What Do We Bicker About, When We Bicker About Terrorism?

I've got less time on my hands for internet bickering than I used to, but I am a seasoned veteran.  If you're reading this, you're probably a bit handy at the internet bickering yourself.

So let's skip straight to the main course - what do we bicker about, when we bicker about terrorism?  More or less everything except terrorism, is my suspicion. 

A few observations about the responses I've seen to yesterday's bloodcurdling horror in Woolwich, starting with 

When a guy who has just beheaded a man while shouting about Allah is shown explaining that he did it because of violence perpetrated by British soldiers in "Our lands", it's probably okay to call him a Jihadist or an Islamist terrorist-wannabe. 

You'd think this would be uncontroversial, given that beheading-while-shouting-about-God is one of the Jihadi's favourite pastimes, and that publicly justifying yourself with standard Jihadi boo-hoo can reasonably be described as "Jihadist behaviour". 

But you'd be wrong.  

Now, our legal system and its presumption of innocence is one of the things that makes this country great, but we aren't all lawyers in court, so we can draw conclusions as we see fit.  

I expect it's possible that these arseholes were crazy* wannabe-Glorious Warriors of God, but we all know that the sole requirement for being a Jihadi is saying that you are one.  That is, after all, the whole point of Al-Qaeda and its offshoots - anyone can join in the fun, by declaring that you want to do so**.

There are times when it's appropriate to reserve judgement; there are times when the best course is quiet reflection until all the facts emerge. 

And then, there are times when a man bloodily decapitates another in the street while shouting Jihadist slogans.  At moments like this, a rush to judgement is probably justifiable.  If anything, it's reasons to doubt Jihadomentalist lunacy that may need backing up in this scenario. 

Also, 

While it's certainly true that 99.99% of Muslims are not bloodthirsty Jihadi arseholes, it is also necessary to point out that a sufficiently worrying number are.  

It's great to see how many people are at pains to note that most Muslims are no happier with psycho-murderers than any section of the the UK's populace.  Go on folks - there are plenty who need to be reminded of facts like this, and reminded often. 

Nonetheless, I do have to point out that Jihadi arseholes are a conspicuous and alarming problem whose ability to sow hatred and discord is wildly disproportionate to their meagre numbers, and that this has to be discussed with clear eyes and no illusions.  

Going apeshit every time anybody mentions the loony, supremacist Islamist theories popular among most who commit these very specific murderous acts isn't helping the situation and is probably helping those who want to inflame it.

Yes, there are "media narratives" and people looking to exploit this or that, but neither I nor the public at large are much worried that "the media" are going to set off nailbombs in our cities.

Yes, there are other forms of terrorism, and "terrorism" is a much-abused word.

Nonetheless, back when Anders Breivik quoted Melanie Phillips and her cohort of pant-shitting imitators in his loopy theories about imminent Marxo-Jihadical genocide, we all thought it was hilarious when the lot of them started backpedalling away from their own whiffy theories like roid-raging cyclists while screeching about censorship. 

Still though, I think it's worth noting that when Breivik said he was prompted to action by his favourite doom-mongering race theorists, he may just have been telling the truth, much as David Copeland probably was a Nazi scumbag.

Which brings us to... 

When lots of criminals keep telling you their crimes were motivated by (x), then their crimes are more likely to have been motivated by (x) than by whatever theory you have just pulled out of your arse. 

We've seen this one before - some twatty little gimp stands up in court and says that yes, he committed acts of terrorism because yes, he's a Soldier of God in a war that encompasses Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

And folk stand around stroking their chins wondering what he can possibly have meant by such a statement.  

Well, look.  I'm aware that Islamism didn't spring into being fully-formed from nowhere; I'm also aware that it barely needs grievances to justify whatever bugfuck nuts acts of mayhem and destruction it wants to commit.  I'm also aware that it won't go away if we would only tickle its ears and give it a saucer of milk.

