I, the turcopolier, have made this comment by EO into a front page post so don't complain about the lack of paragraphing. pl
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"Colonel, Manchester was as bitter as we have had. As bitter as 9/11 or the London bombings, perhaps more so because the targets were young people just setting out on the road to adulthood. That is a time of promise. It should not be a time of death. It is more bitter than most of us know. It is worse because we ourselves have contributed to the tragedy. On the one hand we have thousands upon thousands in our police forces and in our intelligence agencies straining every nerve to prevent such tragedies. On the other we are heaping fuel on the fire of fundamentalist Muslim terrorism with every day that passes. That is sometimes said too glibly. There are those who claim that we in the West are the root cause of Jihadi terrorism simply because we have intervened so much in the Middle East. Maybe that is so, for some Jihadis, but Muslim fundamentalism is such a strong growth that it needed no Western provocation to set it in motion. No, what we have done is more than that. We have not only removed or weakened the regimes that inhibited, more or less, that growth. What we have done is to encourage Jihad to flourish on an immensely greater scale. That increased scale increases its glamour and its pull for our English Muslims many times over. That increases greatly the chance that they will fall victim to that glamour. That increases greatly the probability of terrorist attacks. By chance I came across a video, just a short time before Manchester, that summed this murderous foolishness up. For all I know it may be a staged video - so many are - or compiled for PR purposes. But staged or contrived though it may be, the video sets out with grim clarity how we have contributed to, set the scene for indeed, the deaths of our own. https://freespeechdefense.net/2017/05/i-wonder-why-this-is-being-censored/ I refer to the section starting at nine minutes. It sets out what perhaps all on your site know but so few elsewhere. Western countries have been arming and training Muslim fighters knowing full well that those fighters were Jihadis, and were more than likely to join even more extreme Jihadi units. Knowing full well also that some of those Jihadis, but now trained in killing and invigorated by contact with other true believers, would return to their countries of origin and do what harm they could. Later on, in the copy of the video I have seen, we hear Jihadists, English and German nationals among them, making it clear they have the intention of doing that if they can. But if that were all then perhaps the danger would not be so great. Those thousands and thousands of our security forces at home do at least have a fighting chance of knowing who's been over there and who's come back. They know what they have to deal with even if that is a difficult task. What we fail to understand is the appeal of the Jihadi cause to our own disenchanted Muslim young at home, and how we ourselves have so greatly magnified that appeal. We fail to understand that what is to us atrocity upon atrocity in Syria is to them a great cause. We see ragged groups of thugs using, often inexpertly, the deadly equipment we give them or the supply of which we facilitate. They see a band of glorious martyrs. We see a mix of ethnic cleansing and rule by terror, covertly used by us to weaken regimes we don't like. They see only meritorious conquest leading to a cleaner and more just society. Can we wonder that to a number of our idealistic young, some of whom experience more than the rest of us the dysfunctionality of parts of Western society, the glamour of such a vision is irresistible? We, operating through our intelligence agencies and Special Forces, have presented them with the stage upon which that vision can be exhibited. And from his English home the loner or the psychotic or the idealist can see that great stage that we have set up and wish, somehow, to be part of it. It is not significant whether Manchester was the work of a homegrown loner or of an organised gang; the vision that inspired the commission of the atrocity is the vision we engineered. For there is now no doubt that the flood of foreign Jihadis that have wreaked such havoc in Syria and neighbouring countries was released by us or with our active complicity. It could not have happened but for Western assistance. We do not acknowledge it. We pretend that the tragedy of Manchester has no relation to our contribution to the tragedy in the Middle East. As here, from a BBC report - "Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham said the city would "pull together", adding: "That's what we are. That's what we do. They won't win." As if, as the Mayor of London intimated recently, bomb attacks were phenomena that we just have to learn to live with. As if they were simply there, and no cause for them. Or no cause we have anything to do with. Just after the London bombing I met a journalist who worked for one of the broadsheets. He was proud of the fact, as well he might have been, that he and his colleagues went in to work the next day undaunted, as did, I believe, most Londoners. Looking back more than seventy years he conjured up the spirit of the Blitz. No matter what they throw at us we don't give in. We muddle on. "That's what we do." So he spoke. I held my peace. How could a journalist of all people, I did not say, fail to know that we had in large measure brought it upon ourselves? How could we be such fools? Police and intelligence in this country, all thousands of them, holding terrorism at bay. Their colleagues abroad creating the conditions in which it can grow; deliberately setting the scene for the deadly vision to flourish past any heights it could have achieved unaided, that deadly vision which now inspires so many of our disenchanted Muslims or Muslim converts here. We are fools in deadly truth, and it is our young who have paid for it in Manchester. " EO
kooshy, your first question definitively got only very, very little attention. For the obvious reason. It wasn't easily "mainsteamable". Not much easily available knowledge. ... As a result 9/11 to a high percentage triggered the default setting of distrust in 'our own' Western democracies. Not least because they responded like they did. That sure helped a lot.
