Photo courtesy The Mirror.
To commemorate the anniversary of the 7/7 terrorist attacks and celebrate my friends in the UK, another piece of the Terror book, in progress. (And yes, I already hear voices saying, if you think England’s so much better than the U S of A, why don’t you stay there. Not what I’m saying). This is from the early chapter on fear:
In a major policy speech on the approaching war with Iraq, President George W. Bush echoed previous statements by his national security advisor, Condoleeza Rice (and ideas we find in the television show 24) by arguing “We cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” These slightly mixed metaphors (Bush was originally responding to criticisms that we had no proof Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction) collapse into a single frightening martial threat to the United States. “Through its inaction,” the president said, “the United States would resign itself to a future of fear. That is not the America I know. That is not the America I serve. We refuse to live in fear.” [1]
What Bush was offering, simultaneously, was the fearful spectre of nuclear attack, and the hope that someday, by taking the actions he wanted to pursue, we might live without fear. It is a horrible thing to live in fear. Nothing in human existence is worse, Thomas Hobbes affirmed. So, in a very real sense, our fear of fear may drive us to any extremes in hopes of escaping a future of fear. That is why fear is our opening point in examining the culture and political climate following 9/11. The illogically-named War on Terror, is, on further reflection, perfectly-named; our battle is not, perhaps, first with mere humans who might attack us, but with the fear that, as President Bush said, would enslave us. Every action taken in the War on Terror—preventative war, torture, rendition, civil rights violations, stereotyping Muslims—grows out of the fear that sprouted from those fireballs on September 11.
It should be instructive that while the government of Britain acquiesced to many of the requests of the Bush administration related to war and the conduct of it, the people (if not necessarily the leaders) of Britain, a nation which has lived longer with the spectre of terror than the United States, can show us some different responses to the call of fear. On the morning of July 7, 2005, a group of Islamic extremists attacked the London transit system during rush hour, killing 52, injuring hundreds, and pushing hundreds of thousands into the city streets; “7/7” is as identifiable a date in Britain as 9/11 in the States. Although this event had obvious similarities to the 9/11 attacks, it was the latest in a serious of British bombings over the years from a series of terror groups, and the most serious on British soil.
Where terror attacks are concerned, people in the United Kingdom would seem to have more of which to be frightened than people in the United States, yet, paradoxically, they do not seem to manifest this fear. A few weeks ago, I stayed at the Hilton Metropole London, where victims of the 7/7 bombings had been carried for treatment; I walked past the St. Mary’s Hospital down the street, where more badly wounded had been rushed; I boarded the Underground at the Edgeware Road Station, site of one of the deadly explosions. And as I looked at the faces of my fellow commuters, I did not sense the sort of fear and irritation I sometimes find among my traveling counterparts in the States. “Why don’t we treat it the way the British deal with IRA bomb threats in London?” writer and professor Jay Parini asked. “It’s just become part of their lives, like bad weather.” [2]
This advice might serve us well. While George Bush’s grim response to the attacks of 7/7 was “the war on terror goes on,” not all British politicians seem to have pushed the terror aspect in the same way as their US counterparts have done (a factor, by the way, that may explain why US citizens were at first more compliant with their government’s policies than British citizens have been); in fact, although he later called for more draconian measures to prevent future attacks, Prime Minister Tony Blair gave a statement on the evening of the 7/7 bombings in which he encouraged his fellow Britons to refuse to give in to fear:
I think we all know what they are trying to do, they are trying to use the slaughter of innocent people to cow us, to frighten us out of doing the things we want to do, of trying to stop us going about our business as normal as we are entitled to do and they should not and must not succeed.
When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated, when they seek to change our country, our way of life by these methods, we will not be changed.
When they try to divide our people or weaken our resolve, we will not be divided and our resolve will hold firm.
We will show by our spirit and dignity and by a quiet and true strength that there is in the British people, that our values will long outlast theirs.
The purpose of terrorism is just that, it is to terrorise people and we will not be terrorised. [3]
British friends, in fact, have told me that it simply is not in the British makeup to be terrorized; they survived bombing raids in World War Two, have lived with the possibility (and actuality) of IRA attacks for decades, have been menaced for being the United States’ closest ally in the War on Terror, and are thus unlikely to succumb to fear-mongering. For me, this attitude is best illustrated by a ubiquitous popular poster originally designed in case of German invasion in World War Two and now to be found everywhere, “Keep Calm and Carry On,” which has been described by the BBC as “the very model of British restraint and stiff upper lip.” [4] The design, rediscovered in 2000, has been widely reprinted and used on merchandise ranging from postcards to mugs to baby clothes to doormats. A slightly-altered version of the poster (“Keep Calm and Read On”) is an ad-campaign currently plastered throughout the Underground, reminding people in the very places where terrorists have attacked to go on about their business. Ironically, in language familiar from the speeches of George W. Bush, a Cambridge-educated clergyman told me, “If we let them throw us off our routines, then indeed the terrorists have won.” What the British demonstrate in this instance is how one can live in the face of fear without giving in to it. [5]
[1] “Bush: Don’t Wait for Mushroom Cloud,” CNN, October 8, 2002. Accessed at http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/10/07/bush.transcript/
[2] James Atlas, “The Fear this Time,” New York May 21, 2005. Accessed at http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/9605/
[3] “London Rocked by Terror Attacks,” BBC News, 7 July 2005. Accessed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4659093.stm; “In Full: Blair on Bomb Blasts,” BBC News, 7 July 2005. Accessed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4659953.stm
[4] Stuart Hughes, “The best propaganda poster ever?” BBC News, 4 Feb. 2009. Accessed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7869458.stm
[5] Whether British institutions have used other issues as candidates for fear mongering may be up for discussion; my point is that the response to the terrorist threat seems to have been handled differently by the British government, and attempts to convince Britons of the threat of Saddam Hussein were largely ignored or disregarded, leading at last to the fall of the Blair government.
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