But I have to say that, when folk insist on continuing to kill themselves and other people and then justifying it by calling it revenge for this or that disastrous foreign policy catastrofuck, they probably mean that they're angry enough about our foreign policy to kill and die over it.

This is one of the great unsayables, for much of this country's pundit class.  To note it is to attract accusations that you're saying that you deserve to be killed, and so on.  Sadly for fannies of this ilk, this issue is totally impervious to our feelings about it.  

Or, in shorter form - just because a man's statements are highly inconvenient for your personal foreign policy preferences, doesn't mean they aren't true. 

And lastly, a favourite topic of mine... 

What the fuck are we still doing in Afghanistan?

Let's play devil's advocate and accept the standard hawkish boilerplate.  Let's assume that a vast section of the world's Muslims are deranged with lunatic, murderous psychopathy. 

Well then, what? Do we intend to make war upon a billion people and if so, what proportion of that population are we going to have to splatterate in order to make the remainder see sense? 

And if you can put an exact deaths-to-revelation ratio on this then how, exactly, is a temporary occupation of the arse-end of the Islamic world meant to remedy that situation? 

And of course, it won't.  But then few of our bickerings have really had much to do with reality anyway, this last ten years or so.

*And it actually is okay to use the word "insane" to describe the behaviour of people who do things that we think are insane, even if we don't think that those people are literally insane.  

**This is the point, often made, that had pundits twiddling fingers at their temples when Adam Curtis raised it but not, curiously, when Jason Burke does likewise.

Biased Against Everyone and Everything, Everywhere

"Nigel Farage has said he hung up on an interview with BBC Scotland because the line of questioning "was insulting and unpleasant"... He told the BBC he did not regret the interview's abrupt ending, adding "I wasn't very impressed with it..." - BBC, 17 May 2013

"Asked about how many elected representatives he has in Scotland, Mr Farage said: "Absolutely none, but rather more than the BBC. We could have had this interview in England a couple of years ago, although I wouldn't have met with such hatred as I'm getting from your questions.  Frankly, I've had enough of this interview, goodbye." - Telegraph, 17 May 2013

 "Newsnight Scotland has been accused of being biased towards the SNP.  Labour MP Ian Davidson called it "News-Nat" throughout an interview...  Record, 9 August 2012

"Labour have hit out at BBC Scotland for refusing to broadcast their conference this weekend... Labour MSP David Whitton said "This is a remarkable decision and demonstrates a serious lack of balance from the BBC..." - Record, 17 March 2011

"SNP anger at "enemies" in the BBC boils over...  Stewart Stevenson, a former minister and close friend of Alex Salmond, tweeted: "Once is happenstance. twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action – Ian Fleming." - Telegraph, 7 March 2013  

"SNP go on attack against BBC Scotland over EU interview...  The SNP unleashed an extraordinary offensive on the BBC yesterday as ministers scrambled to salvage their claims a separate Scotland would enjoy an easy entry to the European Union. - Telegraph, 28 January 2013

I could go on and on here, since these boo-hoo-woe-is-us assaults on BBC Scotland are more or less endless - but I'm sure you get my drift. 

Rather than seriously entertaining the notion that BBC interviewers are viciously biased against Nigel Farage, UKIP and the Union, we should ask ourselves why, exactly, a man who can't hear a few incontestible facts without a hilarious meltdown can somehow keep his shit together on UK-wide media.  

Because it should be obvious that any politician who responds to being asked how many representatives UKIP has in Scotland with "None, which is more than the BBC" then hanging up, is not exactly an arch-media manipulator. 

My Girls Are The Creme De La Creme

If you believed the Meryl Streep film, she died like she lived - in comfort, delivering rambling, fantastical homilies on personal responsibility to the uncomprehending and the indifferent.

I was a toddler when she was elected, but she must've hit Scotland like a thunderbolt.  The nation never wanted any part of her lunatic revolution - we rejected it at the ballot box again and again, in fact - but by God, we got it good and hard anyway.  Such was the wonder of free choice that we had that of others thrust down our throats by the fistful for a decade.

