Registered: Jul 2000
Location:
Posts: 5526

In Britain, the Debate on Terrorism Brings Passion and Depth -- Except at Universities

By ELAINE SHOWALTER


London
On September 11, I was having lunch in a London restaurant when the manager asked if I had heard the news about a plane hitting the twin towers. I dashed across the street to Debenhams department store and spent the afternoon watching Sky News, as a large but eerily silent audience gathered.

Since then, however, the reaction to September 11 here has been anything but silent. Indeed, what has struck me about public discussion is that it has been so noisy, acrimonious, infuriating, hyperbolic -- and stimulating. And above all, so, well, public. Compared with what I read on the Internet from The New York Times and The Washington Post, the British press is willing to be much more controversial.

The press here is having its own war of words. Not only have newspapers, magazines, and journals taken up strong positions on the sources of terrorism, anti-Americanism, and British involvement in military action in Afghanistan, but they have also been taking ferocious shots at one another. Editors, reporters, columnists, and feature writers attack their rivals and opponents, name names, and pull no punches. The Times goes after The Guardian, The Sun feuds with The Mirror, The Daily Telegraph snipes at the Independent, The Guardian denounces the lot of them, and they all take on the BBC, Sky News, the London Review of Books, and the New Statesman.

Andrew Anthony, in The Observer, calls it "Britain's very uncivil war." Once positions, particularly those proor anti-American action in Afghanistan, were drawn up, he states, "no one has seemed prepared to move or defect. Instead, both sides have simply upped the barrage of slurs and insults." As I write, the Taliban are fighting a last-ditch stand in Kunduz and Kandahar, and the antiwar journalists (here called everything from "doves" to "wobblers" to "traitors") at the various papers seem just as dug in and just as determined not to change their minds. As Polly Toynbee, a Guardian writer, notes: "Great bowls of rotten words remain uneaten."

Meanwhile, the derring-do of British correspondents has reminded many of Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop. When the London airports were closed, some journalists from the BBC chartered a plane from Stansted and flew to Toronto to get closer to the World Trade Center. In a piece of fascinating irony, all the British fashionistas were in New York for the fall shows and suddenly found themselves reporting -- brilliantly -- from ground zero.

In Afghanistan, John Simpson, the BBC's portly world-affairs editor, sneaked into the country in a burqa, and has just been photographed marching triumphantly into Kabul ahead of the Northern Alliance. He has been much satirized as "the liberator" and "Simpson of Kabul" -- the joke now is speculation that he will try next to form an interim government -- but he is also much admired for his exploits.

The Times's young reporter Anthony Loyd, who has been doing his own hard traveling for several months with the mujahedin, discovered a huge trove of secret documents and blueprints for nuclear weapons in the Al Qaeda safe houses in Kabul. If the U.K. had a Pulitzer Prize, he would surely win it, but it doesn't; here, he gets ridiculed by Matthew Norman, the Guardian columnist (for showing off, I guess): The Time's diagram of some of those blueprints "does resemble an Ikea guide to constructing a stripped pine bunk bed," Norman complained.

The editorial stances of the newspapers, however, have not prevented them from publishing in their pages journalists who have other points of view, so the fights are often internal as well as external. The Guardian is generally critical of what it calls "America's war," but it has been among the most interesting and politically diverse of the daily broadsheets. It runs a column by the British, New York-based historian Amanda Foreman, who declares: "I still hate the terrorists. ... I would like to kill the bastards myself"; an interview with Paul McCartney, who supports the bombing of Afghanistan, titled "Give War a Chance"; and a call from Andrew Murray, chairman of the Stop the War Coalition, for "a halt to this dangerous and unjust war."

Christopher Hitchens, usually a strong peacenik (and, he reminds us, a "charter supporter" of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), gloats "ha ha ha and yah, boo" to the pacifists as the Taliban crumble. "Looking at some of the mind-rotting tripe that comes my way from much of today's left," he writes in The Guardian, "I get the impression that they go to bed saying: what have I done for Saddam Hussein or good old Slobodan or the Taliban today?" In the next issue, the newspaper prints George Monbiot's retort that "this new triumphalism is sliding effortlessly into a new imperialism. ... If this is a victory for civilisation, I would hate to see what defeat looks like."

The arguments have reminded some observers of the early months of World War II, and John Lukacs's book about the British internal debate over negotiation with Hitler, Five Days in London, May 1940 (1999), has been a recent best seller. George Orwell's "England, Your England" (1941), a withering critique of the British left intelligentsia, is also frequently cited. Orwell noted that "the immediately striking thing about them is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of constructive suggestion." "Tell me," asks Christopher Hudson, a columnist for the Evening Standard, "what has changed? Here they are today, the same people, except that they speak with more authority."

