alittlepoison

1. “England lags. This country is absurd with its sentimental regard for individual liberty … The bourgeoisie of this country make themselves the accomplices of the very people whose aim it is to drive them out of their houses to starve in ditches.”
   UKIP leaflet
2. “I have always dreamed… of a band of men absolute in their resolve to discard all scruples in the choice of means, strong enough to give themselves frankly the name of destroyers, and free from the taint of that resigned pessimism which rots the world. No pity for anything on earth, including themselves, and death enlisted for good and all in the service of humanity.”
   Al-Qaeda discussion forum
3. “Their character is built upon conventional morality. It leans on the social order. Mine stands free from anything artificial. They are bound in all sorts of conventions. They depend on life - open to attack at every point - whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is evident.”
   Statement from Osama bin Laden

Actually I lied. These quotations are not from UKIP, Al-Qaeda or bin Laden. They are all taken from Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent, first published in 1907.

Quotation 1 is from a character called Mr Vladimir, a right-wing ambassador who wants to end Britain’s liberal tradition of granting asylum to foreign “terrorists.” In this case terrorists are not fundamentalist Muslims, but revolutionary Anarchists (yes, it seems pretty weird now that Anarchists were once considered a threat to civilisation). This ambassador plans to stage a “bomb outrage” in London to provoke the Government into cracking down on radical organisations.

Quotations 2 and 3 are from two of the Anarchists, one of whom walks the streets of London with explosives strapped around his body - a prototype suicide-bomber. The words of both these characters almost perfectly paraphrase recent Al-Qaeda statements (”you cling to life, we worship death”). Entire paragraphs of Conrad’s prose could be inserted into speeches being made today.

Reading this novel, I was amazed at how precisely the same shit is going on now, over a hundred years later. The language is different in style, perhaps, but the plot is essentially the same - the war between “freedom” and “terrorism,” the war (this is even more abstract and absurd) between life and death.

Anarchists didn’t take over the world in 1910, and Islamists won’t in 2020. Civilisation didn’t end in Conrad’s day, and nor will it end in ours. Perhaps we should all learn to stop worrying - as Stanley Kubrick said - and love the bomb.