Posted by Anthony Lane
If you came across this footage as you were browsing the Web, you would not immediately know what you were watching. You might mistake it for a stunt, or a setup, or even a promotional clip for an upcoming film. Even when you discovered what it actually represented, you could be forgiven for finding it unreal.
The footage is British. It was Wednesday afternoon in Woolwich, a
district of southeast London. The man addressing the camera has yet to
be named, but he is not a figure easily forgotten. He wears jeans, a
dark jacket with the hood back, and a black knit cap, but his hands are
bright red all over. The right hand is free; the left carries a knife
and a meat cleaver, also covered in blood. He gesticulates, using both
hands to reinforce what he is saying. Some of his statement has been
elided for legal reasons (in Britain, the media is not supposed to
broadcast confessions), but this is a text of what can be heard in the
clip:
We swear by the Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone. We must fight them as they fight us, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth… I apologize that women had to witness this today, but in our land our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government. They don’t care about you. Do you think David Cameron’s going to get caught in the street when we start busting our guns? Do you think the politicians are going to die? No, it’s going to be the average guy, like you.
The deed he refers to is murder. He and another
man, who becomes visible later in the clip, have just killed a man
whose body we now see lying in the street: such, at any rate, is the
allegation. Nearby, only a few yards away, is a military barracks;
current reports, and these may yet be amended, suggest that the dead man
was an off-duty soldier who was outside the barracks, and who was first
deliberately rammed by a car and then set upon with the knife, the
cleaver, another long knife or machete (which can be viewed in the left
hand of the second attacker, in a separate still image taken at the
scene), and a gun. It is reported that, as the crime was committed, the
assailants exclaimed “Allahu akbar,” or, “God is great.” One
eyewitness told a London radio station, “They were hacking at him,
chopping him, cutting him. These two guys were crazed. They were just
animals. They dragged him from the pavement and dumped his body in the
middle of the road and left his body there.” The Independent
newspaper claimed that they were trying to “behead and disembowel” the
man. His body was left in the street. It was just after two o’clock in
the afternoon.
To repeat: some of these details remain unconfirmed, and no doubt the
sequence of events will soon become clearer. But various salient points
can, perhaps, be made:
1. The alleged attackers, having done their worst, made no attempt to
flee. On the contrary, they appeared keen to stay in situ; the young
man at the center of the footage, especially, wanted to deliver his
speech. According to one report, he seems to have approached a bus and
spoken to passengers, encouraging them to take photos; he was therefore
taking advantage of the fact that words and deeds, of almost any
kind—though few, anywhere, as brutal as this—can now be recorded and made public.
Soon after he spoke, armed police arrived. The two attackers went
toward them, still bearing weapons, and were shot. Both are now under
guard in hospital.
2. There is a particular horror associated with low-grade or homemade violence of this kind. The bombs used in the attack on the Boston Marathon were, as has become clear, frighteningly easy to construct; but there remains something hideous about the use of weapons that are, to other people, barely weapons at all, but household or kitchen implements. That was true of the box-cutters used by the hijackers on 9/11, and it is no less true, though of course on a far smaller scale, of the blades employed today. We might expect them, perhaps, to play a part in distressing crimes performed by those of unsound mind and thus of diminished responsibility, and, had there been a single attacker in Woolwich, our suspicions might have turned in that direction; but there were two men, obviously acting in consort, and, as far as we can judge, wholly alive to the fact and implication of what they were doing. (That is why the Prime Minister, David Cameron, and the British Home Secretary, Theresa May, have, with understandable caution, suggested that the murder was a terrorist act.) Cheap weaponry is also likely to cause concern to the security services; you can track the purchase and handling of explosives, but how on earth do you prevent someone from buying a few steak knives at a hardware store or a supermarket? Why should such a purchase even come to your attention?
3. When the speaker mentions “our land,” to which country does he refer? And does this mean that he is a foreign national, or might he be a British subject who has been radicalized, either in Britain or elsewhere? (His accent is English.) And, if so, were he and his colleague acting on their own initiative, or were they part of a small cell or a larger organized command structure, under orders from an authority that either is or is not known to the intelligence services? Similar questions, one presumes, have been occupying the thoughts of the F.B.I. and other agencies ever since the events in Boston on April 15th.
