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As Americans say, what goes around, comes around. The arming of the Mojahadin and the support given to fundamentalists in Afghanistan by American governments is being repaid by the fanaticism of the Taliban government and its support for Osama Bin Laden. So attention is being focused upon the Middle East as the immediate locus for the motivation of the appalling acts of last Tuesday. But my principal political education began with the dropping of two atom bombs on Japanese cities. The calculated callousness of those attacks on innocent civilians have never since then, thanks be, had any equal, although the bombing of North Vietnam and Cambodia approached it. So when we consider the causes of the inhumanity of the attacks on the New York skyscrapers we need to go deeper than most commentators so far have managed. The blow to the Pentagon is less troubling. If a state erects the largest building in the world in order to direct a military capacity primed to destroy the entire human race many times over, it is a little disingenuous to cry 'foul' when it is attacked. It is hard for the civilian employees, but American weapons are regularly employed against targets in other countries and the military should expect some retaliation. To say 'we are at war' may be a way of giving licence to unlimited reprisals - somewhere in the near or distant future - but we do well to remember that such a blanket statement was the excuse for what was done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What goes around, comes around. If we are serious in wanting to end terrorism and make a world fit for everyone to live in, we shall have to do much better than such instinctive reactions. We shall have to turn to constructing new global institutions, eschewing war and militarism, rejecting nuclear weapons, stopping arms exports, curtailing espionage and foregoing belligerent propaganda. Of course this applies not only to Americans. There is an arms exhibition currently in London. When challenged about the sale of arms, a British minister replied that they could not be halted: as a consequence of them 100,000 jobs were at stake in Britain. So the official British views is that keeping 100,000 workers employed in a business as evil as the slave trade is more important than taking steps essential to achieving a peaceful world. This, and the reliance upon 'wars' against this, that and the other perceived opponents is the mind-set that keeps us on course, not to eliminate terrorism, but to guarantee its survival. But to return to the heartland: a report from Florida told how the news from New York had stimulated a four-fold increase in purchases of fire-arms and stocks of bullets. But don't worry, what goes around, comes around. Some of those bullets will doubtless be put to use, perhaps in the next school-room killing, perhaps in a second Waco siege. If you can't trust the government to protect you against terrorists flying suicidal missions, perhaps a few more guns at home will help. At least if the suicidal tendencies become contagious they will have a macabre utility. And presiding over this demand for action, i.e. reprisals, sits (because he has not yet shown much sign of inspiring leadership) is the man who proclaims his devotion to 'the sanctity of human life'. His chief demonstration has been his record as Governor of Texas, with a record number of execution of condemned prisoners, including some of those wrongly convicted. They, regrettably, were not exonerated early enough to save them. But they gave the required message: don't mess with Geo. W., even if you aren't guilty. None of this has much relevance to my starting-point - the annihilation of well over a hundred thousand civilians in two Japanese cities. That has been generally forgotten, now that the Japanese are among the allies in the latest 'war against evil' It may be salutary for the millions of good churchgoing folk in the United States to recall (if their theology extends to it) that evil is in the heart of man (and women), including Americans and that rooting it out will take more than the greatest firepower in human history or imagination..
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