On a grey and grim December day, what better way to harness the spirit of the wartime slogan “Keep calm and carry on” than to regard the California massacre not as an act of global jihad but as just another pair of US mass murderers, with a grudge against fellow health workers, exercising their constitutional right to bear arms?
I realise this is not easy when a knife attacker has gone on a rampage in east London, and the organised slaughter in Paris is still fresh in all our memories.
But let’s keep things in perspective, because Europe’s refugee crisis, the war in Syria and economic austerity aren’t going away quickly either, and plenty of people are keen to whip up fear way beyond the rational.
The rise of rightwing populists such as France’s Marine Le Pen or redneck America’s Donald Trump are the direct consequence.
So all these problems are connected and none will be easily resolved, even if the bearded puritans running the self-styled Baghdadi caliphate of Isis/Daesh are rapidly squashed by concerted international action – itself highly unlikely now. I got that timescale wrong. Daesh is digging in, as new documents revealed on Monday.
If we are in for a long haul it is surely best to do what Daesh’s prisoner citizens reportedly do in Raqqa. They are grateful for low cloud and, preferably, rainy days which discourage the bombing, much as besieged people always calculate, including Britons in the Blitz. It’s worse in Raqqa because the bombed also have their own occupiers to contend with. But people in crisis learn to be grateful for small mercies.
Chavistas routed in Venezuela a few days after the Peronist populists unexpectedly lost the Argentine presidency – must be a trend, yes? And look at Front National’s gains in France’s regional elections. More evidence of a shift to the right?
Only up to a point. As with alleged jihadi attacks, each case is different. As an economic populist, Le Pen is probably closer to the Peronists and Chavistas. Argentina’s new president, Mauricio Macri is a technocrat, perhaps closest to Australia’s new PM – by party coup, not election – Malcolm Turnbull, a rich investment banker and republican.
Not fitting either stereotype easily, apart from being a political dynast, is Canada’s new leader, Liberal Justin Trudeau. What all five changes have in common is economic distress blamed on discredited incumbents – the eternal story – but all are different. We might say the same about the Oldham West byelection: let’s not over-interpret it.
Thus the first reaction to the killing of 14 people in San Bernardino, California, was “just another US gun rampage”. If you check the media it wasn’t front-page news around the world. It’s happened too often. The triple killing at a family planning clinic in Colorado by a right-to-life type was just three days earlier, a murderous spree at a community college in Oregon happened in October.
Only when Tashfeen Malik was found to have pledged her allegiance to Daesh on Facebook as she and her husband, Syed Farook, packed their arsenal and dropped the baby with grandma did everyone go into terrorist overdrive – even Barack Obama, normally Mr Cool.
Watching the FBI press conference with its local “partners” – each very aware of their state or local status – it became clear they still don’t know much about how terrorist cells work. Lucky them, though motormouth politicians like the New York congressman Pete King, a long-time IRA cheerleader, rapidly changed their tune on terrorism after 9/11.
Yet religious zealots with festering grudges, amassing weapons and a 4x4 gas guzzler of an SUV rental with which to kill colleagues and a rival (Jewish) religious zealot, it all sounds as American as apple pie, though the mainstream majority has rallied admirably to community cohesion in its wake.
How people respond to a crisis in their midst matters more than ever for reasons set out by Rafaello Pantucci in his “terrorism as theatre” article in Monday’s Guardian: mobile phone cameras turn witnesses into instant broadcasters.
The footage from Leytonstone hardly makes for a heroic jihadi video, though they will probably do their best in the Raqqa editing suite. From the slaughter of health staff in California there is no footage, only the bloody denouement on a nearby highway. Far better, surely, as we struggle to keep calm and carry on, is the Leytonstone witness who called out: “You ain’t no Muslim, bruv.”
As a hashtag it’s gone viral. Excellent. A marketing slogan could not have done better. Let’s tell each other he spoke for most of us. We’ll feel better and that matters.
