The equivalising of what’s not equivalent is dear to the hearts of the ‘But Brigadiers’, who claim a purity of principle themselves, unlike the rest of us, who hypocritically defend one man’s rights and not another’s. There are two answers to such puritanism. The first is Leonard Cohen’s: there’s a crack, a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in. Avenging angels might be consistent but humans aren’t. ‘Everything unconditional belongs in pathology,’ Nietzsche wrote, agreeing with Leonard Cohen. Only the pathological believe themselves free from those venial irregularities that make us favour novelists over deniers, tigers over skunks, even though as abstract causes they can be made to appear the same.
The second answer is that the pathological are themselves no better in practice. What principle of pure truth guides Chomsky when he equivalises a journalist killed in crossfire in Gaza with the cartoonists mowed down with malice aforethought in Paris? And while he wants us to see a parity in these deaths, the fervency of his reasoning declares him to be more outraged by those in Gaza.
So how are you getting on substituting ‘and’ for ‘but’? Jihadists shouldn’t kill journalists in Paris. And Israelis shouldn’t kill journalists in Gaza. Doesn’t cut the mustard, does it? The reason being – leaving aside the preposterousness of analogising massacre and mishap – that it removes the idea of consequence. The ‘but’ that was deemed so necessary after 9/11 – that great ‘but’ from which all the lesser ‘buts’ have sprung – was the ‘but’ of extenuation. It was the first, grammatical step in shifting blame from perpetrator to victim. Not only, on the back of that ‘but’, was America reminded that others had suffered, that America was instrumental in that suffering, and that America could therefore be said to bear a share of responsibility for what happened, the ‘butters’ finally came within a whisker of condoning the act of terrorism itself.
And so it has been these past few shameful weeks with the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Little by little, day by day, the ‘But Brigade’ has turned its monosyllabic screw until the cartoonists become complicit in their own demise and their murder appals us a little less. Yes the requisite noises are made – free speech non-negotiable blah blah – but the ‘butters’ are quick to invoke instances where we do negotiate it: anti-Semites removed from their positions, for example; anti-Semites not allowed to speak what’s on their minds. Funny how it’s always the freedom to be an anti-Semite the ‘But Brigade’ protects. And finally, in justification of murder, the issue of provocation is wheeled out, though the concept of ‘asking for it’ would not be entertained for a second if the crime were rape.
Pace the Papa, he who insults my mother might deserve a stern rebuke, but not with rocket launchers and Kalashnikovs. Nor does being rude to someone’s ma equate to criticising his beliefs. I thought we had long ago decided we are all fair game when it comes to the gods we choose to revere, whereas our mothers, like the colour of our skin, we are given. If the Pope has a vested interest in protecting religion from scrutiny, so does the ‘But Brigade’ have a vested interest in drawing attention away from any atrocity that isn’t perpetrated by Americans or Israelis. Except that there isn’t any atrocity which isn’t perpetrated by Americans or Israelis, for who else is ever on the end of the chain of repercussion, extenuation and blame that begins with that malignant ‘but’?
And no I said no I won’t No: Molly Bloom decides against casting a vote in the 2015 elections
Yes they’re all big infants making promises I’d be twice the fool to believe even the one who looks like Gromit’s friend Wallace but we got that wrong a Casanova no one can look into his big brown eyes without falling head over heels and asking to see his manifesto I bet all the girls say show me your manifesto costed he tells me which is more than can be said for any of the other parties but I’m not asking about any of the other parties I tell him looking away so I don’t fall victim to his Casanova charms I’m asking about yours that makes him laugh mine doesn’t do what most manifestos do that’s what he says it doesn’t offer a list of promises so what’s a manifesto for I wonder well that’s easy to answer he answers easily looking me up and down a woman really feels looked at when he does it unlike leaders of the other parties especially the one who’s always offering me beers made of English hops and promising to untax my tampons no thank you not likely soft-lipped Casanova now is another matter persisting that his manifesto answers the questions I’m asking who said I’m asking any questions well we’re answering them whether you’re asking them or not is his answer take the deficit no you take the deficit that’s just what we’re going to do in our party he says take the deficit and stick it which is all right by me I won’t be losing any sleep over any deficit well you should interposes the one with the long forehead from another planet the Mekon was it if you care about the future ha that’s rich coming from you says Casanova what about the health service if you care about what country your children are going to inherit looking at me so now he wants me to have his children which isn’t the worst offer I’ve ever had not the best either under the bedclothes discussing deficits not my idea of a not with either of them certainly not the Mekon who loves his wife so why is he there for me in that case I wonder what she thinks of him telling every man woman and child he’s there for them who does he think he is Big Brother wasn’t he there for us Big Brother Is There For You will he be there when I’m having Casanova’s baby I bet he won’t jealous is my guess wants to be loved always sticking his face into other people’s selfies being there for them and promising the Good Life that doesn’t sound much like my idea of a good life no mention of glorious sunsets and fig trees no kissing under Moorish walls just tax relief and selling people homes they’re already in and you’d think they’d give the earth to get out of the big question is whether he’ll be there for himself come 8 May he’d be better off if you ask me leaving being there to his Chief Whip which is a funny name