Bombing Manchester
The Nazis bombed the hell out of Manchester in late 1940, killing 684 just before Christmas. In 1996, the IRA detonated a massive bomb in the heart of Manchester. No one was killed because the IRA called in a warning. Still, over 200 people were injured. In 2017, a suicide bomber blows himself up at an Ariana Grande concert. Twenty-two are dead thus far, many of them teenagers no older than my sons. We’ve yet to determine the size and color of the chip on this asshole’s shoulder. But I can pretty much guarantee you that, regardless of his politics, he wanted the same thing the Nazis wanted in 1940, and the IRA wanted in 1996: namely, to scare the shit out of the people of Manchester.
Scared people are incredibly predictable. They’re also remarkably easy to manipulate. In a sense, then, the problem of terrorism is akin to a classic boxing problem: the jab. If, like me, you’re right-handed, the left-hand jab is so unbelievably useful precisely because it bypasses your opponent’s rational mind. His hands fly up reflexively to block the punch that doesn’t matter whilst you hammer him with the one that does. Of course this trick won’t work on the well-trained, who’ve learned how to override their knee-jerk impulses. Wise fighters don’t fall for the jab. Same is true of wise citizens.
My mother was born in Manchester in 1950. Her parents, my grandparents, were part of the generation that defeated the Nazis. They knew how to respond to terrorism! They knew how to avoid falling for the jab! Just look at all of those amazing old photographs of defiant Brits having picnics and playing cricket in craters left by yesterday’s bombing raid. That sent a message!
Like bratty kids who throw temper tantrums in toy stores, terrorists do what they do because it’s worked for them in the past. As Yuval Noah Harari puts it in Homo Deus (2015): “Terrorists are like a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so weak that it cannot budge even a single teacup. So it finds a bull, gets inside its ear and starts buzzing. The bull goes wild with fear and anger, and destroys the china shop. This is what happened in the Middle East in the last decade. Islamic fundamentalists could never have toppled Saddam Hussein by themselves. Instead they enraged the USA by the 9/11 attacks, and the USA destroyed the Middle Eastern china shop for them. Now they flourish in the wreckage.”
The enemy has come to believe that he can sway elections with bombs, shape foreign policy with fear, and write laws with blood. We need to disabuse him of these notions, friends. We need to prove him wrong. As Napoléon once quipped: “Never do what the enemy wishes you to do.”
