Tag: Blair

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On an Unimaginable Scale

Paul Stephenson, deputy chief of the Metropolitan Police in London, said the goal of the people suspected of plotting the attack was “mass murder on an unimaginable scale.”  New York Times, August 28, 2006

I guess now we know why the scale was “unimaginable”. It was unimaginable because only the police involved in this case could look at the evidence they had gathered and come to the conclusion that a major terrorist plot was actually in the making.

As always, over and over and over again, the headlines screamed TERROR! UNIMAGINABLE SCALE! BOMB FACTORY! HIJACKINGS! 10 or more planes!!! and so forth and so forth. It’s almost as if the police were desperately trying to convince you that all of the infringements of your civil liberties, all the excessive new police powers, all of that sold-out, smug, superciliousness on Tony Blair’s face– all of it was justified. Here they are– Al Qaeda plotting again!

Well, it could be Al Qaeda. They admitted right away that there was no real evidence of a link. Oddly, they admitted that there was no evidence at all, of a link to Al Qaeda, but they understood the media: every article I saw on the story included the phrase “Al Qaeda” mostly to acknowledge that no link to AL QAEDA!!! was found.

The paranoid reader immediately understands: of course it was Al Qaeda. They just haven’t found the proof yet.

As it turns out, there is not much evidence of anything else either, other than the usual story of young, devout and foolish Islamic fundamentalist boys plotting and bragging and conducting rather laughable experiments to see if they might actually be able to blow up a disposable camera. The “bomb factory” turns out to be an apartment where they stripped batteries and emptied sport-juice containers. One of them had a copy of a schedule of flights on his memory stick. There was no date. They had not even discussed possible dates.

There had not been a single successful explosion of anything. They had no weapons. They had no passports.

In one of their homes, they found a copy of a book– they have noted this, for the judge to consider as something material to the question of whether these people should be locked up indefinitely– they found a book called “Defense of the Muslim Lands.” Oh the horror!

They also found “jihadist” literature. Suppose that we Christians were suddenly under suspicion of plotting to attack Muslims around the world. Suppose they searched your house. Would they find any “Christian militant” literature? Would they find a link to James Dobson’s website which advocates defiance of the courts? Ah ha!

The security commissioner of the European Union, pleasantly named Franco Frattini, said the British decided to proceed with arrests because they had intercepted a message from Pakistan saying “go now”. A “senior British official” admitted that the message was not quite that clear.

British Home Secretary John Reid, at the time, told the media that attacks were “highly likely” and would be on an “unprecedented scale”.

If you can find some indication anywhere that this idiot was not making statements of unimaginable stupidity and unprecedented hysteria, please show me. Reid himself had to back down quickly once he realized, apparently, that he was about to destroy the tourism industry.

Are the Islamic boys guilty of something? I don’t know. If I was in a mood to be really, really generously broad-minded about what they were actually up to I suppose you could charge them with…. well, get serious. With what? Talking about conspiring to plot? Hating America?

The truth is– check the news stories– buried on page 5 or so– if you don’t believe me— the truth is this: they had no weapons, no bombs, no tickets, no actual date, no specific plan to commit any terrorist act. They just talked about how they hated America and Britain because of their decadence, and because of their foreign policies. That’s about it.

I understand– you don’t believe me. It’s too silly to be true. I won’t be offended if you go and check some newspapers first. Even the paranoid ones do generally repeat the official facts. So back to my point– I don’t think I would convict them of anything.

It doesn’t matter. The headlines did their work. More than ever more and more people are convinced that there are thousands of Muslim youths out there planning right now to blow up airplanes and drop anthrax on you and build nuclear bombs and kill you all. We must kill them first.

And more and more people think I’m crazy for actually insisting that even terror suspects are entitled to due process and a fair trial under the laws that have existed for years and years before there ever was a 9/11.

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The Just War Theory

The Christian Reformed Church officially believes that there is such a thing as a “just” war. It’s there in our official church policy, right next to sensual abstinence and charitable materialism.

I liked the 1960’s. Sure there were a lot of crazy ideas in the air, and a lot of foolish ones. And sure, the hippies were naïve and idealistic. But you have to see it from the point of view of someone “coming of age”. You have to appreciate what it was like before t he 1960’s.

The 1950’s was Frank Sinatra, Leave it to Beaver, Senator Joseph McCarthy. It was Billy Graham and Richard Nixon and John Wayne. It was military bands and double-knit pants, pant-suits and Tupperware parties.  It was Bette Davis and Doris Day and Rock Hudson and, god help us, Barbara Stanwyck, who all, to me, had the sexual appeal of dried potatoes.

The 1960’s was the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jesus Christ Superstar, and blue jeans. It was Woodstock, Janis Joplin, J.D. Salinger.  It was Natalie Wood and Ali McGraw and Faye Dunaway.  It was t-shirts and sandals and free love–whatever that was– and John Kennedy.

