LONDON: FICTION BECOMES PREDICTION

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LONDON: FICTION BECOMES PREDICTION IN "DIRTY WAR" *PIC*

 

Posted By: Patriotlad <Send E-Mail>

Friday, 15 July 2005, 10:28 p.m.

"THE GLOBAL CIVIL WAR FICTIONALIZED IN "DIRTY WAR" FROM 2004 -- IS IT

PREDICTIVE FICTION OR IS IT FOREKNOWLEDGE OF THE LONDON BOMBINGS OF

7/7 ??"

http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=74996

 

The world emerging from the next great war, then, will be a tougher

world, more disunited than ever, abounding still more in concealed

aims and secret preparations and the fears and suspicions they

engender. What else can it be ?

 

This is evident for example in the steady increase of bomb-making and

bomb-throwing in the world. It is a growing feature of the normal

social life.

 

In a world of deepening misunderstandings and grievances, there is no

reason to doubt that they will become as common as road accidents and

as little thought of, a part of the normal give and take of politics.

People will harden their hearts to the consequences until the bomb

comes to themselves, and then their enlightenment will be too late."

-- from "Decadent World" in The Fate Of Man by H.G. Wells, 1939.

 

THE GLOBAL CIVIL WAR FICTIONALIZED IN "DIRTY WAR" FROM 2004 -- IS IT

PREDICTIVE FICTION OR IS IT FOREKNOWLEDGE OF THE LONDON BOMBINGS OF

7/7 ??

 

Written by Daniel Percival and Elizabeth Mickery, "Dirty War" was

released in Great Britain in September of 2004 and co-produced by HBO

and the British Broadcasting Corporation. This made-for-television

movie about a suicide bomb attack on central London features an all-

British cast and excellent performances by three of the principal

actresses. Directed by Daniel Percival, "Dirty War" is a highly

compressed version of the big story behind a suicide bombing planned

by Islamic extremists, including both Britons and foreign agents. It

was released in the United States in January of 2005 and is available

on DVD for rental.

 

 

"More and more the world will be for the tough, the secretive, the

treacherous and ruthless. Cities will be dangerous labyrinths", wrote

H.G. Wells in 1939, just before the outbreak of a second general

European war. The great science fiction writer and essayist despaired

of ever seeing an Age of Reason, again. He feared that people in

general would, "under the stress of their conscious helplessness, ...

lapse into mystical religiosity, refuse to bear children, [or] resort

to suicide".

 

Although he could not know it in 1939, the opinions he ventured in

The Fate of Man come remarkably close to being an exact description

of radical Islamic doctrine, especially as presented in the HBO movie

made by Daniel Percival. One of the outstanding but little-known

talents in this television drama is Koel Purie, who plays a British

Muslim police investigator named Sameena Habibullah. She speaks

several languages including Arabic and she abhors the ruthless

violence being advocated by the likes of Al Qaeda and other extremist

groups.

 

References to the Madrid train bomb attacks are included in "Dirty

War," so those viewing this fictional presentation find themselves

located directly in this time, this day and age. There are, however,

some very disturbing or thought-provoking congruences between the

film and the real-time events of July 7th, 2005, in London.

 

First and foremost, there is the element of surprise. In the way of

investigating something different -- the capture of three North

African men who entered Great Britain under false identities, and who

were photographing a U.S. installation at Menwith Hill -- the Anti-

terrorism squad of the metropolitan police uncovers what seems to be

a reconnaissance cell or a logistics cell of an unknown network. In

short order Habibullah helps the investigating officers to determine

that their suspects are not linked to the erstwhile North Africans.

 

Percival's interweaving of elements -- showing the radical cell

working on assembling a "dirty bomb", i.e., a regular bomb with

radioactive chemicals added to make it more deadly, while police are

trying to figure out who is who -- works really well. It takes some

time and some information-sharing for the investigators to awaken to

the concept of a pending radiological attack. In a similar way, many

experts have commented upon the fact that the July 7th suicide

bombings seem to have been a complete surprise to the British police.

 

Secondly, the plot of "Dirty War" contains several important markers

which raise important and thorny questions -- like, do any of the top

police officials in Britain ever watch their own countrymen's work on

the television ?? The action and the use of many street scenes and

locations about London indicate clearly, that the production and

filming of "Dirty War" had to be conducted with the express

cooperation, and help of London's metropolitan police. There are many

important scenes with large crowds and the movie begins with a

response drill being conducted by fire and rescue personnel.

 

THE LIVERPOOL STATION CONNECTION

 

Several viewings of "Dirty War," for the purpose of a close analysis,

bring the similarities between fiction and reality more closely into

focus. As has been reported extensively and by different, competing

news operations, the first three bombs set off on July 7th appear to

have all been timed for 8:50 AM.

 

The first suicide bomb attack in "Dirty War" goes off at 8:00 AM

precisely, and the two bombers are positioned in a rented van filled

with make-shift explosives and radioactive powder. They detonate

their mini truck-bomb near the entrance of the Liverpool Station. One

of the three blasts of July 7th went off in the underground near

Liverpool Station.

