She was asking for it, guvnor.

What’s new?

It is perhaps less often remarked on than it should be that in the aftermath of the revolutions that swept across much of mainland Europe in 1848, Karl Marx and family sought refuge in Britain and so did Prince Metternich, previously Chancellor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Marx and family settled in a few modest rooms in Dean Street, in the Soho district of central London – see the blue plaque on the Quo Vadis restaurant – to live off subventions from Engels who ran a commercially successful family textile business in Manchester.
http://www.london-eating.co.uk/venues/venue.asp?venue=8

Prince Metternich eventually settled in more capacious accommodation at 42 Brunswick Place, Hove, East Sussex.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/beyond/factsheets/makhist/makhist3_prog5b.shtml

The problem with your comment, Bi, is essentially grammatical; you have mistaken the hortatory for the imperative.

Maria is emperor of nobody’s mouth (let alone an ‘authoritarian fascist pinko’). She has not the power, nor (I daresay) the desire to abridge your freedom of speech. Rather, she was pointing out to people like you that you will come over slightly less the contemptible twat if you learn to mimic certain minimum standards of decency.

Mrs. Tilton, one hardly recognizes you without the spider gravatar.

A London less extravagantly resilient, less splendiferously multicultural, would not have ridden through this latest outrage with comparable aplomb.

Look at the gherkin. If you’ll put up with that, you’ll put up with anything. Gaudí, if you were living at this hour, we could have a more complicated conversation.

Umm, after September 11 I thought quite a few Europeans and Americans blamed the US in a similar manner as the papers appear to be doing so here – ie not blaming 9/11 on US foreign policy but saying it happened because airport security was slack, or due to failings by the US intelligence forces and/or the laws they worked under. I don’t recall them being condemned as implicitly blaming the Americans for causing the terrorists to attack them and thus being in bad case (although, the Internet being the Internet, someone out there probably has).

I didn’t read the articles as saying so much that the British deserved to be attacked, or that they caused the attack (as if the terrorists were mindless automans not human enough to be expected to bear any moral responsibility) but that the British intelligence services were deficient in some ways and this allowed the bombings to happen, and if those deficiences were corrected then the bombings might not happen again.

I do not know of any clear moral theory of the border between the criminal’s responsbility and the government’s. The bombings would never have happened if some people had not decided to commit a terrorist act. But it does strike me that, given there are dangerous people out there, the State does have some duty to defend its citizens (especially since it prosecutes viligantes), and therefore can be criticised for failing in its duties without implying that the State therefore caused the terrorists.

And criticising the State for failing to do its job properly, if your complaints are right and I have no idea if the newspapers are, is probably going to be a more successful way of preventing further attacks than just saying that the terrorists should not have done it because murder is morally wrong – no matter how fervently I agree with the last clause.

My sense of the NY Times article was that it accentuated shortcomings that exist, well, pretty much everywhere, and could be asserted by anyone at any moment. It added nothing new to the dialogue about security, and seemed to be drawing from some now-discredited stories about London and the UK. In other words, it was a cheap shot, and in bad form coming two days after the blasts.

That’s bad enough, but when one stops to ask why this article was written, and what purpose it serves, two answers come to mind. One is to lay the finger of blame upon Brits for their laxness and tolerance. The other is to promote the idea that there are hotbeds of terror in other places, and that these places can be blamed for America’s suffering.

I was not born or raised in Britain, but I was nonetheless offended that a couple of non-resident journalists would cursorily slag the considerable efforts and sophistication of Britain’s efforts to deal with ‘terrorism’. Better that they should be looking at their own system with its profiling and its heavy-handedness, and asking if the British response is somehow more ‘proportionate’ to the situation. Bluntly, it seems that even the NY Times has succumbed to over-reaction and paranoia, and that this article was written from what might be called a ‘hysterical’ perspective.

This makes my second point a bit easier to see. Paranoia and blame go hand in hand, and it seems pretty clear that the article was looking for a scapegoat, and finding one in London, and Britain more generally. The reasons behind that thinking are not so easily identified, but seem to revolve around the demonisation of others for the sake of satisfying one’s own rage.

I love the idea, from the New York Times article, that it was our ‘long tradition of civil liberties’ that was to blame. Clearly we should get rid of this tradition immediately.

