March of time: Tony D’Souza on Iraq war protests

‘We were united by one idea.’

‘Look’ said my seven-year-old grandniece as she burst through the door, giggling uncontrollably. ‘It’s an old man dancing like a chicken.’ She handed me a phone and I could hardly believe my eyes. It was Mick Jagger performing on stage. The song was ‘Street Fighting Man’ from 1968.

Has so much time passed? Well, yes. And there’s no point in complaining about it. That song rang in our ears when we took to the streets during the anti-fascist protests of the seventies and eighties. We marched then just as those before us marched against the Black Shirts in the East End. I have always felt it was the right thing to do, even if our protests were hijacked by political groups with their own agenda. We were creating a disturbance, making trouble, even, but we did it in the same spirit as US senator John Lewis, who said ‘Get into good trouble, necessary trouble, to redeem the soul of our nation.’

Many years passed before I took to the streets again, but just over twenty years ago, February 2003, I joined 1.5 million people on the streets of London to march against the invasion of Iraq. This time the marchers were much more diverse. There were nuns, infants, trades unionists, barristers, football fans and even a classical quartet with the banner ‘Make music not war’. We were united by one idea: to halt the impending war, or to at least give inspectors more time to find the weapons of mass destruction on which the case for war depended.

The outrage that day was so universal it moved with the rotation of the earth. Protests began in Auckland, then moved to Sydney, Manilla, and Moscow. The march in Rome involved three million people, the largest anti-war rally in history. Worldwide, six to ten million people took part, in up to sixty countries. Ordinary people, all over the world, knew war was a bad idea and would have a disastrous outcome.

And they were right. The protests were ignored and the invasion went ahead. Saddam Hussein, the murderous despot, was executed, and the moral authority of the west died on the gallows with him. Now, when Vladimir Putin defends his despicable land grab in Ukraine, he can point to what the US and its ‘coalition of the willing’ did in Iraq. and can ask (not without some justification) what moral right does the west have to lecture him?

The effects of war in Iraq are still felt today. I am proud to have taken part in that protest even though it failed. It’s important to stand up and have the courage of one’s convictions. And here’s the deeper point. For activism to be meaningful, conviction must come from within. This is what Quakers call discernment. Without the inner light to give direction, activism is empty sloganeering.

Now I wait upon the inner light. If it asks, I am ready to dance like a chicken, or again be a street fighting man.

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