Somewhat belatedly, this month’s Harper’s contains an essay about the July 7th London bombings. (A direct link to the article is not yet available. An update will be posted.)
I was in London for the six week NYU journalism course and remember that day well. The article made me take another look at the ongoing debate about objectivity.
I was just outside of central London in Lewisham the morning of the bombings. That’s normally a 20-minute ride by light rail back to the city. After spending the first part of a rainy morning with a friend who, undeterred, went to the airport for a flight to Spain, I spent a few hours in a diner near the rail station. Once the trains were running again, I made it back to Charing Cross, and walked a very long way back to my dorm in very high heels.
There was an unexpected attack on the public transportation system and we didn’t know if there would be more. Rather than panic, people walked. They talked and ate at that diner. They stopped in pubs along their way in central London for news updates and a pint. The National Portrait Gallery in Trafalgar Square stayed open until 5 that same afternoon. To my mind, the British that day showed a great deal of calm and courage. Many seemed to expect that something like that would happen since 9/11.
In the essay, the author, Charles Glass, compares the British on July 7th to the reactions during the Blitz 50 years ago.
On that first day of the Blitz, 430 Londoners died. Intensive bombing continued for fifty-six straight nights, stretching on with varied force until May 1941. In January of 1941, George Orwell wrote to his American readers in Partisan Review that the bombing ‘is less terrifying and more of a nuisance than you perhaps imagine’ and that ‘the actual casualties were very few.’ While MacKenzie Young called the first night’s death toll in 1940 ‘very small,’ Britain’s press and politicians behaved on July 7 this year as if fifty-six dead meant Armageddon.
He goes on to criticize the British for staying off the streets after July 7th, and Tony Blair for inciting “hysteriaâ€.
Based on sheer numbers, the Blitz was the worse of the two, without a doubt. And it’s true that there was a big reaction from the media and politicians after the attacks this summer. But I’m wondering if the British back then could imagine the situation we’re in now. In many ways, objectivity is something we strive for rather than achieve. Can we make this sort of comparison about events 50 years in the past without overwhelming bias?
Terrorism has everyone analyzing the best course of action. Looking at government reaction to an attack is one thing. But analyzing the actions of ordinary people might require a bit of distance for a fair judgment. Perhaps, a couple of years down the road when, hopefully, some current issues have been resolved, we’ll look back on July 7th with a different set of eyes.
willemmarx @ November 20, 2005 - 3:10pm
I read that article in Harper's and did wonder somewhat at Charles Glass' heavy criticism of the British public in the wake of the bombings. I think it was an attempt rather to criticise Blair's "scare-mongering" (the phrase I believe he uses), in the same way that commentators here sometimes criticise the White House and other state, federal and city authorities for increasing the level of terror alert as a way of keeping the public compliant.
However, it is interesting to note that Harper's is far from widely available in the UK, and perhaps Glass did not believe it would be that widely read. Though July 7th was the day I landed in Baghdad, and I watched events unfolding from a tent inside U.S. Camp Victory, I know that many Londoners would be upset and even angry by his criticism of their overreaction. There are many differences between modern Brits and those of the 1930s and 40s, but I believe Mr. Glass should have focused more on the way the government coped with the disaster, than on the way ordinary people did.
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