Don't get me wrong but there are days when blogging seems to be the hardest thing to do. Some days, one can surf round the web, taking in favourite sites or randomly hitting on newly discovered treats. On other days, you just can't seem to move for bigots, racism, hatred and simple narrow-mindedness. Today is one of those other days. In an hour, I reluctantly followed a chain of blogs in which every blog was either extremely right wing, racist, homophobic, xenophobic or plain hateful and sociopathic. The common links were that each was the online 'voice' for a seemingly well educated white middle American and the central theme was related to September 11th and calling for immediate military action in Iraq, regardless of the consequences.
I have spent time in the the US and I count myself lucky to have American friends and colleagues, of both the online and face-to-face varieties, who are drawn from varying races and creeds. However, it saddens me to have to try and reconcile these wonderful firends and their country, held to be the home of the free and champion of liberty, with the blinkered, inward-looking rants of those calling for death and destruction at any cost. How does this work?
The American media are often chided by European commentators for their unashamedly 'domestic' news bias. However, the fact remains that little of the world's news makes the main networks' news broadcasts and I am convinced that this is one of the key factors in the apparent spread of such extreme attitudes. On an East Coast visit after September 11th, I was discussing my love of cooking with a colleague and referred to an Afghani dish. Someone who overheard rounded on me for even daring to mention Afghanistan and was soon joined by the majority of those present. I spent a sweaty half an hour explaining to the assembled crowd that the Afghani people and the Taliban were not synonymous and that other nation's armies, including the Russians, French and yes, the English, had used Afghanistan as a battleground for their own agendas for hundreds of years. Yet people like me, and more recently the French due to their stance on Iraq, seem to be regarded by the authors of such sites as pinko liberals who are not to be trusted. Time and again, the central texts of these sites maintain that non-Americans can have no idea of the pain that America felt, and still feels, in the wake of the WTC and Pentagon attacks. As a result, folks such as I who expressed alternative views on such things are villified and cursed by a section of the American people who act as though they have a monopoly on grief and outrage in the face of terrorism.
To anyone of that mindset reading this, I say have two things to say.
Firstly, just because we don't bay for war like Bush, it doesn't mean that those of us in the rest of the world beyond US territorial borders were not affected by September 11th too. I and my European colleagues watched the the unprecedented horror of the WTC attack unfold on a plasma screen in my network operating centre, only too aware that telco technicians that we spoke to on a weekly basis were in the basement switchrooms of the towers when they collapsed. For three days after the attack, I tried in vain to contact a friend in NYC that I had only just been reunited with a week or so before. On the fourth day, a one line email arrived to say he was alive but too shocked to write.
Secondly, whilst the US was keeping the foreign policy nightmare of Vietnam at arm's length, people in the UK and Ireland were learning to live with the ever-present horror of terrorism wrought on the streets of Belfast, Birmingham and London. For three decades prededing 9/11, British and Irish families were coming to terms with the fact that a loved one would never return from their office, shopping trip or pub - victims of a campaign of terror funded, in part, by the finance raised by NorAid in the US. Yet no right-thinking person will ever hold the American people responsible for the actions of a small and determined group of terrorists this side of the Atlantic. Whilst I can never know what it is like to belong to a nation who lost so many in one single attack, I believe I can empathise. At just before 7p.m. on my birthday some years back, I was showering before going out for a meal with friends. At the same time, about 900 feet from my house, James McArdle, a 29-year-old bricklayer from County Armagh, calmly walked away from a truck that contained the 1996 Docklands bomb. When the half tonne of explosives was detonated shortly after, not only did this end the fragile IRA ceasefire, it ended the lives of Inam Bashir and John Jeffries, from whose kiosk I had bought the evening paper half an hour previous.
Many people around the world live with the aftermath of fear, hatred, war-mongering and revenge. No one is right and no one is wrong. Ironically, it is the very differences between us that seems to ensure that, no matter what we as a race do to extinguish oursleves, we thankfully can't quite manage to do so.
than for this theme - it's actually smart for me.
Posted by: nike at May 8, 2004 12:50 AM