In addition, although awareness has dawned gradually, the British press has become increasingly cognizant of the fact that the struggle against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda is very much a British war, too -- and not just because British forces are involved in fighting, but in a much wider sense. As extremist Islamist groups here have expressed support for bin Laden and recruited young British Muslim men to fight for the Taliban, the debate has expanded from considering the rightness of the bombing and the role of American foreign policy in inspiring terrorism to include such issues as the problems of multiculturalism in Britain and the nature of British citizenship and identity. In a recent poll reported in the papers, more than 10 percent of British Muslims say that they think bin Laden was justified in his attacks on the World Trade Center; and more than 200 British Muslims have gone to Afghanistan to fight on the Taliban side. At a recent London "peace" rally, some Muslims call George W. Bush a "devil worshipper" and bin Laden a "freedom fighter."

At the same time, there has been both satire of the local militant mullahs in Finsbury Park and elsewhere and serious self-reflection among Arabic Brits. Mark Steyn, who writes for several newspapers, offers a parody of Allan Sherman's camp song:


Hello, Mullah,
Hello, Mama,
Here I am at
Camp Osama
Death to Bush and
Blair and Putin!
Death to all the non-Islamic
Parts of Luton!

Ziauddin Sardar, author of Introducing Muhammad, takes a strong stand on Muslim responsibility: "All Muslims, by acquiescing in emotive rhetoric, in some degree share responsibility for raising young men who would rather kill and die than live with the real world with all its moral doubts and uncertainties. We share the blame, because we fail our young people by not offering them a better way," he writes in the Evening Standard.

Salman Rushdie, in The Guardian, warns: "This paranoid Islam, which blames outsiders, 'infidels,' for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest-growing version of Islam in the world." (On the other hand, writes Kaizer Nyatsumba in the Independent, "Operation Enduring Freedom might well spawn more terrorism.")

All these are strong and controversial views, and reading the papers is not likely to lower the blood pressure. In contrast, British campuses have not been major centers of argument, with no reports of courses modified, teach-ins, or professorial soul-searching (all of which have wracked the campuses of American universities here). To be sure, academics and intellectuals have not been completely invisible, but they have been at the margins, even, some would say, on the lunatic fringe. The London Review of Books rounds up the usual liberal suspects -- the old New Left activist Tariq Ali, the Marxist literary critics Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton, the Indian novelist Amit Chauduri, the Columbia University professor Edward Said, and the like -- for a symposium (Andrew Anthony calls it "now infamous") on the events of September 11 that, over all, takes a critical view of U.S. policies.

In it, Mary Beard, a Cambridge historian, describes opinion in her neck of the woods: "When the shock had faded, more hard-headed reaction set in. This wasn't just the feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming. That is, of course, what many people, publicly or privately think. World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price." Reaction is swift, with the American literary critic Marjorie Perloff leading the counterblasts, and subsequent weeks have seen what John Sutherland, a professor of English at University College London, calls a splendid "don-fight."

To my view, though, the spat seems more like an academic quarrel-as-usual, with the standard and relatively genteel tactics of letter-writing, name-calling, aspersion-casting, subscription-canceling, ass-covering, and grandstanding that mark most such events. It could just as well be about literary theory or tenure rather than death and destruction. What's most disheartening is the absence of reflection, and the swift rush of familiar opinion that fills the vacuum of thought.

Although one of my friends, who teaches English at Oxford, tells me that "I have been a liberal leftie academic all my life, but now I'm in shock. I don't know what to think," her comments are a rare instance of intellectual uncertainty at a time when many British academics I've met have been ready to offer solutions by September 12.

A Cambridge science don assures me that, if we just ignore bin Laden and Al Qaeda, they will go away. Another rants against American military response. Asked what he suggests, he recommends intermarriage with Muslims.

In September, the British had a three-minute period of silence in honor of the trade-center victims, especially moving in my usually uproarious local outdoor market on Chapel Street; but, at a dinner party, a professor tells me that "my mother" was furious: "Why do these Americans get three minutes? Everyone else gets one minute." Well, thank you for sharing.

No wonder that Chelsea Clinton was so upset at the spiteful anti-Americanism at Oxford in September that she counter-demonstrated at an antiwar rally. Another American at Oxford, the mathematician Jonathan David Farley, warns her in The Guardian not to "corral all Americans into the pro-war camp." "Shame on you, Chelsea," he writes, telling her that African-Americans are "less enthusiastic about America's wars in the developing world because we are aware, as has often been said, that no Iraqi ever called us nigger." (Clinton is feeling better; she tells The Times, "I do have non-American friends now and I am very happy with my course.")

