The price of liberty

Five years ago today I was approaching the end of a summer of no little indolence. I'd stayed on in my hall of residence over the summer rather than return to the clam and filth of London in July and August (consider, if you will, the impossible conditions prevalent here recently) and apart from having made half-hearted attempts to find employment (item: working in newly-opened bar - completed training weekend (! - surely "training half-hour"?) then blew it off on account of the deliberately hideous uniform; item: working in bars and restaurants around the Open golf tournament - blew it off on account of 5am reveille; item: did a few days' jobbing work in and around my hall - blew it off on account of it being severely infra dig and on account of my rapidly mounting distaste for the disastrous effect of the summer heat on my stout and deeply, wildly unattractive lady boss) had for the most part stayed up late, slept late, made the occasional trip to the supermarket to stock my newly-acquired fridge and more-or-less single-handedly kept the local Deals-on-Wheels™ skunk supplier in business while attempting to write a film and engaging in a correspondence seduction of its putative star, who was at the time exposing much of her extremely becoming form to the Los Angeles sun.

I don't mention any of this in order to contrast it with any seriousness of my response to, or any fundamental shift in my attitude inspired by, the attacks of September 11th 2001. I'm merely setting the scene. (The film was made, by the way, some 14 months later, by which time I had been fortunate enough to experience its star in all her fearsome glory (although I must admit to having exerted very little influence on the final approach, as it were); we're still friends, though not so much with the nudity these days.) There I was, then, only just dressed on that Tuesday afternoon (it being barely later than 2pm BST; I had, of course, been up until six or so that morning smoking furiously and writing slowly) - when thundering down the corridor came the colossal form of one of the few other people in my hall at the time. We were mostly on the same corridor (for the ease of the cleaning staff) and so he was simply banging on doors, yelling, in what even for a flamboyant, 20-stone, homosexual Swiss was a shockingly loud manner, that we should all "come and look at the fucking TV!" Which we did.

There's nothing that can at this point be said that hasn't been said already by writers far more talented than I. I was disbelieving (although, being still slightly fugued from the previous night, slow to grasp the sheer enormity of the spectacle unfolding in New York and its far-reaching implications which we are, of course, still feeling today and will continue so to do for some considerable time yet); we watched, smoking heavily, the occasional "Christ" or "Fuck's sake" punctuating the equally stunned though rather more eloquent commentary on the TV. Then I went and made an entirely fatuous post to a newsgroup I read, which remains to this day available in Google's archive, and was deservedly utterly ignored, receiving not one reply while the group experienced its busiest day in history.

The reaction of others in the group, though, should have been an indication of what was to come. Barely had the second tower fallen but the arguments that would come to dominate the next five years had already been soundly thrashed out, rehearsed and turned any number of different ways. People had fallen into clichéd roles: the arrogant rednecks (one actually invoked the "you'd all be speaking German" canard), the lily-livered appeasers, the supercilious Europeans ... friendships and emnities that survive to this day were formed in the heat of the immediate aftermath of that surreal New York morning.

Afterwards: blah. The world changed: duh. Clash of civilisations, oil grab, fuelling radicalism, blah blah blah Usenetconspiracytheorycakes. I'm not particularly comfortable with the War on Turr, but I know a mediæval theocracy of repression when it flies a plane into a building; I know that I prefer an open society to a closed one; I know that I prefer women in skimpy clothes to women in bin-bags - and not just becaude I'm a perv but because it means they are free to dress like that if they wish; I know that I like my science up-to-date and, you know, scientific; and for all that I can't draw to save my life I know that I like being able to draw whatever I like, however badly I do it. I know that all these things are in danger at the moment, from within and without. I also know that:

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

So said no less a pacifist utilitarian than J.S. Mill, who knew from Spinoza that peace is not merely the absence of war, "it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice." We will not have peace merely by stopping fighting; neither will we have security.