As I wrote last night, my mental faculties have been pretty much nil lately, and I’ve been away from the computer a lot and a bit overwhelmed with personal things. However, the horror in Mumbai has flummoxed us here in Baroque Mansions as much as people everywhere else. The fact that there seem to be no words, that it is simply horror, isn’t much use. I mean, I feel not much use. A few of the blogs have been very good about purveying material and posting original responses and I have been reading those. 3 Quarks Daily, which I always check in on anyway, is one of these. And Linda Grant, whose co-blogger’s son was in the Hotel Taj Mahal and is now seriously injured, is another.
Lifting a quote and a quote-within-a-quote, I take you to her blog, The Thoughtful Dresser. She is on temporary sabbatical from fashion following recent events, and this is her latest. As always in these things, as she reminds us, it is partly words that are to blame; our vital first step in fighting for what is right is simply to be clear about the meaning of the words we use.
The Bible, which you know I am not always given to quoting, and which in our current climate may even be a dangerous book to mention, contains the common-sense nugget that you will know what kind of a tree it is by the fruit it bears. This might be a good time to remember that.
I was working in Central London during the final years of the IRA’s bombing campaigns – I was in Liberty’s the December the IRA bombed Harrods – and I can remember the weird sort of murky glamour they had for some people. But there is no glamour. It’s just evil.
An Irish friend this weekend mentioned that when she was younger she met several members of the IRA, who were immediately recognisable, she noted for their ‘coldness and arrogance’. These two characteristics I suspect, are what you need to make a terrorist. For while millions have grievances, often legitimate grievances, it takes a specific type to turn that grievance into a plan to execute in cold blood civilians on a large scale. The numbers, in fact, are very small, though their impact immense.
On the news the terms ‘militant’ and ‘terrorist’ have been used interchangeably. As George Szirtes points out,
People who deliberately focus on civilians are simply murderers. If they do so for a political purpose they are terrorists and murderers. Not militants. Not an army. They are murderers with a vastly inflated opinion of their own honour and righteousness. which also makes them hypocrites.
