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Britain clings to its bombing addiction with the weary rationale of a junkie
Turning Libya into a jihadi Mad Max should have cured Britain’s habit. But, instead of entering recovery, Cameron is just looking to score another hit in Syria
The government seems to consider war more palatable than taking in additional refugees. Photograph: Keystone USA-ZUMA/Rex Features
In every addiction, a part of us is addicted to the process. Laying out the cigarette papers to build the joint; heating the spoon and flicking the syringe; dealing with our emails before our DMs; cueing up Netflix for when the kids go to sleep; methodically polishing the keys to our own prisons.
Britain seems to be going through the preliminaries associated with one of its most cherished addictions: bombing. Bombing Syria has probably only been postponed by Russia’s intervention. It was, of course, amusing to see the western press suddenly preoccupied about whether bombs were hitting their intended targets. Perhaps Putin should have avoided such rigorous international scrutiny by bombing only hospitals.
The recent immolation of a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Afghanistan presented us with the internal contradiction of our media’s presentation of bombing: that we have technology so precise our weapons can hear their victims begging for a trial, and that we sometimes blow up stuff “accidentally”. It has been suggested that non-white people caught up in our foreign wars are “unpersons reported”. More accurately, they are treated as subpersons. A handful of Afghans dying could make the front pages, but only if they were strangled one by one by Beyoncé as the half-time entertainment at the Super Bowl.
Historically, Syria has existed as a place where outsiders come to fight, a bit like Wetherspoon’s. No one likes Assad: he has the surprised appearance of a man who has just swallowed his own chin, and a bizarre, faint, fluffy moustache, as if he pulled on a cashmere turtleneck just after eating a toffee apple. He has created a hell for his own people that British teenagers seem eager to go to and fight in, just to give you some idea of how shit Leeds is.
Philosophers stone – selected views from the boat http://philosophers-stone.co.uk
Source: http://www.philosophers-stone.co.uk/?p=4782
