Waiting for the evidence

I went for a walk through London with a friend this afternoon. It was a beautiful day and we had a mind to take some pictures.

More by accident than design, we passed Tavistock Square, Kings Cross and Aldgate Station on our travels. It’s the first time I’ve been to these place since they were bombed..

Need I say how horrible it all was?

The sites are surrounded by plastic sheeting whilst the police continue with their forensic work. That’s not so bad. Next to each site, mounds of flowers are growing steadily as people leave tributes. That’s quite touching. The horrible part is the dozens of home-produced posters of victims still not confirmed dead by the authorities, pinned up on nearby lampposts and walls. From a distance they look like missing cat notices. Only there are dozens of them and up close you can see the peoples’ faces. Many of the faces are smiling. Family snapshots of never to be repeated, happy occasions. ‘Missing’, ‘Have you seen our daughter?’, ‘Please help’. These, more than anything else, have really rammed home the reality of what has happened. I could barely look at them. I certainly couldn’t bring myself to photograph them. But part of me tells me that I should. I’ll be round that way again in the weekend and maybe I will have sorted myself out by then.

We spent most of the afternoon wandering around the East End; Shoreditch, Brick Lane, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel. These are very Muslim areas. There was a much larger than usual visible police presence. Maybe I was feeling overly sensitive but every now and again I saw people looking suspiciously at the camera in my hand as if it were a weapon. Whatever, I took virtually no pictures of anything today.

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I’ve reached a peculiar point for this blog. It’s a personal blog not a political one. Part of me wants to move away from the single issue I’ve been stuck on lately. However, I want to finish recording my thoughts about why last week’s bombings are not like 9/11 and why I know the nature of London and Londoners’ response to the bombings are misrepresented in the media. I’ll probably get round to that next.

One of the absolutely key differences between ‘77’ and 911 is that none us knew what to expect in the aftermath of 911. Not the way the story would be managed, nor the way our governments would behave. There was a lot more trust floating around. This time round a lot more people are suspicious, plus we are more literate when it comes to how the game is played. God willing, this will help us to identify the lies in real time this time rather than retrospectively, months or years after the event.

And, following on from my previous post, the case being woven around the suspected suicide bombers is starting to smell already. But I’m waiting for the official release of a couple of pieces of the ‘evidence’ before I say any more about that. I’m especially looking forward to the CCTV footage of the four guys at the Kings Cross we’ve been told about. I am looking for three things in particular but I’ll save that for a later post. In the meantime, this story seems to have some potential.

Think what it must feel like to be a decent, law abiding Muslim living in the West right now. The staring. The bricks through the windows. The thinly disguised hate in the newspapers and our politicians’ words - how insincere does that ‘it’s only a minority’ crap sound. We’re fighting a war to save Western Civilisation don’t you know?

Fuck Bush. Fuck Blair. Fuck the newspapers. Don’t let them demonise your neighbour. Take any opportunity you can to let that neighbour know you’re not part of the mob.

(category: political stuff)

A word or two on yesterday's news

So, our security forces have identified the Four people they believe carried out Thursday's bombings.

On the face of it the evidence is pretty strong:

• They’ve found personal documentation and belongings from the Four at each of the four bombsites
• They’ve found bits of at least one of the Four at one of the bombsites
• They have the Four on CCTV in Kings Cross
  
• They’ve found explosives at one of the Four’s home and in a car
• And, at this stage, God knows what else.

I wonder if the newspapers will resist the temptation to coin a phrase like the Fanatic Four over the coming days.

Let’s see what those coming days bring. Maybe the case against these men is as strong as it seems this morning. Having said that, I recall that in the aftermath of 9/11 all sorts of incriminating things were found in cars, passports conveniently hurled out of the flight decks of exploding airliners and apparently damning anecdotes of nights out in Florida strip joints were told. The attackers also seemed to be sending anthrax in the mail from beyond the grave. None of this material held up to much scrutiny in the months and years that followed. And, judging by the huge trail of evidence described by our police yesterday, Thursday’s bombers did pretty much everything short of leaving a line of doughnuts to their front door in helping the police with their enquiries.

