'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

Causes Celebre

Many of the leading lights of stage, and screen were at the 1961 CND rally in Trafalgar Square, London, and quite a few were arrested. Bertrand Russell, a scion of the leftist intelligentsia at the time, told a television news crew, ‘Well the case is quite simple. We think the policy which is being pursued by the Western Powers is one which is bound to end in the extermination of the human race and some of us think that might be rather a pity.” Well, Bertrand the Western Powers did pursue that policy and the human race, some forty-six years later is still here, pity or no.

To a celeb, ‘Ban The Bomb!’ is a no-brainer. It instantly certifies you as a ‘deeply loving and caring person’, who you are anyway, of course. But what would have been the scenario if those ‘highly gifted and deeply committed’ people who influence so many had had their way? Let me present the formula in Einsteinian fashion: CND = TWD (Totalitarian World Domination). I vividly remember as a teenager the pacifists marching down Oxford Street, London’s main shopping thoroughfare at the height of the Cuban Missile crisis. Their hysteria was palpable, and lets face it, no one felt exactly comfortable with the situation, but whatever the true story may have been, the situation was there, and it was there to be met.

I am not negating the principles behind many of these heartfelt, and generally ‘left-wing’ (although many times, I would quarrel with that appropriation) celebrity supported causes. But why, oh why must these good intentions so often be taken to the point of such incredible naiveté? I would certainly back John and Yoko’s ‘Give Peace a Chance’. Certainly, give it a chance, but don’t bet the house on it.

One of the more recent celebrity initiatives was to sell wristbands ‘to end world starvation’, something that it was patently never going to do, no matter how many they sold. When I bought one, I voiced this thought. The reaction was incredulous: But everyone knows it will! Who’s ‘everyone’? Well, Sir Bob Geldorf, Bono, George Michael, John Bon Jovi, Chrissie Hynde, everyone! 

The list of such celebrity causes has long included Aids and now there is Global Warming. The sophisticated money from such as Bill Gates has gone to help the far more pervasive, but less glamorous infection of malaria, and the only thing I can say about the global warming argument, is that it coincides with the undeniably urgent need to break away from non-renewable energy sources, particularly those that pollute both the Earth and ourselves. Funnily enough, the same item could win the day for both causes, that item being a condom.

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