Inside some liberals there's a Stalinist trying to get out. This includes liberals who are also artistic people. I introduce to you one Carla Seaquist. A playwright, no less, she has taken the same road as normblog-regular Slavoj Žižek, only more so, in pronouncing The Hurt Locker to be politically in sin.
'How can artists, especially ones who call themselves serious, not take a political point-of-view of a war that, unlike a "good" war like World War II, is a seriously "bad" one...?' That is Ms Seaquist's opening question; and if you read the rest of what she has to say, you will find that modern history divides into good wars and bad wars and there is an obligation upon artists such that, 'For an artist to take an "apolitical" stance in relation to [a bad war], a war that tramples all over the moral line, is to surrender the title "artist."'
Seaquist construes the main protagonist's love of danger in the The Hurt Locker as rendering the movie 'pro-war', a piece of crassness I will merely note and leave behind. (As if the director must be commending to her audience the pyschological attitudes which she portrays in the fictional character.) What is more worthy of note is Seaquist's confidence that wars can all be neatly categorized as either good or bad wars. She has evidently not come across wars that were more problematic than that, that caused controversy because of an element of moral complexity. The Falkland War, the first Gulf War, even the last Iraq war itself? And she has evidently never had to reflect on the fact that even the very goodest of good wars had some content - yes, I mean on the side of the good - that was morally dubious, to put it no more strongly than that. Seaquist might like to do herself the favour of reading W.G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction. World War II was certainly a good war in my book, but the incineration of hundreds of thousands of German civilians, like the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ought to give pause to anyone who thinks that artists must be bound by the simple dichotomous taxonomy with which our playwright operates.
Worst of all, beyond this simple-mindedness, is the bland assumption that she and her artistic mates, whoever they are, may lay down some obligatory line fixing the acceptable boundaries of proper art and excluding as beyond these boundaries anyone who does not propagate the 'correct' view about today's unfavourite war. The little inner Stalinist of the big bold liberal.