I’m pretty stunned by way the media has hysterically latched onto the possibility that these guys may have been suicide bombers and the manner in which that story has been reported. Suicide bombing evolved as a tactic due to the sheer desperation of people faced by overwhelming military force. The point was to find a way to deliver an attack against a heavily defended enemy. The suicide element and the belief in an afterlife were incidental. The Japanese and the Vietnamese were driven to similar tactics against the Americans in past years and I don’t believe anyone is accusing them of being ‘Islamofundamentalists’.

But that’s not how the nature of suicide bombing is being portrayed in our media. We’re being presented with a vision of a psychotic foe actively seeking death for death’s sake. Men who will sacrifice their lives for no reason at all. Fans of the Life of Brian will see parallels with the Assyrian Suicide Squad (funny) which, in turn, was based on the story of the Zealot garrison at Masada who killed themselves and their families, though not in that order, rather than surrender to the Romans in AD74 (not funny).

Whatever the true story of last week’s bombings turns out to be, assuming we ever learn it, the coverage in our media HAS been demented, biased and manipulative. The behaviour of our government before and after has been equally wicked. British Muslims and, I suspect, Muslims all over the World are scared of what this will all mean for them, and with good cause.

It’s a bloody nightmare. How else can you describe a war that has no conceivable end?

Cor Blimey Guv'nor I'm a Cockney sparra pt1

Tracy received an email from a friend in New Zealand this morning ...

"You know on the news the other night they interviewed "Londoners" and everyone one was foreign?! I mean, American, Arab, east European etc………….reckon stef might just be the last Londoner in London…………was very typical of a cosmopolitan city but you would have thought that out of 5 people picked on a bus on their way to work that one would be have been English?"

This intrigued both Tracy and myself as our experience of the coverage here in London was the exact opposite. With few exceptions, the people being interviewed on the streets after the attacks were white, English born, middle income types.

Skewed overseas coverage of events in London is not a new thing. I remember back after IRA bombed the City of London in 1993, an English friend who had been living in the States for a while spoke with me on the phone about his concerns over coming home for a visit for a few weeks. The coverage of the bombing in America was so exaggerated he was shitting himself. Somehow he’d got the impression that we were being cut down in swathes by a deluge of explosions. As I recall, only one person had actually died. Something similar seems to have taken place with last week’s bombings. Tracy’s family in New Zealand were freaked.

But it’s not just the overseas news coverage that seemed out of step with reality this time. The domestic reporting seemed pretty iffy as well.

If I was asked to target the two tube stations nearest to parts of London with a high Muslim population density, straight away, and without any hesitation, I would select Aldgate and Edgware Road. The Edgware Road is lined with Middle Eastern Coffee shops and eating places, complete with blokes puffing on Hookahs on the pavement. Aldgate Station is a limp stone’s throw away from Brick Lane.

Edgware Road and Aldgate were two of the stations bombed on Thursday

Now I’m not being all conspiratorial and suggesting these stations were targeted deliberately. What did surprise me was, given the locations, how few Arabic or Asian people were interviewed during the day and how little reference was made to the fact that the bombs exploded in Muslim parts of town. When I saw ‘few’ or ‘little’ I mean virtually none.

As I mentioned previously, the ‘Londoners’ interviewed were predominantly white English. The vast majority of them weren’t even Londoners at all. They just catch the train in from way out of town and come to work here. This was evidenced by the bizarre spectacle of thousand of people, described in the media as Londoners, walking out of the city with maps in their hands trying to figure out their route home. The area between ‘Home’ and ‘Work’ was a complete mystery to them.

The harsh reality is that the quality of life and schooling in most of London are now so awful that few of the people who grow up in this city actually hold down jobs in the city centre where the bombings took place. Those Londoners that do manage to get decent jobs piss off to the suburbs to raise their families there as soon as they can.

Nice places to live in London are the exception rather than the norm. For each pleasant part of East, Northeast, South or Southeast London that someone can name I can name half a dozen vile, woeful districts nearby.

And, by and large, those vile places are occupied by poor white trash and poor foreign trash, an awfully large amount of poor foreign trash. Trash, as in they’ve been dumped onto human rubbish tips and nobody gives a fuck what happens to them; provided they turn up to clean the toilets, wipe middle class babies’ arses and all those other delightful minimum wage jobs they’ve been imported to perform.

