March 24, 2003
AIEEE! IT BREEDS! John Pilger's
AIEEE! IT BREEDS! John Pilger's daughter Zoe proves that the stupid apple doesn't fall far from the idiot tree. Let's fisk little teenage commie girl:
Of all the carnage to come from a war in Iraq, one positive element has emerged. Young people of my generation are becoming more and more politicised.
Isn't it great? Maybe if a few Tomahawks go astray and rub out a kindergarten, they'll become even more politicised! Cool!
It is now normal for me to overhear 14-year-olds discussing the pros and cons of military intervention, on the bus on the way home from school.
They're probably talking about your house, Zoe. I favour intervention.
It is common to turn on the television and see students under the age of 18 defying their teachers, waving banners and megaphones, and protesting in Parliament Square.
Not on my television it isn't. Not since I installed FuckWitBlock™, anyway.
"Generation apathy" has officially woken up. This is much to the dismay of the British media who have long cherished the view that young people are indifferent to politics. We would rather, if you believe what you read, vote for our favourite contestant on some brain-dead reality TV show such as Big Brother than for our choice of prime minister in the next general election. Reporters such as Andrew Marr of the BBC have dismissed the massive growth of school students' direct action against the war with back-handed comments like: "Well, it beats doing your homework."
Does anyone else detect the leaden hand of Big Daddy John in this grinding, painful prose?
A new anger has arisen, fed by other issues that affect our lives, such as the proposed top-up fees for students. For the first time young people are asking how it is that the Government cannot afford to send our generation to university without loading them with up to £21,000 of debt? And yet it can afford to spend untold billions on a war against a country which poses no immediate threat.
Yep. Pure JP.
For many of us, such priorities are wrong. This is also the first major war in our living memory, and there are no "grey area" justifications, like there were in Afghanistan, when we were supposed to believe that searching for an evil baddie in caves was enough reason to level a starving Third World country.
That "living memory" of hers isn't very accurate. Afghanistan was levelled?
The increase in press attention to the anti-war movement from wide circulation papers such as The Mirror (Daddy's paper!) and The Independent has helped us become more shrewd in reinterpreting the propaganda and lies in other parts of the media. For example, students from my school strongly opposed to the war dismissed the front-page and government calls to "support our boys in the Gulf". As one 15-year-old campaigner observed: "I'll support the troops when they start coming home."
Talk about your shrewd reinterpretations. That kid'll be reading at an 11-year-old level within two years, tops.
It is a well-documented figure in the young anti-war movement that 42 per cent of the Iraqi population are under 15. As one student shouted from our school stage on Thursday: "We're not going to die, so why should they?"
Quite so. The London schoolchildren must be killed at once.
Posted by Tim Blair at March 24, 2003 03:15 AM