If you could've called forth Middle England's rampant id in all its virtuous pomposity and self-regard, it would don one of those fruity little dresses and wander around quietly lecturing the less fortunate on the value of thrift.  She came from a sub-species of affluent, frustrated bores who thrill to imagine themselves menaced by the phantasm of some terrible, probably Bolshevik menace, from the safety of their own inviolate Hobbit-holes.

She was the perfect product of a system warped by a righteous belief in its own entitlement and a suspiciously convenient terror that somebody, somewhere, might be nibbling on a hunk of government cheese at its expense.

All of which is ironic really, since she resembled nobody more than that stock figure of Scottish letters -  Miss Jean Brodie, resplendent in her Prime, sermonising to the class like Providence, like the God of Calvin.

She sold the UK on her little home-spun homilies about the path to prosperity but force-fed vast tracts of it grinding misery.  That was the eighties for many of us: endless harangues on hard work and self-sufficiency, delivered by those who were striving daily to make the possibility of either ever more remote.

If she ever suffered a moment of doubt while entire towns were shuttered, she never showed it, certain that God was on her side whatever her course.  So she experienced no difficulty or sense of hyprocrisy in stomping like a stormtrooper on those who resisted her, sending legions of militarised police to spread her message of personal freedom by force.

If our skyrocketing unemployment rate ever gave her a moment's pause, we never saw a flash of it.  In all the broken marriages and deprived upbringings and jobless poor, she saw only more proof of the powerful correctness of her opinions, and redoubled her efforts to kick us all into a shape she found more pleasing.

All of our lives and livelihoods were secondary concerns in the great psychodrama of her personal battles.  The atmosphere she created was like sitting in a classroom copying out lines from the Bible, with no toilet breaks, and the penalty for asking questions is caning.

Most of Scotland didn't hate her because it disagreed with her politics or her style.  It didn't loathe her or the clique of privileged, over-educated sexual deviants around her simply because they might as well have been aliens with flourescent genitals, for all that they understood us or our lives.

We despised her because she made war on us gladly, with a song of joy in her heart, for our own good.  She was certain she knew better what we needed than we did ourselves, and she never missed an opportunity to let us know that she could make us see it her way, any time she liked.

She loomed over our childhoods like a gorgon and bequeathed to us as adults possibly the most offensively cretinous politics ever to stain the tattered ideal of British democracy.  In a more just world, her political legacy would be fit only for slapstick comedy and allegorical children's TV dramas.

She was a fantasist and a mentalist.  She sent us all to fight for General Franco. Her passing comes far too late to offer any comfort to those upon whom she wreaked the worst of her harm, like the death of Stalin.

I'm not glad she's dead.  

I'm sorry she entered politics, and I'm sorry we did such a shitty job of repudiating her that we became a nation that richly deserves to be ruled by her idiot offspring.

That Marriage Argument, In a Nutshell

Lover One:  My darling, I love you.  I want to share my life with you, declare my devotion to you before our loved ones and as an incidental result, entitle you to a significant share of my estate if I die unexpectedly.

Lover Two:  Dearest, I love you too.  I want to share my life with you, declare my devotion to you before our loved ones and as an incidental result, entitle you to a significant share of my estate if I die unexpectedly.

Weirdo Humanist MC:  I now declare you -

(Bang, Crash!) 

Lunatic interloper:  Stop!  You two autonomous individuals cannot order your personal lives and legacies in whichever way you see fit!

Lover One: What?

Lover Two:  What?

Lunatic interloper:  Moral/Religious/Civil law says that you can't do what you're about to do.  You must stop.

Lover One:  Eh?

Lover Two:  (Who's a bit more streetwise about these things)  Keith, gonnae chuck this mentalist out, eh?  He's talking pish.

(Scuffle, Scuffle, Shout!, Scuffle, return to relative peace) 

Lover Two:  Now, where were we?

Lover One: My darling, I love you...

Oh Yeah? Well, Regulate This!

