Well, there are troops on the streets of London. So they say. I haven’t seen any myself, but I’ve seen them on TV. Downing Street of course, 10 special forces, men and women, in camouflage, toting huge machine guns on their chests. I would warrant that’s the way most of the country is seeing them. Five thousand troops apparently, all around public “hotspots”. Houses of Parliament and the Old Bailey central criminal court are closed to the public. Police and troops are working together.
So this is disconcerting. Maybe it shouldn’t be, but it is. The US has a ban on the army being used for internal policing (although the national guard can be). France doesn’t, and the army’s everywhere. The UK is somewhere in between, but there has always been a strong sense that policing should be as light as possible. More honoured in the breach, or The Bill, than the observance, the troops are here, and the election is nowhere, all appearances by leaders, and three solid days of hustings (local candidate debates) cancelled. Cancelled with, one feels, a sense of relief in some quarters, charade debates in the Tory-blue sea. The troops seem so much more real.
[Rundle: eerie Britain in a state of stasis as Manchester bombing becomes everything]
Two days after the bombing and the event itself is now being buried in arse-covering, PR and talk of “resilience”. Now, as more information comes out, it’s become clear that the bomber, 22-year-old Salman Abedi, had traveled back and forth to Libya and possibly Syria as recently as a few weeks ago, that his father returned to Libya from Manchester to fight Gaddafi’s forces in the 2011 uprising. Neighbours said that in recent months Salman had become angry and erratic, picking fights with everyone, praying in the street, festooning his bedroom windows with jihadi flags, etc. “I had arguments with him about the bins,” a neighbour said, which is sadly, stupidly funny. What could be more British than an argument about the bins?
But it’s becoming clear that there was a failure of targeted intelligence and surveillance — which most of us accept is now a grim necessity, for a while. Targeted and specific, as opposed to general — but in this case neither, or not enough, apparently. So instead we are having the performance of security, troops on the streets, etc, and, most dispiriting of all, large sections of the news media seeing its role as little more than buttressing public opinion, and snarling at a young man who is now a scorch mark on a concert hall floor.
[We mustn’t normalise terror, so we’ve ritualised it instead]
For those in the media who see their role as nothing other than supporting state action, the Manchester bombing is a toughie. The event is close to degree zero as an event — atrocious, but no record setter, part of no wider attack (yet), the attacker leaving no statements, videos, etc. The network that primed him — if there was one –– has kept quiet, and everything folds back to the act itself. To fill pages and time, news media inject it with a meaning: he hates our freedom/freedom of women/sexualised culture, etc, but it is all added after the fact and underscores the bomber’s success on his own terms, the storm he created, by being the empty eye of it. Protecting state institutions is purely ceremonial, a yearning for violence to be old-fashionedly political again. Any copycat incident will be some screwed-up attack on a traffic warden with a sharpened trowel or something, and any organised follow-up is more likely to be in a matinee of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 than the Royal Courts of Justice.
Awareness of this has prompted a lock-em-all-up mentality in some quarters, but not many. That is less out of deference to civil rights than it is an awareness that intense detention, policing, surveillance simply produces insurgents and terrorists on a grand scale. And of course with all the wall-to-wall resilience stories, there’s no room, even on the BBC, for straightforward political analysis and discussion of the incidents for which such atrocities may be payback — such as the US airstrike on a mosque in Aleppo, which killed 42 people in March. With Trump having relaxed the rules of engagement considerably, the war on our turf may hot up again. “They won’t change us.” They already have as soon as you utter that very sentence.
They won’t change us. Yet there are troops on the streets of a nation where the cops don’t carry guns. And one sees, suddenly, how it would happen if it were otherwise, if the troops were here to stay and the election wasn’t. How easy it feels. How absent any resistance, or even opposition to the process there is. It is a very uneasy feeling, far more than the risk of bombs, waking up in another country not my own, coming through the TV, troops on the streets.
These Fifth Columnists whom we in the West import en masse are not avenging military attacks, they are seeking precisely what they openly say they are seeking.
They spread like ants when the Americans along with craven allies destroyed the regimes in Iraq, Syria and Libya which had been successfully suppressing them.
fmd. You’re either so stubbornly thick that you refuse to accept how unrelenting western invasion of foreign countries connects to attacks like these, or you’re genuinely scared of the Muslim boogeyman. If it’s the latter that’s the case, I’m truly sorry you live in such fear, but here is that incontrovertible fact for you, one more time: 1.5 billion Muslims – taking ‘Muslims’ to mean ‘adherents of the Islamic faith’. That’s a LOT of people to be afraid of if Islam is as dangerous as you say it is.