Quite a large proportion of these people happen to be Muslim.

Roughly half the people currently living in London weren’t even born in this country, let alone this city. We’ve been packing them in like there’s no tomorrow.

I admit I was none too happy about the packing in process. I’m still not ecstatic about the thought of it today. Turning large swathes of my hometown into a slave colony, served by 3rd world quality infrastructure doesn’t strike me as a good idea. But our new arrivals are people the same as me and they’re an integral part of the city now.

One of the consequences of having so many new friends coming into this city is that it has become home to just about every exiled 3rd world politician, political party and resistance group under the Sun. Logic dictated that these groups left each other alone and didn’t blow up any of their hosts.

Which is why many people thought that the attacks on New York, Madrid and elsewhere wouldn’t be replicated here.

Until last Thursday that is.

It just didn't make any sense.

But that always was bullshit logic.

There are essentially two ways to make sense of the bombings attributed to Al Qaeda.

The first explanation is the Blair/ Bush view. The perpetrators are insane and have no rational objectives.

As I’ve mentioned before, this is just plain nonsense and I’m disgusted, but not surprised, that the majority of people have swallowed it. Irrational insanity is not contagious. It’s not a condition that can be spread like a virus. How can people believe that a global network of sophisticated terrorists are committing senseless acts for no purpose? Of course the people setting these bombs have defined objectives

The second possible explanation is that whoever is planting these bombs is planting them with the intention of provoking a specific, anti Muslim response from the countries targeted. It doesn’t matter if they really are Muslim fundamentalists or people pretending to be Muslim fundamentalists, their intention is clear and London would be a most excellent target.

And now we’re playing straight into their hands.

And why did I make a point of emphasising the fact that the majority of Londoners don't come from London? I'll get onto that in a while ...

The Blitz Spirit

In spite of the bombings last Thursday, pretty much all of the public events planned for the weekend went ahead as normal.

On Sunday I attended the celebrations commemorating the 60th anniversary of World War Two. Well, sort of the 60th anniversary.

Someone commented on my blog a few days ago that, when it came to history, the only thing you could be certain about was dates. The rest was open to individual interpretation. As it happens, even the dates are flexible. The War in Europe ended on 8th May 1945 and the War in the Pacific on 15th August 1945. So, for some reason, we marked the end of the conflict on 10th July. This followed on from the recent commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar on 29th June (actual date of Battle of Trafalgar 21st October). I still haven’t figured out what that was all about. But I digress.

Anyway, I took time out from chatting with a loopy Polish veteran who had accosted me on the Mall, to complain to me about his son’s mail order Thai bride, to listen to what the Queen had to say about the week’s events. It was quite spooky at times as she was using distinctly Blairite language. It didn’t sound like her at all. I shivered particularly at her reference to the British people banding together to protect ‘our way of life’ in 2005 as we had done in 1945.

There’s something quite amusing about the Queen referring to protecting ‘our’ way of life – ‘wot? mine or yours luv’?’ but I’ll let that ride today.

She also made passing reference to the Blitz

Blitz, I keep hearing that word a lot lately.

The day before the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the averaged-out end of the War we were in Southwark Park on the other side of the Thames, attending the annual Bermondsey Beat festival.

Bermondsey is a unique place. It’s a small chunk of central London that has resisted many of the demographic changes that affected most of the rest of the city. It’s still predominantly white, working class and home to people who, by and large, were born in the area. For London, that’s extremely unusual these days.

Bermondsey still feels like London felt twenty, thirty or forty years ago. I can’t put my finger on why though. There are no large mountain ranges or glaciers nearby that have cut off Bermondsey from the rest of civilisation. No quarantine measures were in force. For the life of me, I just don’t know why Bermondsey hasn’t changed as much as the rest of the city.