I notice that although many on the Right have been quick to blame ‘liberalism’, ‘leftism’ and ‘civil liberties’ for the mass murder in London (with some going as far as to say the attack was a ‘good thing’ because it would help the British ‘stay the course’ in Iraq), the likes of Nick Cohen have been mysteriously quiet about these opinions, concentrating their fire (pardon the pun) on those on the left who have attempted to contextualise the attack. Harry’s “Little Green Soccer Balls” Place has been fuming with self-rightous rhetoric about these commentators. Harry himself has done his bit to curtail the tradition of civil liberties that, as we must all agree, caused these attacks, by more or less abolising his comments section, and banning anyone who disagrees with him. Well done! All it needs is for Tony Blair to follow his lead and abolish free speech and elections and the war on terror will be all but won.

In related news, if you are annoyed with the comments policy at Harry’s Place then please understand that none of us can do anything about it. The correct thing to do is what I did; whine about it on your own blog and at perfect.co.uk. If you want to complain about the Crooked Timber comments policy, the place to do so is at Shot By Both Sides and if you want to complain about comments there, I suggest an email to the Daily Mail’s “Have Your Say” column.

‘Safety is a form of liberty, and a very important one too. Safety is the liberty to live.’

How very true. If your safety is compromised our essential liberties are under threat.

One question. Yes or no, no ‘ifs’ ‘ands’ or ‘buts’. Did you feel safer from Islamic terrorism before the Iraq war, or after? Yes or no?

This question goes double if you happen to live in London.

One last question: a quote from Bush, October 2004. (c/o Kos).

‘ We are fighting these terrorists with our military in Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond SO WE DO NOT HAVE TO FACE THEM IN THE STREETS OF OUR OWN CITIES’ (emphasis added).

How do we all feel about this statement now? By his own criteria has Bush’s war in Iraq succeeded or failed in its objectives?

The (short) choice seems to be this:

1. London had it coming because Blair tolerated the Islamists who had come to town. Or…

2. London had it coming because Blair sent soldiers to Afghanistan and Iraq.

So, the (short) question is: Would absence of either (or both) have prevented the bombings?

And, if London “had it coming”, did Madrid? Beslan? Istanbul? Bali?

Chris, what joke and what was the joke six months ago – are you talking about Ward Churchill’s stuff?

I do blame Tony Blair just as many people do (albeit not in the way the linked articles do, of course). And it’s also true that citizens in a democracy are in part responsible for the actions of their government. How is this a joke?

The French papers had the same kind of article, only earlier. Here’s one from Le Figaro: http://www.lefigaro.fr/europe/20050708.FIG0290.html

If memory serves a similar article also appeared in Le Monde. Anyway here’s part of an interview which appeared in Le Monde: “Parce qu’on considérait, avant 2001 et même après, que les Anglais étaient laxistes en autorisant des lieux de prosélytisme djihadiste. Par exemple la mosquée de Finsbury ou celle de Whitechapel. Et en fait, ces lieux de prosélytisme, pour les services britanniques, étaient des points de fixation qu’ils laissaient exister, mais qu’ils surveillaient. Et après septembre 2001, ils ont arrêté des figures éminentes du “Londonistan”, par exemple Abou Qatada, et du coup, paradoxalement, il y a tout un tas d’islamistes radicaux qui ont basculé dans la clandestinité et dont on a perdu la trace. Ce qui fait qu’à l’heure actuelle, les tendances récentes étaient les suivantes : disparition dans la nature de nombreuses personnes ; démantèlement récent de cellules formées d’individus parfaitement intégrés dans la société, ne fréquentant pas les milieux radicaux et sans antécédents judiciaires. L’autre tendance, c’était l’apparition de réseaux islamistes radicaux dans les campagnes anglaises, en Irlande. Et à cet égard, on peut parler de Dublin comme d’un “Londonistan bis”, même chose en Ecosse. Les choses étaient donc devenues beaucoup plus incertaines.”

Although always happy to slag the NYT, I do think that is a deliberately eccentric way to read the articles. On the other hand, that way of looking at London does have a long history. In The Secret Agent, the Russian ambassador’s assistant, Mr. Vladimir, who orders Mr. Verloc to carry out an outrage at Greenwich, goes on at length about the ridiculous English habit of tolerance:

“England must be brought into line. The imbecile bourgeoisie of this country make themselves the accomplices of the very people whose aim is to drive them out of their houses to starve in ditches. And they have the political power still, if they only had the sense to use it for their preservation. I suppose you agree that the middle classes are stupid?’

Mr Verloc agreed hoarsely.

`They are.’

`They have no imagination. They are blinded by an idiotic vanity. What they want just now is a jolly good scare. This is the psychological moment to set your friends to work. I have had you called here to develop to you my idea.’