Blame the user, not the tool. Or are you incapable of making such a distinction?
“But it’s becoming clear that there was a failure of targeted intelligence and surveillance — …….. as opposed to general”
That’s the problem with general surveillance of everyone, it tends to take up vast resources that would be better spent on targeted intelligence and surveillance. BK often writes that there are approximately no examples where general surveillance of the masses has cuaght anyone or anything, while targeted surveillance has quite a good record.
Then again, they’d have to be able to identify someone like MH Monis as being someone worthy of surveillance, and clearly all those signs weren’t enough for our spooks.
‘Caught’ perhaps. Oh for an edit button on the crikey website.
“If the troops were here to stay and the election wasn’t.” Sheesh, Rundle. Goosebumps.
I must’ve missed the numerous news bulletins updating the names of the 42 worshippers in Aleppo back in March.
The manner in which Manchester’s grief, damage & aftermath is reported in the media is evidence our society has been changed. Revealing the depth of the wounds feeds terrorists’ satisfaction.
The yanks weren’t trying to kill 42 innocents in Aleppo. If they were the whole place would be levelled.
Surely you’re not suggesting that it’s any less reprehensible because they ‘didn’t mean to’ kill innocent people…
Of course I do. Any reasonable person knows that it is worse to intentionally kill someone than it is to accidentally kill someone.
So the possibility – and statistically evidenced likelihood – of missing your target and killing innocents is an extraneous consideration so long as you’ve got the right idea?
Man, the sorts of things we’re so comfortably able to write off as we sip our coffee and type comfortably on our keyboards knowing we don’t have to live in fear of the sky.
Especially when the intentional killing is part of a global war against human liberty.
The Americans have such smart bombs now that the bomb fragments actually know the difference between the innocent and the guilty, Craig. Didn’t you know? It’s a little like God knowing the difference at the Massacre at Beziers. Or those bullets in that old Warner Brothers cartoon, there were three of them, three different Wild West cowboy bullets- remember?
All I can imagine is this time the bomb fragments went rogue. They were bad fragments. Murderous, psychopathic fragments who loved destruction and saw human beings as just so much meat to be butchered. Perhaps they thought God would know his own.
Has anyone raised the Mental health of these angry embittered young men (mostly they are) who blow themselves up with the intention of harming as many as possible.
The back story behaviour of these men surely points to really disturbed minds.
Most people who come out of these hell zones after witnessing death and destruction, crave peace and safety. Ask any of the refugees resettled in the west. But something is happening to a very few, sometimes second generation. What is it – how can we intervene and stop it. The grief and sadness of the people who have lost their loved ones has to be answered by action to stop the madness and violence.
The west cannot claim no responsibility- the USA and allies bombing of Afghanistan in retaliation for the Saudi Arabian pilots bombing in New York, the destruction of Iraq based on a false premise- remember the mythical “weapons of mass destruction” are just for starters.
Something is snapping in the minds of men who are retaliating by punishing the innocent.To try to stop this inhumanity we have to go beyond political slogans and mindless threats.
They are not retaliating and they’re not mentally ill any more than Lord Haw Haw was, they are engaged in aggressive war with a theocratic subjugation objective they are shouting at the tops of their voices.
For what it’s worth Pamela, I have repeatedly called for these people to be described as ‘deeply mentally ill’ rather than give them the glorification of ‘terrorist’ that they seem to crave. The mental illness is far the greater cause in their actions.
You make a few great points, and of most interest to me is that quite a few are second generation who have never been personally exposed to the terrible actions of the west (or fellow muslims of a different sect) Their hatred/anger is entirely created by accounts of others rather than by personal experience. That speaks much to both the vulnerability and gullibility of mainly young males, and the cultural and religious contexts that has some people see them as worthy fodder for their ‘glorification.’
Well said, DB. (My only reservation is that most mentally ill people don’t pose a threat to others. We don’t want to demonise THEM.)
Here’s a thought, Pamela. Tell 1.5 billion people they are evil, brutal, primitive murderers and see what happens. Oddly enough, human beings tend to internalise society’s messages and meet its expectations.