The world is an unsafe and painful place. Warsan Shire’s description of what the atlas answers when she asks where it hurts – “everywhere / everywhere / everywhere” – is impossible to deny.
Britain: two terror attacks in just about as many weeks. Both claimed by ISIS, both during an election campaign in which a leftwing, anti-austerity candidate with a solid anti-war record looks set to surpass the ghoulish status quo.
One could be forgiven for thinking that Manchester would mean a safe victory for Theresa May. Conservatives are experts at exploiting fears of insecurity after terror attacks, using them as a cudgel to beat anti-racists and peaceniks alike. It backfired this time. May’s move of putting the army on British streets merely set up Jeremy Corbyn to say what most had known for some time: that fifteen years of a war on terror had made the world dramatically less safe.
Now, another attack. This time on and near the London Bridge. It further proves Corbyn’s point. One may be tempted to be generous to May and think she wouldn’t make the same mistake twice, but her ineptitude and that of the Tories may yet surprise us again.
Consider the backdrop. May, the Tories, and much of the political and media establishment have been hammering Corbyn over the past weeks about his somehow dangerous insistence that he would not push the infamous red button initiating a nuclear attack. Commentators are now made “nervous” not by the specter of nuclear holocaust but by a politician’s refusal to initiate it. In the midst of terror attacks revealing just how far out of control the imperial project has spun the planet, the world’s rulers seem to be implying that if they can’t have it, nobody can, like a petulant four-year-old who would destroy their toys rather than share. Corbyn is chastised for being the adult in the room.
In reality, there is a great amount of consideration in what the establishment are saying. Even in their blinkered intransigence, there is cold calculation. Just because they are desperate doesn’t mean they lack motives. Method in madness, all that. Sam Kriss, in a characteristically thought-provoking blog post that went up just today, suggests that the harsh rationality of the nuclear age is more or less concomitant with the calculus of power and profit:
This is the ground of politics as administration and necessity and the root of the technocratic age. Once the life and death of every living thing can become a matter of calculation without ideology or ethics, so is everything else. People can starve to death in empty flats because there’s no magic money tree; thousands can drown on the Mediterranean because we don’t have the resources to take in any more. It’s common sense. Common sense in the twenty-first century is always common sense from the point of view of an atomic bomb.
There is, unavoidably, a cruel absurdity on the other end of this common sense.
This post originally appeared at an earlier blog that I used to run. I have migrated it with its original post date.
