marathon bombed

just in case you have not had access to the television or internet until this very moment, it is my sad duty to inform you there has been a bombing in the city of boston, usa. some people have died and many are injured.

i cant give any further details beyond this, and i haven't the energy to rehash the various conjecture ive read so far. however what i can and will do is speculate on the causes and results that this bombing might have, because, well, i set this blog up explicitly for that purpose.

at the moment the consensus coming out of america is, of course, that some radicalized muslim or other has orchestrated these attacks. apparently a saudi national is under arrest after being tackled shortly after the blast (by a civilian) for exhibiting "suspicious behavior."

now it may well turn out that this saudi is indeed involved in the bombings, but at this point it seems hard for me to believe that this man was considered a suspect because he exhibited genuinely suspicious behavior (rather than just being middle eastern and near to the explosion when it happened)

- hear me out on this one -

the bombing is being reported as a series of different bombs all detonating at roughly the same time (a little after the end of the race) with some failing to detonate. so that suggests pretty strongly these explosives were on either a timer, or triggered remotely, rather than being strapped to the body of a radical(s) and being detonated manually.

with this in mind it seems unlikley that the culprits of the bombing would choose to be so close to the blast when it happened, unless they actually needed to be there to ignite a fuse or a trail of gunpowder (like in an old western), or were just curious to see the results.

so, on the face of it, or to me at least, common sense seems to dictate that it is somewhat unlikely one of the people responsible for the attack would be nearby at the time.

that an arab man was "arrested" by a zealous civilian immediately afterwards is not really surprising (it is common knowledge that on the whole americans are quite racially prejudiced, especially against those perceived to be muslims)

what is surprising (or, perhaps not surprising at all) is that the us media was so quick to report it, from where the news spread to international outlets. it has been reported that the "suspicious behaviour" that led to the saudi being tackled was that he ran from the explosion after it happened.

while running from an explosion might not be the bravest thing in the world, those experienced in terror attacks will know that secondary devices designed to kill those responding to the initial blast are commonplace.

coming from saudi arabia, it is not hard to imagine that this man may have been aware of this. or he may have just been terrified by the noise and so fled. hell MAYBE he thought that being an arab in america and near to a recent explosion was just as big a threat to his health as any secondary blast.

either way, guilty or not, the saudi was tackled and held by a presumably patriotic american hero, racist or not. the man was not arrested by any public official, nor was he charged with anything, nor was he a suspect for any other reason than being middle eastern when it happened and not wanting to hang around.

nevertheless, the us media faithfully reported that a saudi national was a suspect in the bombings. never mind the fact that he wasn't really a suspect, but rather had only seemed to be suspicious to some random citizen at the time, who probably broke the law to apprehend him.
a suspicious saudi man fits very neatly in to the tried and true media narrative on terror attacks that has developed over the last decade (can you think of any other memorable attacks perpetrated primarily by saudis hmm??)

so even in the initial reporting immediately following the attack the national schizophrenia of america was already well and truly on display.

what is also worth noting is that nobody in the various media spheres seemed to consider the possibility that the attack may have been carried out by one of the many right-wing groups in america, which i recall some recent study or other identifying as by far-and-away the most likely source of future terror attacks on us soil.

but this too is nothing new. after all, the oklahoma bombing wes initially blamed on radical muslims too.

all the same, my money is still on this attack being the work of islamists. not because the attacks were designed to inflict maximum causalities (right-wingers also have no compunction to mass killing), but because they were intended as spectacle.

Engelhardt wrote recently about the 9/11 attacks:

"...19 hijackers with box cutters produced a remarkable, apocalyptic, and devastating TV show in which almost 3,000 people died."

that's basically what this attack seems to be, albeit on a smaller scale. i would bet good money it was no coincidence the bombs were placed at the finish line of a major event.

and why would terrorists still want to do this? because it is proven to work. very well in fact.

history is full of amazing jokes and ironies that can usually only be appreciated in hindsight: that the jews who survived the holocaust ended up becoming fascists is an especially good one, the 9/11 attacks are another:

believe it or not 9/11 is unironically hilarious because america reacted EXACTLY how al-qaeda wanted; namely by launching a series of disastrous and unbelievably expensive wars in the middle east and trashing their economy, ideals and global legitimacy in the process.

immediately after 9/11 the whole world briefly loved america. the cliched but ever-appropriate example is the french paper le monde running the headline "we are all americans."

but instead of capitalizing on this good sentiment, america behaved exactly like the pugnacious imperialists that bin laden had charged them to be. fast forward to now, america is not loved.

in the perfect world (as secretly designed by me) this attack in boston would herald the beginning of the end of the war on terror:

after a decade of perpetual war, spectacular infringements on basic rights, and a million zillion billion dollars wasted, the american oligarchs came to realize that you simply cannot stop every single attack no matter how hard you try and how much you kill.

perhaps obama would look over the damage caused and observe the similarities between the explosion and a drone strike (this is especially preposterous i know)

perhaps the american people would realize that the small possibility of being killed in a terrorist attack is an unavoidable part of life and has been for some time (much like, oh, say, getting killed by gun violence or in a car accident- two preventable dangers that are much, much more likely)

alas however

what is almost certainly actually going to happen is that this attack will instead lead to an acceleration of america's absurd slide in to militarism.

cause and effect will be confused. this attack will be touted as hard evidence that much more needs to be done in the fight against disparate groups of radicalized individuals, rather than being seen as blow-back from america's ongoing war against much of the muslim world.

if america took one quarter of the money it now spends on intelligence and "defense" and instead spent it on useful things her economic problems would be solved in a few years. (i could probably link you to something or other but if you doubt just look it up yourself)

for the first time in years america has the genuine sympathy of the international community again. if god is kind, obama will use the opportunity to start amending for the last decade of us behavior and make use of the opportunity that this tragedy presents. if god is gay (or fake), then i think obama will use the attack as a carte blanche for some new monstrous crime or crimes that will, in the long run, only result in more americans blown to bits.