I remember negotiating the sale of my parents' nearby shop a few years ago with a property developer. Naturally, I was trying to bump the price up. He was trying to bump it down. At one point he said ‘Look this is as good as you’re going to get. Every time there’s a property boom in London, there’s talk that people will snap up properties in Southwark and Bermondsey and the prices will shoot up but they never do. People just don’t want to live here’. Well, he was wrong. Our end of The Borough got awfully trendy, awfully quickly. Bermondsey, at the other end of The Borough, is next in line. The days of the working class London white tribe that currently live there are finally numbered.

This is a tribe of people whose idea of a fine night out is dirty fighting in a pub. They all smoke like chimneys. They all drink like fish. They eat shit. They are light on formal education. They dabble in dodgy deals. Their accent is harsh and incomprehensible. In years gone by, they formed mobs and burned down the occasional courthouse, gleefully attended hangings or put on a red coat, sunk a pint of rum and faced off a few thousand natives in some godforsaken part of the world. They are fiercely patriotic and not in some namby pamby inclusive liberal way. These are ‘old’ Londoners and there aren’t that many of them knocking about any more.

Anyway, the Bermondsey Beat festival consists of a half a dozen bands and whatever other events and stalls the organisers can cobble together; I particularly enjoyed the ‘Fun Dog Show’ which featured an array of the least fun dogs you could possibly imagine. Creatures spawned in Hell itself whose entire body weight lay in their jaws and forelimbs with tiny vestigial hindquarters. If somebody had so much as cut a finger within sniffing distance of that show there would have been bloody chaos.

But that’s Bermondsey for you.

The strangest part of the day came at around six o’clock. ‘Darts’, a lively retro ensemble singing act from the Eighties were doing their thing, when they suddenly stopped so that we could all hold a two minute silence in memory of the people killed in the bombings. This we all duly and respectfully did. At the end of the silence the organiser came back on stage and said ‘thank you for that and now back to the FABULOUS DARTS!!!’ and they went straight back into their show band style number.

You had to be there.

The silence was introduced by the local MP Simon Hughes who said some touching things about the emergency services, his thoughts for the people caught up in the explosions and the need for life to continue. The crowd was with him 100%. He also referred to the Blitz.

The Blitz

That bloody word again.

Because it was home to a high density of wharves and warehouses, Southwark/ Bermondsey was knocked around pretty badly in the last war. Having said that, the total fatalities were only something like 900. I say only 900 because, even though that’s 900 too many and each a tragedy, by the standards of the time it wasn’t very much at all.

The Blitz is a myth.

A necessary fiction put about by the British to keep up domestic morale and convince America that Britain was worth supporting even though we were obviously losing the war and losing it badly.

Londoners were no more or less resilient than any other group of human beings in similar circumstances. Sure there was heroism, stoicism and a refusal to accept defeat. There was also looting of bombsites and rioting outside the private bomb shelters that were closed to working class people. At least eighty people, maybe a lot more, were killed in the park at the end of my street by a single bomb in 1940. They were killed because they were huddled in an inadequate makeshift shelter. Well, more of a shallow trench than a shelter. No memorial marks the site today because the news was suppressed after it happened. The locals were none too happy about that. Round about the same time, a downed German airman parachuted into the park and was lynched by a mob from a lamppost. That story didn’t make the papers either.

Later in the war, between 1943-45, we erased entire German cities from the air, sometimes over the course of a single night. At least 600,000 German civilians were killed, compared to 57,000 British dead. In spite of all the death we rained down on Germany the German people carried on, yet no one goes on today about those plucky Berliners or Hamburgers.

I guess no one felt sorry for them because their government made illegal war on other countries. Those civilians were held to be somehow responsible for their government’s actions. I have to say I am a lot more sympathetic to the plight of those Germans after developments in my own country over the last couple of years.

One lesson people thought they had learned at the end of the Second World War was that you can't crush the morale of a city by bombing it: not London, not Berlin, not Leningrad, not Tokyo, not anywhere.

What I am trying to communicate is that neither the scale of the London Blitz nor the response of Londoners was any more horrible or more noble than anywhere else in the World during those terrible times. Creating a fantasy about a unique Blitz spirit reduces people and the things they endured to mere characatures, designed more to serve the PR interests of their masters rather than themselves.

Anyway, aside from the fact that the Blitz myth is precisely that, a myth, there's another reason why all this talk of the plucky London Blitz spirit in the face of the supposed Al Qaeda threat rings false...

