Parsons Green: silence in the face of terror

Sep 23, 2017 by

by Brendan O’Neill, spiked:

Are we going to talk about this? The fact that there was an act of attempted mass murder on the Tube on Friday? The fact that someone in our midst – a refugee, allegedly – planted an Iraq-style IED, the device of a warzone, among innocent commuters in order to destroy life and limb on a vast scale? Mercifully, the bomb, in a bucket in a Lidl bag left on a train at Parsons Green in west London, didn’t properly explode, meaning it only – we say ‘only’ about such incidents these days – injured people rather than killing and maiming them. But this shouldn’t take away from the horrifying fact that this was the fourth time this year that a suspected Islamist sought to massacre crowds of Brits: ordinary people, workers, mums, children, pop fans. Where’s the discussion? The concern?

For me, one of the most chilling things about terrorism in Britain today is the awkwardness, the staring at our shoes, the national silence that now follows each attack. We don’t ask questions, far less get angry. We emit a national groan and follow it up with expressions of sorrow for the dead and injured, some perfunctory laying of flowers, a blast of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ or even worse Oasis’s ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ – a clear instruction to suppress strong feelings – and then we ‘move on’. That’s the cry of politicians and the media class. ‘Move on.’ Don’t dwell, keep calm, carry on, move on. This is presented to us as a display of defiance, an embrace of normalcy to let the terrorists know they won’t win, but with each attack it’s becoming clear that it’s no such thing. That it isn’t stoicism and strength that makes them say ‘move on’, but their opposite: moral cowardice and a profound urge to avoid confronting this problem head-on.

The speed with which terror attacks are forgotten, casually phased out of collective memory and collective discussion, has become alarming. It is astonishing to think the Manchester Arena bombing, one of the worst attacks in Europe in recent years given it was specifically targeted at girls and their parents, killing 22 and injuring 250, was less than four months ago. Four months. Who talks about it now? Go to a respectable dinner party or media get-together and there will be furious discussion of the alleged rise of Nazism post-Charlottesville, when a protester was killed by a deranged hard-right man in a car, but if you raise the Manchester attack, the staring-at-shoes will begin. ‘Must you talk about that?’ It’s gone now, faded from daily thought, like it was a sad car crash on the M1 rather than a conscious ideological assault on our fellow citizens.

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