Canada and Other Matters of Opinion

by Rex Murphy

  They act because, so far, they can. They kill, because that is what they do. And they will continue to do so unless they are stopped. The ability and the wish to take innocent lives, on a vast scale, is off the moral and intellectual radar of most human beings. We have not taken the measure of modern terrorism because it is so far outside our moral spectrum; the spectrum of those without a vestige of conscience is alien to our sensibility as it is to our understanding.

  London this week, New York and Washington nearly four years ago, were by no means the full blossoms of modern terrorism. Just the infant rattle of a terrible idea yet to unfold in its full and horrible realization, and therefore a practice that has emphatically to be stopped.

  FANATICAL MINDS DEFY LOGIC | July 23, 2005

  Two terror attacks in two weeks. It’s Londoners who are having the really rough summer. A revealing feature of Thursday’s “rerun” came from the fact that the rucksack bombs didn’t explode—only the detonators fired. Early speculation built on this failure to suggest that the attack might have been the work of “amateurs.”

  Here we are, but five years into the great new millennium, and terrorism has become so familiar, so pervasive, that it can accommodate a couple of categories: typical terrorism—i.e., done by professionals—and the copycat or “incompetent” variety, the work of amateurs.

  It was interesting, too, during the early hours of this speculation, that this kind of talk seemed so normal. None of the pundits betrayed the slightest surprise that terrorism might have “migrated” from purely professional nihilists or committed jihadist fundamentalists to a second tier of freelancers, publicity seekers or copycats.

  Such talk showed how habituated we have become to the pervasive and diffuse sense that it can happen anywhere, at any time. We all know what “it” is. And when bombs go off, whether in the London subways—as was really the case this month—or in Paris, Washington, Montreal or Toronto, as may well be the case next time, we will all be shocked by the carnage, but not surprised by the event.

  We will be shocked because carnage visited on innocent people, from whatever motive, will always shock those who have remained within the circle of civilized humanity. But we will not be surprised because, since the mass slaughter of September 11, the Western world has been on notice that its citizens are targets in an amorphous, conspiratorial campaign that flies under the accommodating banner of Islamic fundamentalism.

  We are similarly on notice that the self-appointed leaders of al-Qaeda and its franchises follow a logic of their own choosing. Whether that logic may be divined with any degree of fidelity from what they actually proclaim as their goals and motives, or whether (apart from the malignant delight they take in the deeds themselves) they have anything that conforms to rational and understandable goals, are wide-open questions.

  What we do know is that the logic of fanatics is a specialized product; it does not ape or mime the logic of ordinary people. Efforts to “understand” the terrorists are efforts to bring the calculus and standards of responsible minds as instruments to map their opposites: irresponsible minds that do not acknowledge standards of any kind.

  The rhetorical questions that have saturated a thousand news stories since the first London bombings—How could young, homegrown British subjects from Leeds take up the suicide bombing of fellow citizens?—illustrate this point.

  People are agape with perplexity that “their own” have ventured mass slaughter of their fellows. These were not “imports” on some desperate mission, sent by the international outlaws of terrorism. These were men, born and bred in Britain, of families who, from all accounts, cherished all that Britain, as a democratic multicultural state, offered them. They were nice. They were friendly.

  They did, some of them, good works.

  All such questioning is beside the point. The only “understanding” of a terrorist deed is the deed itself. Attempts to find some formulaic shortcut to understanding them—it’s the plight of the Palestinians, it’s Tony Blair’s joining in the armed deposition of Saddam Hussein, it’s American policy in the Middle East—are rote, puzzled stutterings in the face of something, fundamentally inexplicable.

  Terrorism will not be understood out of existence. It must instead be challenged, guarded against, and to the degree that arms and intelligence, and the co-operation of nations, will allow, it must be utterly incapacitated. The only logic that fanaticism allows is the expansion of its power to kill. The only logic that will defeat it is force.