There just aren’t that many Londoners actually living in London any more, certainly not from the tribe that endured the bombings in 1940/41. And that’s going to be awfully relevant to the British attitude and response to last week’s bombings. I’ll get onto that in a bit…

77 is not 911

I have noticed that some people have started referring to last week’s bombings in London as 77. Attempts to make parallels between what happened in New York four years ago and London last week were inevitable.

Inevitable but totally wrong.

It’s taken a few days for the story to stabilise though. The first 24 hours were quite confusing. Was London thrown into chaos and panic or did the plucky Londoners show a stiff upper lip? Did the bombers stop the City in its tracks or did it carry on regardless? The media hadn’t decided, or been told, how to shape the story so the reporting was all over the place.

Anyway, the story has settled down and the journalists and commentators are working hard at creating a 77 legend; the plucky Blitz spirit, the calm efficiency of the city’s emergency services, the story of a city that just won’t die.

But the "77 is 911" story doesn’t seem to be taking hold.

There are lots of reasons for that.

Firstly, there’s the issue of sheer numbers. Whatever the final death toll is in London it will be an order of magnitude less than the number of those lost in New York. Fewer people have been directly touched by the deaths.

Nor has the impact of the attack been so physically visible in our lives. Most of the horror took place underground. Our skyline hasn’t changed. Our rail service was disrupted but Londoners are sadly accustomed to buggered-up infrastructure and the occasional multiple-fatality train disaster.

The attack on New York also had a certain cinematic quality to it that the London attacks lacked. 911 was large-scale and in your face. In comparison, the London bombings were relatively small scale, cramped and grubby. They didn’t make for very dramatic television. There’s less imagery incised in our minds.

The legacy of the IRA bombings over the last thirty years is also a factor. Though we’ve been mercifully spared bombings in recent years, many people still remember those times and London has never fully relaxed since that campaign was stopped or, shall we say, suspended. Terrorism has been part of London life for a long time. The Twin Towers attack came out of the blue and was a genuine surprise to people who had never really faced up to the reality of terrorism. I recall some Londoners murmuring bitterly at the time that maybe those New Yorkers who were funding the IRA through NORAID might think twice about contributing funds to buy Semtex and M16s to be used on the streets of Britain’s cities.

And, funnily enough, they did.

A LOT of new people have moved into London since the days of the IRA so they were probably caught unawares. Speaking personally, for myself and people I know, we never did fully forget the risk of terrorism. On several occasion in recent years I, or the other 1/2, have left train carriages that contained what might have been unattended packages. This may sound harsh but it really didn’t seem worth questioning strangers to find out who, if anybody, would claim them. Not worth it, right up until last Thursday. Expect to see an awful lot of trains, buses, theatres, cinemas and whathaveyou being evacuated over the next few months. Before everyone gets complacent all over again.

There are other, more interesting, reasons why London and Britain won’t react to the bombings the same way as New York and America but before I get onto those I need to jot down a few thoughts about what I did over the weekend …

Play the paradigm game

OK, so I’ve suggested that there may be an alternative way to look at the identities and objectives of the people who bombed London on Thursday. I also suggested that when information comes in that doesn’t fit with a particular world view, the person holding that world view will ignore it, discount it or bend over backwards to ensure that it still fits in with their world view. What they will never do is question the validity of their paradigm.

So, lets see how my theory stacks up against a couple of handpicked stories from the Sunday newspapers.

There is no CCTV footage available from the bombed bus – per the daily Mirror

"… British Transport Police have recovered nearly a million used tickets from barriers across the rail network, hoping some will carry the bombers' fingerprints as they travelled into London.

But the investigation received a serious setback when it was discovered the CCTV cameras on the bus that blew up were not working so detectives will not get vital images of the bomber.

One senior Yard source said: "It's a big blow and a disappointment. If the cameras had been running we would have had pin-sharp close-up pictures of the person who carried out this atrocity.

"We don't know if the driver forgot to switch them on or if there was a technical problem but there are no images."

