Julie Burchill writes in the Times:
I’ve heard some pacifist claptrap in my time, but Benardo Bertolucci’s recent babble – “An orgasm is better than a bomb!” – really took the biscuit. What, the orgasm of a rapist, a paedophile, or a wife beater is better than a good, honest bomb dropped on a genocidal enemy?
…..
[W]hat joker decided that it had to be either/or? Whatever he was on, it was probably the same stuff as the clown who wrote the lyrics to last year’s biggest chart hit Where Is The Love, a song complaining about, among other things, the extremely just war against the monstrous Baathists.“When you hate, you’re bound to get irate/Badness is what you demonstrate/ So meditate to the love, y’all!” There you go – if those Kurds being gassed to death and those others guys being fed feet first through a shredder by the Baathist dudes had only managed not to get irate, and found a way to meditate to the love (y’all), there wouldn’t have been any need for a nasty war… Anyway, the point is that on Valentine’s Day, when all around is pink and fluffy, I for one would like to put the case for – in an imperfect world – the coexistence of bombs and orgasms, love and war, snuggly bunnies and brave soldiers both. Furthermore, probably because I’m (a) spiteful and (b) don’t know when to stop, I’d like to question the motives and morality of those people who keep repeating the astounding claim that Bush and Blair are “worse” war criminals than Saddam, and who have so relentlessly demonised we who were in favour of the war as bloodthirsty perverts compared with their little-friend-of-all-mankind shtick; in short, the Bombs vs Orgasms crew.
I’d like to say to them upfront; those bombs are the best ensurers and protectors of your orgasms currently operative. I’m not asking you to love ’em, but I am asking you to acknowledge them, hear them, feel their pain – and, if possible, give ’em a great big old Oprah-style hug.
When the war started, I could comprehend why some of those who were against it felt as they did. I could understand that certain racists and xenophobes and grumpy old men believed that the life of one British soldier was worth more than the lives of a thousand Iraqis. I could understand why the Catholic Church was against the war; after all, they above all have shown such great empathy and support for fascist tyrants down the ages. These people were merely being consistent; they didn’t approve of personal freedom in their own countries/congregations, so why should the Iraqis have it either?
But what I couldn’t understand were the huge numbers of what I thought were People Like Me who were willing to march against the right of Iraqis to have a chance at freedom, an escape from tyranny. Women, gays, trade unionists; all of them, their snuggly self-righteousness coming off them in radiant waves, like in the old Ready Brek adverts, marching for the right of Saddam and his psychotic gang to continue torturing and murdering the people of Iraq – and Iran, and Kuwait – as he pleased.
Some of them were people I knew – my friends. I knew they weren’t evil – I loved them, in my fashion. So in the end, I came to the conclusion that they were in some way daft, even though they spoke intelligently – it was the only way I could keep talking to them. Christopher Hitchens described the anti-war marchers as “the sinister leading the silly”, and I’d rather think of someone I liked as silly than sinister.
It hasn’t stopped there. The continuing alliance of the anti-Blair Left with extreme Islam is extraordinary…
(Hat tip: SdeW.)