  Following the second London bombing, it was Australia’s John Howard, not Tony Blair, who best sketched the failings of looking for “cause and effect” to explain terror: “We lose sight of the challenge we have if we allow ourselves to see these attacks in the context of particular circumstances rather than the abuse, through a perverted ideology, of people and their murder.”

  I wrote after the first London bombings that the British were lucky the dead and wounded were so few—few only in the context of an appetite for destruction that, should it find the means, would be boundless. London was, by that understanding, even luckier this week.

  But luck is thin and fleeting. We temporize with terrorism when we look for root causes. The attacks will continue until they are stopped. Terrorists will inflict misery with exponential fury when they can. On the one question that counts, the sentence so many are appalled to hear applies: George Bush was right: it is a war.

  WHAT WE ARE FIGHTING FOR | May 23, 2006

  After last week’s Commons vote, I wonder how many people are much clearer in their understanding of our mission in Afghanistan. We have made commitments to Afghanistan. We were part of the operation that rid that country of the Taliban government and pursued al-Qaeda after 9/11. We did that, not only as an ally of the United States after the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, but also because there were Canadians killed in those attacks. Canada agreed that eliminating a government that had sheltered and nursed the terrorist organization that committed the atrocity of 9/11 was both right and in our own self-interest, that not pursuing the Taliban and al-Qaeda would only leave Afghanistan as a potential site of similar designs in the future.

  That mission had UN approval, was composed of a concert of forces, of which our country’s was one. But protection against future terrorism meant more than just displacing the Taliban government. It meant offering, insofar as an international force could offer, the citizens of Afghanistan the opportunity to build a new kind of government, one elected, one less hospitable to hijacking by sinister forces and more open to the basic civil liberties that people in the democracies take for granted. It was to assist in that effort that Canadian troops remained.

  It is not possible merely to wish benevolent government on a nation whose history, both recent and of old, has been a field of war, invasion and lawlessness. So, our troops remained deployed to (a) guarantee a measure of security while Afghanistan citizens went about the first steps to democracy and the extension of basic rights, (b) assist in building the essential elements—schools, a justice system, infrastructure, roads—that any society must have, and (c) offer humanitarian assistance where possible.

  Four years after the Taliban were deposed, even after Afghanistan made the first steps to building a democracy, that country is still under threat from forces, both Taliban and others, who do not wish to see that result and who are on a campaign to demoralize Afghans, destabilize their government, intimidate their citizens and drive from Afghanistan all those who are assisting its democratic growth.

  Those forces must be fought. The first principle of establishing a representative government in Afghanistan is to fight those who would deny it: the Taliban, remnants of al-Qaeda and the so-called insurgents. There is no other way that the secondary parts of the mission, the more benign or peacekeeping operations, can be performed.

  So, we are at war. We are at war because we acknowledge our own interest in Afghanistan and because, as Canadians, we see the value of extending, if we can, so
me measure of liberty and democracy to a people who have not tasted those virtues. The campaign in Afghanistan can be seen as harmonious with the liberation efforts that Canadian forces, to their honour, were associated with in the far more enormous campaigns of the First and Second World Wars. That, as I see it, is the rationale of our mission in Afghanistan. To the extent that a majority of Canadians accept these goals and fully appreciate and understand them, the mission will have the kind of support outside Parliament that is necessary to maintain it.

  Achieving that appreciation and understanding will take far more, however, than the very mixed effort in Parliament last week.

  THE REAL TRUTH | July 15, 2006

  I was never an X-Files fan. Agents Mulder and Scully grimly walked through hundreds of episodes, wearily tearing away at the flimsy curtain the rest of us call “reality,” whispering of cover-ups, UFOs, secret agencies within secret agencies, and powerful forces “out there,” and I was happy to have missed almost every one of them.