4. Last, and strangest, is the woman with the shopping cart. As the speaker delivers his peroration, a middle-aged woman approaches from behind, pulling her cart, passing him, and carrying on by. She either does not notice what is happening, or prefers not to, or pretends not to, and who can blame her? We cling to the dictum voiced by W. H. Auden, that suffering “takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” But modern outbursts of violence, compounded with the modern means of capturing and publicizing them, may compel us to revise, or intensify, that observation. What Auden was pointing to, in his poem about Bruegel’s “Fall of Icarus,” were the lives that unfold, mild and oblivious, away from the scene of death or destruction: the ship that sails on, say, in Bruegel’s painting, while the boy with melted wings drops out of the sky. But what if life itself becomes an intrinsic part of the scene; what if someone else walks dully along, a foot or two away, just as death is lying there, and as the bringer of death is still crying his wares, and explaining what he sought to achieve? That is utterly disorientating, in its clamping together of barbarism and urban normality, of cloudy British weather and startlingly bright blood; and it may begin to account for the effect—bewilderment, shaken together with disgust and disbelief—that this footage is liable to have on those who see it. As we learn more, in the ensuing hours and days, of what occurred just before the cameras were switched on, that effect is unlikely to subside.
http://tinyurl.com/ndur48n
2. There is a particular horror associated with low-grade or homemade violence of this kind. The bombs used in the attack on the Boston Marathon were, as has become clear, frighteningly easy to construct; but there remains something hideous about the use of weapons that are, to other people, barely weapons at all, but household or kitchen implements. That was true of the box-cutters used by the hijackers on 9/11, and it is no less true, though of course on a far smaller scale, of the blades employed today. We might expect them, perhaps, to play a part in distressing crimes performed by those of unsound mind and thus of diminished responsibility, and, had there been a single attacker in Woolwich, our suspicions might have turned in that direction; but there were two men, obviously acting in consort, and, as far as we can judge, wholly alive to the fact and implication of what they were doing. (That is why the Prime Minister, David Cameron, and the British Home Secretary, Theresa May, have, with understandable caution, suggested that the murder was a terrorist act.) Cheap weaponry is also likely to cause concern to the security services; you can track the purchase and handling of explosives, but how on earth do you prevent someone from buying a few steak knives at a hardware store or a supermarket? Why should such a purchase even come to your attention?
3. When the speaker mentions “our land,” to which country does he refer? And does this mean that he is a foreign national, or might he be a British subject who has been radicalized, either in Britain or elsewhere? (His accent is English.) And, if so, were he and his colleague acting on their own initiative, or were they part of a small cell or a larger organized command structure, under orders from an authority that either is or is not known to the intelligence services? Similar questions, one presumes, have been occupying the thoughts of the F.B.I. and other agencies ever since the events in Boston on April 15th.
4. Last, and strangest, is the woman with the shopping cart. As the speaker delivers his peroration, a middle-aged woman approaches from behind, pulling her cart, passing him, and carrying on by. She either does not notice what is happening, or prefers not to, or pretends not to, and who can blame her? We cling to the dictum voiced by W. H. Auden, that suffering “takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” But modern outbursts of violence, compounded with the modern means of capturing and publicizing them, may compel us to revise, or intensify, that observation. What Auden was pointing to, in his poem about Bruegel’s “Fall of Icarus,” were the lives that unfold, mild and oblivious, away from the scene of death or destruction: the ship that sails on, say, in Bruegel’s painting, while the boy with melted wings drops out of the sky. But what if life itself becomes an intrinsic part of the scene; what if someone else walks dully along, a foot or two away, just as death is lying there, and as the bringer of death is still crying his wares, and explaining what he sought to achieve? That is utterly disorientating, in its clamping together of barbarism and urban normality, of cloudy British weather and startlingly bright blood; and it may begin to account for the effect—bewilderment, shaken together with disgust and disbelief—that this footage is liable to have on those who see it. As we learn more, in the ensuing hours and days, of what occurred just before the cameras were switched on, that effect is unlikely to subside.
http://tinyurl.com/ndur48n
No comments:
Post a Comment