Keep hope alive

Echoes of la Mon, of Greysteel, of Srebrenica, of Omagh and beyond shudder across the water from New York. The walls absorb a monstrous noise, a coruscation, a catastrophe. We search for words, not meaning. Who knows? We have just passed through another gateway, and nobody is certain what lies beyond. There was Before, and now there is After. It’s as simple and cataclysmic as that.

Thousands of innocent people going about their daily lives were slaughtered in a short series of monstrous acts. Now, even as the echoes subside, the drums rise. There is much talk of war and retribution, but few signs that those who will decide have thought through what this might entail, other than violence and vengeance and further deaths. There is a grave risk that ‘world leaders’ may compound the problem, by doing what the terrorists want, rather than the unexpected.

Is this a war? Are awful deeds to be expunged by making poor states even poorer? By so doing, is there not a risk of provoking new and even more desperate acts of terror, possibly involving biological or nuclear weapons? Few question that retribution should follow - even Iraq’s foreign minister condemned the attacks. But many now argue that it should not result in yet more innocent lives being lost.

Would it not be more fitting to take the attacks on New York out of the war zone? Are they not, as Robert Fisk has argued, crimes against humanity, and shouldn’t the planners and perpetrators be pursued accordingly, as have others before?

One senses that this might cause some qualms in Ireland, where individuals guilty of crimes against humanity are still at large and in some cases have prominence, but that’s our problem. Even as we reel with shock at the attacks on New York and Washington, we must remember that for a moral philosopher the difference between Omagh and New York is simply one of scale, not culpability or intent.

Millions have died in small wars and repressions, in terrors and counter-terrors at the hands of insurgents, Governments and all the shadows who flit between. Now, many are asking is one life more valuable than another? Why the greater anger over this latest monstrosity and not all the others? Voices say we should refresh our set of values. If we do, it might nudge us towards a more humane, just and stable world.

Lest we forget, in the days leading up to the attacks on New York and Washington, newspapers carried reports of bigotry from both Belfast and Galway, with headlines like ‘World Watches In Disbelief’. The US attacks put these into perspective, and yet the passions they evidenced were akin to those that provoked appalling war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.

Also in the weeks before the attack, Israeli gunships flew to an office building housing the headquarters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and pumped rockets into it, assassinating the leader of the organisation and others. Those who hit the World Trade Center are not the only ones to attack office buildings. And 10 Palestinians were killed on the day after the attacks on the US. Israel called these ‘anti-terrorist strikes’, the Palestinians called them ‘massacres’.

The papers also carried reports of women in Kashmir wearing the Islamic veil after a 14-year old student was disfigured for life in an acid attack. It was carried out by a shadowy group called Lashkar-e-Jabbar, who have ‘ordered’ women to wear the veil. Her crime? Her head was uncovered.

This is of a piece with the many reports that have emerged from Afghanistan as ruled by the Taliban regime. It is difficult to see any way out of this except arming those women who choose to live differently and encouraging them to shoot assailants. But of course, you can’t do that either.

So, there are appalling forces at large in the world. And fundamentalism, the desire to return to the basic texts at the expense of all human compassion and understanding, is one of them. It is not just a Muslim thing. Christian fundamentalism is as pernicious and Hindu fundamentalism sparked dreadful carnage in India some time ago.

Also, fundamentalism is not just religious. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were the public faces of another form of fundamentalism that evoked a more primitive age in its espousal of capitalism red in tooth and claw and the survival of the fittest. Thatcher memorably asserted that ‘there is no society, only individuals’. Moral values were for wimps. Her reign had many fruits. They include the drunken oafing and dumbing down that has pervaded British culture in the 21st century.

It is fittingly ironic that Reagan and Thatcher’s greatest triumph, the overthrow of the Soviet Union, should have led to another, more insidious and terrible conflict waged by those whom they themselves had armed and trained against the Soviets.

Fundamentalism leads us backwards to the dark ages in the hope of paradise in the next life. Contrast that with New York which above all else symbolises hope and the future and the promise of paradise in this life (if not the actuality).

To understand this you have to visit Ellis Island and see the Statue of Liberty and read the accounts of the lives of the teeming and mostly impoverished millions who flooded into America in the hope of something better. It is a wonderful and deeply moving experience. And they still come - take a cab ride to hear it, walk the streets, open your ears. And ask any who have experienced the other if it’s better. It always is.

That’s why the attacks on New York have such psychological force and have elicited such shock and outrage. The terrorists thought they were attacking the citadel of capitalism and global America, and in some ways they were. But they were also attacking a dream nurtured by as much as half the people of the world, one that we in Ireland are intimately familiar with.

That is not to condone CIA mischiefs in Central and South America or elsewhere, it’s not to support any of the unsupportable things that have occurred over the years. It’s to look at the world from the perspective of those of us who don’t make great decisions and who dream of a better time (even when we have it). It’s at the level of dancing, watching movies, drinking and making love, and often to a soundtrack of American music.

One hopes that New York, and in turn the world, can re-discover that sense of hope. We (collectively) invented it, perhaps because we (collectively) need it.