How to get your terrorist attack noticed
It's not easy to make a point nowadays, at least not in a way that'll get you noticed beyond your own borders. Sure, blow up a few people here, there and everywhere, and you might make a few paragraphs in the "Wog news" section of a broadsheet perhaps, if you're lucky, and if someone from the BBC hasn't been phoning up someone else who used to be on the BBC and that. But how to make that breakthrough from simple domestic sociopath to world-renowned figure of shitscariness and bogeymanness?
Simple. Just point your gun at a few whites. I mean, rack up the numbers by annihilating a few poor brown fellas waiting for a train, by all means, but unfortunately, if you stop there, then you're just destined for the slot after the business news and just before the county cricket scores. No, you need to scare some whites in order to get the klaxxons going. Demand they show their passports! Ask them whether they're British or not! That'll guarantee dozens of photographs of elderly whites being led to safety, while thousands of pictures of injured and splattered brown folk get utterly ignored.
The way my newspapers have been reporting it, the crimes against humanity* which have recently taken place in India were a deliberate attempt to target westerners and tourists. Yet the numbers don't quite bear that out - from the 120 or so dead, fewer than 10 were not Indian. Now that doesn't really add up, does it?
So what's going on? Was there an attempt to kidnap westerners rather than kill them, hoping for maximum publicity? That's certainly a possibility, to try and give the story as much prominence as possible in the global media. And it worked, by god it worked. The bombings in Jaipur barely registered in the papers over here, despite the city being on the tourist trail, yet the Bem Bahir bombings have really hit the headlines. It's not just the scale of the incident, either.
I don't know if it's just me - maybe it is just me, but do you know what, I couldn't give a thruppeny if it is just me - but there seems something tiresome in 2008 of having to relate these news stories from The Abroad in terms of how many Brits were among the piles of bodies. How does it really make a difference? So we know one Briton was unfortunate enough to have been slaughtered by the pitiless murderers... does that make a difference? Are we supposed to empathise with him more than the others? Is the one Briton's life somehow worth more than the Indians gunned down at the train station? Why all the focus on the hotel atrocities when the epicentre of carnage took place there instead? Can't we break away from this kind of coverage, and say that dead people are dead people are dead people? Isn't there any way of doing that?
I don't know, but I really have grown tired of it. I've grown tired of the fact that I wouldn't have read much about this incident, unless it had apparently targeted westerners, because apparently that's what I want to read about. Apparently I wouldn't care if it were just some foreigners being gunned down - unless they're white foreigners in an American or Finnish school, for example, and then it's of vital importance to me. Oh, I just don't know. But to me it just seems that the attitude of our media, concentrating on 'people like us' first and everyone else as some kind of mass of humanity in a distant second place, is what may have led to 'westerners' being targeted in this incident. Can't get your terrorist attack noticed? Want a bigger audience? Then go for some whites! And see the viewing figures go through the roof.
* My new best friend, William/William Gazy, has already decided for me that I don't regard the perpetrators of these crimes as being bad people, because they're not white, and for some reason my PC NuLab brain can't process the idea that non-white people are bad. And while I do appreciate being told what I already think by a trolling turd, I'm afraid he's wrong. I tend to think that people who shoot other people are quite bad men, and that the shooting of other people is quite wrong.
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Hello. I'm a Bristol-based writer and soon-to-be-redundant journalist. You can read more about me and the Enemies site here, or follow me on Twitter. Email me if you like - antonvowl at live dot co dot uk
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November 28th, 2008 - 10:04
‘My new best friend, William/William Gazy, has already decided for me that I don’t regard the perpetrators of these crimes as being bad people, because they’re not white’
I understand your taste for specious reasoning and aggressive sarcasm is the very bedrock of your world view; but you must also realise that, mutatis mutandis, that very same outlook runs the Daily Mail. Maybe you should read deeper into Orwell’s essays. You will find that it is oh so easy for the wild-eyed righteous young radical to absorb and use the tactics and strategies of his opponents and often become worse than them. A quick consideration of the crimes of the two major communist revolutions of the 20th century will show where pathological hatred, a sense of absolute righteousness and an expedient attitude towards truth (three things you evidently have in abundance) will lead you.
