Nov
29
First published on Monday, February 17th 2003
On Saturday, the largest ever protest to hit the streets of London took place. It was a march against a War on Iraq and a fun day out for all or almost all involved. It is estimates that one and a half million people took part on the march. All these people where against the war well apart from me and all the children younger than 12 who were there and all those girls who had come to “meet cute guys” and all those students who had turned up because their friends were coming and they wanted a fun day out. Of course apart from them everyone there was against the war.
The anti war march also was a “free” Palestine march hence the literature on sale from the “Socialist Worker” stand which claimed that Zionists were responsible for the Holocaust. I wonder how many of the people on the march shared the views of these Socialist nutballs.
The pop “star” Ms. Dynamite was at the march and was able to use the event to plug her songs and claim that we shouldn’t go to war because Iraqi children should be free to have a peaceful childhood so that they can write music about there happy childhood. I’m sorry honey, but last time I checked that nice Mr. Hussein is not into the freedom of expression thing but he does like children, why else would he have allowed his army to gas so many innocent Kurdish children and why else would he torture children in order to gain “confessions” or information out of their parents.
Though the march was attended by bored teenagers, out for a good time, and many harmless old hippies there were some pretty vile people at the march. The Communist Party of Great Britain was there in full force for example, protesting for peace while advocating revolution. I can see the consistency in there position there… really. The Commies were not the only ones who suffered from inconsistency. There was for example one group of people holding up a banner saying “Learn from Ghandi”. I’m sure that they did not mean to advocate to their fellow marchers that they should back the war but if they actually knew their Ghandi they would know that Ghandi was a big fan of “imperialist” war given that he did give his support to Indian involvement on behalf of the British during the First World War.
Interestingly for a march with such a large amount of socialists and anti-capitalists taking part there was quite a bit of capitalist trading taking place. I wish I had had the foresight to sell anti-war memorabilia- I would have made a bomb! It was however nice to see a thriving market economy at the heart of a demonstration backed by the Communists.
The Big winner of this March as well as Saddam Hussein was most definitely Piers Morgan, editor of the Daily Mirror, who had supplied the marchers with “No War” signs that also coincidently bore the logo of his newspaper on them. Some of the marchers did fathom what was going on and felt obliged to rip off the Daily Mirror signs from their banners but these protestors were the few and all in all the Mirror was able to gain quite a lot of cheap publicity from the march.
All in all it was a nice walk. It was a bit of a cold day for it though I hope the march against a war on North Korea takes place during a warmer time of year.