target: Glasgow?
by Alastair McCulloch
*This article was written in a timely fashion, but not posted as such -LL team*
I realised this weekend just how ethnocentric my view of the world is. On Saturday 30 June two men drove a jeep filled with gas canisters into the front doors of Glasgow airport terminal one. The driver failed to get through the doors and succeeded only in setting the jeep on fire in the process, not to mention getting himself and his friend well and truly arrested. This was obviously a shocking and unnatural event. Was it really though? Atrocities much harsher, more barbaric and grotesquely successful take place in countries everywhere, right now, and I don’t bat an eyelid. I mean to say, no-one was even injured in the attack, apart from the ideologically vehement man who set the jeep and himself on fire with a petrol bomb.
My reaction to this oddity was mixed. I felt this was an event reserved for more culpable and politically high-profile targets, the New Yorks and Londons of the world. I had always said that Scotland was not really important enough to be a target. That being said, this occurrence was like being slapped in your sleep. It felt as if this was, in some way, unfair. I sent an email to friends with a link to the BBC’s news website. In the subject section of the email I wrote “what is the world coming to?” When I thought about that sentence it occurred to me what an incredibly moronic, crass and naïve thing this was to write. This ludicrous attempt at bombing doesn’t really warrant that kind of pompous blustering. The world has been a truly fucked up place for a long time, and it shouldn’t take an abortive fumble at jihad to make this apparent. It was a gut reaction sentence though, something that came without thought or reflection; an almost visceral, bodily response to an unnatural and uncomfortable situation. It was like a convulsive exhortation of fear, relief and anxiety, vomited onto the page.
The reasons, I suppose, are understandable given the context of the attack. While Scotland has always propped up a significant proportion of British armed forces, the history of terror-motivated attacks on Scotland is non-existent. In my lifetime, albeit relatively short in span, there has never been anything close to this type of attack. I doubt if there has even been a similar event in my father’s lifetime. Throughout the Northern Irish “troubles” of the 70s and 80s, mainland IRA bombings were exclusively directed at England and specifically London. As a result, we have today the famous Londoners’ stern resilience to keep on keeping on, no matter what the risks. The same cannot be said of Scotland and the Scottish. That said, I feel it does not excuse my rashness. I guess it always comes down to where you live. North of the Anglo-Scottish border, we feel distant and aloof from the reach of “outside events”.
On the other hand, my immediate response to the threat was almost apathetic in appearance. Outwardly I was completely unfazed, almost glazed in fact. I rationalised the situation. Given the fact that two cars stuffed with explosives were found a day earlier in London, I thought the obvious deduction would be to link the two attempts. This, I thought was probably an erroneous conclusion. The July 7 bombings in London were committed by a group of disaffected youths from Birmingham. Somehow London’s attacks did not feel to me like the work of a large, well-organised terror network that spread its oily fingers across the globe. If you have ever heard someone from Birmingham talk, you would know the kind of feeling it was. Rather than outrage or terror, I almost felt pity for these men. I didn’t want them to be alive so I could beat them, or hurl abuse at them. I simply wanted to talk to them and ask them a few questions. I remember seeing a video released posthumously of one of the bombers talking earnestly to the camera, explaining that he was a soldier, and that “this is a war.” As I listened to him inarticulately stumbling over his words and belabouring his justifications I wanted badly for him to still be alive, so that I could ask him where his uniform was and why he wanted to kill non-combatants in his imaginary war.
The same kind of feeling crept over me with this new attack. I think it was the almost absurd outward appearance of the incident. At first sight this looks to be a severely bungled operation and the unsubtle, ramrod tactics of it all only serve to reinforce this image. It is only in the last couple of weeks that new evidence has come to light suggesting that this was obviously well-planned and most definitely linked to the London incidents which occurred the day before. Even so, far more terrifying than any potential terrorist action was my auto-reaction at the time of the event. My silly sentence would seem to indicate that however I consciously rationalised this non-event, it still affected me on a deeper level. No longer could I consider my environment immune, and therefore I became, if only for a split-second, the very thing that I loathe, namely a pompous navel-gazing moralist buffoon, my “world” only encompassing the immediate reach of my given nation’s borders. There is a distinct possibility that there lurks within me a narrow-minded, conservative nationalist, who cannot come to terms with the world on a larger scale. There is a proverb, which I cannot recall exactly but it goes along the lines of “you’re a liberal at 18 then a conservative at 40”. I hope this is not the case, but at least I have been warned. Hopefully that will be enough.