I did not say you didn’t regard Islamists as ‘bad people’, you liar, I said that you tend not to get publicly outraged by them the way you do when white armies kill people. I said I thought it was because your outpourings are not based on sound anti-fascist principals but on certain specific hatreds and neuroses about the country you live in. In the little room in your head where you think what you really think (as Graham Greene called it) I am willing to bet you think that ‘the old white people being led to safety’ deserve to be shot, man, because of what ‘western imperialism’ has done. I cannot prove that, but since every person I have met with your veiwpoint has said something like that sooner or later in an unguarded moment, I think it’s a good bet. Your first reaction to 9/11 was: ‘They deserved that.’ Right?
November 28th, 2008 - 10:13
No, wrong. You couldn’t be more wrong. I don’t think about 90 per cent of the things you so confidently think I think. Of course I don’t think white people deserve to be shot, any more than brown people; that’s kind of the point of wanting everyone to be treated equally. But you triumphantly imagine that I do, so you can lambast me for opinions that I don’t have. Because you’re a fucking idiot as well as a cunt. I don’t mind anyone slagging me off for things I say, but not for things I don’t say but which you think I think because you ascribe a set of values and ideas to me that I don’t actually have. Troll.
November 28th, 2008 - 10:25
Don’t feed the trolls. Ever. You’ll never get rid of the buggers if you so much as acknowledge their existence.
November 28th, 2008 - 10:41
“unless they’re white foreigners in an American or Finnish school, for example, and then it’s of vital importance to me”
I don’t remember anyone in the UK paying much attention to the Finnish school shooting, or even to most American ones.
November 28th, 2008 - 10:42
William should really go back to the club where his brandy and cigar is waiting for him.
That and a sound spanking at the hands of Madam Siegfreud…
AND he’s still only done one post on his own blogsite.
Clearly he’s busy writing more on your site (and selling those scintilating articles for the “national” newspapers) to bother with his own site.
Carl Eve
November 28th, 2008 - 11:03
Interestingly the troll seems to have two different profiles on here. We have
William Gazy http://www.blogger.com/profile/11040712094749807389
And
William http://www.blogger.com/profile/16055515812503947157
The plot thickens!
November 28th, 2008 - 11:55
A quick bit of Googling reveals a William Gazy posting comments under articles by the king of blustering right wing twats – Peter Hitchens.
Judging by Mr Gazy’s pseudo-intellectual rantings, it would seem he fancies himself as a bit of a Hitchens. Or even fancies a bit of Hitchens.
Though I wonder why he felt the need to post comments under his story? Surely being a NATIONAL newspaper journalist of such repute he’d had popped out for large Booths and tonic with his old chum to chat about it in person…..
By the way I have no idea what ‘troll’ means – is it it geek speak for cunt?
November 28th, 2008 - 18:54
Thank you for this. It’s been on my mind since the I first saw yesterday’s Telegraph, where, under the headline of the collapse of Woolworths, was a column about “Britons targeted in Bombay terror”. Obviously The Mail et al were fair worse.
For one thing, the Empire is long gone. and maybe it’s time to start referring to cities the way their own governments do. But moreover, as you so rightly point out, maybe we can stop the parochial coverage that means something only matters if “one of us” was a victim.
The US media was just as bad. On CNN, the anchor was breathlessly asking Christiane Amanpour, the Chief International Correspondent, if this was the “test” Obama was always going to face. She brushed him aside, but all this commentator seemed to want to do was put a tragedy into a national framework.
But this is nothing do, and probably isn’t just about the home country. Coverage of Rwandan vs Kosovan genocides, anyone?