I was watching “The War of the Worlds” at my local theater, but thoughts of the London bombings kept crowding out the pictures on the screen. And those were remarkable pictures up there. Steven Spielberg spared no detail in showing a bloody rampage of space creatures across the American landscape. Yet the vivid gore of the movie did not overpower the awful images out of London. Why was that?
The best answer is that both “The War of the Worlds” and real-life terrorism are the same story. Intelligent beings strike at civilization for the sole purpose of killing people. Neither the space creatures nor the terrorists have any real negotiating points. Their goal is to commit wholesale murder of ordinary people, who are powerless to stop them. Even the annihilators’ favored targets – public buses, trains, planes, ferries – are the same in both the real and the imagined events.
Earthquakes and tsunamis kill humans by the thousands, and disaster movies dramatize their destruction. But these, of course, are acts of nature. The quality of the dread changes when a thinking entity stands behind the bloodletting. That’s why when terrorists, serial killers or movie vampires cause mayhem, the story is not just one of disaster but of horror.
What makes the London bombings extra frightening is that these perpetrators, unlike vampires and space aliens, look normal. Sure, the terrorists in London could be identified as ethnic Pakistanis, but they were British-born and dressed like everyone else. In Europe, where 20 million Muslims live, these four would seem unremarkable.
Darwin suggested that the ability to fear might have evolved as a tool to aid survival. But how can that instinct help you when you don’t know whom to fear? The BTK killer was the ultimate average person in his Wichita, Kan., neighborhood. Stories like his churn stomachs precisely because the villain walks among us unobserved.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Wednesday that his government would seek stronger laws to better screen out and deport the bad guys. These are the immigrants, he told Parliament, “who may incite hatred or act contrary to the public good.”
But how do you identify them? Mad-dog Muslim preachers are easy to spot, but what about the bombers’ families? The parents were the immigrants here. And while the elders may have had foreign accents and different dress, they seemed to have integrated themselves into Western society fairly well. It was their British-born children who had adopted what Blair called an “evil” ideology.
The dread of not knowing what activates the monster in seemingly normal people sends many analysts on a search for root political causes. Pull out the roots, they argue hopefully, and we can solve the problem. Islamic radicals and their “moderate” enablers like this sort of discussion. And to keep it going, they always have a list of root causes at the ready.
The perennial is the plight of the Palestinians. Right after the bombing, Tony Blair stuck to the script, talking up the $3 billion that the G-8 countries had just pledged to the Palestinian Authority over three years. But an examination of grievances attached to each terrorist outrage shows an ever-changing index of reasons why Muslims are angry.
The 9-11 attacks were hooked to the American presence on Saudi soil. The Bali bombings were blamed on Australia’s role in freeing East Timor from Muslim Indonesia. Madrid was linked to Spain’s participation in the Iraq war. Spain dutifully pulled out, but over a year later, police found a terrorist cell that they suspect planned to destroy historic landmarks in Barcelona.
Of all the reasons offered for this rage against the West, the most likely is also the vaguest: a sense of smallness. For some young Muslims, terrorism may seem a means to show mastery over people they feel inferior to. The Western leaders’ ritual of calling Islam a religion of peace only enrages them further.
This is what our societies face. And that’s why movies like “The War of the Worlds” offer no cinematic escape from reality. They present just an exaggerated version of it: Regular folk trapped in some mad plan of extermination. For theatergoers, the truly scary part comes when you tell yourself, “It’s only a movie,” and you’re not entirely sure.
Froma Harrop is a Providence Journal columnist. Contact her by writing to fharrop@projo.com.
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