Oh no, the liberal-left has gone berserk again!

We're talking about Nick, of course, so it's worth recalling that for him, "the liberal-left" is "going berserk" roughly 99% of their waking lives, and that when he says "berserk" he usually means something like Saying rude things about Sarah Palin or Thinking that having massive wars with everyone is a silly idea.

To go berserk then is basically to disagree with Nick about something.  Quite how being rude about Sarah Palin is some kind of 28 Days Later rampage is anyone's guess, but there it is, in black and white.

Today, we're "berserk" because some percentage of us agree with proposals for press regulation, a stance which strikes Nick as a kind of parade of suburban Mussolinis crushing human freedom.  This represents a form of progress for Nick, given he's usually more fond of dressing people up in SS uniforms and making them march about for his amusement, as opposed to comparisons with Hitler's more slapstick Italian accomplice.

You'd be forgiven for missing the freedom aspect of course, since a skim-reading would leave you with the impression that the topic is "My God those liberals are bastards and I hate them all, the verminous wankers that they are", as opposed to a Tom Paine-esque defence of liberty.

Sharp-eyed readers will spot that the bodycount from all of these berserkers is zero, while many of Nick's own pet projects are now buried under a sky-scraping pile of skulls.  We might question whether somebody who has a long record of hemming-and-hawing and reluctantly-concluding on the issue of  torture might have a bit of a cheek to accuse anyone else of enabling oppression, but likely to no avail.

Well, I'm agnostic on Leveson.  I think it's entirely right and just that the press should be held accountable for their behaviour, but I'm not convinced that these proposals are the right way to go about achieving that.  These proposals may in fact be terrible idiocy, and Nick may well be correct to oppose them.

But let's just observe how odd it is that most of the hacks I've seen really shitting their legs off with rage over press regulation are the type who are prone to making sweeping generalisations about the inherent villainy of entire demographics.

I mean, I'm not saying it's impossible that Nick is particularly offended by encroachments on human freedom.  It's not the kind of thing that usually bugs him, since he's been entirely on-board with just about every major bit of loony Star Chamber legislation aimed at "protecting the public from terrorism" of the last decade, and an enthusiastic booster of pretty much unlimited, omni-directional war whenever the option has presented itself.

Maybe Nick is trying to alert us to our voluntary adoption of our own disenfranchisement.  I'd say it's also at least possible that Nick is chewing the cushions because press regulation might make it more difficult to call people pro-genocide dictator-fellaters and so on without then getting publicly reamed by the regulator for disseminating bullshit.

And you can probably imagine why somebody like Nick would find that an alarming prospect.

Plus Ca Change, Plus Ca Le Meme Bullshit Chose

Oh, those whiny war protestors!  So narcissistic, thinking their opinion should trump that of parliament!  So self-indulgent, to ignore the fact that many had different opinions!

I mean, I understand these whacks at anti-war hacks.  I found all those Boo-hoo how come nobody listened to us? opinion pieces trite and annoying too.  Who wouldn't?  I agreed with the authors' sentiments and I felt like launching the laptop out of the window.  Me!

What's noticeable though is that the last week's pre-war nostalgia parties came in only two flavours - either the We-Were-Right variety from the anti-war folks themselves, or the You-Were-Kind-Of-Right-But-You're-Dicks species from their detractors.

And indeed, the But-You're-Dicks guys have a point, at least about democracy.  Loads of people really did think Saddam Hussein was armed to the teeth with nuclear and chemical weapons and that somewhere beneath the smoking remnant of his fucked airforce or the charred ruin of his 70's-era army, lay the Destruction Of The West.

I imagine quite a few even believed he could fly over London in one of those model planes the Americans pretended to be afraid of, then drop an ebola-stuffed atom bomb on Great Ormond Street Hospital out of his arse.

People believed these kinds of inane fictions because largely, they were naive enough to think that the government wouldn't lie through their teeth with the charm of conmen slipping a sly finger into Granny's purse, but they believed it nonetheless.

