Police and members of the emergency services attend to victims of a terror attack on London Bridge in central London on June 3, 2017. Armed police opened fire during what they described as a "terrorist" attack in central London Saturday after reports of stabbings and a van ploughing into pedestrians just days ahead of a general election. / AFP PHOTO / DANIEL SORABJIDANIEL SORABJI/AFP/Getty Images
Most times scanning the ‘coverage’ pumped out by the mainstream media feels pointless, like watching a model train on an oval track. The train comes along, we look at the little wheels going around and for reasons nobody understands… we expect something different.
Why do we keep watching? What perverse impulse compels us to keep constantly updated on sameness? It reminds me of that classic scene on The Simpsons where Bart is watching ‘The Clock Channel’ on cable TV, which is just a clock ticking live on the screen until an excited announcer says “coming up soon on The Clock Channel – Six o’clock!”
There were terrorist attacks in Manchester and then London and the media train set off around the track. First it’s the flashing red headlines of rolling news, then it’s a volley of re-tweets from the great and the good offering their ‘prayers’ and ‘thoughts’.
Prayers to whom and about what I think. ‘Please God, let my press officer put out a tweet so I can appear appropriately somber and grief stricken’? I don’t seriously believe that many of these people believe in any power beyond than their own wealth and celebrity, so why the abrupt interest in prayers? Who are they praying to anyway – themselves? What are they thinking about, their public image?
Of what use are the ‘thoughts’ of random politicos and celebrities to those making funeral arrangements for their loved ones? Not much. In fact one suspects that some might thank Donald Trump or Theresa May to mind their own business. I know I would. There is no stopping it though, those burying their children get the widely reported prayers of establishment big-wigs whether they want them or not.
I am thinking of offering a new product line of pendants for people to wear that make it clear that in the event of their death in a terrorist attack, the usual suspects can keep their crocodile thoughts and prayers to themselves. If one survives, the pendant will include clear instructions that they are not to be visited in hospital by royalty, Boris Johnson or any other celebrity parasite.
Of course this is all just a social pantomime, good clean honest family fun. But one wearies of the barrage of patronising stories in the media in a stylee of wartime Pathe News reel that tell us how marvellously chipper and defiant the residents of an entire city have suddenly become.
“Johnny Foreigner might have had a pop at us but nobody squashes our tommy-tastic spirit for long, aye readers!”
Cue video montage of ordinary people walking around (take that ISIS!) going to Tesco and little children being press ganged into holding up signs with hearts on. Good grief.
Dare I say that it’s rather easy to be chipper and defiant about terrorism…when one is not involved or ever likely to be. I suspect the residents of cities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen are rather less bellicose and stiff upper lip about it all. But then they have endured a greater degree of violence of this kind for years on end, sometimes on a daily basis – all aided by our tommy-tastic foreign ‘interventions’ and arms sales of course.
8.6 million people live in London. How did the media get around to gauge their relative level of chirpiness so quickly? And since the statistical chances of them ever being actually involved remain fantastically low…surely defiance without risk is pretty meaningless?
Trouble is, like so many things today, responding to terrorist attacks has become an online pastime replete with hashtags, pretty colours for your Facebook profile and Blitz spirit to tweet about.
The real stench of this inexorable tsunami of bullshit is that all the tub thumping about “Enough is enough” from perfectly safe people posing in WW2 tin hats doesn’t do anything to prevent the next terrorist attack and does even less for the dead, injured and bereaved.
Participation in the great online spectator sport of ‘responding’ to terrorism is the perfect distraction from the widespread death, suffering and instability that western ‘interventions’ have wrought in the Middle East and beyond: instability and injustice that has created the terrorist organisations that now attack us and has made recruitment all too easy for them.
Any sign that our tommy-tastic meddling in the Middle East is perhaps under review? Not a bit of it. It’s full speed ahead with arms sales to Saudi Arabia that end up in the hands of god-knows-who and merrily helping out gangs of Islamic extremists to create god-knows-what in Syria.