enough to give a certain sort of woman ideas not me no though I don’t mind admitting a gentle whipping never went but he isn’t that sort of man you can see too busy taking his glasses on and off quizzical with them on kindly with them off which is where they’ve been ever since his party became the protectors of babies and decent hard-working pensioners from the cradle to the grave the sooner in the grave the better no that’s not fair they don’t want us dead at least not before we’ve voted and paid our taxes which pop-eye Casanova says those with the broadest shoulders have to bear it’s only fair whoever said life was fair but oh I must say I do love broad shoulders whether they’re bearing taxes or just being there who was it now with the broadest shoulders I’ve ever seen took me back to his mansion he called it not what I’d have called a mansion me neither he said putting a flower from Aldi in my hair but a mansion is what Casanova calls it for tax purposes and you know where the tax will go and when I said I had no idea but I hoped into buying me more expensive flowers he told me it was to give unemployed gay immigrants free kidney transplants so I knew which party leader he’d be voting for not the boyish-looking one with the tousled hair who cosies up to whoever will give him leg room the one who doesn’t think prison is the proper place to keep prisoners presumably wants to put them in mansions tax tax tax big crackdown even Mr Whippy’s promising crackdown on tax evasion avoidance dodging shirking shuffling equivocation fugivity or is that Casanova’s non-dom thing which puts me in mind of whipping or rather not whipping because that sort of corporal is presumably not what a non-dom does but maybe won’t mind being on receiving end of unless a non-sub as well O Lord the cost of having a dirty mind which some party probably the Greens is going to want to tax because where else will money come from to abolish zoos except for hen nights that’s Riga finished let alone feed two hundred thousand million children starving in nuclear submarines which we’ll give them the right to buy no that’s the Mekon’s idea having reached conclusion that a little bribery never went so long as it’s costed unlike every other party which isn’t costed and if you want to know how we’ve costed it
snuggle up in bed with someone with broad shoulders and read our manifesto and ours and ours what we find us too is that voters expect require demand believe swallow that our specifics add up or subtract and as for austerity light or dark it is both necessary, and redundant as will be evident if you do the electoral sums and look at how people have acted in the past if you want to know how they will act in the future we’re the only party that cuts costs and costs cuts and learns from our mistakes although there were no mistakes amen to that says Casanova or Mr All Heart No Brain or is it All Brain No Heart if you ask me not much of either but that goes for the lot of them coming on all hot air and cheap perfume no I say no I would not like to no and my heart and my brain are hurting and no I say no I won’t No.
Culpability Brown
Time we talked about our culpability in the matter of terror? I put that interrogatively for fear readers might rather we talked about something else. I share the reluctance, but, as the blamers tell us, we cannot understand the motives of those we call terrorist unless we acknowledge our contribution to their state of mind, and the last thing we ever want to turn our backs on in this column is understanding.
Let me say, then, from the outset, that I get it. I understand. Many of those acts we call terror are committed because the perpetrators believe it’s their duty to take vengeance on the West for its invasion of Muslim lands, the ‘war on terror’, the Israeli occupation, the mass incarceration and destruction of innocent Muslims, the murderous sanctions against Iraq and now Iran, the routine killing of Afghan civilians by British troops, the lax morals of Western women, the publication of The Satanic Verses, and other military incursions and cultural abuses too numerous to name. That they believe this we know because they tell us. And when an assassin speaks, it’s provident to listen.
I say to listen, not necessarily to trust. In any circumstances it’s unwise to believe what people say about their motives. If Sophocles, Shakespeare and Freud didn’t teach us that, they didn’t teach us anything. And even to talk of ‘motives’ is crude when it comes to the unseen and often unguessed-at impulses that drive us. But the reasons people give for why they act as they do at least paint a picture of what they think is inside their heads, if nowhere else, and that tells us something. It tells us who they’ve been listening to, for example, and what they’ve been reading. It sheds light on the culture of those we call terrorists – see how careful I’m being – if not their psychology. That it cannot be taken to reflect an impersonal or verifiable truth – any more than it is verifiably true that our rivals are monsters and our lovers paragons – needs no protesting.
So there you are. I get it. This is how it feels, this is what it looks like, this is the cultural terrain, inside the head of someone who plants a bomb or tries to bring down an aircraft, or walks the streets with a machete. I understand. Can I go now?
To be clear: the grievances listed above contain buried quotations, not from terrorists themselves but from Western commentators who feel some kinship with their views if not their deeds. Let’s give them a single name, say Culpability Brown, since they all think we’re to blame, borrow ideas freely from the same branch of Handmedown Bank, and are similarly careless in their condemnations – as, for example, in accusing British troops of killing Afghan civilians ‘routinely’, where ‘routinely’ is a rhetorical device, planted to derange even further those whose minds are full of scorpions.
Cometh the atrocity, cometh Culpability Brown. Does he wait like a spider suspended in the darkness, the opportunity to blame you and me again, reader, the reward for his infinitely banal persistence? Out into the light he crawls, anyway, in the immediate aftermath of every killing, to agree the crime is terrible, unspeakable, yes, but – ah, the callousness of that ‘but’ – we had it coming.