And so it's noteworthy that we've seen so many pieces reminding us of how many people believed all the bullshit propaganda, and so very few pieces explaining why people actually believed this facile, transparently fantastical nonsense.

I mean, this is surely the big story here.  When nearly half the population base their opinion on a war - a war with a bodycount big enough for a respectable mid-20th century conflict, mind - on tall tales and oogah-boogah, you'd think that would be an issue.  And yet, from what we've seen this week, it barely rates a mention.

The reason is plain, I imagine.  It's fun to club writers like Owen Jones and Laurie Penny for being angsty and strident.  It's fun to concuss these people with the club of political reality, and fun to call them wankers for dismissing so many suckers.  Let's laugh at the weepy idealists is a grand lark.  Point with me, people!

We fucked up and got tens of thousands of people killed, on the other hand, is not fun.  Explaining why you fell for one of the most hilariously obvious con-jobs since those American women got serially-groped by the door-to-door Breast Inspector isn't fun at all.

Nope, correspondents can't don Kevlar, stand on the deck of an aircraft carrier and shout over swooshing infographics, which demonstrate that unmitigated lies and bullshit came out of this mouth here, entered journalistic ears at this strategic point, and were then distributed verbatim to the populace over a wide area, here and here.   

Can't do that, no sir.  We were slack-jawed, credulous idiots doesn't sell papers, unless maybe you can think of a way to get a credulous but photogenic idiot to get his or her arse out during the confession.

Nobody can explain their grand theory of humanitarian derring-do while perched upon the carcass of a nation.  You can't take the moral high-ground when you've carpet-bombed the middle-ground and napalm-nuked the low-ground, and then strafed the rubble.

Nobody looks good when they're gabbling justifications for credulously accepting Iraq as some kind of sudden, pressing threat to world civilisation.  It sounded ludicrous back when there was doubt over the issue but now, long after the matter has been settled, even the masters of the art just sound like they've been caught whacking-off to bestiality-porn on the office computer.  Again.

And that's what all of this is, in the end-up - a choice between publishing self-effacing articles openly declaring the authors' incredible levels of gullibility, or just forgetting the nation's credulity and giving the hippies one more richly-deserved slipper-thrashing.

This country's no different to any others, I imagine.  Lay out a choice like that, and the hippies are always going to wind up with smarting arsecheeks, especially if they've had the temerity to be both correct and smug about it.

If it also has the effect of drawing a discreet veil over one of the most crass and nonsensical episodes in recent British history well, that's just one of those little added benefits that life sometimes throws you.

TFMAVAWMETAPMN, Redux

(Since I spent most of my time on this blog arsing on about our myriad wars, and since we're coming up for the ten-year anniversary of The Fabled, Most Awesome Virtuous Anti-War March Ever To Achieve Pretty Much Nothing, I thought I'd revisit TFMAVAWMETAPMN.  After all, every other lazy bugger is). 

I remember it was very cold, and I was very hungover.  It took a long time to get to Glasgow - either lots of people were driving through for the protest, or there was a football match on.

I remember it was damn loud and some jokers had brought drums, but I recall being fine with that.  It was all kind of exciting.

I remember we joined in right behind a bunch of Commies with shouty placards, since it seemed as good a place as any.  "Who are these guys?", Mrs R. asked me.

"A bunch of Commies, by the looks of things", I told her.  I seem to recall that the crowd behind us were crusties, Greenie types, although my memory is vague by now.

I remember that when we turned south and made for the Clyde, a workman in a hardhat shouted down from some scaffolding at us.  "Don't you have anything better to do?  Get a job!"

Get a job?  I had two, for Christ's sake.  "It's Saturday, dickhead" I shouted back, and added the finger for good measure.  I was a youngster, you know how it is.

I remember Mrs R's friend phoning her right then.  "Youse are pure fannies", Mrs R's friend told her. "Do you want Saddam to bomb us?"

