Joe Biden’s bauble for Bono, in the form of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, reminds us of the U2 singer’s lifetime of service to imperialism. Harry Browne reflects on the record.
To be brutally frank, there is no special shame or disgrace in receiving the USA’s Presidential Medal of Freedom, as Bono as just done. Nor is there any great credit.
The roll of previous recipients is probably lighter on war criminals, proportionally, than the Nobel Peace Prize; and, while the medal tends to honour long-serving politicians, it skews increasingly toward hall-of-fame sportspeople, artists and other celebs who have given their name and/or money to charity.
It’s politicised, sure, in the silly way of American polarisation; mega-rich donors might even get one. But hardly anyone says No to it and you don’t need to be a Yank to earn the bauble: Leo Messi is right there beside Bono on Joe Biden’s final list. For God sake, even the guy whose aid team was murdered in Gaza happily turned up to accept a gong.
It’s different from British honours, where ‘Empire’ is right there in the title and most of the best people refuse them – unlike what Bono did, in 2007.
Still and all, when we see the pictures of Paul Hewson, aka Bono, Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, back in the White House, it gives us a good chance to size up the famous Dubliner’s lifetime of service to American power.
Rebel readers of a younger generation might well wonder what all the fuss is about. Sure, over the last year or so, activists have been noting Bono’s silence on the Gaza genocide – but you might have figured we were just highlighting the hypocrisy of yet another liberal old fart who was erring on the side of caution in his public statements.
It’s way worse than that.
Cover for US Imperialism
It’s a long story, but not hard to sum up. In a crucial period around the turn of the millennium, Bono was at the forefront in providing ‘anti-poverty’ cover for American imperialism – just when a global anti-capitalist and anti-war movement was fighting hard to oppose it.
Clothed in Bono’s velvet glove, President George W Bush’s iron fist smashed into Afghanistan and the Middle East, with the horrendous consequences still being felt today.
How did the singer from a kind of naff Eighties and Nineties band – with admittedly distinctive guitar effects and some pretty banging songs – achieve this sort of dangerous proximity to power?
Bono and U2 got some local practice in this sort of relationship in their earnest early days in Ireland. A committed Christian with broadly liberal sympathies, he attached himself to Fine Gael taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald’s reformist campaigning – and to the Dublin middle class’s unwavering hostility to the IRA’s armed campaign against British rule in the North.
With the single ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ in 1983, the band had it both ways: alluding vaguely to the 1972 British atrocity in Derry, but ultimately voicing an aversion to all violence. It went down great in the US, and Bono famously introduced it on-stage from the start with “This song is not a rebel song”; he soon worked a white flag into the stage routine that accompanied it.
Comically, his hatred of the IRA and its political party, Sinn Féin, once led to an angry rant at an American fan waving an ‘SF’ flag – for San Francisco.
There was also, though, ‘Bullet the Blue Sky’, from the 1987 album The Joshua Tree – where any ambiguity in the lyrics was overwhelmed on stage by clear references to violent US-backed repression in Central America.
Make Poverty History
But having come of age in the era of US Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr, the mature Bono and the U2 boys were excited when at long last there was a Democratic successor, Bill Clinton. It was during that Clinton presidency in the mid-1990s that Bono made his move into the Washington-friendly, NGO facsimile of activism that brought him to the pinnacle of his influence, as the Clinton term finished and the second Bush came to power.
That rise coincided with a new generation of post-Cold-War activism that questioned the dynamics and nostrums of neoliberal globalisation that were remaking the world into a (yet) more brutal and unequal place. But unlike in the 1980s, when Bono and U2 could be vaguely associated with anti-Reaganism, by the time of the 1999 Seattle WTO protest and its successors, the rock stars were very much inside the White House, looking out.
What Bono, along with Bob Geldof and others, created from that viewpoint was something of a pseudo-movement that worked to reduce poverty – but consistently took the most conservative, US-friendly line in debates with and among anti-poverty campaigners.
The culmination was the 2005 G8 summit of world leaders in Scotland, when ‘Make Poverty History’ staged a mass non-protest march that ignored the murderous war that Bush and Tony Blair were waging in Iraq, and accepted the flimsiest promises from governments in terms of debt reduction and anti-poverty spending.
