Not Scared, More Realisitic

[Annie]

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/050725ta_talk_gopnik

COMMENT
NOT SCARED
Issue of 2005-07-25
Posted 2005-07-18

In the hours after the Thursday-morning bombings in London, it seemed as if everyone was on the streets, walking home. With the Tube shut down and buses barred from the central part of the city, hundreds of thousands of people went trudging in the bright sunlight—across Westminster Bridge and in front of Westminster Abbey and down Birdcage Walk, next to St. James’s Park, which, in commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, was lined with ancient ambulances from the Blitz.

To anyone who had been on the streets of New York on September 11th, the resemblance was both sickeningly familiar and startlingly different. The sense of a city turned inside out, of a shock too large to quite analyze—that was there. But the consuming terror was not. No one ran, or cried, or even talked much about what had happened. Businessmen walked side by side from the City to the South Bank, still doing business, jiggling their cell phones impatiently in a futile attempt to make them work. Visitors just off trains marched toward their West End hotels, bags in hand or thrown over the shoulder. The police had an emergency plan—blocking off some streets, and redirecting human traffic to others—that seemed marked by a preternatural calm and a long-considered certainty. So calm and certain, in fact, that when, near Victoria Station, on Buckingham Palace Road, American tourists clustered around police officers and demanded directions, the bobbies took maps from the blue-rinsed legions and kindly, patiently, even chattily, showed them how to get from where they were to where they wanted to go.

Much of the difference, of course, was a matter of scale. Big Ben had not collapsed; the dead were going to number in the dozens, not the thousands. By some hideous new standard, as the security services allowed, London had “got off easy.” And there was no image to run again and again on television; Hell was mainly hidden underground. In New York then, we had to make an effort to get to “normalcy,” and in London now people almost had to make an effort not to be normal, not to allow the swiftly resumed flow of life to remove them from the reality of a tube far below the street, with hundreds of mangled and murdered people inside. (A woman, we were told, was found on one of the trains by a policeman who saw that, though she was moaning, she had neither legs nor arms.)

In the absence of fear, what asserted itself was, simply, tradition—a habit of responding shaped not only by memories of the Blitz but, more acutely, by the I.R.A. bombings of the past three decades, which were random and deadly. (In England, the I.R.A. was responsible for the mutilation of scores of people and the deaths of almost a hundred, including two senior Conservative politicians and Lord Mountbatten; in 1984, it very nearly got Margaret Thatcher herself, at a Tory Party conference at Brighton.) And without the corrosive presence of fear the argument about what had happened in London became, very quickly, starker, blunter, and more faceted than the argument has been allowed to be in America. The patriotically correct nationalism of the Murdoch media is less paralyzing in Britain than it is here. The London argument pits not left against right but the old right and the old left against the Thatcherite right and the Blairite left. And, while in America the argument that a war on terror might not be “winnable,” or that the terrorists might not be madmen but shrewd and calculating militants with a clear cause, has often seemed almost unsayable, everyone in London was either offering it or offering a refutation of it.

One early casualty, for instance, was “The Power of Nightmares,” an influential three-part BBC series that argued that Al Qaeda does not exist, except as a kind of collective hallucination on the part of American neoconservatives. This hypothesis, and, with it, the theory that the terrorist threat was manufactured or hyped, had become extremely powerful on the respectable left. To be fair, the show’s producers never argued that there were no Islamist terrorists—their argument was, instead, that there was no coördinated network of terrorists run by an old Man of the Mountain in hiding. But the popular, anti-Blair, dinner-table view had long ago become that the terrorist threat was exaggerated, or that it wasn’t immediate. That view was destroyed in a morning.

Yet the antiwar left (and right) did not hesitate to blame Blair and Bush for what had happened in London. The bizarre left-wing M.P. George Galloway was the first off the mark, insisting within hours that the bombings were the inevitable payback for the war in Iraq. He was so clearly lacking in tact and a sense of fitness that no one took him seriously. But serious people quickly made the same argument; as early as Friday morning, journalists like Tariq Ali, in the Guardian, were saying flatly that what had happened had happened because Britain was in Iraq. The United States and Britain began the war in Iraq with the certainty, the argument goes, that they would cause many civilian casualties in pursuit of their political goal, and that the response, however brutal and inhumane, is part of the normal calculations of organized violence.

Against this argument is the view that the new kind of terrorism is essentially nihilist and apocalyptic, and that Iraq is only a kind of inchoate excuse. “After all, the African embassy bombings happened before Iraq,” Mark Urban, the diplomatic editor of the BBC program “Newsnight,” said. “The I.R.A. had a political arm, and a political goal, however unreal: they killed to get people to the table. What is there to negotiate with these people? An end to the American presence in Saudi Arabia? All right, we’ll consider it. The elimination of the State of Israel? Hmm, that may be a bit more difficult. The restoration of a universal Islamic caliphate? It may be a bit of a deal-breaker, that. This is not a program, really. It’s a wraparound justification for a violence whose real end is the expiation of shame through massacre.”

Of course, the worst of both readings of what is happening is surely true. The terrorists are psychopathic and shrewd, nihilist and rational, glorying in death for death’s sake while still calculating whom to kill, with what effect, when. Will this epoch, which began on 9/11 and had a new chapter written on 7/7, end only with the apocalyptic defeat of one side or another, or will it end, as all previous terrorisms have, with unspoken concession and quiet remedy and pointed police action and the workings of time and politics? This isn’t an argument that can be ended or resolved, in London or anywhere else, anytime soon. But at least it is an argument, and at least in London they weren’t afraid to have it.

— Adam Gopnik

 

[Bonnie]

Great article, many good points made.