  Moody and Sullen, as one bright parodist renamed them, were knights errant of the paranormal and the paranoid. Though relentlessly grey, brooding and portentous, The X-Files made a sweet pitch to adolescent minds (of all ages) with its signature motto: “The Truth Is Out There.” Capital letters mandatory. (It’s not philosophy unless it’s in capital letters.)

  The X-Files was fast food for the conspiracy gluttons, the intellectually lazy who relish the frisson of some exotic theory of “hidden others” who have arranged the world, and all that happens in it, in dark code: they with their laboratories and computers, they with their power and money, they with their secret societies (think The Da Vinci Code), run everything. In other words, the world is a puppet show run by dark and hidden adepts of power and politics, and only a few—the conspiracy-mongers—have peeped behind the occluding screen.

  The assassination of John F. Kennedy, now nearly forty years on, has spawned a literature of suspicion and conjecture of intimidating bulk and mass. The “grassy knoll” and the “second gunman” have inspired more plots than the entire membership of the International Association of Crime Writers. It’s a law of this kind of thinking: the further from the event under scrutiny, the more mountainous the unhinged speculation surrounding it.

  Except—except for September 11, 2001. I would have thought that the horrors of that day, the magnitude of the attacks, the immense coverage of the actual crashes into the towers, the even more immense coverage in the days after, had evacuated September 11 of all mystery and speculation. We know that day too well.

  We swiftly learned the identities of all nineteen hijackers. We saw, in (alas) real time, the buildings collapse; we saw the heroic efforts of firefighters and police in New York; we have since read and heard of the numerous cellphone conversations before the brave passengers of Flight 93 tried to wrest control of the doomed jet from the hijackers. We have even seen the video of Osama bin Laden wherein he gloatingly narrates the success of his mission, takes pride in his drear accomplishment.

  What else is there, the reasonable mind pleads to ask? But no. The questioning of 9/11 is a full-blown industry on the Internet. The buildings didn’t collapse because two fuel-loaded jets crashed into them; a missile, not another jet, hit the Pentagon; Flight 93 was brought down with a missile—the fantasies spin on. Books have been written telling the “real truth” of that day.

  One truly bizarre, or comic, online posting conducts an experiment (with pictures) using rabbit wire, a concrete cinder block and a container of kerosene to “prove” the steel pillars of the twin towers would not have melted in the fires that followed the crash. Engineers who visited this site have left jibbering and in tears.

  Bush was behind 9/11. The Israelis were behind 9/11. Bush and the Israelis and a neo-con cabal were behind 9/11. Osama didn’t do it. Thousands of people engineered a controlled demolition of the towers; the hijacked jets crashing into them were no more than an elaborate version of the street magician’s “bait and switch.”

  I cannot comprehend what tilt of mind refuses the tidal wave of tragic facts about that horrible day in favour of near-lunatic and unmoored speculation. The answer must be that the hatred of U.S. President George Bush has, among the most strident of those who despise him, reached incandescent proportions and has merged with that strain of freewheeling paranoia that is an undercurrent of much of our modern times. Hating Mr. Bush ferociously, and believing so firmly that the truth is always “Out There” (never in front of your face), has produced a monstrous fable of conspiracy, cover-up, sinister motivations of an all-controlling apparatus that has abused the world and engaged in two wars (Iraq and Afghanistan), all for some agenda that works for the benefit of (who else?) Israel and the Jews.

  The 9/11 conspiracy theories—whether those who peddle them are aware of it or not—trail in the spurious and repulsive wake of that arch-conspiracy, the demented Protocols of the Elders of Zion. One would have thought the last century had got us past that delirious and hate-nourished fantasy-hoax.

  GREAT AND GOOD

  POWER BASED ON FAITH, NOT ARMS | April 9, 2005

  The mighty of the Earth—presidents, kings, queens and diplomats—were drawn to Rome this week. For a few days, it seemed the ancient capital was reliving the days of its early power and glory, when it was the heart of the greatest empire of its day, and when the coronation or the death of an emperor summoned the potentates of all the then known world.

