With the burnt-out shell of Grenfell Tower hanging still in the sky above west London, Cardiff father-of-four Darren Osborne took it upon himself to turn the UK back towards culture and racial division, with a van attack on worshipers at Finsbury Park mosque in east London. One person has died after the attack, and 10 were injured, the death toll may well rise. Osborne, detained by members of the crowd, was said to have been saved from serious injury by an imam, who prevented the crowd from laying into him. He was heard to yell that he wanted to “kill all Muslims” or “kill more Muslims” or possibly both. Perhaps his attack will be followed by copycat attacks, or by revenge attacks, or both, or not.
No one really knows or has much capacity to gauge the level of potential violence out there. One thing can be said. Over the past two months, London has been changed. Whether it wanted to or not, and no matter how many “keep calm and carry on” posters, memes, coffee cups circulate, the city had now had not only a wave of violence, but of different types of violence, all in a short period. Perhaps this sort of cluster will not happen again for a while, but that’s of no matter. Such violence cannot be dismissed as an aberration. London is a contested, violent city — as, to a degree, is Paris.
That is not necessarily an abnormal condition for cities, especially if you remove the descriptive distinction between terrorist violence and violence of other sorts. American cities from the ’60s to the ’90s, Belfast, Derry and many Italian cities in the 1970s, Jakarta in the 1960s, US southern cities in the 1930s, Berlin in the 1920s — and fast-forwarding to many Latin American cities now. The modern city is a place of contested orders and parallel regimes. The wonder of much of the recent period is not how much violence there is, but how little. With the imperial West — the US, UK and France — having now spent nearly two decades bombing and waging war in west Asian Muslim lands, it is astounding that its cities are not now subject to a sort of civil war. Even allowing for foiled plots, the number of people intent on unleashing atrocious jihadi violence in Western cities remains infinitesimal, about one person in a quarter million. Imagine if it was occurring at the merely incredibly uncommon, say, one person in 10,000. Then London, and other cities, would be at the sort of war somewhere like Belfast was in the ’70s, with daily killings and conflicts, troops, barbed wire, internments, raids, etc.
[Rundle: ‘They won’t change us,’ we mutter to ourselves as the troops take the streets]
Belfast. Or Baghdad. For what cannot be denied is that the character of Western imperial cities is changing in line with the cities they destroyed in waging war, and in the same way. London is not, of course, visited by anything like the same level of mayhem as Baghdad, but, well, random killings by two “sides” of a conflict, suicide bombers, and a burnt-out concrete block of flats on the horizon — you’d have to say that Londoners are getting a taste of what a contested city feels like.
Will such disorders simply bubble along at this level indefinitely? Or is something more in the offing? The official line of the West is that the motives of jihadi terrorists can be easily divined: they are religious fanatics with an idea of a theocratic society so repressive and joyless that, in both means and ends, it counts as a sort of nihilism. Because it is such an omega point of political meaning, a black hole, it has no dialogue with the politics around it, no aims that could be reasonably replied to. That is simplistic propaganda, as it applies to many such Western killers. Its aim is to license imperial foreign policy, while disciplining its own subject population to accept a level of mayhem as part of the war effort.
Little spoken of in any discussion of such Western jihadism is the different sources of news and information they rely on, via satellite TV and the internet. The Western media has been scrubbed clean of any coverage of war in Afghanistan and Syria. You’d barely know we were there, let alone conducting ongoing operations. Yet this is particularly important, because such conflicts have changed since Donald Trump took office. The relatively tighter restrictions on rules of engagement imposed by President Barack Obama have been lifted; the civilian casualties are mounting. Obama’s drone campaigns involved civilian casualties — but since many of them were families of jihadi groups, separate from (and often oppressive of) other local populations, sympathy was limited; this was part of Obama’s strategy. Trump has returned to old-fashioned colonial discipline, racist in its indifference to who is getting bombed. Such brutality acts as a call, a challenge to a small number of people: acts of violence that cannot be allowed to pass unavenged. It is not the whole story, and people are right to point to contemporary alienation, identity annihilation and the lure of fanatical death as a source for jihadi violence. But to suggest that each does not reinforce the other is ridiculous.