Thank God for the journalists. For me, it has been morally impressive and intellectually stimulating to see the vigor, range, depth, and passion of the political debate here, even if there have been some times when I've wished for a bit more substance and less heat. I advise any American academic with some time to come to London. On the cultural scene, life goes on as energetically as usual, with talk of the Booker Prize, the Turner Prize, the controversial plans of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the magnificent new wing of Tate Britain, the gorgeous new galleries of the Victoria & Albert, the perennial hopes for the World Cup, the triumphant opening of Harry Potter (well, some things are the same as in the United States). The Christmas lights are up on Regent Street and Oxford Street; the collapse of tourism since September 11 has made it easier to get tickets, reservations, and travel bargains.

Above all, London is a place to put these terrible events in context, with Band of Brothers on television, Mrs. Miniver being serialized in The Times, and numerous reminders of the Blitz to tell us that the world has survived even darker times before.

Elaine Showalter is a professor of English at Princeton University, on leave this year and living in London.

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Page: B16

Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged

Registered: Jul 2000
Location: A New England
Posts: 9187

Cool - if a bit long - read.

Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged

Registered: Aug 2001
Location: Hilbert Space
Posts: 35779

That was a very interesting summmary. 'All of human life is here', indeed.

London is a pretty cool place if you look at all of it.

Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged

Registered: Apr 2001
Location:
Posts: 16788

(in regards to the media)

Eye of the beholder I guess.

I see them as a bunch of elitists standing around in their powdered wigs, tights and ruffled shirts sipping tea with their pinkies and noses pointed up talking about how uncivilized and uncultured the rest of us are.
I don’t find their opinions interesting, valid, thought provoking or realistic, but I did enjoy reading that post missphinx.
That’s coming from a lower classed uncultured American though.

Last edited by euphorbia on 12-04-2001 at 07:33 PM

Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged

Registered: Jul 2000
Location:
Posts: 7236

Cool read. I enjoyed it. I do have one complaint though. The interview with Paul Mcartney entitiled Give War a Chance was actually in the Indy and not the Guardian I believe. I remebr reading it (although admittedly it may have been picked up off the train on the way home so I guess my memory could be mistaken). Not sure about the wigs bit though u4b. Try sandals and beards.

Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged

Registered: Jul 2000
Location:
Posts: 4501

Elaine Showalter writes something worth reading! Holy Shit! Seriously, I was very skeptical when I first entered the article--prepared for a fight, so-to-speak--but found myself agreeing with a lot of what she said, and feeling subtlely informed at the same time. I'm less offended by this than her other writings, because she's reporting honestly and with little bias. I feel there's less anti-Americanism than what she seems to imply, but it would be hard not to feel sensitive about it, when living abroad during a crisis.

I still twitch and foam at the mouth when I think about her article about "the wild zone," in which she completely ignores the rules and limitations of the Venn diagrams she uses to prove her theory (sigh, liberal arts geeks trying to be math geeks). Plus, her theory just sucked ass to begin with (women have a language men can't understand, but women can understand men perfectly).

As for Chelsea Clinton, she should try being a Middle East student at an American university during these times. Chelsea's just as knee-jerk emotional as that diseased crackwhore she calls a mother; too bad neither of them uses the brains they are so famous for. I love their wildly divergent accounts of Chelsea's whereabouts during the attacks. Anyone else see those?

Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged

Registered: Jul 2000
Location:
Posts: 7236

On the Chelsea Clinton thing I recall this piece written by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

Poor Chelsea Clinton. Life in Oxford, the city of dreaming spires photographed ad nauseam by American tourists, is proving to be less delightful than her dad must have promised. She should never have allowed herself to believe Bill who, as the rest of us know, has problems with accurate recall. He claims to have had a spectacularly good time when he was there as a Rhodes scholar in the sixties and still goes all misty eyed when describing how his love for Britain grew out of this period of intimacy with the revered institution and its inmates.

Chelsea joined the university this year to pursue a post graduate course in international relations and is bloody miserable. In an outspoken, moving article in the US Talk magazine, she shares the feelings of isolation and bewilderment which have got significantly worse since 11 September.

She often eats alone and spends time with other Americans because she finds it difficult to deal with "anti-American" feelings which are rife at the university. She feels that she is tested and mistrusted by British students because of the "protectiveness, defensiveness and pride" she feels for her country. She says, too, that she finds it offensive that anyone should believe America "would enter this conflict capriciously" and confesses that these views "boggle" her mind. I find it mind boggling that a student of international relations should be so ill prepared for robust debate about the grave situation we find ourselves in but I do sympathise with her sense of exclusion.

Oxford is an awful place for anyone who is not a natural insider. I was there in the seventies too but unlike President Clinton, I hated the experience, especially the English department and my snooty tutors. American, Irish, Scottish, Australian students I knew then felt the same way and it was no accident that we befriended each other in order to survive. But unlike Chelsea, we never expected to be embraced by the ancient establishment.

