London Is Not Burning

One tends to adopt major cities, if one lives in them -- or perhaps better said, they adopt you. London is one of mine. I worked and lived there parts of one year and passed through variously another. And Britain obviously is my 'roots' nation. So I can feel the loss, possibly of someone I knew or connected with one just as we felt the pain of 9/11 here in NYC. I can empathize with those who worried about their loved ones with whom they could not communicate by cell phone, just as I could not reach my wife who had headed down 'there' for a meeting 9/11.

But what I do know from my time living in London not so long after the Blitz of WW2 when the Nazis intentionally struck at civilians there -- the planes were ordered to look for the bend in the Thames and then to drop their bombs just thereafter, which was the East End of London or its poorest district where I worked with teens as a teen myself in the Bethnal Green Community Center -- is that London is not burning.

What bugs me following the terrorist attack yesterday with reports of the deaths now passing 50 is the bloody calls for revenge from some of those not at all affected directly by London's loss. We are not watching a war now -- unless one's eyes are on Iraq or Afghanistan where we did launch wars. Terrorism directed intentionally against civilians is criminality -- not war. When the Nazis did it, it was criminality. And when we Allies retaliated in kind -- Dresden and Nagasaki -- this was equally criminality. And when we assaulted Fallujah in brutal disregard of the civilians left there, this, too, was criminality. There are just wars and just ways to fight wars. Let us not beg off from justice whatever criminality we may be facing. To do so is to reduce ourselves to the same level of criminality as those whom we are charging with crimes against innocent civilians. I personally have had it with our armchair war-makers who would justify their own abominations in such cheap and despicable ways.

There are right ways to wage wars when such are absolutely necessary and a right way to peace which is not through criminality and tit for tat attacks on civilians.

London is not burning and will recover its equilibrium by tomorrow. Let us mourn with those who have lost their loved ones as we do with our own here.
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"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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