[We mustn’t normalise terror, so we’ve ritualised it instead]
That would suggest that such contestation will not be over anytime soon, and it may get considerably worse. Eventually perhaps, news outlets on mainstream channels may have no choice but to make the connection between Western foreign policy and the war at home.
But it may not be the only source of “contestation” on offer soon. The Finsbury Park truck attack is one of dozens, hundreds of attacks on UK Muslims over past years. But it’s one of the first that has been choreographed to be a spectacle of terror. In its wake English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson has called for the formation of white militias, and for the armed “defence” of whites against Muslims. Since Robinson is part of the Canadian media outfit “The Rebel”, which is now represented in Australia by Mark Latham, such fascist squaddist rhetoric is now being spread here. Since Latham is now explicitly branding his output as part of the “Rebel” stable, it would seem he is willing to be fully associated with such sentiments and urgings.
Beyond that economic, rather than cultural, conflict may become a source of conflict. Grenfell Tower on the London horizon should be a reminder of that. While attention turned to the Finsbury Park event, a spectacle with some violence attached, the death toll from Grenfell was ratcheted up from 58 to 79. Does anyone really doubt it will hit triple figures? This is an event of such stupendous violence and human loss that it cannot yet be fully appreciated. By now many have read about the 26-year-old Italian architect and her boyfriend, who made a series of calls and texts home, in full awareness that she was about to die horrifically, missing out on the life she had anticipated. The story is nearly impossible to read to the end.
The anger glows white hot at that, even half a world away. There are some events that cross a boundary, that demand militant action as an act of political assertion. Something more than a protest, more than a march, more than an occupation. Furthermore there is, within limits, a moral justification for such action, if it has a focused political purpose. At some point, replying to what appears to being wanton, negligent killing with the techniques of mass non-confrontational organisation becomes a form of passivity. I would suspect that we are not far away from a different form of militancy, a different form of contestation, coming from different sources, on the streets of Western cities, and people will be called on to make their political and moral judgements accordingly. Long after the Finsbury Park attack, and even the Borough Market attack have faded in the memory, the image of Grenfell Tower will remain burnt into the sky above London. A dark anti-pole star for whatever is to come.
So much of the Neocon ascendancy in the Anglophone world was based on the Rupertarians keeping things invisible for so long. Between Trump and the Grenfell Tomb, it’s getting harder to hide the fact that the cracks are showing that the Conservatives are arseholes all the way down.
Well said, RHW, all the way down.
Frightening, GR, in the way this morphs and twists and turns, like a lethal virus constantly mutating, one step ahead of the vaccine. Could lead anywhere, or even if there is a period of quiet, how long will that quiet remain ‘eerie’?
Perhaps we are scarred much more deeply than we realise.
It is just not England.
My wife and I have been enjoying an annual holiday in a little village in the South of France for the past ten years. A few days ago we returned from our latest visit. This particular village has a largish Muslim population and the town, as a whole, has muddled together quite well for all those years, considering all the sad world events during that time. However, this trip we both picked up a much darker mood in the town-folk as never before. Each population has retreated into a “side”, as it were. We were informed that the local schools put on a minute’s silence for the Manchester victims and the Muslim school-kids did not cooperate in what appeared to be a organised strategy. My wife and I have always made a point of smiling and being friendly to Muslim families in the street, but this year we were faced with blank stares in return. Several ordinary French residents have told us of their fear of their neighbors, and likely this is feeding Muslim anxiety and resentment. I think that the nearby Nice attack last year has hardened attitudes considerably in ways that can only lead to bad outcomes. I am still struggling to comprehend what is going on in Europe, but the continual erection of bollards in what were once open city squares and the patrolling of heavily armed soldiers in tourist locations are having a serious effect on the population on both sides of the divide. The general message is that the population is defending itself against “the other”.
I don’t know what is going on, and I am not an alarmist, but one thing is for sure – some sort of change is coming and it might get ugly.
I don’t know if I’d trust anyone reporting that local Muslims support terrorist action as a group; sounds like the sort of untruth spread by people with an axe to grind.