Although it is tempting, I can’t really say that Mr. Vladimir and the NYT are operating on the same page.

Who, precisely, has actually stated that London ‘had it coming’?

I hesitate to mention this here but a web trawl shows that in the early 1900s, Lenin and his partner Krupskaya came to London quite often on political business.

For example: “Lenin and Krupskaya left Munich on April 12, 1902, arriving at Charing Cross a few days later, in ‘disgusting’ weather. They were met by Alekseyev, who took them to a furnished room near his lodgings. By the April 23 they had found two unfurnished rooms at 30 Holford Square, off Great Percy Street in King’s Cross Road, almost opposite Frederick Street. (The square was bombed during the Second World War.) The rooms were simply furnished with two beds, two tables, a few chairs and some rough bookshelves. . . ”
http://www.marxlibrary.net/lenin/lenin_6.htm

The famous split between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party emerged at the Second Congress of the Party in London in 1903. Lenin was here again then.
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/julius_martov.htm

By accounts, he and Krupskaya were here again in 1905.

Readers will now whom to blame for all the inevitable subsequent events in world history . .

I suppose the one dubious claim to redemption for London and England, if it be that, is that in 1886 Engels wrote this in the preface to the English edition of Marx’s Capital:

” . . Surely, at such a moment, the voice ought to be heard of a man whose whole theory is the result of a lifelong study of the economic history and condition of England, and whom that study led to the conclusion that, at least in Europe, England is the only country where the inevitable social revolution might be effected entirely by peaceful and legal means. He certainly never forgot to add that he hardly expected the English ruling classes to submit, without a ‘pro-slavery rebellion,’ to this peaceful and legal revolution.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p6.htm

Look – they hate our freedom, so if we get rid of it, they won’t hate us any more. What’s so hard to understand about that?

Am I the only one to think that the people who actually planned the attacks and planted the bombs are not the ‘fiery preachers’ of the kind overtly speaking to 500 people (the supposedly ‘ever-larger crowds’…) in a conference centre in London?
This is not Ramallah we’re talking about, and it’s not impressionable young kids recruited to blow themselves up with cheap nail bombs. I don’t see how preaching or supporting political extremism, of which there’s quite a lot more around than the Islamic kind, equates with actual sophisticated terrorism.
Not saying there’s no relation whatsoever; just that even if the UK expelled every sheik Omar and followers, I don’t believe it would have changed much in terms of prevention of actual bombings.

Besides. We don’t even know who did it, yet.

Although Britain has passed a series of antiterrorist and immigration laws and made nearly 800 arrests since Sept. 11, 2001, critics have charged that its deep tradition of civil liberties and protection of political activists have made the country a haven for terrorists.

I can only hope that’s poor wording… whereas what follows seems even too clear:

The British government has drawn particular criticism from other countries over its refusal to extradite terrorism suspects.

Translated: they don’t like Guantanamo and torture outsourcing to ME regimes as much as we do. Traitors!

Thanks Bob B, that’s good stuff. I’ve always dug the ‘Marx in the reading room’ story, but didn’t know about Metternich. I probably should have known about Lenin’s history in England too. Interesting in light of how (as John Keegan describes it) Germany facilitated Lenin’s entrance into Russia in 1917 as a form of wartime sabotage, which worked like a charm.

More broadly, I read somewhere recently that Rome, despite the occasional abberation, was the most open society of its day, and still one of the most open ever. Can’t say whether that’s accurate, but it got me thinking about the relationship between political openness and social advancement, and (perhaps inevitably) empire. Or in other words, those who say the UK’s openness will be its downfall may have it exactly backwards. The UK’s openness has been what has made it great.

I didn’t read the articles as saying so much that the British deserved to be attacked, or that they caused the attack (as if the terrorists were mindless automans not human enough to be expected to bear any moral responsibility) but that the British intelligence services were deficient in some ways and this allowed the bombings to happen, and if those deficiences were corrected then the bombings might not happen again.

This whole line of argument operates from the faulty premise that even an excellent intelligence service or police service can protect against terrorists. They can’t. As Rice said (and I paraphrase): we have to get it right every day, they only have to get it right once. The whole reason Bush wants to take it to ‘their’ homes is becuase we can’t reliably provide the kind of security needed to keep them from coming into our homes to blow us up and simultaneously keep our civil liberties. (Arguably even if we were willing to sacrifice our civil liberties it wouldn’t work–witness Russia).