In what other context, these days, do we allow people to tell us we have it coming? This one goes about with her handbag open, that one with his wallet protruding like a free gift from the back pocket of his jeans, complains the poor pickpocket. ‘I was provoked, Your Honour.’ How the girls in their short summer dresses, flirty, drunken, free with their kisses, arouse the hapless rapist. ‘Aren’t they, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, in every meaning of the phrase, asking for it?’
This is not an argument against precaution. Though no provocation justifies a rape, it’s still sensible, given who we know is out there, to be on our guard. A sad reflection on the times, though one that has no bearing on the heinousness of the crime of rape itself.
So what precautions should we take – accepting that they have no bearing on the crime of murder – when it comes to terror? What should we change? Our foreign policy, plainly. The things we do that upset jihadists, though the concept of jihad – much argued over as it is – pre-dates Bush, Blair, Salman Rushdie and the Israeli occupation. I’d be surprised if there are many who think the wars the West has fought since 9/11 have in all cases been well considered in conception or execution. Cruel and terrible mistakes have been made. But the mass murderer Saddam has gone. The Taliban, destroyers of other cultures, killers of women and children, haters of the light, might not have been routed but they are not – not yet, anyway – what they were.
No such offsetting gains against losses, however, when Culpability Brown describes the world. Only our undiluted villainousness. So let me ask a question: if we are to blame for those we call terrorists, if we create the culture in which it looks right to them to kill, aren’t those commentators who excite that culture into an even greater ferment of boiling hate – who speak, for example, of British soldiers killing Afghan civilians ‘routinely’ (once a day? twice a day?), who collapse history until there are no two sides to any conflict – aren’t they, the butters and the blamers of the press, more culpable than anyone? Our security services film potential terrorists travelling to places where they will be inflamed, when indoctrination can be achieved as effectively over here by nothing more sinister than newsprint.
If you are looking for whose hands beyond the murderers are bloody, look here. At those who, to further their own ideological ends, agitate the already unstable with lurid untruths.
Don’t ask me
My position on whether we, or anyone else, should intervene in Syria couldn’t be clearer. I absolutely, utterly and definitively don’t know. I like to think I have been consistent in this. I didn’t know what I thought when the Syrian uprising started more than two years ago; didn’t know when the Syrian army stormed the city of Homs; didn’t know after reports of the Houla massacre reached us in May last year; didn’t know when brutal-faced Syrian generals denied all involvement in any massacre; didn’t know when I saw pictures of rebels bearing marked resemblance to clerics we are always trying to deport to Jordan, and don’t know now.
Gas should concentrate the mind – or at least the minds of those on whom it has not been used – should it not? Gas, for God’s sake. Gas, with all its hideous associations for those of us who still remember the twentieth century. Isn’t gas the line that can’t be crossed, and once crossed must incur not just our wrath but our strenuous and if necessary armed insistence that it will never be crossed again? Don’t know. Yes but no but.
I am not asking for anyone’s pity, but chief among the pains of writing a newspaper column each week is having to know what you think. No matter that you are more the craven-scrupled Hamlet than the itchy-fingered Fortinbras, a man who can ‘find quarrel in a straw’, you must lash yourself into opinionated action on the morning that you write, fat the region’s kites with the offal of the villain of the week, understanding that if your thoughts aren’t bloody, they are nothing worth.
Out there at this very moment, in lofts, basements, lean-tos and neglected gardens, a thousand otherwise genial-tempered hacks are rubbing the lamp of intemperate opinion to coax out a view – immoderately enthusiastic or grossly derogatory, it hardly matters which, and the distinction probably won’t be noticed anyway – on celebrity chefs, wayward footballers, twerking pop stars, tatto
oed nobodies and any one of a thousand comedians whose routine is indistinguishable from the others – a judgement I no sooner make than I withdraw lest you think I have a view on the matter.
But what are such artificially manufactured convictions compared to the certainties the leader of a powerful nation has to delve into himself to find when confronted, not with Jamie Oliver and potato crisps, but Bashar al-Assad and a rocket-load of sarin gas? Who’d be Obama? Damned for every action he takes and damned for every action he doesn’t. It’s hard not to suspect, from the pitch of their voices, that those who rail against our going in today are the very people who railed against our staying out yesterday. Or is it just that dead certainty sounds the same, no matter who you are and what it is you’re being dead certain about?
So what is it we think we know? Or at least – to shrink the field to more manageable proportions of ignorance – what is it we think we know about this region of the world? Let’s start with dictators. We think we are against them. His being a dictator was one reason among many for getting rid of Saddam Hussein. But then we discovered that a dictator sometimes holds together, by virtue of the violence at his disposal, factions that would otherwise do even greater damage to their country than he does. ‘Iraq was better under Saddam Hussein,’ say those who once blamed the West for putting him there in the first place. A dictator, it would appear, like your reflection in a mirror, depends where you’re looking from. And whether Tony Blair is looking over your shoulder.
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