If you mean my comment about the people we spoke to, you may well be right? If it is true, i don’t see it as supporting terrorism but one of all the wagons circling together on both sides. You see, i am not defending nor endorsing anything. I’m not even in a position to explain things. We just observed stuff, and things have changed from the way it used to be.
As London becomes Baghdad? Talk about hubris and hyperbole. When are the west going to get that we are the terrorists, we are bombing umpteen muslim nations to bits because we in the west are waging Dubya’s frigging crusade started in 2001.
So haunting to be reminded so hauntingly of all the…haunting, heartbreaking phone calls home from atop those flaming Twin Towers nearly 16 years ago – ach, and how easy it is to forget that building’s name and purpose, literal and symbolic avatar of what I think it’s becoming clear now was an unprecedentedly, unsustainably violating global-tribal economic cleaving. There’s some sort of terrible historical fibrillation in play between these two towering infernos but I’m not thinker or poet enough to articulate it. Still. The convergence of class warfare and neoliberal economics and foreign policy blowback the writer tentatively teases out – pretty gutsy, it’s a hellishly fraught tightrope to navigate – feels exactly right. History feels so weighty just now, all mass and momentum.
Pick a side? Jesus. I guess mine will be: ‘do no harm’. Speaking of which: there’s great solace and some kind of roadmap in writing of this rarified tender ferocity. Civilisation will obtain.
Those final 3 word seem uncharacteristically optimistic of you – civilisation is a thin veneer only 3 missed meals thick.
I’ve watched at least two massive social movements come & go, the 60s gave way when a quarter read Thoreau, a quarter Mao and the rest, either nothing or Ayn Rand.
The other was the flight from reason in the 80s when the Nu-Rite took over UK, USA & Europe with the neolibs & the white shoe brigade – the response of those who would suffer most was to seek gurus and play video games.
Like Nudiefish, I only make theses observations and have no coherent solutions to offer.
Heya AR. You brought me up with a start. I am the most optimistic, upbeat person I know. I live every day drunk on the sheer joy of being alive. The endless good things life chucks at you, even when you’re struggling financially. And no-one in this country is. Not really. Not yet. I swear and screech write viciously and profanely on this site for the very best reasons, AR. Out of fear and desperation and ferociously defensive love for life and humanity. Yep – You’ll be ROTFLYAO
…To read a Rundle at max full tilt or Razer when she’s batshit scathing or Bradley’s ripper on the contempt of court today or Bernard when he’s had at few tokes or Charlie Lewis on drumming etc etc…is to be reminded that what really underwrites humanity is our capacity for connecting emotional abstraction. That architect’s final impulses were all just that. That’s where we all turn in the end, each other (mum? I love you, mum). There are an infinite number of ways of exercising that abstract capacity, as many as there have been humans. If you’re one of the lucky ones, you get to do it with actual words. It’s just that sometimes history inverts poetry’s necessities; tenderness sounds vicious; eloquence scans like filth; civilisation looks like destruction.
Unless something authentically cataclysmic stops neo-liberal economic rapacity and exponentially expanding fossil fuel energy consumption, humanity – that exquisite capacity for abstract emotional connection – will be burned into oblivion. Would you bomb a world trade centre to disrupt a species’ suicide? Will it look like that in the long view rear mirror? It might, unless we turn over some of our own furniture voluntarily, preemptively…
Civilisation will obtain because the hunger for emotional connection can’t be destroyed as long as there’s one person left to write ‘I love you’ on the planet, and one to read it. Great writing – and all the greats are funny first and foremost, as Martin Amis pointed out – is civilisation.
I really should swear less AR. It’s just…well, fun. Bum poo willy. Tee-hee.
As a song of the times (to come?) Pete Seeger’s “Which side are you on?” would seem apposite – or by the Dropkick Murphys if you prefer.
Just remember, nothing new under the sun – In 1885, the Knights of Labor organized a successful strike against Jay Gould’s Missouri Pacific Railroad. In response to the strike, Gould famously growled, “I can hire half the working class to kill the other half.”
When I see those heavily beweaponed police on London streets, or the Tactical Response coppers in Oz, I am less worried about their nasty toys than their steroid sodden appearance.
Just what we need, ‘roid rage + rapid fire.