This cry for help pointed to by NTK gave me horrible flashbacks. Still, I was ripe for finding a slagging off England entertaining, not just because I was nearly there this time last year, but because my English bank finally managed to get my wife and I the chequebooks for our joint accounts. A year after we ordered them.
After the events of the last few days, and the opportunistic responses of people who seem to see the WTC bombing as an excuse to push an agenda of war and oppression under the aegis of protecting the “free world” from it, this piece by Mark Twain seems especially appropriate.
When I heard the current US President promising to go after all those individuals and countries who support terrorism, I found myself wondering when he'll start rounding up people in NYC and Chicago. I lived in the UK during the early Eighties, when the IRA were quite active indeed, and their activity was the murder of innocent civilians - Irish, British, they didn't care. And their funding came from America - from idiots who believe the IRA are glorious freedom fighters, not murderous thugs.
More than once, the UK government asked US governments to act to prevent the millions of dollars pouring into IRA coffers. The response of the US government was to invite Gerry Adams over for tea.
That's not fighting terrorism, that's abetting it.
Still, the UK fight against the IRA has served up some valuable lessons the US would do well to learn from, before they make the same mistakes.
All the retaliation by the UK, all the draconian laws and faked trials and SAS hit squads gunning people down (and sometimes even getting the guilty ones) did nothing to halt the IRA. Handing the police and security forces in the UK the power to detain indefinitely, banning from the media anything considered sympathetic to the IRA, all achieved nothing. Massive increases in the power of the police to arbitarily break up meetings achieved nothing. Nothing, that is, except the steady progress of the UK along the road to becoming a police state, a trend which continues. Oh yes, that's another lesson: the security forces you set up to “combat terrorism” will become greedier and more rapacious.
What has given hope? Dealing with Ireland, with Northern Ireland Catholics and Protestants as though they are human beings, not goodies and baddies. Listening to their grievances. Talking to those who will talk, and trying o work with reasonable people toward reasonable outcomes. Sometimes that even means having to hold one's nose and talk to people like Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley, to be seen to be trying to work with people one despises. The unreasonable - the terrorists and security forces - have been marginalised. Once, support for the IRA in the face of percieved opression in Nothern Ireland was so strong churchmen would preach from the pulpit in their favour, and the Irish government provided them with a haven. Constructive attempts to work with people who feel wronged has eroded that support, with reasonable people on both side beginning to see the IRA (and the Protestant paramillitaries) for what they are: nasty, brutish thugs. Undercut their support amongst the people they purport to represent.
The US President is right about one thing: it takes a long time, and it requires patience. It has been a long time to get even a semblance of progress in Nothern Ireland, and there are continual setbacks, and it is hard for the people involved not to simply fall back on the old standbys on guns and bombs. But it's worth the effort.
I wonder if the United States can learn that lesson, or whether the next few years of my life, of everyones' lives, are going to be marred by a new, fascistic state as it lashes out at home and abroad, randomly, incorrectly, trampling the things it strives to protect.
Well, I'm glad someone other than me is discussing the notion that the US would do well to understand the notion of learning from other nations' mistakes when dealing with terrorism. Sadly, it's in a forum unlikely to be doing much beyond preaching to a choir of an already sceptical audience. Until it gets on CNN, I doubt it will make much difference.
Speaking of CNN, I notice they appear to have decided that since their ratings slumped ever since the high point of the Gulf War, the thing to do is to encourage the US into another war so they can boost their ratings. Perhaps that's unfair, but it certainly looks that way from where I'm sitting. CNN quickly abandoned any pretence of giving a damn about the tragedy except as it pertained the chances of a new war, preferably with all those gee-whizz millitary gadgets the US force have (and that the CNN loves to profile; I like cool millitary hardware as much as the next guy who's never been closer to combat than Gunship 2000, but really...) and indulge in the pornography of mass destruction.
Sadly, New Zealand has continued it's downward spiral in the general direction of the United States, with idiots plastering their cars with US flags and painting swastikas on the Hamilton mosque. It makes me ashamed of my country, and angry. People who want to behave like the lowest breed of Bubba should fuck off to the States, where they'd fit right in.
And Operation Infinite Justice? When the fuck did they hire Stan Lee to script their wars?
You're the President of the United States and you have a problem. You want to reward campaign contributers and push through your daddy's fantasy of a space missile shield. But there's no rational justification for it - hell, there isn't even an irrational justification. So what do you do? You give your enemies carte blanche to build up an arsenal of mass destruction. Because as long as you achieve your short-term poltical aims, who gives a fuck if the world gets blown to hell?
Probably the dumbest response I've heard to commentary on the WTC bombings had to be that which came in response to Russel Brown's rather lucid piece; how dare Brown, one correspondent demanded, attempt to "explain the unexplainable". That's right; don't think about it; don't try to work out how and why it happened; just lash out in a blind, murderous rage at random, hoping you hit someone who may in some way be responsible. And if the end result of that stupid rage is more rage, more attacks, and more dead Americas, well...