The second question is who really is supporting this bastard SOBs, ideologically or financially.
This on the other hand got a lot. Attention, that is. Not least since it helped to justify the wars. First Afghanistan, then Iraq. Let's dry out the money sources", state sponsors? A war on terrorism in which you attack the state since it harbors the wrong people? I would assume that is something rather recent in the history of wars. And the latter decision no doubt among many other matters must have had an influence on the "Western Muslim" perception. As much as it did on ours.
Posted by: LeaNder | 25 May 2017 at 07:28 AM
EO and the historians amongst us.
In the Soviet example I had the feeling that quite a large part of the populace had a fair idea that the official media were lying to them, but at what point did this become common knowledge? More consumers of Western MSM seem to be coming to the same conclusion but where are we on that curve and at what point does it become a real problem for the elites who benefit from a uninformed, or misinformed, public in a nominally democratic society?
Posted by: JJackson | 25 May 2017 at 08:32 AM
Thanks EO, for your beautifully stated thoughts!
Posted by: Valissa | 25 May 2017 at 10:10 AM
JerseyJeffersonian,
I agree with your sentiments. Don't quite understand why you addressed this to me, however.
Posted by: Fred | 25 May 2017 at 10:13 AM
I agree.
Imperial Germany, before 1914, according to the testimonials of many foreign visitors was a magical country. What was left of that after 1919 was destroyed by NAZIs and WWII.
Imperial Germany was also a representative government; it was not an autocracy as English propaganda implied.
The Soviet Government, like prior such Modernizing/Westernizing governments as those of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Alexander II, carried out a modernizing Revolution-from-Above.
That pattern of the Russian past was recapitulated by Gorbachev and later by Yeltsin. I think the Putin-Medvedev period has broken with that (or so I should hope).
Posted by: Babak Makkinejad | 25 May 2017 at 10:19 AM
The fundamental problematic, in my opinion, is that US has gained nothing - in my opinion - from her interventions in those distant lands.
The Indian Wars, the US-Mexican War, brought new territories into the Union. Those are the only gains that I can see for US and then they directed at neighbors and not distant lands - as you put it.
What has US gained from almost 200 years of interaction with Japan; US has become weaker and Japan stronger. Likewise for Korea, Vietnam, Israel, Iran, Libya, and Iraq.
I mean, can one say:
"Here it is, I have my car and 2 cylinders of its 6-cylinder engine are directly related to US intervention in the ABC country."
Posted by: Babak Makkinejad | 25 May 2017 at 10:24 AM
If you are looking for an accurate definition of we, you can start with what it is not. You stated above:
" You had to go to the internet to ferret out the details and to the academics to find out the background the details fitted in to. That to most people is a ridiculous amount of trouble to go to to find out about things you can do nothing about anyway."
If you are 1) ignorant of and/or 2) can do nothing about something that someone else is doing, then you and them are not "we" in regards to their actions, as far as culpability goes. If TPTB have hidden their actions and motives so well that the majority of adults and, according to you, most of the youth are in the dark, then it is THEM vs US, regardless of geographic location. Part of TPTB's modus operandi is to shift the blame of their actions onto others. One should never embrace their position as scapegoat.
Being English, it seems that you have taken the White Man's Burden to heart. Perhaps it's in your bones. I feel no such burden, and don't feel that is a natural imperative that I do. It seems to be a mental abberation, not uncommon among those with high ideals, particularly in a country with a recent history of dominance.
It's apples and oranges to compare either the US or GB with Germany and the USSR of the 1930/40's. They could potentially be consider homogenous nations where everyone was aware and participated in decision making, but then looking just below the surface, this illusion dissipates anyway. The USA and GB these days are hardly homogeneous. They both are strongly divided within themselves, with many different cultures of varying compatibility. They are nearing states of nature with groups within are in perpetual states of conflict. There is no common responsibility there. Couple that with the likelihood that these mixing of populations is being lead by TPTB with nefarious intentions, and you might as well apply the notion of shared responsibility to two pit-bulls in a dog fight.
Posted by: tim s | 25 May 2017 at 10:44 AM
Get your facts right.
It was the Conservatives who might seem left-wing to most Americans who allowed his parents into Britain in 1991 and established links with the LIFG that led to a failed assassination attempt against Gaddafi in 1996.
