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After the London bombing: an exercise in avoiding the truth: cultural self-reflection is desperately needed to grasp the crisis of meaning that typifies our world today.

Article Excerpt
In the midst of carnage and outrage in many parts of the world and with daily body counts in Iraq often in excess of the loss of life in the London bombings, the endless array of soul-searching accounts and inquiries about the terror seem an exercise in double standards. Or does this preoccupation arise out of an unease still to be articulated? Is there a sense in which the bombing confirms a new order of threat comparable only with that of September 11, not just a threat to the Western way but, more significantly, touching doubts about the viability of that way of life? While there is good reason to make this argument, if the analysis and interpretation in the press is motivated by deep unease it only concentrates upon the immediately present anguish inseparable from the disruption of everyday life. It leaves in the background the more extended processes of history, international power relations and cultural transformation that can contribute to an understanding of, as distinct from a reaction to, the experience of a terrorist assault.

In the round most people have only a rudimentary sense of the way the external relations of their governments affect the way they live. It is one thing to depend on ready access to oil, to take a relevant example, but quite another to grasp that its taken-for-granted availability frequently carries over into the subordination of other people. Often enough, as the whole history of conquest demonstrates, it entails the disruption of their taken-for-granted way of living, including their religious beliefs.

When some among a minority drawn from a subordinated people seek to hit back by terrorist means, as in the case of the bombing in London, or earlier in Spain, the sense of outrage and injustice of people who simply take for granted their own established way of living is readily understood. At least in the short term it is a simple matter for their political figures to play on their sense of outrage, to speak to their emotions rather than to enlarge their understanding of the overall international context.

In Australia, Beazley's denunciation of 'sub-human filth' was a clear example. In the UK the Queen's declaration that our 'Western way of life will not be affected' also depends on a hypocritical self-righteousness which can provide ground for a totalitarian shift. A changing relation of the state to citizens begins to take shape, as illustrated in policies of shoot first and ask questions later.

These attempts aside, the more considered concern in the press has reflected on the new reality that these terrorists,...

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