With burning dissent over Vietnam in both countries, there was little soppy sentimentalism about special bonds between the two nations and American students were often loudest in their condemnation of their leaders. They led the demos and we followed, singing Joan Baez songs and holding candles which blew out in the wind.

Not so today. Large numbers of Americans who go to Oxford or Cambridge are more simplistically patriotic and over-romantic about their country. The British students at these places, on the other hand, are no longer only representative of old money or Toryism. The most protected areas have been infiltrated by radicals and a good thing too. Audiences attending Oxford Union debates today will always include bright women in Hejabs, radical students from comprehensive schools and globally aware undergraduates who see through the rhetoric of American and British power elites.

Outside cosy political circles, the relationship between US and UK citizens is more complicated and edgy than is often realised. Movies and television programmes rarely tackle the subject preferring instead to feed us inane stereotypes and the message that both countries are boundlessly and unconditionally loyal to each other.

I was in Oxfordshire this weekend, at a conference of the British American Project, an annual gathering of people from both sides of the Atlantic who are thought to have some influence on public life. The project was set up in the mid-eighties when the Reagan-Thatcher love-in was in full swing. Key people thought it would be a good idea to create an ever expanding network in order to deepen "the special relationship" between the two countries. To ensure that this would happen, top people were drawn in as were others who were against the notion of this "special" alliance.

There was room at this inn even for those like me (I have been a member since 1988) who were vociferously left of centre and proud of it. Several past and present cabinet ministers, special advisors, (Peter Mandelson, David Willetts, Lord Holme of Cheltenham and Jonathan Powell are fellows), editors, broadcasters, peers, lawyers, heads of non-government organisations, campaign group leaders, educationalists, doctors, writers, senior civil servants and others now make up the list of alumni.

History has transformed the political landscape but the network survives and has become more questioning and interesting as we travelled through the Clinton-Blair period and now the very extraordinary Blair-Bush era. Have we truly developed a closer understanding between our nations, we always ask ourselves, or do our meetings only reveal the chasms, the misunderstandings and mutual ignorance and suspicion which carry on regardless of how much talk, drink and bonhomie passes between us? This year, of course, these questions have taken on an exigency and emotion that none of us could have anticipated, We all felt the pressures of 11 September and its aftermath powerfully, just as powerfully as Chelsea in fact.

My view today is that in spite of the war and obvious warm feelings which people in both countries feel for each other, the gap between us as nations is greater than anyone is really prepared to admit. The informal conversations I had over the past 36 hours have convinced me even more of this. I must tread carefully now because I have no desire to relive the eruptions which followed a Question Time when I said that Americans needed a period of introspection and self analysis to understand why so many people in the world were hostile towards the superpower. In common with others committed to equality, I admire hugely the progress that the US has made to create an ethnically mixed hierarchy in all its institutions. I love the openness and generosity of the Americans I know and do appreciate the role the US has played in Northern Ireland and Bosnia. But the country has also been much too hubristic and self-obsessed and almost every Briton I know, white and black, would agree with this.

Britons, I feel, understand geopolitical realities better than Americans and this is due entirely to the fact that our media – even at it most dumbed down – manages to communicate complex truths and to give people a little more of a sense of history and consequences. It is to our credit that even our tabloids have done this and sometimes more convincingly than the serious broadsheets. In the US unless you read the heavyweight publications, even today, the rest of the world barely exists in the consciousness of most Americans.

The cultural and commercial imperialism of the US is regarded with great suspicion by many Britons, a tad hypocritical you might say for a nation which is still so proud of its own imperial past. Americans feel patronised, mocked by Britons and at times sense that their contributions to European stability remain unrecognised by ungrateful Britons. As she struggles so far away from home in cold little Oxford, Chelsea may be finding it hard, but what she is experiencing will, in the end, give her a more sophisticated understanding of what is special or not about the Anglo-American relationship in the 21st century.

y.alibhaibrown@independent.co.uk

Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged

Registered: Jul 2000
Location:
Posts: 5526

Thanks much for the good read in return, Sp00ky.

Note on my personal leanings on political issues:
I grew up under Reagan, Bush, et al., and my reaction was disgust, fear, lack of patriotism, and avoidance of politics in the media as much as possible.

I feel more connection with the US as an entity now than I used to (which is saying very little). I appreciate the freedoms provided by size and diversity and that I have the ability to live in a region of it as open-minded as it is.

Most of the US seems more alien to me than Britain and many European countries.

Chelsea's done a lot better than I would have under the circumstances. I wonder what's up with Bush's daughters these days.

euphorbia, you'd like London despite the noticeable lack of powdered wigs

Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged