Larvatus Prodeo

One of the old canards we’ve had a look at here before is the (typically) generationalist argument that if the kidz aren’t marching in the streets, then politics must have disappeared from contemporary culture. Here, culture is a key term because “68 thought” (to Anglicise a useful if ill-intentioned phrase from conservative French philosophers - representatives of what Dominique Lecourt calls the “mediocracy”) exploded the links between politics and culture, yet arguably dissolved itself into culture. That’s a more complex story than I have time to tell here, but I wanted to have a look at some of the afterlives of the protests against the War on Iraq that happened all across the world on February 15 2003.

It’s often argued that the protests failed to “stop the war”, and thus were fruitless. This, of course, is a rather odd criterion by which to judge them, because I’m unaware of any protests which have actually succeeded in stopping wars… So the second argument we’re normally confronted with is that the protests failed to translate into an ongoing movement. That might again be the wrong yardstick - in that the “peace movement” of the 60s had its conditions of possibility in its antecedents in the anti-nuclear struggles of the Cold War era. Possibly quite wrongly, disarmament and nuclear proliferation are no longer perceived as subjects for mobilisation because 1989 and 1991 dissolved the fear of nuclear holocaust in our social imaginary, a fear sort of displaced onto “terrorism” but largely now absent.

I think you could make an argument, though, that the anti-War concerns of 2003 translated into powerful sources of electoral change - in a number of countries - Spain, Australia being two that spring immediately to mind and now America and Britain, where the bellicose regimes of Bush and Blair/Brown are now in their final stages of dissolution for reasons closely linked to the Iraq War. It would be very interesting to map the influence in all this of what we might call Open Source Protest, and here I’m not just thinking of GetUp!, MoveOn.Org and the “netroots” but the more explicitly cultural aspects of anti-war sentiment.

Continue reading ‘Open Source Protest’