It was no contest.

One of the things a lot of people in my generation believed in–don’t puke now–was the PEACE movement. I remember arguing with my teachers and parents and minister about it. They all believed that war was a regrettable necessity, but a necessity nevertheless. They argued that the world was full of violent, evil people, who were just itching to conquer and destroy us, just like the Nazis, and the Communists, and, of course, Cuba. In order to preserve our God-ordained lives as suburban consumers, it was necessary to threaten to destroy all life on the entire planet. There could never be peace as long as there was sin in the world, and there would always be sin in the world.

The more sophisticated among us argued back: they are warlike because we are warlike. They hit back, because we hit first. They threaten to destroy us because we threaten to destroy them.

Hopelessly naïve, so we were told.

The Christian Reformed Church produced a thoughtful document that supported the pro-war faction. But a careful reading of it reveals that the peaceniks were gaining the high ground. This document laid out very stringent conditions under which a war could be considered “just”. The one that was most interesting: the benefits of a particular war should outweigh the cost.

Well, I suppose you wouldn’t have a hard time finding militarists who really believed that the benefits of almost any war outweighed the costs. Benefit: lots of medals. Cost: hundreds of thousands of lives. After reading this document, I came to conclusion that some members of the committee which wrote it were playing a joke on us.

It is of more than passing interest that the current generation of leadership in the West, especially Tony Blair in England and Bill Clinton in the U.S., are baby-boomers, members of the “Give Peace a Chance” generation. And guess what: they are proving us right.

The biggest difference between Clinton and Blair and their predecessors, Thatcher and Reagan, is that Clinton and Blair really do believe that peace is a good thing. (One of Ronald Reagan’s first acts as president, way back in 1980, was to restore the funding for military brass bands which President Carter had cut. Thatcher, of course, charged off to Argentina to save the Falklands for England, tally ho.)

And so we finally have peace in South Africa. Peace has a tenuous grasp in the Middle East. And so you have Blair in Ireland and Israel, and Bill Clinton lending the full support of the U.S. But it is not those two men alone. Baby boomers now hold the reigns of power in industry, commerce, education, and government, and whatever other compromises they have made in their lives, they seem to agree that peace is better than war.

Of course, there are still conflicts and civil wars and other disturbances, in places like Nigeria and Kosovo, and the Middle East could still explode if negotiations don’t make some progress soon. But over-all, has the world ever been in better shape? No, it hasn’t. Last year, there were two significant conflicts in the entire world. In any given year during the 1960’s, there were at least 20.

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Perhaps the difference in generations is most aptly summed up in a controversy that broke out several years ago between the Canadian Legion and some “peaceniks” in Chatham, Ontario. The Legion was outraged– outraged, I say– that a group of nuns and activists had decided to hold a peace rally in front of the local cenotaph. How dare they! In their protests, the Legion made transparent all their pretty rhetoric about heroism and sacrifice: the truth was, they didn’t go over “there” to die for their country. They went over there to kill for their country. And the monument was not a tribute to the peace they won; it was a tribute to the camaraderie of men who enjoyed dressing up and shooting guns off at each other, and then spending the next forty years boozing it up away from their wives and retelling the same boring stories about “Jack” and “Bill” and how splendidly they gave it to the wicked kraut.

They realized that peace activists devalued their most cherished accomplishments.

I had been brought up to respect these men for the grim work they did of defending liberty and freedom. After hanging around a Legion hall a few times, and after all we’ve heard in the last few years– about the Queen and admitting Sikhs to the Legion halls, and the flag and so on– I was left with the impression that most of these men had some skewed imperialistic notion of “liberty” that didn’t have much latitude in it for diversity or democracy. I don’t think many of these men cared much about the horrible injustices of the Nazi regime, except insofar as particular incidents could be used to paint the enemies as monsters.

More recently, the veterans complained bitterly when the National War Museum revealed plans to include a section on the Holocaust. How dare they? What’s that go to do with World War II? In the U.S., veterans complained so loudly and bitterly that the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. was forced to withdraw an exhibit that merely documented– did not damn or praise, merely documented– the bombing of Hiroshima. In one sense, their actions are a glorious admission of shame. They want to pretend that Hiroshima never happened.

I mean that, absolutely, their actions were a monumental admission of shame.  If they really believed there was nothing morally wrong with Hiroshima they would not have been bothered one whit about featuring it in an exhibit on the war.

I have gone from believing that these men fought out of a sincere belief in democracy and freedom and justice to believing that most of these men still hold the same attitudes and political views that gave rise to many of the 20th century’s military conflicts in the first place, namely, that honor and national pride are worth killing for, and that material wealth must be guarded against interlopers, and that killing in the name of a nation or a flag is honorable and right.