Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

Flesh and Speeches (July 2005)

EVERYONE WAS STUNNED. We could see a flickering light and thought there was going to be a fire. We could not open the door of the carriage at first; when we got out, we could see seriously injured people in the tunnel.' These are the words of Loyita Worley, a passenger on the Circle Line train going to Aldgate, a little before 9 a.m. on Thursday, 7 July.

People underground are both sheltered and helpless. Tunnels are ways of escape and terrible traps. The dust suffocates when the tunnels are blocked.

To blow to pieces those going to their early morning work by public transport is to attack, in shameful stealth, the defenceless. The victims suffer more pain and for far, far longer than the suicide-bomber. And such suffering gives them most surely the right to judge.

Yet others, the politicians, rush in (from Gleneagles to London) to speak in their name, whilst serving their own interests, which involve gross simplifications, the use of terms that deliberately confuse and, above all, an attempt to justify themselves and their past — however disastrous the errors committed.

Not even the innocence of the pain and grief they have come to staunch and console appear to give them pause, so that for one moment they hesitate.

‘I kept closing my eyes and thinking of outside. It was frightening because all the lights had gone out and we didn't hear anything from the driver, so we wondered how he was.' (Fiona Trueman — on the Piccadilly Line)

The calm of Londoners, who suffered the outrage of the explosions and the ordeal of waiting for news from dear ones who may have been there (that silence which cuts like a blade between the two lobes of your heart), impressed the watching world, as did the calm of Madrid's population the previous year. Such calm could hopefully encourage clear and, above all, precise thinking. In Spain circumstances allowed it to do so, and one of the first acts of the newly elected government was to withdraw Spanish troops from the war in Iraq, a war which the majority of Spaniards were vehemently opposed to.

In London, despite the evident failure of that war to bring anything but chaos and ruin to the nation it claimed to be liberating, the effect of the atrocities suffered by people on their modest way to work has only been to increase the intransigence of the prime minister and government, who tugged a protesting country into an unnecessary war.

On the morning of the explosions, speaking from Downing Street, Blair declared: ‘[Terrorists] 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, trying to stop us going about our business …'

Those who argue that Al Qaeda was active before the invasion of Iraq, and that therefore the fighting in Baghdad or Fallujah is irrelevant to the London bombings, are arguing in bad faith. The same bad faith which encouraged them to lie about the weapons of mass destruction which did not exist. Bin Laden was certainly planning his attacks against the West before the Iraqi war, but that war, and what was and is happening there, is supplying Al Qaeda with a steady flow of new recruits. Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of MI5, is said to have warned other G8 countries about the danger ‘of a new generation of fanatics as a result of the war in Iraq.' And she, one can assume, knows what she is talking about.

The atrocities were planned to coincide with the 2005 G8 meeting, at which the British prime minister was President. What happened at that meeting is not another story but another part of the same one. In this context it is not the Koran that should be studied, but the behaviour of the richest countries and corporations in the world. Those corporations consistently wage their own ‘jihad' against any target that opposes the maximization of their profits.

The war in Iraq was conveniently removed from this year's G8 agenda. The agreed priority was to reach some agreement about action in face of the disastrous overheating of the planet, and Africa's poverty.

Before the meeting, voices from all over the world — economists, rock singers, ecologists, musicians, religious leaders — appealed, in the name of conscience and solidarity, for new and unprecedented decisions, for some change that might improve the planet's future chances. And what happened? After you've sorted through the rhetoric, like a rag-picker: almost nothing. A little dance of statistics. But at the flat rate of the rag-pickers — nothing. Why?

Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma. The G8's dogma is that the making of profit has to be mankind's guiding principle, before which everything else from the traditional past or aspiring future must be sacrificed as illusion.

The so-called war against terrorism is in fact a war between two fanaticisms.

To bracket the two together seems outrageous. One is theocratic, the other positivist and secular. One is the fervent belief of a defensive minority, the other the unquestioned assumption of an amorphous, confident elite. One sets out to kill, the other plunders, leaves and lets die. One is strict, the other lax. One brooks no argument, the other ‘communicates' and tries to ‘spin' into every corner of the world. One claims the right to spill innocent blood, the other the right to sell the entire earth's water. Outrageous to compare them!

Yet the outrage of what happened in London on the Piccadilly line, the Circle line and the No. 30 bus was the misadventure of many thousands of vulnerable people, struggling to survive and make some sense of their lives, being inadvertently caught in the global crossfire of those two fanaticisms.

The poet Keats wrote:‘Fanatics have their dreams wherewith they weave a paradise for a sect.' All those who belong to no sect would choose to live, not in a paradise, but above ground, together.