The bus had four cameras - one covering people getting on, the second at the exit doors and one on each deck scanning the length of the vehicle…"

Well f*ck me. That’s a surprise isn’t it? Amusingly, I was joking with Ian, wasn’t I Ian, about this very subject today before I read the story. I must be psychic. I guess the CCTV tapes ended up in the same place as the missing flight recorders from 9/11.

Of course, those who adhere to the Blair/ Bush paradigm will simply say something like ‘London buses are a clapped out pile of sh*t anyway, so it’s not surprising that the CCTV doesn’t work.’

OK, how about the second story that amused me today …

The bombers might be ‘white’ – per the Independent

"… Among new revelations about the highly sophisticated nature of Thursday's attacks, intelligence officials disclosed that they were examining the prospect that so-called "clean skins" - who could have been Muslims from the Balkans with no previous links to terror groups - were recruited to evade heightened security in the capital.

The theory was given credence by the fact that the security services had no advance warnings, suggesting that the bombers were not known extremists. Police and intelligence agencies admitted yesterday they were caught off guard..."

Well f*ck me twice over. And, remember, the important thing to always bear in mind is that Middle Eastern Muslims are to blame, no matter what, and that no price is too high to stop them destroying our way of life…

Israeli Vice Premier Ehud Olmert said Sunday that "the terrorists operating in London last week were doing it as part of a comprehensive terrorist war against the Western civilisation similar to what they've done in America, similar to what they've done in Spain."

On his part, Cabinet Minister Matan Vilnai from Israel's Labour party said democracies, including Israel are being targeted by "terror." "We are part of it and the whole free world is now part of it," he said.

Hmmmm … comprehensive war against Western Civilisation … whole free world now part of it …

As I said before, if all this insane horse crap hadn’t taken so many lives it would be funny

But it has and it isn’t.

Being a super psychic I will predict the following for the near future…

• A story that there was some kind of disaster control exercise coincidentally taking place at the same time as the bombings
• Possibly more bombs, but probably somewhere where the flow of information and any investigation can be better controlled than in London
• A LOT more insane scare stories, and the occasional bomb scare based on ‘hard evidence’ that cannot be disclosed for security reasons, that people will swallow whole
• One or more dead patsies. Or a live patsy with the mental capacity of a two year old
• More dead Muslims

If events follow their usual course we can also expect that any outstanding questions about the execution of and motivations for the bombing to be met with the ‘This is just the stuff of conspiracy theories. It is offensive to the memory of the people who died. I’m not going to dignify this kind of disrespectful nonsense with an answer’ defence.

That one’s always a winner.

Anyway, why not play the Islamofundamentalist paradigm game yourself? It’s easy. Pick up a newspaper or watch television and try and identify the most mind-twisting pile of bullshit you can that people are swallowing uncritically because they are dumb, pre-programmed robotic wankers. Though I must admit, it stops being fun after a while and can become very, very depressing indeed …

Paradigms

Mine is a very personal blog. I started writing it simply as an exercise to discipline myself to write frequently. Not necessarily well, just frequently. I’m taking an extended time-out from work and would like to write a book. What is sorely lacking is a compelling central theme for that book that would hold my interest long enough to complete it. So, in the meantime, I blog. A few friends, real and virtual, call by and all is as it should be. Sometimes I write in a reasonably interesting way about reasonably interesting subjects, more often I don’t.

Anyway

I grew up and live in central London. Even by the usual standards of London, this has been an eventful week; Live 8, the Olympic Bid and, most recently, the bombings. And I’ve made reference to these events in this blog. This has led to my blog being considerably more verbose and ‘heavier’ than usual lately. Unsurprisingly to those who know me, my personal interpretation of these events has been at odds with the mainstream.

I’ll get to the point soon.

One of my virtual buddies disagrees with my take on the circumstances behind the train bombings yesterday. That’s cool. We’re both old enough and hairy enough to respect different points of view and not fall out over it. But that got me to thinking about why we don’t agree. As a general question, how can two people be presented with broadly the same information, I won’t say facts, and process that information to come up with two completely different conclusions?

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It’s all about paradigms.

A paradigm is a mental model that you use to interpret your world. Every new piece of information you acquire has to be slotted into that paradigm. Paradigms are an unavoidable consequence of having a human brain. They're necessary.

