Norman Geras joins today’s counter-demonstration with a response to anti-war blogger Martin Wisse.
Wisse wrote on his blog:
I’m sick and tired of those who gave Bush and his cronies another chance to screw up a country, after it had already become clear what he had wrecked in Afghanistan… If you supported the war on Afghanistan, you were wrong. If you supported the war on Iraq you were doubly wrong. If you still support the war on Iraq, you’re a fool. We said nothing good would come from this and indeed, nothing good has come from it.
Think about the locution here ‘screw up a country’, vis-à-vis both Afghanistan and Iraq. As if they were previously unscrewed. But that is, actually, chicken feed. Think carefully about: ‘We said nothing good would come from this and indeed, nothing good has come from it’. It’s hard to know whether it’s worse for Martin Wisse if he really believes this statement or if he doesn’t and is just looking for a strong effect. But nothing good: not the closing down of the torture chambers, not the eviction of Saddam and his two boys from their seats of power, not the opening up of Iraq to a free press. Just nothing. I will credit the guy with not really believing what he says; with just enjoying his own sharp strength with language. But it’s a particular irony that this goes out under the conceit Wis(s)e Words. Someone who can, in all deliberateness, actually give forth that depraved statement would do well, truly, to reconsider or shut up.
It isn’t typical of the whole opposition to the war. It is symptomatic of a wide tendency towards denial within the anti-war movement.
Stop the denial.