—
The British government has drawn particular criticism from other countries over its refusal to extradite terrorism suspects.
—

Perhaps worth mentioning that the country doing the criticism in question is actually France, over suspects from the 1995 Paris Metro bombing.

http://www.antara.co.id/en/seenws/?id=4259

Ramda`s case has been a source of antagonism between London and Paris, with French officials saying the delay in his extradition showed a lack of British cooperation in tackling global terrorism.

and

http://www.sacc.org.uk/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=60&catid=29&Itemid=51

The treatment of Muslim suspects in France is notoriously bad. In a recent report, Amnesty International noted a pattern emerging of an increase in police violence, deaths in custody and torture. The victims are predominantly Muslims of North African origin. Furthermore, these incidences for the most part have been overlooked and the French Government has not to date introduced any mechanism to ensure such abuses are checked and promptly investigated. Amnesty International is concerned about France’s failure to abide by its obligations under the UN convention against torture, particularly in the area of its law enforcement agencies.

soru

“Implicitly blaming London and Londoners for last week’s atrocity is in rather poor taste.”

There was no blame of London or Londoners. Rather, there was the reporting of certain criticisms of the British government.

If these criticisms are sound, and the British government ought to have been doing the things its critics say it should have been doing, then it’s not too soon to report them.

If, for example, newspaper reporters had learned on September 13, 2001, that the Bush administration had ignored various signs of an impending terrorist attack in the months leading up to 9/11 (as Bush’s counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke later alleged), then September 14 would not have been too early to report this. Any editor would have been rightly fired for sitting on this story as in ‘bad taste’ to run before the ‘bodies are buried’.

If these criticisms are unsound, then object to the NYT and the Post for uncritically reporting them. But don’t get on your high horse about bad taste, respect, and unburied bodies.

Jeebus. I am going to break radio silence and say that I completely agree with Sebastian for once (well also the torture bits). See Jack Balkin for the civil liberties erosions suffered by the British… before this last atrocity. It’s not possible to have a diverse and free urban society without structural tolerance for cranks and madmen, some of whom are going to crackup and will need to be dealt with after the fact. And as Sebastian says, if the source is truly external, eliminating it at that source is essential. Unfortunately, Iraq was not the source (though might be additively contributing now), and apparently crucial resources were squandered pursuing that little imperial adventure. As DeLong said, more attention on Afghanistan and Pakistan please, and I’ll add in the Saudis.

I’ll voice a bit of agreement w/ Sebastian, too, except to say that the comparison w/ Russia isn’t really good for a number of reasons. First, the crack-down of civil liberties in Russia really doesn’t have anything to do w/ terrorism there. That’s sometimes used as an excuese, but it’s a blatently transparent one to anyone who knows anything about the situation. None of the moves towards an authoritarian state there can plausibly be seen as anything like a rational response to the acts of terrorism there. (This of course becomes even more the case when you look at the FSB complicity, and perhaps even participation, w/ many of the events, especially the moscow apartment bombings.) Secondly, what largely keeps Russia as unsafe as it is is massive corruption and a sort of inefectiveness that’s not (thankfully) that common in either the UK or the US. Relatively small cash payments can get you through a police checkpoint w/o trouble in Russia, while the same is probably not true in the US or the UK. So, while the general point is okay, using Russia as an example doesn’t really work.

In 1911 when the Chinese Emperor finally fell , Sun Yat-sen (one of the chief leaders of the revolution) was fundraising among Chinese miners in Denver, Colorado.

http://www.wanqingyuan.com.sg/english/onceupon/china.html

Maria,

Haven’t read the comments but I must say that I agree.

Willfully eccentric? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? An explanation would be interesting.

The responses that refer to a quasi/national character are nice. I like the idea that Londoners in particular are blithely dismissive of ‘shock and awe’ tactics. One might expect agents of an authoritarian state, fictional or or otherwise, to be peevish about this nonchalant attitude, fouling their speech in frustration at the detachment of people they want to impress, negatively or otherwise.

Similarly, what Daniel and George have said. The absence of moral panic is a fine trait. Just the thing to rouse the ire of jealous people elsewhere. ‘You’re not freaking out! What’s wrong with you?!’ Apologies if that seems willfully eccentric. It’s just an alternate reading.

bi,

I think the onus is on you to show where I have made the points you argue against but since I have trouble following your argument I will attempt to show that I didn’t mean what I didn’t say.