Most of us use second hand paradigms. They are given to us by parents, teachers, priests, politicians, newspapers, whoever.

Paradigms have all sorts of interesting qualities:

• Groups of people believing mutually exclusive paradigms genuinely cannot understand where the other guys are coming from. Belief in Biblical Creation or Evolution are examples of two competing paradigms. You could listen to advocates for each point of view talking at, rather than to, each other for hours, each never ever comprehending what the other guy is actaully saying.
  
  
• Paradigms explain everything they need to explain. This is achieved by the simple expedient of ignoring any anomalous information that comes their way; pretending it doesn’t exist or just not listening. It happens all the time.
  
  
• At any one point there are only a small number of thought models that are socially acceptable. Individuals have the option of choosing one model from that narrow selection or creating one of their own. Those people who create their own individual explanatory models are what is commonly referred to as being mad.
  
  
• Paradigms only die when their believers die. People find it awfully difficult to change a paradigm once they’ve taken it on board. Generally they don’t. Most of us live our lives using the belief systems that we settled on by our late teens. That’s why it’s so important to embed thought models in people when they’re young and why McDonalds builds so many kiddies playgrounds.

Maybe it’s because I had too much time on my hands but I rejected two major life paradigms well into my thirties. I decided that there is evidence for a creative force in our universe and I also realised that this world is managed by a small group of bastards who would stop at nothing to dominate us all. It was quite a strange feeling having to re-categorise half a lifetime’s worth of experiences and opinions I can tell you.

And so we get back onto the subject of yesterday’s bombing.

By and large, there’s only one paradigm available in the UK to explain the War on Terror. The notion that a shadowy group of international fundamentalist terrorists is bombing us for no other reason than they hate us.

It’s genius, really. People in the UK have to believe this because no other model into which they can slot the facts has been made available to them. Even people who disagree with Bush and Blair are still basically playing their game using their rules. Blair and Bush opponents acknowledge the Al Qaeda threat but maintain that erosion of civil liberties is no way to deal with it.

But what if there is no threat? What if the bombs are being planted by a group seeking to generate anti-Muslim behaviour and start wars in far off lands?

I can think of one government that has benefited enormously from what is being done to Iraq, Iran and Syria. I can think of another government that is in desperate need for new resources and new markets and political distractions at home. Both governments have a well-documented, and indisputed, track record of ruthless 'false flag' operations. Why is it so hard to at least experiment with the thought that these two governments are covertly involved in what was done to London yesterday?

If you look at events in that frame of mind all the facts still make sense. I would argue a lot more sense.

That’s what I believe. The major chunk of the Muslim world believes the same thing. It doesn’t get a mention in the UK. Of course it doesn’t, people might look at the world in a very different light. Besides, Muslims are insane nut cases who’ll believe any old crap. Only Muslims are insane enough to commit horrible acts. Our leaders, our civilised, white leaders would never dream of doing such things. Our paradigm tells us so.

The Catholic Church opposed the Theory of Evolution not because it brought any new information to the table but because it enabled people to interpret existing information in an entirely different way. Permitting people only one way of thinking is by far and away the easiest way to control their thoughts and manipulate their actions. Get them thinking the right way, your way, and they’ll do the censoring for you.

Now I could support my doubts about the War on Terror by quoting reams of references, point out the self-evident lies and contradictions in the words of our leaders. I could objectively demonstrate the obvious and widespread deceit and bias in our media. I’m a moderately intelligent man. I’m quite well read. I’m not particularly insane. I pursue no discernable ideology. My point of view can be supported rather well.

But there’s no point is there? If someone’s brain isn’t wired to process this information it’s a futile exercise isn’t it?

This is particularly upsetting as, if you believe what I do, you feel a strong compulsion to try and warn people what’s going on out there.

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I’ll close with a small example of what I’m talking about.

A few days after 9/11, a widely-circulated story appeared that a couple of the hijackers had spent their last night in a titty bar in Florida. They were flashing lots of money about, drinking heavily, bragging about ‘something big’ and feeling-up strippers. Different versions of the story had them leaving copies of the Qur’an in the bar or shagging the strippers. I remember joking about the story with a couple of people I was working with, both true believers in The War on Terror myth. Neither of them could understand why I was laughing.

