I found the following column on The Daily Dish and thought I’d post it here. It is tough stuff, and the attitudes expressed certainly don’t make you any friends right now, but it is how I feel too, and I am not backing down. I got an exhilarated phone message from a friend of mine telling me he was at the “march”, and he wished I had been there. You would have had to pay me to be at that march. I find, in some people, that there is an assumption that I will agree with them, just because I am an actress, a writer, a single woman, whatever. I am all of those things, but I also will not “march for peace”. Not because I am not for peace, of course I am! But just screaming “No to War” without understanding that human beings are always on the brink of crisis, that peace has to be managed and guarded is stupid and ahistorical. Sometimes peace must be fought for.
Pollard says it better than me, and he’s British, so he has more authority. The column is called “My Address Book is the first Casualty of War”.
An excerpt:
Almost alone among my friends, I did not go on The March. My absence was not due to ambivalence, but because I considered the march to be contemptible. I think the marchers are not only wrong but dangerously, wilfully, shamefully wrong …
I have tried to point out that saying you are in favour of “peace” is meaningless. Which sane person is not? The question is: peace on whose, and what, terms? If it is peace on the terms of brutal dictators, secured by allowing them to build up whatever weapons arsenals they wish, then that is not peace. It is suicide.
