I ain't marchin' anymore.

Radio

I had the privilege of listening to Emporer Lib Dem Nick Clegg on the radio this morning. He started out with the obligatory and Ritual Invocations of Israel's right to defend itself. (No talk of morality or proportionality or Palestinians' right to resist illegal occupation of course.)

What Clegg's position boiled down to was- in paraphrase- "look, this is counter-productive, not in Israel's long-term interest blah blah blah.” Like a “dove” during the Vietnam War.

At which point I was dying for an Israeli to turn around say “Gee, thanks for the unsolicited strategic advice Mr Clegg, but we think we know our own interests better than you do, so we're going to keep on bombing, if it's all the same to you.” And would have loved to have heard Nick's response to this. Within the logic of his critique, where would he have been able to go?

The March
A very good turn out on short notice, and the organisers will doubtless be cheered by this. I've only the vaguest guesstimate of how many were there- so the usual heuristic applies- halve the number the organisers boast of, multiply the police estimate by two, and voila, you have the range of likely numbers. Two thousand? Three thousand? Something like that. A lot of Asians, maybe 60% of the turnout? Ditto for gender? At worst 50/50.
[Update 4.1.09 Sure enough, the BBC says 2000 and the organisers say 5000...]

Walking along, I overheard one of the police calling in to central control to get a specific CCTV camera trained on a group of 8 lads who looked like, well, 8 lads. God bless the Panopticon, eh?

We trudged up from from All Saints park, down Oxford Rd, right onto Deansgate, right up whatsit road and so into Albert Square, where a giant Santa squatted incongruously in front of the Town Hall. And it was cold. As TS Eliot said, in a different context "A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a journey."

And then, inevitably, we had the speeches. God will we ever learn? No-one can hear what is being said (which is usually a good thing for the reputation of whoever is speaking), and all the lines of attention are at a distant Leadership. Never are we invited to get into sub-groups based on where we live, what work we do etc and to start thinking about how to sustain a campaign that would force our government into something sensible and humane.

OF COURSE this is not always possible, and won't always work, and marches can be a merely a demonstration of strength rather than a further recruiting ground/planning space. But as it stands at present, local organising is, as far as I see it, rarely going on. There are spasms of activity when the atrocity levels rise from merely terrible to actually apocalyptic. And these set- piece marches, which make the participants feel like they're Doing Something, however briefly.

The marchers get to feel they've Done Their Bit, the invited speakers get an ego-boost and their organisations get added 'exposure', which beholds them to the march organisers. The police get overtime payments I guess.

So everyone is happy, and nothing changes.

Analysis

I haven't read enough on this, so I reserve the right to be absolutely wrong.

A couple of weeks ago there were some articles in the FT about the Saudi plan of 2002 getting dusted off, and Bush/Rice sort of backing it, for “legacy”/PR reasons. And taking the Chomskyite/MAD Magazine line that the thing a military industrial complex fears is a real prospect of peace, then the attack on Gaza “makes sense,”

If you don't want a final peace deal (yet, or maybe ever), and you want to keep strangling your enemy for an ever better deal, and you have a lingering fear that the New Guy might not tolerate your excesses, then you strike out. This has nothing to do with Jewishness, Inuitness, AlphaCentaurianism, this is just how the powerful play the game with much weaker opponents.

Best book I ever read about Israel was that Arthur Neslen's "Occupied Minds" published by Pluto Press. It's extraordinary.

Apologies to the late Phil Ochs for (mis)appropriating his song for the title of this posting.