On the 7th July 2005 my friend Colin Morley was murdered by a terrorist bomb on an underground train in London. The night after, I sobbed as I told my local dance group the news. Nobody knew what to say. It was awkward and uncomfortable for people to see just how sad and pointless life feels when you lose someone you care about to something so stupid and empty.
Perhaps you can understand now why I have never felt comfortable with all the posturing after each and every terrorist incident. The people that lead the ‘prayers’ and ‘thoughts’ are people like Theresa May who helped to create this mess in the first place and when you actually lose someone it just feels sad, empty and lonely. You don’t feel like posting on Facebook or wandering around holding up signs with hearts on.
The blunt truth of the matter is this: unless we cease our violent imperialist meddling in other people’s countries and make reparations for that which we have already done, then these charades in response to terrorist attacks are going to go endlessly on and so will the funerals.
Terrorism cannot be blamed on the internet, solved with security or slowed down by curtailing our civil liberties. Ultimately it can only be beaten by acknowledging our role in creating it and desisting from doing so. If we behave well, the extremists lose the enemies they crave and are deprived of funding and recruits.
Berating the entirely innocent Muslim community to “root out extremism” is all very well, but you can’t wander around in the park looking for terrorism with a metal detector – particularly when the cause lies thousands of miles away. Respecting the sovereignty and citizenry of other nations would be a more plausible starting point.
Perhaps if we weren’t all feeling so marvellously chipper and defiant in ‘standing up to terrorism’ in the safety of our living rooms and Facebook pages, we might collectively do something to deal with it.
A great many warned – not least a certain Jeremy Corbyn – that the invasion of Iraq would lead to regional instability and unleash terrorism on a scale never seen before. He was right then and he is right now.
That is not to deny the personal responsibility of the evil men that do the killing or to imply that they have any excuse for what they do. It has to be said though that our rightful outrage towards these individuals changes nothing, prevents nothing and if we transfer it to the wider Muslim community will merely boost and reward the very terrorists we seek to confront.
We can blame all in sundry if we want and tub thump and flag wave to our hearts content…
…but if we want an end to it all, then our nation’s ongoing culpability in creating this mess will have to be acknowledged and ended.
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”Viewing all this history, and viewing the actual, visible record of officials like Theresa May (and her bipartisan UK predecessors and US counterparts) on counterterrorism, we are left with only two possible conclusions. One, that all of these highly educated, accomplished and successful individuals — across the range of party affiliations — are dithering, blithering idiots, incapable of recognizing the clear, manifest, repeated failure of their counterterrorism policies, year after year after year. Or two, that quelling and countering terrorism is NOT actually an overarching priority for our leaders; that they know full well these policies lead to more extremism, more terrorism — as their own intelligence services have repeatedly told them — but carry on with them just the same.
Therefore we are left with a further conclusion, which I’ve noted before, but which becomes clearer and clearer with each new terrorist attack and each new doubling-down on the same failed policies by the West: for our leaders, for those on the commanding heights of our bipartisan power structures, the game is worth the candle. The pursuit of their geopolitical power-game agendas means more to them — much, much more — than the lives and well-being and security of their own citizens. If there is no change in these broader policies, no change in the inhuman, inhumane agenda of domination, then no amount of tinkering with “Prevent” programs on the local level — much less even more authoritarian repression on the national level — will stop the outbreak of sickening evils like the London killings.
Until more people recognize the fact that our own governments have been absolutely crucial to the rise and spread of violent Islamic extremism — both directly, in their alliance with Saudi Arabia, and in the many, many instances of their arming and abetting Islamic terrorists; and indirectly, in carrying out policies which they KNOW will produce radicalized extremists — then we will not even begin to address the problem, much less start to solve it. And this includes recognizing —and questioning — the agendas of our elites as well, to ask why their barbaric quest for dominance and control over others is worth the lives of our sons and daughters, our fathers and mothers, our brothers and sisters, as well as the lives of the countless innocents they kill, year after year, in foreign lands.”
Counterpunch 5 June 2017