Londoners recount horrors: Tell us your story pt2

Well…

To describe this last week as being an eventful one for London would be a bit of an understatement.

Live 8, the result of Olympic bid and then, yesterday, the bombings.

And I’m sadly ‘off message’ for all three events.

Yes, all three.

In fact, there are some striking similarities between all of them. In their way, each was very much an event of our times and, personally, I treat each of them with equal levels of concern and scepticism.

If you have bumped into this page and choose to read further, please bear in mind that nothing I have written is intended in any way to minimise the horror of what happened yesterday. Far from it. As well as the people who were killed, dozens of others were horribly injured; many were burned, others have endured amputations. The thought of it sickens me. The thought that this happened in places that are familiar to me, places that I, and many other Londoners, pass through every day makes the horror of yesterday very real and very immediate.

And I am nauseated by the thought that there are people out there who I believe are already making capital out of this horror.

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Even though I’m one of those people who have been intensely sceptical about the War on Terror I never bought into the notion that it couldn’t happen here. ‘It’ happened in New York. ‘It’ happened in Madrid. There was no reason to believe that we were immune.

I do, however, have strong doubts about the true motivations of the people who have carried out these atrocities. Hundreds of terrorist suspects have been arrested in this country, countless billions have been spent on security and military action and all we have to show for it is the conviction of a handful of ineffective, solitary losers on nonsense charges. No secret underground bases in Afghanistan, no weapons caches, no super-trained secret agents, no evidence worthy of the name to support the global terrorist conspiracy theory that our governments have been peddling so actively.

Yesterday’s horror changes none of that. Careful not to appear distasteful or insensitive, the Government Spin Machine was set to work yesterday but in a relatively subtle way. A previously unheard of organisation called the "Secret Group of al Qaeda's Jihad in Europe" claimed responsibility for the London attack via the Internet. Some news organisations accepted this uncritically. A handful pointed out that this group of supposedly fanatical Muslim fundamentalists had mistranslated the Qur’an. Pretty much every news channel described the synchronised nature of the attacks on London, and the apparently meticulous planning, as being uniquely characteristic of Al Qaeda and prime evidence of its responsibility.

So, we’re all to believe that Al Qaeda is the only organisation in the world that executes well planned, synchronised operations but can't read the Qur'an properly. Sorry, I don’t buy that, I can think of one or two others.

And besides, a glance at a London tube map shows that just a couple of people could have pulled off yesterday’s attack. All three trains and the bus that was attacked passed through the same point, Kings Cross Station. Based at Kings Cross, they could have planted devices on each of the three trains and still have had enough time to board a number 30 bus and blow themselves up, or be blown up, in Tavistock Square.

It has already been hinted that the bus was blown up by a suicide bomber. That's a bit strange. Firstly, because the bus was a 'soft' target and didn't require a suicide to be attacked and, secondly, Tavistock Square is hardly a high profile location. Why press the button there of all places? No restrictions were in place at the time of the explosion and the supposed suicide bomber had his pick of London landmarkets from which he could meet his maker. Sounds like a balls up to me.

The only thing that was 'characteristic' about yesterday's atrocity was a desire to cause maximum disruption and fear with total disregard for human life. And there are plenty of groups who stand to benefit a lot more from that than Al Qaeda, assuming that you believe such an organisation even exists anyway.

But, for argument's sake, I’ll pretend that Al Qaeda does exist in exactly the form described by Blair and Bush.

Think for a moment about what Blair and Bush claim Al Qaeda’s motives to be. Listen to their rhetoric. Yesterday Blair kept sliming out lines like

"They are trying to use the slaughter of innocent people to cow us, to frighten us out of doing the things that we want to do, of trying to stop us going about our business as normal as we are entitled to do."

The terrorists will not destroy "our values and our way of life"

"We will not allow violence to change our society and values"

No reference to Palestine or Iraq or the wicked regimes we support and were supporting long before 9/11. Nothing. What we are supposed to believe is that we are dealing with insane people with no real agenda other than to fuck us up and who don’t mind dying in the process.

And, sadly, the majority of people seem to have swallowed that horse manure.

No need to concern ourselves about the culpability of our own governments' actions or the desperation of people oppressed by the most powerful military powers on Earth. People who have no aircraft carriers, cruise missiles or stealth bombers. People so hateful and desperate and poorly equipped they will give up their own lives to strike back. And if you’ve been driven to a point where you’ll sacrifice your own life, why would you give a damn about anyone else’s?

As I said, I personally believe Al Qaeda to be a lie but if you are willing to believe a group of such people exists how can you possibly swallow the nursery grade ‘they hate us for our freedoms’ argument? Doesn’t ‘they hate us because we’re killing their families, stealing their resources, corrupting their societies and desecrating their sacred places’ make a just little more sense?

Of course, we’re not ever going to hear our politicians be quite so candid are we?

Personally, I have no doubt that there are evil forces in this World who hate freedoms and would dominate us all, but forgive me for not trusting the words of our Prime Minister, a proven liar with blood on his hands.

One of the other themes of yesterday’s commentary was the notion that the terrorists' actions will rebound on them. 'Our society won’t be cowed by terror and will strike back at the terrorists'. I heard variations of that one a lot yesterday. The flaw with that particular argument, of course, is the fact that we don’t actually know what the terrorists' intentions are. Strangely, the people responsible for this attack, and the one’s that came before, have been quite reluctant to own up or explain their motives. Obligingly, our governments have filled in the blanks for us…

‘Some insane (but well organised) towel heads did it because they hate us for our freedoms’

But maybe the terrorists, whoever they made be, want our governments to erode civil liberties, even more than they have already. Maybe the terrorists want us to get stuck into another war or two? I’m willing to give roughly even odds that an Iranian connection will be found to yesterday’s events. Anyone out there fancy a bet?

The War on Terror has impacted on our way of life. It has been used as an excuse to deprive us of long-cherished rights and freedoms. Government and big business are certainly more powerful than they were pre 9/11 but we’re clearly not any safer. But why should we expect to be? Look at the Nazi regime during the last World War. They had total control of the population of Europe. They had ID cards. They used torture. They imprisoned without trial. They made war on ‘criminal’ regimes. Did that stop terrorism, sorry, resistance?

The parallels between our times and those of the Nazis are extensive and not superficial. Just substitute Muslims for Jews and you’re there. And there were a couple of things the Nazis were particularly good at; staging terrorist attacks and border incidents and selling their people the most colossal lies on the long-established principle that if the lie is large enough and if you repeat it often enough people will swallow it. In fact, people will want to swallow it.

I can see very clearly where Tony Blair, George Bush and their backers are going to try and take us after yesterday’s events. It’s evil. It’s ugly and it ain’t going to work. Well, it isn’t going to work for us but it might work for them. It all depends on what you choose to believe is really going on out there doesn’t it?