Behind the Exaggeration
This is not to say that Bono’s campaigning was or is ‘fake’. It involved real effort and yielded real, if ambiguous, results. A lot of dollars to fight AIDS in Africa came out of the Bush White House with Bono’s encouragement; this and other health initiatives did lead to real improvements in childhood mortality in poor countries, in particular.
But the successes were often distorted and exaggerated. Nothing done by rich Western countries in Africa has come anywhere remotely close to the poverty eradication achieved in China over recent decades.
Meanwhile, one cost of Bono leveraging his Christianity to earn the support of Bush and other US evangelicals for ‘fighting poverty and AIDS’ has been a massively increased presence of religious right-wingers in Africa – at a terrible cost to women and LBGTQ+ people.
During this period, Bono decisively teamed up not only with the US government and its religious right, but with the most powerful American philanthropists, Bill and Melinda Gates. The three of them, indeed, shared the title of Time’s Persons of the Year in 2005. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the campaigning organisation founded by Bono in 2004, named ‘One’ after a U2 power ballad, has served basically as a PR wing (“raise public awareness and educate policy makers”) of the Gates Foundation.
And wouldn’t you know it: the Gates Foundation really sucks at fighting poverty. It’s good at promoting agribusiness and other corporate interests in Africa, though – and Bono has been with them along the way, including a big, ugly push for a so-called Green Revolution in the continent’s farming.
He partnered with lots of other companies to promote corporate philanthropy through his (RED) label for conscientious luxury goods.
It’s fair to say that the singer’s popularity and influence has waned since the heights of 2005, and nowhere more than in his own country. The revelation that U2 were availing aggressively of corporate tax loopholes came alongside the devastating financial crisis that hit Ireland hard after 2008; this did reputational damage from which Bono has never fully recovered.
Reaction to a Bono speech for European centre-right parliamentarians in Dublin in 2014 captured the new vibe: others may think he’s a saint, the Irish Times writer observed, but he makes our toes curl. Having acted as a PR buffer for American and British war-mongers, he was now a kind of scapegoat for Irish austerity and tax policy.
More than a Hypocrite
It would be wrong, though, to laugh Bono off as a mere hypocrite. He was the symbol of a moment that continues to resonate in politics in the US and elsewhere, when politicians of various establishment stripes fully copped on to the power of celebrity. An artist who had moved a generation of listeners with the form and content of his music, and of his character, could use that influence in alliance with the powerful.
The partnerships Bono formed with Clinton, Bush, Blair and many others were often depicted as ‘odd couples’, but the oddity was all on the surface, only as deep as a pair of leather trousers and some dark sunglasses. They were perfectly comfortable alliances based on shared class interests. Political scientist Alan Finlayson dubbed the strategy Bono-ism, and it is the singer’s most lasting legacy.
The philanthropic capitalism that he advocated, however, has an increasingly hard time flashing its credentials. The Global South, and Africa in particular, have suffered devastating one-two punches since Bono went quieter: the financial crisis of 2008 onward, and the ongoing economic effects of the Covid shock. Even the World Bank, inclined to friendly spinning of Washington’s anti-poverty efforts, is calling the 2020s a potential lost decade in reducing the suffering of the poor.
And, of course, the mess the world finds itself in as we begin 2025 goes way beyond what the World Bank captures in its data. Rising right-wing nationalism in rich countries, including many of Bono’s old friends in Washington, increasingly rejects even the thinnest ideas of global solidarity that an establishment-friendly campaigner relies upon. The war, the slum, the migrant boat – the new consensus of the powerful still has so many ways of killing the poor. Bono’s medal from ‘Genocide Joe’ Biden has the air of a swan song for the charitable wing of liberal internationalism, a final honour for a do-gooder as he and his earnest intentions sail into the sunset. It remains to be seen if that’s really the case, if the savagery of the global ruling class is going to be even more blatant, more direct, less Bono-ised. If it is, then our resistance too must be more blatant, more direct, and much, much less Bono-ised.
Harry Browne is a lecturer and journalist. He wrote The Frontman: Bono (In the Name of Power), published by Verso in 2013.