 

Another one of the July 7th explosions happened in the underground on

a train that was approaching Edgware Road Station. In "Dirty War,"

the planning agent who is coordinating the reconnaissance and attack

cells meets one of his organizer agents at a cafe on Edgware Road.

This planning agent is a respectable management consultant with no

obvious ties to any radical group, originally from Jordan. He is also

registered as an adult student at the University of London.

 

The bomb which ripped apart a London double-decker bus exploded very

near to the University of London, at Tavistock Place.

 

The North African infiltrators who are being checked by police at the

beginning of "Dirty War" are traced to a Bed & Breakfast hotel in

Leeds. Two of the real-life bombing suspects lived in Leeds.

 

The technical mastermind of "Dirty War" is an unidentified Pakistani

infiltrator. The logistics or support cell which helps him get set up

consists of British-born Muslims of Pakistani origin. Two of the

young men now thought to be the suicide bombers of July 7th, S.

Tanweer and H. Hussain, are British born Muslims from families who

emigrated from Pakistan.

 

"THE COMING BARBARISM" HAS ARRIVED IN FACT AND FICTION

 

"The coming barbarism will differ from the former barbarism by its

greater powers of terror," wrote H.G. Wells in 1939, "urgency and

destruction, and by its greater rapidity of wastage. What other

difference can there be without a mental renaissance ?"

 

More than sixty-five years have elapsed since Wells published The

Fate Of Man, a brilliant, acid-penned evaluation of a modernist

Europe so paralyzed with indifference that it could neither

understand nor react to the obvious terrors of Stalinism, or to the

obvious threats of National Socialism.

 

The Britain of Wells' time is gone, now, replaced by the dim-witted

brutality of soft-shoe socialists, and their political opponents, the

Thatcherite "comfortable Right". The subtext of Daniel

Percival's "Dirty War" is as chilling as the plot and the action,

itself. These young Islamic radicals depicted in his fiction are not

concerned with the inequities of "free trade" between wealthy and

progressive democracies and developing countries in Asia or Africa.

They are not motivated by Marxist fantasies of The New Socialist Man

nor by some neo-pagan obsession with GAIA or global warming.

 

As Koel Purie's character puts it so succinctly, in "Dirty War,"

these young radicals find themselves immersed in the greater

brotherhood of Islam and in the concept of all Muslims being family.

Therefore what happens to their "family" in Kabul or Baghdad or in

Gaza, happens to them as well. As Percival shows in this chilling

story of suicide bombers who set off a radioactive device meant to

contaminate thousands of people, condemning many to a slow and

wasting death, the motivation is not monetary or proprietary -- and

therefore they cannot be bought off. Sameena Habibullah tells her

colleagues that these angry young men are seduced by the purity of a

fanatical creed within Islam and are, therefore, "brainwashed."

 

As other and more brilliant writers and observers of the human

condition have noted, in years past, revolutions in modern industrial

societies are not ginned up from the impoverished nor even from the

working poor. They originate in the lower middle-class and among

those who are well-educated but also receptive to a kind of "retro-

Puritan" philosophy.

 

The Islamic radicals in "Dirty War" are not poor, they are not

deprived, and they are not isolated in some kind of Mercedes-lined

ghetto of the Umma. They work, they dress well and speak properly and

carry on their dastardly plotting with the latest technologies --

cellular telephones, computers and instant messaging, the free

exchange of goods across many boundaries, and the new techniques of

Identity Theft. The two young men from Leeds who have been named as

being suicide bombers in the July 7th attacks bear an uncanny

resemblance, culturally speaking, to these fictional characters !!

 

The congruences and similarities of the fiction of "Dirty War" and

the events of July 7th in London are even more chilling than the

context of the made-for-TV movie. Parts of the most important

commercial districts of London are left unusable because of the gamma

radiation in the dirty bomb, and the value of houses in neighborhoods

near the blast plummet rapidly in the immediate aftermath of the

suicide attack. The subtext is that people who care only about money

and commerce are wholly vulnerable to the radicalism of these neo-

Puritans and Islamic fundamentalists, who seem to truly believe that

mass slaughter and maiming of innocents who are also "infidels", is

wholly justified and proper.

 

The police and fire officials charged with public safety and security

helped HBO and the BBC in the production of "Dirty War" .... They

should have screened it a couple of dozen times for their best

counter-intelligence operatives and agents.

 

The patterns of behavior demonstrated in the fiction of "Dirty War"

seem to have been replicated almost exactly in the way the attacks

underground, on July 7th, were carried out. Had the suicide bombers

of real life been able to use radioactive contaminants, life in

central London would have been disrupted for a generation to come,

and thousands of real people would have been as grievously injured as

were the thousands of fictional victims depicted in Daniel Percival's

brilliant and disturbing 2004 television drama.

 

H.G. Wells' The Fate Of Man was published by Longmans, Green &

Company.