Mrs R told me her friend thought we were pure fannies and wanted to know whether we wanted to get bombed by Saddam.  I told her I thought brainless, credulous horseshit like that was one of the main reasons for being there in the first place.

I remember when we got to the Armadillo, where the Labour Party conference was being held, we had to wait for about an hour and a half for everyone else to arrive.

I remember the Prime Minister had showed up earlier than expected for his big troop-rallying, let's-bomb-fuck-out-of-Iraq-for-reasons-that-make-no-damn-sense speech and then buggered off long before we got there, to avoid any unpleasantness with the huge crowd of pissed-off people.

I remember the snipers on the cranes overlooking the Clyde, and how big their rifles looked even at long distance.  I remember the police cars parked at the Armadillo all had one copper driving, and another with a sub-machine gun in his lap.  MP5s, I'd learn later from playing Call of Duty.  Deadly effective up close, but not so much at range.

My mate thought they were there to protect us from terrorist attack; I thought they were there to protect the Labour Party delegates from popular attack.

I remember thinking there must have been about sixty thousand people there.  I'd been to enough football games to know what a big crowd looks like, and this was a big crowd.  I remember the cops thought it was half that size.

I remember that the protesters were about evenly-split between Barber-jacketed middle class folk, studenty/crusty types, and ordinary Glaswegian punters.

It was the Glaswegians who actually made an effort to speak to you.  They were nice and many were clearly from rough parts of the city, and although some of them had some fairly wacky ideas, all of them appeared to be basically aware that wars involve killing fuck out of people in vast numbers.  That put them far ahead of the lawyers at my work, who mostly thought this war was an awesome idea.

I remember that many of the speakers were boring as hell.  I remember Tommy Sheridan blared slogans at us like an angry foghorn, exuding little of the personal charisma that he's apparently famous for.  I remember John Swinney gave us a hedging, if-this-then-that speech of the genus you'd expect from a professional politician with higher ambitions.   Mind you, I remember that Jimmy Reid - I think it was Jimmy Reid, anyway - was witty and acerbic, which I liked, although I had no idea who he was back then.

It may be because I like her so much that I remember Margo MacDonald making most of the points I agreed with: the ones about how the whole affair was a stupendously retarded and dangerous idea, certain to end in a godawful bloodbath; about how the Vietnam War must've struck people as sane at some point, even though it was plainly deranged, but mostly about the jaw-dropping levels of political bullshit citizens were being forced to wade through, to get at anything that looked like a semblance of truth.

Somebody pointed out that the previous Gulf War had been sold as a virtuous police action, but later turned into an insane death-rampage, although I don't recall who.  Somebody else noted the many and various porkies that had been told about the new war, and how you couldn't trust anyone who you caught telling you porkies.  You couldn't trust them at all, and you were a sucker if you did.

And then, we walked back to Mrs R's car and went home.

I remember it was still very cold, even though it was a beautiful sunny day, but I remember there was a widespread feeling of satisfaction, like something good and worthwhile had been done...  Like maybe, some kind of contribution had been made to the debate, a statement that couldn't just be ignored or slyly shoved aside.  The crowd was plainly a mish-mash of political cranks and ordinary citizens, but getting this many people to take time out to agree on one basic message - This war is total bullshit - felt like an achievement.

I don't remember whether it was that night or the next day that we got the Prime Minister's response, but I do remember that I was out of the front room, and that Mrs R shouted me through to the TV.

"Tony Blair was just on talking about the marches", she said with a confused look on her face.  I asked her what he'd said.

"He said he was glad that we could protest, because people in Iraq can't do that", she said.

"Uh, okay.  What else did he say?"

Mrs R shrugged.  "That was it.  He said it's great that we can march, because Iraqis can't".

"That was it?"  I looked at the TV.  The newsreader was talking about something else.  I clearly remember rubbing my temples like I had a bad headache coming on.

"The man's a fucking lunatic", I said eventually.

"Yes", Mrs R said.  "He is".

Then, we watched the football reports.