Labour didn't form a government in the UK until 1997. It was the Labour government that bought the Libyan government of Gaddafi, the one that was oppressing all the jihadists, in from the cold.
Then it was those twats, Cameron and Sarkozy (also right-wing) who decided they knew better and started pushing for regime change in Libya probably at the request of the communists who run Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
So it was the right-wing Conservative Party which is responsible, although I will admit it wasn't helped by Tony Blair's moronic behaviour in going along with the George W. Bush's (right wing again) invasion of Iraq as punishment for Saudi involvement in 9/11. But it was the Cameron government and is the May government that has given so much support to the jihadists in Libya and Syria and the Gulfies in Yemen.
As for living in a multicultural society, I have no problem with it as it's not the multiculturalism that causes the problems, it's the morons pushing neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism, something that the left-wing in the UK were solidly opposed to until the neo-liberal Blairites took over.
Posted by: Ghostship | 25 May 2017 at 10:58 AM
the two daughters who left to join the jihadi cause in Syria,
I think you are confusing this with another case from Manchester:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2703792/Twin-Manchester-schoolgirls-ran-away-Syria-married-ISIS-fighters-mainly-stay-indoors-read-Quran-unless-jihadi-husbands-out.html
They were of Somali origin from Chorlton, a couple of miles way from Fallowfield.
Posted by: Ghostship | 25 May 2017 at 11:14 AM
Thanks. Of course what you say is true but there was only one aspect of the Manchester bombing that I wished to comment on at this time.
"What we have done": it may be that you do not find the distinction as great as it appears to me, but I was making a distinction between "normal" covert intervention and what happened in Syria. Normal covert intervention is just that, covert. In Syria there was so much of it, and inevitably so visible given the scale, that it ballooned into something far removed from covert. Above I termed the results a "Jihadi spectacular", and it is that that will have lent so much increased glamour to Jihad, in whatever form, for our impressionable Muslim young in England.
That is what we have done, and although it is an unintended by-product of our intervention in Syria it has further increased the threat here.
Posted by: English Outsider | 25 May 2017 at 01:02 PM
Fred,
My response was springboarded by my agreement with your assessment that the parents had no intention of becoming, in their civic beliefs or behaviors, citizens of Great Britain. They were jihadi squatters in that nation, and what happened with their spawn is highly indicative of that.
Oh, and parenthetically, regarding the mayor of London's views on terrorist actions being something that, well, just happens in large cities? Perhaps his benchmark is the third world hellholes of Pakistan, riven with murderous sectarian hatreds? Maybe if the carnage were limited to only a few thousand a year, that would be just hunky dory for London? If that's what he likes, perhaps he should instead aspire to be mayor of Karachi or its like - he'd fit right in. I don't think that we want that state of affairs in our western lands; we largely got that out of our system with the religious wars a few centuries ago, and concluded that this was a losing policy for any nation that aspired to the best for its citizens and in consideration of its future prospects as a nation for that matter.
Posted by: JerseyJeffersonian | 25 May 2017 at 01:56 PM
In line with your comment - on the MI5 going beyond wink-wink to actively asssisting bunch of jihadists to travel to Libya. Expect Syria to be the same. http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/sorted-mi5-how-uk-government-sent-british-libyans-fight-gaddafi-1219906488
Posted by: FkDahl | 25 May 2017 at 04:14 PM
Tim S - I think we're essentially in agreement but just employing different terms or usages. It's a habit to use "we" when discussing UK or indeed Western foreign policy but you're quite right, there's not a lot of "we" about it when the electorate isn't told what's being done.
The white man's burden was always something of a con. The Empire was scarcely a charitable institution. Maybe not quite such a vicious con as the version of it the politicians sell us today. But they call it R2P now.
Posted by: English Outsider | 25 May 2017 at 05:16 PM
14 of those 19 men came from one place. The others were driven by the ideology coming from the same place. The US has just promised 330 billion dollars to the same government. Has their ideology changed? No. Have they stopped promulgating it? No. I don't understand.
Posted by: Linda Lau | 25 May 2017 at 05:35 PM
EO,
I see soldiers in the streets and I wonder where they wrre during Rotherham and every other act of violence and hatred perpetrated by theae invaders.
Sorry to say, the bullets in those rifles are for you and yours. They are the prison guards of your multicultural insane asylum.
Posted by: Tyler | 25 May 2017 at 05:47 PM
Ghostship,
The parents of the terrorist brought their hate with them, the bomber never was weaned off of it. John Major's government may have opened the door to these two individuals but the utopianism I spoke of long predates his becoming PM.
"...it as it's not the multiculturalism that causes the problems, it's the morons..."
