[lbo-talk] They lived in the next street from me

[Jim Devine]

James H writes:
>None of this background explains the bombings. Hasib Hussain (19),
Shehzad Tanweer (22), Mohammed Sidique Khan (30) and their last, as
yet unnamed accomplice lived the same lives as many people who went on
to do quite different things with their lives. Of course it is
tempting to ascribe political motives to the bombings, because that
makes more sense of them. But in the end, these suicide bombings are
just the equivalent of what the Americans called 'going Postal', after
Post Workers went to work and blasted all their colleagues - or a kind
of Columbine Massacre on the Underground.<

it's a mistake to seek a single cause of an empirical event in human
history. An event like the London bombings is over-determined. There's
the psychological dimension of some individuals being pushed over the
edge. There's the sociological dimension of the relationship between
"Asians" and the rest of British society (that JH sketches). There's
the political dimension of the US/UK war against Iraq. There's an
ideological dimension... Etc. It's all of these together that combine
to cause such an event.
Jim Devine