1) Myopia refers to the limited range of possible explanations considered, the lack of consideration of the costs of pursuing a different policy and the lack of consideration of whether the loss of freedom would buy any safety. You clearly are not one of the freedom or death school nor one that believes that it is quite hard to trade freedom or death yet you agree with Mr. Holsclaw who makes the same point.

2)More or less the same point. Some people said some worrying things, some others did some bad things, we must agree with your politics. A law that made most of these speeches illegal would make a lot of things illegal — Mark Steyn possibly.

3) I regularly travel on the number 30. As far as carrying on and not letting the terrorists win, I have to run the risks being talked about. I don’t see that I should leave London because someone bereaved has magically attained true wisdom and thinks that staying in London is not worth their loss. I really fail to understand what you think I should do or what higher road you propose to take.

Murdering 50 people chosen more or less at random does not directly further anyone’s cause. If the actions have any purpose at all it comes from the wider response. I don’t really understand why it provokes so little disgust. For example if the muderers had instead abused 50 children that also would be terrible but I think also highly counterproductive. Why not the same with murder?

Now, what is your point? Can you not find anything I actually said to disagree with or does it only work if you make it up? I’m surprised that someone so keen on the sovereignty of other people’s mouths should feel so free to put words in them.

If you are replying so quickly and are literally zillions of miles away you must have mastered the art of faster than light travel so perhaps you could make yourself useful and hang about Kings Cross from about 8 am last Thursday and see if you can do something.

It was probably just diversionary in preparation for something more dramatic to come in a lesser known locale.

Whatever the propriety of Yanks expounding to a fifth column of Muslim terrorists within the UK, nobody seems to have noticed that the Times sounded the same theme on July 10: The Hate: Who planted the London bombs? Experts believe a new generation of angry young British Muslims has spawned its own terrorists.

Can I win the prize for being the first commentator to mention NORAID? Thanks!

literally zillions of miles…

(scratches head)

[b]
This is completely wrong-headed. It comes from an appalling provincialism, an unwillingness to look at things from the other guy’s point of view.
[/b]

Interesting comment, because Rice was actually quoting an IRA spokesman.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/crime/caseclosed/grandbombing.shtml

soru

Jack, you’re clearly an incoherent idiot.

J Thomas: _But maybe we should look at ways that the government can find out who’s making bombs without actually restricting our other freedoms. If we could build a government that we could trust with our private information, then it would all work out._

That’s an idea.

dglp: _’You’re not freaking out! What’s wrong with you?!_

And of course, dglp knows how to read the minds of terrorists. Now tell us exactly where the next bomb will be, otherwise you’re committing treason.

Soru, the article you quote is about an example where the british used normal police methods to find the perpetrator and jail him. They found the bombmaker. They found out about his associates. They didn’t need to change the laws to do it. And this was after a technically successful mission. The bombs went off, and the high government officials weren’t killed but they came close. It might be the IRA was better off with high government officials who survived by luck than with replacement officials who didn’t have that personal experience. But part of the terrorist organisation was damaged even after an operation where they performed perfectly.

So why is Rice repeating false terrorist propaganda?

Doesn’t she know better?

-sigh- Thank you, Jack, for giving an amazingly accurate critique of your own posts (except “dglp” should be replaced with “bi”, and “extravagant markup and use of capitals” with “long-winded posts containing several paragraphs”).

“A law that made most of these speeches illegal would make a lot of things illegal — Mark Steyn possibly.” This is of course a well-supported conclusion, arrived by a rigorous, irrefutable, detailed argument which is a nice contrast to my “opaque” reasoning and my “non-sequiturs”! Now I’m converted.

(And personally I don’t see what’s so important about Mark Steyn that he should be allowed to speak. He’s just as loony as any Islamic fundamentalist, except he’s not gotten to the point of exhorting others to kill. Or has he?)

And in case you’re still too block-headed to get the point about dglp reading minds: how does he know that “You’re not freaking out! What’s wrong with you?” is what the terrorists are thinking, and perhaps if “we” just presevere a little more, the terrorists will give up and convert to Christianity. For all we know, they may be thinking, “They’re not freaking out. Well, let’s just try harder next time. And if that still doesn’t work, let’s try _even_ harder. We will definitely succeed in the end, for Allah is on our side.” I defy anyone to prove that this can’t be the case.

Jack, why are you so worked up about what you perceive as “insults”? Anyway, I didn’t comment on this blog in order to care about other commentators’ feelings and make everyone feel good about themselves. Or is it another of those “etiquette” things?