Right. Those morons. Not the other morons of course. "The other morons" not to be construed in any way to be the new cultural enhancers of Britain who think the way to purify Islam is to set off bombs that kill 14 year old girls. I'm sure that will be great consolation to the families of the dead.
Posted by: Fred | 25 May 2017 at 07:30 PM
If we are in agreement, essentially, it is most unfortunate that our terminology does not reflect that. However, I think that there are some critical differences in what is an otherwise general agreement in our opinions.
The older I get, the more I see how much CON there is in the reality presented to us. I think that those of us of European, particularly northern, descent are not accustomed to the mental aspects of modern day politics/warfare. To see through so much obfuscation on a daily basis on all matters of significance is not our forte, and we suffer for it (at least for now).
Posted by: tim s | 26 May 2017 at 09:32 AM
Fellow Traveler,
From DAY ONE I never fell for the lies about how they got here or who supported them.
Posted by: Cee | 26 May 2017 at 02:54 PM
EO - an excellent piece
Today Jeremy Corbyn dared to say otherwise and was predictably attacked by establishment figures. Here is what the British Defense Secretary Sir Michael Fallon said on Channel 4 News (beats BBC hands down IMHO):
"There is no correlation here between foreign policy and this appalling act of terrorism"
However, the fact is Corbyn spoke, got air time and at least one TV news anchor actually put this point to Fallon with some balance (not a thing Corbyn's views get a lot of).
The IRA's campaign ultimately led to the Good Friday Agreement. In reality they bombed the British government to the negotiating table. The Islamists cannot bomb us to the negotiating table, but they may eventually succeed in changing the narrative, if the cost is sufficient.
Brits do not need to sit by and wait for this outcome. Spread the word, get people to read SST and similar outlets for 'what is really going on'. Start your own blog even - and don't waste your time on the Tylers. Brexit and Trump were 'impossible', there is hope if we collectively make it happen.
Posted by: Simplicius | 26 May 2017 at 07:45 PM
Simplicius - Thank you for your comment. One can never waste one's time listening to common sense but that aside, yes, it's the information gap. A lot of people still don't know what we've been doing in the ME and therefore can't be expected to see a connection between that and the Manchester bombing.
The information gap is reducing, I believe. More of us don't take as gospel what we see on our TV screens, as the Sanders and Trump campaign showed, and Corbyn here has the courage of his convictions and has been speaking out for some time.
None of that will have much effect. That information gap is still very wide - why would so much money and effort be spent on mass PR if it didn't work? The reaction to the Rotherham scandal that Tyler mentions above, and the reactions to the London and now the Manchester bombings show that.
Most of us will ignore the exhortations to "not let them make us change our way of life" in any case and just take a little more care not to go or let our families go into places or areas that might be dangerous. As for our ME interventions, subsequent posts on this site give some grounds for optimism. We ourselves might not be able to stop our politicians laying waste the region but with any luck it'll be stopped for us. What I termed the "Jihadi spectacular" might therefore die down and with it, maybe, the threat to us.
Posted by: English Outsider | 27 May 2017 at 12:37 PM
Eakens,
The well timed and targeted delivery of those anthrax letters shut people up
Posted by: Cee | 28 May 2017 at 06:45 AM
I came back here to see if I'd missed anything and found I had. I may have partly missed the point you were making in your comment above. You write:-
"You claim the root cause is not simply because
"we have intervened so much in the Middle East."
If that is not the cause of the problems,
then what else is it that we have done to cause the problems?"
It's true that we've intervened a lot in the Muslin countries generally - there was a discussion some time ago in SST that if I remember correctly pushed the start of our ME interventions back to before the 20th century - and some of those interventions have been significant enough. In particular we started using Muslim terrorists in Kabul in the 70's and according to many the prison camps of Iraq inadvertently acted as Jihadi recruiting agencies or contact centres. We have poured fuel on the fire of Muslim fundamentalist terrorism in those and other cases. So you are saying "What else is it that we have done to cause the problems."
I believe that in those other cases we made use of or set off forces that were in the main already there. Even in Libya we used mostly local opposition, as far as I know. In Syria we certainly made use of local elements, Jihadi or tribal or "moderate" local opposition, in our attempts to remove the Assad government and I see a recent long article in the NYT on East Aleppo is still based upon the assumption that that's more or less all we did. If that were so then to your question "What else have we done?" the answer would be "Nothing". It would just be the mixture as before.
But it seems to me that this time we did do something different. In order to bring down Assad we brought in or helped bring in foreign Jihadis on a scale that dwarfed any local opposition forces available to us. The consequences of that are looked at elsewhere, but it does seem that it's a a crucial difference.
Posted by: English Outsider | 29 May 2017 at 12:10 PM