COLD FISH?

[Stanley]

COLD FISH?

Written
13 March 2004

I often wonder whether, emotionally, I am a bit of a cold fish. That’s not a comfortable reflection and it doesn’t really square with my life experience but every now and then there are events which seem to devastate a large proportion of the population but which do not have that effect on me.
Of course I have my defence ready. I remember on the day of the Dunblane killings when a demented gun-owner went into a Scottish school and shot pupils and staff indiscriminately a young work-mate of mine, David Sterricker who was terribly affected, asked me why I seemed to be taking it so much more calmly than him. My response was that of course it affected me but the reason I seemed more calm was perhaps a product of being reared during a world war, sitting in an Anderson shelter all night listening to very large bombs dropping round me and seeing the effects of these activities the following day. When a land mine (a redundant German magnetic mine containing about two tons of explosive modified to burst in the air at low altitude and act as a blast weapon) exploded over the Alice Briggs Home, an orphanage about half a mile from where I lived, hundreds of children were killed. We saw the lorries carrying them away as we went to school. I was about five or six years old at the time.
My point is that perhaps exposure like this creates scar tissue. I have reference points in my memory to terrible events like this and it seems to me that this must have an effect. What’s triggered all this off is the wave of reaction sweeping Europe because of the deaths in the Madrid bombings. I see people, quite rightly, taking to the streets to protest against such indiscriminate killing of innocent people. I see politicians in my own country using the event to reinforce actions they are taking which include imprisonment without trial for unlimited periods. I listened to a minister defending this by saying that intelligence had to be kept secret and that therefore the people arrested could not be tried as it would damage the state. I saw an official statistic the other day, teased out by a parliamentary question that in the last (I think two years) 30,000 forced entries of houses had been made by the UK police, usually at night, mostly on Muslim homes and that less than 1% had resulted in any further action.
I think back to about nine months ago when a whole section of London was sealed off, an armed operation was mounted and eventually two men were arrested and it was announced that explosives had been found. When pressed, the authorities admitted this was ounces rather than pounds. I have seen nothing reported about this since. I think back again to about ten years since when the IRA announced they had placed a bomb next to the M6, so the authorities closed it from Manchester to London. They eventually found a small amount of plastic explosive on a bridge support in the Midlands. My point at the time was that during the height of the bombing in WW2 we only closed roads if there was a significant danger from damaged structures.
I’ve just finished reading Frederick Taylor’s excellent account of the bombing of Dresden and I reinforce my judgement of his thesis with the knowledge that approximately 28 million Russians alone died in WW2. I suppose that the end total must have been 35 million.
I am told repeatedly that we are at war with terrorism and this word seems to be equated with my understanding of ‘war’ in the context of my experience. It doesn’t square up in my mind and I have come to the conclusion that this is because my frame of reference has been modified. This could also explain my subdued reaction to smaller, but no less distressing events. There would seem to be a mismatch here.
There is another mismatch. Nobody seems to know exactly how many Iraqi civilians have been killed. Probably because, as the military have admitted, they haven’t been counting. A figure of about 20,000 seems to be a fair estimate. I don’t know what it is in Afghanistan. Is it my imagination or do these figures for Muslim death mean less to Europe than 300 at Madrid?
I was in America on the 11th of September 2001 and the thing that struck me was that the population as a whole, having nothing to measure this terrible event against, went into a collective hysteria based largely on the effects on themselves. I saw much coverage of the tragedy and was struck by how few people related the tragedy to the people who had been killed. It was as though years of comfortable living, insulated from the shocks of the world had so diminished the capacity for individual and collective crisis management that there was no coping mechanism.
Much is made about the resilience of European populations during WW2, particularly in respect of the reaction to area bombing. What many people forget is that WW2 was less than a generation behind WW1, there was a spine of experience unbroken through the two conflicts. Even children were affected because they were reared by parents who had seen it all before. My father saw action in WW1 and my mother lost her father at Ypres in 1916, this meant that their attitudes were hardened and I think passed on to the children. In effect, we not only collected our own scar tissue but absorbed theirs as well.
The thing that worries me now is that the politicians who are in control haven’t got this balancing insight into recent events. Further, very few of them are historians. I heard one state the other day that more people were killed at Dresden than Hiroshima. He was wrong, the best estimate for Dresden is 25,000 to 40,000 dead and Hiroshima 66,000. It’s a small point but he hadn’t done his homework and is in a cabinet government making policy against bombers on the assumption that conventional explosives are as deadly as atomic bombs. In fact the history of this canard is laid out by Taylor in his book on Dresden and I have the advantage of just having finished it.
All right, I’ve been rambling a bit, this isn’t an essay, it’s a NOP. But I have a conclusion! The biggest danger we face isn’t ten pounds of plastic explosive on a suburban train, tragic though this is. A far greater danger is the lack of clear thinking based on what we can learn from history. The terrorists will win if they force us down a route that leads our masters to think that imprisonment without trial, pre-emptive strikes, selective antagonism based on racial or religious divisions and use of ‘clear and present danger’ to manipulate election results is acceptable practice.
The bad news is that all these things are happening as I write this. So who is ‘winning’?

13 March 2004