I am in some ways both an insensitive and uncivilised person — but on the plus side, quite incandescently unself-deluding. I do not have to believe myself whiter-than-white in order to get along with myself; if after 44 years you never fail to be both amused and amazed by yourself, then you’re doing something right. Still, it was with some surprise that I found myself reacting to THAT photograph — Specialist Lynndie England, aged 21, looking almost wistfully at a naked man on a leash, the end of which she just happened to be holding — with the following thought: “Gosh, what a change to see a WOMAN treating a MAN like a dog in a Muslim country, rather than the other way around!”

But hey, what did I expect? — I’m a female, Western redneck, from what my betters would charmingly dismiss as a “white trash” (ie, working class) background. In another life, I could even have been Miss England! But even as it is, I’m probably bad to the bone and not to be trusted; give me enough rope, and I’ll be leading naked Muslim pacifists — whose only desire is to travel, work with children and help to bring about world peace — around on it.

Of course, in an ideal world no person would treat another person that way. But having accepted — wistfully! — that An Ideal World has long gone Awol, if indeed it ever was, what the hell sort of breast-beating, nay-saying misery-guts wants An Undesirable Thing to be judged to be just as bad as An Evil Thing? These surely are the Politics of Eeyore — that is, of Westerners who WANT to suffer, who WANT their culture to be found wanting, for weird self-loathing issues — and thus their followers the po-faced. Proving again that the first casualty of war is not truth but perspective.

I see the snaps of our young Yankee allies taking their low, lonesome revenge at Abu Ghraib — for all the times their fresh-faced, well-meaning comrades have been butchered, blown up, pulled through the streets barely dead by people of the very nationality they gave up their lives to help — and I see, in the very exposure of those photographs, a good part of the reason why we are fighting, and why we are better. At last in Iraq there is a regime under which “torture” is NOT the norm, but something which has even that regime’s supporters running around screaming like hairdressers for it to be stopped, right now! Now that’s progress.

Many things are done in the heat of battle which wouldn’t get one’s PC dance-card ticked in peacetime. Unfortunately, due to the murderous nihilism of the Baathist stragglers, battles still continue in Iraq, despite the natural desire of most Iraqi people for a life so ordinary that it can easily be made to fade into the background next to the danse macabre demands of the few. My second thought, as the Abu Ghraib weepathon began, was of the Soviet Army in 1945, and its dreadful, joyous progress through a conquered Germany. Now, not even the nastiest, most anti-Nazi Soviet apologist (a title to which I totally stake my claim) can ignore the accounts of the triumphalist behaviour which came to a head when the Red Army entered Berlin; a vanquished Berlin, too, composed almost solely of women, children and the elderly. But would anyone bar a cretin claim that the wholesale rape of German women by Soviet boys invalidated the Allied victory, or made the Red Army’s contribution less cherishable? Soldiers are never saints — unlike we hacks, they never claim to be! — but thank goodness we have them there to protect our sissy ways.

It was dumb, no doubt, identifying with the 21-year-old redneck girl I could have been — as opposed to the 44-year-old chattering-classer I am — in all her gory glory. But not half as dumb as the stuff I’ve read since — written by people who didn’t leave school at 16, so what’s their excuse? — concluding, just because of this penny-ante perversion, that a) feminism was a mistake, b) the working-class (“trailer-trash”, “white-trash”) are worthless and c) our whole Western way of life is, like, a total lie.

It’s priceless, isn’t it? God forbid an unrepentant Zionist like me should bring up the uncomfortable fact that there are on Earth 22 MUSLIM NATIONS, NOT ONE A DEMOCRACY! as I do all the time on internet talkboards; do that, and you’re “just playing on racial stereotypes”. But it’s 22 NATIONS! — how can it be a coincidence that not ONE of them trusts their people enough to give them the vote? What would be convincing — 23 Muslim nations, not one a democracy? Yet let a few scared-stiff young blue-collar (not “white-trash”, because “white trash” is an inherently racist term, implying as it does that “trash” generally is black, and if you want to insult working-class whites you have got to be subtextually specific) soldiers turn out not to be perfect, and whole swaths of people — genders (female), classes (working), countries (the USA) — can instantly be dismissed as worthless.

There seems to be a great fear of the modern world around at the moment, even in those who have benefited immeasurably from its vast and vivifying freedoms. As Sarah Waters, the lesbian feminist novelist, said incredibly the other day: “I feel unsettled by the modern world. The social structures of the past seem much more clearly defined.” The idea that old certainties were in some way preferable to the new uncertainties is true — but only, and this doesn’t bear saying too much, if you had the luck to have been one of the tiny number of rich and/or powerful. For the rest of us, life until very recently indeed was total rubbish; for instance, it’s unlikely that Miss Waters would have enjoyed the freedom to live her life as a lesbian, a feminist or even a novelist in the age she craves. She’d have been out of school at 10, up a chimney at 12, illiterate all her life and doomed to a living sexuality-denying death as a wife or a prostitute. If she was lucky.

This idea that the past was almost without fail the Good Old Days — be it Victorian England or Baathist Iraq — is a common delusion among those who do not feel equal to the task of facing the future bravely. But a coward dies a thousand times before he finally meets his maker, and the same is true of a culture which cannot hold its nerve. We need to keep cool heads, root out the few bad apples on both sides who interfere with our vision of a fairer world and continue with a project as straightforward as it is honourable; to do as much as we can to ensure that every human being has the same rights as we do — to vote, to learn and to be free to make mistakes rather than terrorised into immobility.

And if anybody still believes that, because of Lynndie England and her friends, women should not have rights, the working class need to be kept firmly in their place, and the Western way of life is a total lie, there are always 22 Muslim theocracies where they could go and live, where the lack of decadent old choice and free will would suit them fine. And let people who would value and cherish their freedoms (some of the 80 per cent of the world’s migrants who are Muslims on the move, voluntarily, from Muslim theocracies to Western democracies, for instance — I think it’s called voting with your feet?) take their place. Go on — push off, you bed-wetting traitors, and let somebody else have a go.

julie.burchill@thetimes.co.uk