The mnemonic of the moment was WMD. You hear it every morning in the news, and every evening in the pub dick-joked into Weapons of Mass Dickstruction.
Then, after a decade or so, you don’t hear it anymore. In the news it is replaced by jihad, or Islamist, and sometimes only Arab. And no one goes to the pub how they used to. Your local’s just not your local anymore, is it?
VOICEOVER
Preparations from first light
Silhouetted officers patrol empty cordoned-off streets
VOICEOVER
In the frosty air early morning, political warm-up acts
On the steps of Whitehall a man strums an acoustic guitar
SINGING
Peace, peace, peace, peace,
let’s start talkin’ peace
The important thing about this mnoronic moment, this 15 February 2003, is that it was (yet another) End of Something and Beginning of Something Else. It was neither The Very End nor An Absolute Beginning. It was mid-pivot. Maybe the epicentre of the spin. The “About, face!” Or maybe it had already started its reverse spin-out, building up a headscarf of steam for This Exact Moment, now, or The Next Moment Yet (always hard to tell, when you’re in The Moment, which exact moment it is).
Wide aerial shot of march
People dressed as British Prime Minister Tony Blair and and US President George W. Bush kissing
VOICEOVER
Hundreds of coaches booked. Chartered trains from across the country
SOUNDBITE
Even though United are playing I think it’s probably better to come to London because it’s to try and stop the war.
After 9/11.
Before The Internet.
And before mobile phones. (Both had breached the military industrial complex and been birthed into the society but they haven’t yet hy-bred into the Weapons of Mass Distraction they will become.)
VOICEOVER
This was Hyde Park, The Strand, Embankment
Tilt down from neon advertising to man conducting choir
Choir singing
Banners in march
VOICEOVER
Where’re you from?
SOUNDBITE
Sheffield
SOUNDBITE
Leeds
SOUNDBITE
Suffolk
SOUNDBITE
Barnsley
SOUNDBITE
Birmingham
SOUNDBITE
London
SOUNDBITE
From Bedford
SOUNDBITE
From Cumbria
SOUNDBITE
London, Stoke Newington
SOUNDBITE
From Banbury
SOUNDBITE
from Edinburgh
SOUNDBITE
Northamptonshire
SOUNDBITE
from Malaysia
SOUNDBITE
North Wales
SOUNDBITE
Sheffield
SOUNDBITE
Birmingham
SOUNDBITE
Yeah, I come from Bristol, man
There are no messaging apps. There is no social media, not any that can accompany you through the streets, notificationing, anyway.
People send text messages on their phones. They play Snake on their phones. They make images out of punctuation marks (the most fun) on their phones.
VOICEOVER
Celebrity campaigners are out of bed and out in force
SOUNDBITE
This is a historical day. A day to, um, remember!
SHOUTING
B-Liar! B-Liar! Pants on fire!
VOICEOVER
Thousands from the east, from the west, from the north and the south.
Faces hidden behind banners and pre-fab Socialist Worker placards
VOICEOVER
From the left, from the right, from the radical, from the uncommitted: they came.
Now it’s a norm to complain about how shit phones and social media are. Complaints include (1) unsolicited content, (2) constant availability, (3) privacy, (4) annoyingness, (5) sinister. But anti-socials sentiment is always addendumed by a reason why the talker can’t come off of them. Reasons include (5) a family WhatsApp group, (6a and b) how else to stay abreast of current affairs and the creative endeavours of others, and (7) your service provider charging to send pictures as texts.
Horses
VOICEOVER
It was the day the police simply banished the car from central London
Child on shoulders in crowd
SOUNDBITE
I just think the world’s going mad. I just feel it’s got to be stopped, somewhere. Because after this, it’ll be something else. It’ll be war after war after war.
The notion that it is impossible to organise without the connectivity phones provide is now near-sacred, but The Stop (as it is affectionately named by organisers during the organisational phase), The Stop is everything that phones and social media later promise to deliver – and instead destroy. The ease with which people are able to share their thoughts has, as we all know, not made it easier to put a cohesive strategy to oppose the world’s more malign agendas in motion. It’s done the exact opposite of that. Now is genocide dipped in rice water and honey face mask reels and hipster-austerity gardening-crypto memes.
Pan from protestors dancing to people playing instruments.
SOUNDBITE
I don’t want to see any war in the world, that’s why I’m here
Wide shot of march with man dancing on stilts in foreground
Pakistani protestors with banner (Democratic Revolutionary Party)
Without doubt The Stop is a thing. A ‘We Don’t Believe You (And Even If We Did Believe You We Still Don’t Think You Should Do it)!’ kind of thing.
The only problem is that The Stop doesn’t work. 1 month after 2 million people congregate in London (a number so large you could be out by 50,000 and still not be misreporting attendance) (and millions more do the same in cities around the world), George Double-yu and his zealous co-conspirators (us) invade modern-day Mesopotamia, that alluvial cradle of civilisation, anyway. Double-yu’s tactic is one of ‘shock and awe’.
It doesn’t take the US Army long to find Saddam Hussein (autocorrect keeps changin Saddam to Adam, and who am I to argue?). Within weeks he is found hiding in a hole in the ground on a farm in the country. It’s most undictatorial. The US Army beat him (obviously), rape him (all accounts opt for “sodomise” but I’m guessing Adam did not consent), inspect him for ticks and the like, then throw him in prison. A couple of years down the line they execute him by hanging.
It’s shown on TV. No news channel in the UK shows the moment of death, The Drop, but they do show him stepping onto the gallows and having a thick, twisted white rope, noose, draped round his neck. It lies on his shoulders. Men in masks do the draping. People in the stands jeer. OfCom gets 30 complaints, more about the jeering than the death. I remember watching it thinking that I’d never seen anything like that on the news before. That was the same End of Something and Beginning of Something Else, but it was further away from The End of the End and more in to The Beginning of the Beginning.
Everyone agrees that The Beginning of the Beginning looks a lot like The Middle Ages.
Hardly surprising that post-the Stop (and before XR) the protest movement languishes. The professionalised Greenpeace/NGO side of things tick along but turn up at a protest at any point in the 20-tens and teens, and all you’ll find is a sorry demographic that it is both easy and effective to ignore: Spiral Tribe crusties without a free party to kick you out of and sex-pests claiming left wing to cop a feel. They will fall for anything and, as it turns out, so will you, busy, as you are liking and posting and adding and sexting and unfriending then blocking and trolling and lolling as ur viral video-world goes up in emoji flames.
Iphgenia Baal, 2024