august 05

beyond hypocrisy

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Last Wednesday the police commissioner of the city of london - a financial square mile policed separately from the met - claimed that a terrorist attack on his beat was "a matter of when rather than if". This was reported variously as "City terror attack 'inevitable'" (BBC), "Police: Attack on London's financial district inevitable" (USAtoday) and "Attack on London financial centre inevitable - police" (reuters).

What is going on here? There is nothing 'inevitable' about terrorist attacks.

Terrorists attack because they have a set of unmet demands - sometimes demands they or their compatriots have been making justly and peacefully without result for many years. The only sense in which it can be said that a terrorist attack on the city of london is 'inevitable' is one which assumes the 'inevitableness' of uk foreign policy.

But there is nothing 'inevitable' about people dying in bomb explosions to protect american oil interests. It only takes on this appearance when people wrongly assert there is nothing political that can be done to avert it, when the government's intransigence is popularly indulged.

Politicians and their constituents, in avoiding public discussion of the rights and wrongs of supporting american imperialism, are not ignorant of the possibilities to avert disaster in london. Instead, they wilfully ignore those possibilities because they conflict with their other, primary interests. A whole other dialogue is then invented in which the only relevant information about preventing terrorism is left out. A fake dialogue is constructed around bogus arguments which, while irrelevant to anti-terrorism, are wholly relevant to preserving foreign policy just as it is.

Is this the hypocrisy for which the British are famed? Well, not really. Certainly, all this is the work of the morally contradicted but labelling them mere hypocrites undervalues the ruthless, cynical, greedily self-interested callousness which these ignorance-fakers act out on a daily basis. Such sustained cold-bloodedness is beyond hypocrisy.

The faking of national dialogues in which most everyone participates leads to the faking of national character. While the Sun bleats about the defiance of londoners, 30% fewer now actually travel by tube on a weekend. But this is not about media misrepresentation. The public have enough genuine information to work the situation out for themselves. Instead, they continue demanding more materialism, the price of which is to be america's imperial adjutant. Mostly that price is exported, paid by unlucky foreigners who get in the way of halliburton. Sometimes, just sometimes, however, the cost is also borne by unlucky brits on the no.30 bus. In either event, it is a cost the electorate knows well and has decided to pay. But it doesn't have to be like that. It isn't 'inevitable'.

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other related graphic here