Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Why aren’t we more horrified by the Liverpool bombing?

Are we still fighting the War on Terror?

Police officers at the scene of the blast outside Liverpool Women's Hospital (Getty images)

Back when the West was still pretending to fight the ‘war on terror’, Martin Amis made an observation about the enemy’s tactics:

Suicide-mass murder is more than terrorism: it is horrorism. It is a maximum malevolence. The suicide-mass murderer asks his prospective victims to contemplate their fellow human being with a completely new order of execration.

The horror was not long in going out of horrorism. Not that the acts themselves became any less horrific: self-detonation to take out a pop concert, nail-bomb seppuku against subway passengers. Rather, we stopped being horrified. 

Of course, the initial spectacle continues to startle us, and we utter oaths while shaking our heads, but it is a hollow response. There is not the same awed foreboding that washed over when the second plane knifed the South Tower. There is much less revulsion than there was when London commuters were blown to bits on the Piccadilly line. Theatrical acts of barbarism, staged by our fellow citizens, have lost their satanic dazzle. We have become inured to horror.

There is a good deal of fretting among our educated classes about rising domestic extremism. Here is extremism, it is domestic in target and origin, and it rose quite some time ago

By rights, the attempted bombing of Liverpool Women’s Hospital should wrench us out of our self-medicated numbness. Whatever the motivation, the horror of what might have happened had it not been for a quick-thinking taxi driver is enormous. Women and babies were one locked car door from immolation in hospital wards lined with oxygen tanks.

The video of the premature detonation, and the thought of the carnage that would have been wrought had the perpetrator made it just a few more feet, will be appalling to anyone who watches it.

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