action possibilities and demonstrations around the world, visit the United for Peace and Justice website and the Stop the War Coalition.

See also:

NI 316 Iraq	NI 330 Globocops	NI 340 Twin Terrors	NI 345 Islam

Other relevant NI articles:

Human Shields in Iraq - February 2002
Eduardo Galeano on the symbols of war - December 2001
Oil and the Islamists - December 2001
World media response to 11 September attacks - October 2001
Greasing the machine: Bush and the oil cronies - June 2001
Iraqi artist's image based on his torture in Iraq - September 2000
UN officials resign protesting at sanctions - May 2000
Death of a little poet - November 1998
Deaths of children due to UN sanctions - Jan/Feb 1998
Arms dealer on supplying Saddam - July 1991
UK arms sales to Iraq scandal & cover-up - November 1994