Another cause hijacked

It's one of those things that we would occasionally see evidence of but never quite enough to cross the critical level to make note of, until today: there is a nascent campaign by the reactionary right to package George Bush's War on Iraq as analogous to the Abolition of Slavery. The specific vehicle for this is a sudden burst of endorsements from suspicious sources for the film Amazing Grace, the Michael Apted-directed biography-history of William Wilberforce and his abolitionist struggle against slavery and the slave trade. And by "suspicious sources" we mean the exultations about the film at National Review Online --

[Mark Steyn] But Wilberforce’s life reminds us that great men don’t shirk things because the focus-group numbers look unpromising.

[Rich Lowry] This month is the bicentennial of what was, to use contemporary argot, one of history’s most successful “faith-based initiatives.”

Someone driven by Christianity who has to fight hard in their own time to liberate millions of people from bondage but who history will see as a hero. Geddit?

As it turns out, this drivel rang a vague bell in terms of our own blogging and sure enough looking back at 2003, it was Amity Shlaes pioneering this line of argument in the pages of the Financial Times. That analysis speaks for itself, so let's just note the essential point from there -- the same Britain that set about abolishing slavery in the early 19th century still had the disasters of the Irish Famine and the dispossession of Africans in their native lands ahead of it. Abolition was a case where the country's conscience broke through and achieved progressive change, but it wasn't itself a transformation of the country's character.

But anyway, that's almost too serious a point for this latest rebranding of the War on Terror. Wilberforce and his allies were people with a sliver of power that they leveraged to the maximum extent. They worried about human dignity. Many of them, as Quakers, were pacifists. George W. Bush is president of the most powerful country in the world. He has never shown any personal concern for the welfare of Iraqi citizens, let alone War on Terror detainees (who are, after all, the ones being moved around the world in shackles). And of course Bush and Cheney would sneer at a Quaker foreign policy, indeed anything that falls short of all guns blazing, as weakness that invites further attack.

Still, the only obstacle that's probably giving Team Bush any pause about running with this analogy is its anchoring of the War on Terror in the Christian faith, which is the one thing that from the start they said they weren't doing.

[Note: interesting BBC R4 documentary about Wilberforce]