  That spectacle in ancient days was the requisite homage exerted by earthly dominion, the obsequious response of vassal states and client rulers to a great imperial machine.

  Imperial Rome, the Rome of the Caesars, was mighty and disciplined. Obeisance was the necessary coin of satellites and satraps to the overwhelming predominance of manifest power.

  It is almost chilling that, nearly two thousand years after Augustus, after all that has changed over that vast time, this same city should, even for a few days, become again the epicentre of the world’s focus, and that the highest representatives of the world’s more powerful and wealthy nations, together with those of some of the world’s weakest and most miserable, have been drawn almost irresistibly once more to that venerable capital.

  For reasons vastly different, however. John Paul II was no Augustus Caesar. The insolent taunt of murderous Stalin, which was recalled so many times in the past seven days—How many divisions does the Pope command?—was its own answer. Of power, in the sense Stalin used the word and abused its exercise, John Paul II had none. Yet where is wretched Stalin now, for all his legions? Darkening the darker pages of history, remembered as a monster.

  So it was not power, not the leverage of a great military, or that other power of great wealth to which the world so frequently offers obliging genuflection, that summoned those kings, queens and presidents. The death of a pope, even a great one, does not shatter alliances, rearrange the pieces on the chessboard—those days, too, are long past.

  The leaders of almost the entire world (China being the churlish exception, but then, China is still yoked to decayed communism) presented themselves because they had watched and seen, over two and a half decades, that this pontiff presented himself in a uniquely special way to all the world. They had seen that a man holding the highest office of what very many regard as an anachronistic institution—and representing what very many equally regard as an outmoded idea, ethos and practice, that of religion—exercised a sublime ability to move and enter into the spirit of millions and millions of people.

  In the great fury of this modern secular age, in a world freighted with injustice, shadowed by terrorism and frantic with the thirst for speed, novelty and distraction, Pope John Paul II, by the example of his person and by the immensity of his ability to communicate, was the singular example of a kind of integrity that most had thought had long since vanished.

  Egoless, direct, transparent, resolute—there are a host of personal attributes of this remarkable man—he reached into millions of hearts of every cond
ition and faith, and into the hearts of many agnostics and even atheists as well.

  It is not a phenomenon that will be unriddled—unless, of course, the world is prepared to understand it on his terms, on the terms of his faith in Christ and on his understanding of faith itself. That, for those outside the circle of Catholicism, is almost certainly a bridge too far, especially in our corner of the world, in the tumultuously secular West. A culture that offers intellectual hospitality to the chatterings of Dr. Phil and the romps of Desperate Housewives doesn’t have the stamina to pursue the idea of faith and its agency.

  But the record is there. Before the advent of this man, the world was living nightmarishly the terrible equilibrium of the Cold War and the ever-present anxiety of a nuclear holocaust. Suddenly (in retrospect, it seems almost over-night), beginning in Poland, Russian communism was gone, and a score of countries and their citizens unshackled from totalitarian tyranny. The massive structure of a great antireligious dispensation collapsed and vanished.

  And all of was this traceable, in part it is true, but also inescapably, to the presence of this one figure, whose only force—besides those delightfully caparisoned Swiss Guards—was unadorned belief.

  The operation of the intangible on the tangible, of the pulses of the spirit on the reality of the world, is the dynamic of faith. John Paul II radiated a faith so plain and deep that it shattered what was, at bottom, simply false and cruel.

  Which is why, during this week, Rome is again for a time the centre of the world. Why millions have stood in line merely to pass this pope one last time, and why the mighty and the powerful find it irresistible not to acknowledge, by their presence, that a marvel has been among us.

  John Paul’s passing vibrates unfailing with the passing of Alexander Solzhenitsyn—another voice of steel and courage. Some centuries hence, when they call up the biblical phrase “there were giants … in those days,” it won’t be Dr. Phil or the slutry of Desperate Housewives being evoked.