This is a special guest column by Robin Koerner, a British citizen, an American resident, and publisher of www.WatchingAmerica.com (listed in OTHER VOICES) on our blogroll.
LONDON CALLING
By Robin Koerner
As a child, watching television in England, I often listened to news about IRA terrorist bombings.
As a teenager, I became increasingly frustrated at hearing, after each such attack, politicians’ saying, “The terrorists will not win�. It seemed so hollow all the while the attacks kept coming. It became clear to me that since the terrorists’ goal was to terrorize, and the goal of civilized humanity was simply to prevent them, that the terrorists were, in fact, winning. Given years of “no change� in the IRA’s actions or the politicians’ responses, I just never understood what a victory against the terrorists would look like. Whatever it was supposed to look like, we obviously weren’t moving in that direction.
But things have changed. A few years ago, representatives of civilization, from the British and Irish governments, with the help of such third parties as President Clinton and others sat down with representatives of the same IRA terrorists, and spoke to them, without ever accepting the evils they had perpetrated… People whose families had been declared targets of the bombs of those sitting opposite them at the table, hammered out an agreement. That effort manifested two fundamental ideas: on the one hand, we all have the right to be heard; on the other, we never have to compromise our pursuit of basic human freedoms and dignity. Now, Northern Ireland, while not completely at peace, is experiencing a quiet the likes of which it hasn’t tasted for decades. And London, which has suffered 13 IRA attacks in the last 32 years, has suffered none in almost five.
Today, when dozens of people were killed by terrorist attacks in London, the leaders of the rich and free were in Gleneagles, with the stated purpose of improving the lot of humanity, and, especially, that of parts of humanity that do not vote for them, nor can help them in any immediate way. These world leaders, the G8 and their invitees, are today together with a purpose higher than securing their corporations’ markets or securing re-election.
Today, it is easier than ever to agree with Bush when he said, “The contrast couldn’t be clearer.�
To see Blair standing in front of all of the other leaders at the summit, reading a joint statement with no strategic omissions, no equivocation, suggests to me that we, more than ever, have global agreement on the kind of world we want to create, even if we still have to argue about how to create it. Could the leaders of Russia and China, for example, have stood with the leaders of the United States and other Western nations, just a couple of decades ago, and endorsed any statement read by the leader of Great Britain?
Today, it is acceptable to discuss using our money, and even our armies, to do good rather than merely to secure national interest. Crucially, the following point has been won: the greatest interests of all nations often transcend individual national interests. The contrast of today shows that the world has evolved into knowing that we can do the greatest good by tackling global problems from a common global perspective – and that in so doing, we are not playing a zero-sum-game in which one party has to sacrifice what another gains. Rather, what we do for others, we do for ourselves – whether with respect to poverty, our environment, or anything else.
As Blair issued his statement, French newspapers were declaring the attack on London an attack on all of Europe, and later, President Putin felt free enough to speak his truth about the need for a lack of double standards in fighting terrorism and the need to unite our nations’ forces more closely in that fight. Along with the picture of the world’s leaders’ standing together behind Blair, these are signs of a knowing not just that we must act as a global community but, more importantly, that we can.
So just now, when a Member of the British Parliament stood in support of his traditional opponents in government, and told us that the terrorists won’t win, not only do I understand him, but I think he is probably right.
–Robin Koerner
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.