Muppet: What’s so funny? Those men killed thousands of people:

Stef: They’re supposed to be devout Muslims ready to sacrifice themselves, yet the night before they’re getting drunk and shagging whores. This story’s nonsense. Who’s going to be daft enough to believe it?

Muppet: But these men were westernised. They were under instructions to blend in

Stef: By committing two mortal sins the day before martyrdom? How can you possibly believe that?

Muppet (to me): Some people have eyes but don’t see..

Well, Mr Muppet was right about one thing at least…

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?

Londoners recount horrors: Tell us your story pt1

I wasn’t going to blog anything about what happened, what is still happening, in London today. Police cars are still screaching up and down the road outside. It seemed tasteless to express the kind of thoughts that have been going through my head whilst people are still being operated on, still bleeding.

But that hasn’t held our Prime Minister back and my own blood is boiling.

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Unlike 911, most of the horror took place underground, out of sight. Except for that bus.

Americans have the imagery of the burning twin towers incised into their memories and it looks like we're going to have to make do with a bus. That busted, mangled, normal old bus.

Part of the shock of today comes from the fact that those bombs went off in very normal, very mundane, very familiar places.

Another difference between today and 911 is the lack of surprise. Shock? Yes. Horror? Certainly. Surprise? Not really. The City was expecting it.

Sadly, most of us know the 911 script by heart and people appeared to have followed it diligently. I did what everyone else did. I made sure everyone I knew was safe. Answered a few calls/ emails asking about my own well being, then turned on the television. I didn’t fancy going outside and checking things out for myself.

Good old, dependable, fatuous television.

The coverage followed the normal pattern. First we got a series confused, contradictory and downright misleading reports of what had happened. Then a series of experts, roped in off the street, treated us all to a few hours of bullshit and speculation. Much of the speculation was coming from 'security consultants' who, as breed, are doing very nicely out of all of this. And then, once the story had firmed-up a little, the bullshit and surmise was supplemented by survivor interviews and presenters posing stupid, pointless questions as if they were a matter of pressing public interest…

‘… and we can confirm that the IOC has announced that today’s incident will not effect the status of the 2012 Olympics…’

‘… so, is it too early to say how the response of the emergency services could have been improved?’

‘… Naturally, the question at the top of people’s minds is ‘Was this the work of suicide bombers?’’

and, of course, the one question on every presenter's lips…

‘Can you confirm how many people were killed today?’

‘No I can’t. Some of the bombs went off in tunnels’

‘But surely you can give us some idea?’

‘No. Not at the present time’

‘A sense of the scale though. Is it scores? Hundreds?’

‘No’

‘Ooooowwwww, Go on…’

They’re still at it whilst I’m sitting here typing. Ahead of us lies a long night of media body counting and competition to find the grisliest anecdotes.

In words of Yahoo News …

‘Londoners recount horrors: Tell us your story’

But grisly sensationalism is not my real issue with how today’s horror is being presented, and will continue to be presented. That’s not what’s really bothering me. What’s really bothering me, scaring me, is the way the propaganda has already begun.

But later, Tracy had a pretty rough day today and I shouldn't be sitting here ...

Strange, horrible day ...

So …

It’s our turn now.

Fortunately, Tracy’s fine, though she’s stuck in an office building midway between two 'incident' sites. I’ve been watching, and listening to, police cars and emergency service vehicles tearing into the City and the West End.

The most peculiar part about it all is that many of us were half-expecting something like this to happen.

And I’m angry.

Not for the reasons that our politicians would want me to be angry for.

But now’s not the time.

Instead, here’s an email Tracy received at work from her firm’s Madrid office as soon as they heard what was going on in London...

Dear all,

We want to express our solidarity with you in these terrible moments and hope all of you and your families are well.

Terrorism, which unfortunately we know so well, is the maximum expression of cowardice. It is too easy to kill innocent people.

Please let us know if we can be of any help. In the meantime we pray for the quickest recovery of the injured people and for the grief of the affected families

Kind regards,