Self Hating White Liberals Part 126 - AL Kennedy

She's a grown woman (38 next birthday) and a writer of some repute - though God knows why if this is anything to go by :

"So, the lean and noble figure of Alastair Campbell jogs away from No 10, a whole new selection of profitable marathons opening up, and the luscious and reliable figure of Mandy slips back in. Doesn't it all impregnate you with confidence and pride? "

Uh ? Campbell lean and hungry maybe ... Mandy ? luscious ? reliable ? Why not stick to the tried and tested cliches if you can't find a striking adjective - Mephistopholean is always reliable - unlike Mandy. Sounds as if she's composing an ad for a gay contact mag. And as for being 'impregnated' with confidence and pride - come on, lecturer in creative writing - 'marinaded' would surely do as well if you're just chucking any old words in there. Or think your favourite restaurant and try 'drizzled'.

Surely the day she put this Guardian piece together she was suffering from the ailments described by Christina Patterson in an Independent interview.

"Almost her first words are to request that the harsh office lights be turned off. She speaks in a voice that's barely a whisper and sips water frantically as if trying to quench some terrible thirst."

Sounds like the mother of all hangovers to me, but I may be being unfair - she suffers with a twisted spine.



Here we go - her problem is the blood on Tony Blair's hands.

"I am willing to ignore the blood spilled as a result of Blair's transport policies, Blair's health policies and Blair's decisions relating to arms sales and the escalating bloodbath that is Afghanistan. This leaves me with only Iraq." Cheers, AL. Decent of you to ignore the blood spilled by his increases in NHS spending. Let's stick with Iraq, then.

We won't count the Iraqi servicemen killed "because the ones the CIA couldn't buy off beforehand were, therefore, Evil and deserved to die" - thank the Lord that some noble Iraqis resisted the CIA dollar and fought on ! Didn't Saddam put Republican Guards behind front-line troops to shoot any deserters ? The CIA must have spent a lot, as the vast majority of the Iraqi army survived and have melted back into civilian life. A proportion of them are attacking and killing our soldiers.

There follows some pleasant counting of the possible number of pints of civilian blood spilled during the war - "estimates of the completely dead vary between 37,137 and the much more comfortable 6,118". For 'comfortable' read 'accurate' - there is almost no upper limit to the civilian toll you can find on the sort of websites where Michael Meacher does his research.

Now we come to the bit that makes this Caucasian's blood boil - all eight pints of it.

"Now one wouldn't want to be racist about this, but Iraqi blood does seem to matter a good deal less than more civilised, more Christian, more Caucasian blood. "

How true. How very, bloody, true. Damn right it does, to a self-loathing liberal.

As long as white people aren't spilling it, ANY amount of Iraqi blood can be spilled and you won't give a damn, let alone pick up a pen to write about it.

No one knows how many people died in Saddam's prisons, tortured and without trial. Most estimates are around 200,000. New mass graves, sometimes containing small children, are being uncovered.

Sorry. You don't count. You see, we're really more interested in whether 'the West' killed you. And they didn't.

Sure, it's sad you're dead, but we're campaigning for truth and justice here - got to stay focused on the important things. We're the good people - we care. And our campaign isn’t about you – it’s about us.

‘Not in My Name !’ In Saddam’s name – fair enough. Suddenly we don’t want to count bodies anymore.

The wrong people killed you. Maybe we can say the Americans or British sold Saddam the weapons used - give you a bit of recognition. That's what we did with the million dead in the Iran-Iraq war - focused on some technology sales and a few photos of Rumsfeld with Saddam. So they didn't die in vain. Got several Guardian articles from them. But get real – one Iraqi child with his legs blown off by a Raytheon missile is worth more to us than any number heaving out their last breaths, lying in their own blood, vomit and faeces in one of Saddam’s torture chambers. You see, that won’t have been done ‘in my name’.



She’s not an isolated case of course. Her ideas are those of her class – Warwick Uni, “Community Arts Worker”, “Writer in Residence for Hamilton & East Kilbride Social Work Department” (could you make it up ?), and now a college lecturer. Her gums have been clamped firmly round the nipple of the despised state all her life.

Forty years ago Kennedy would have been writing about Sharpeville while ignoring the atrocities in the Congo. In 1947 she’d have written about Amritsar while half a million died in the Punjab.

And today we can be sure that she won’t tell us about Congo massacres, Nigerian conflict, violence in the Philippines, Indonesia, or any other ‘non-Caucasian’ deaths. Unless, of course, she can use those bodies as weapons in her own – and the Guardian’s - dirty little war.