Madrid
Its terribly shocking when you sit on a train and thinking of it exploding.. Passengers were gloomy this morning, I said 'bismillah' to myself before stepping onto the 8.33 to Kings Cross. I wondered if our World has passed into the next epoch without us realising? It would appear that liberal democratic capitalism can no longer offer the boundless freedom and security that it has done so for the last 60 years...- Well that's 'boundless freedom' for a particular group of people of course.

The terrorist response to globalisation has been to globalise. It remains to be seen if the bombs in Madrid were ETA or Al Qaeda, but to some extent it does not matter. The benchmark for terror is constantly being raised, I suppose as the stakes get higher. What scares me is how mimetic the responses from the World leaders to these acts. Jack Straw responded by arguing that the 'balance' in human rights must surely be shifted.. So what he is saying is we need to become less democratic...Terrorism is obviously not democratic.. SO does this mean that political models are converging. Are the explosions causing politics to warp and implode? Bin Laden and Bush have been compared more then once before so I shall not go there, but let me say that on the one hand violence is used to persuade the Iraqi people that democracy is the way forward by the coalition; and violence appears to be being used to persuade people to challenge the coalition and indeed the West.

In any case I suppose the idea that liberal democratic capitalism could last for ever was always unrealistic.. Empires must have a dawn and must also have a sunset, but its always 'everyday' people that suffer! The irony is that Madrid had huge protests against the War in Iraq, as did London, so if it is about Al Qaeda then I suspect support for that particular brand of politics will suffer further. That not to say that you have to support Al Qaeda in order to be anti war.. But I suspect that may people in Europe had sympathy for the 'root causes' of terrorism, namely Palestine, and US foreign policy. And I still do myself. I just cannot understand what must be in the minds of terrorists, how they can work on the fringes of morality when aiming to achieve their goals. Then again I suppose that traditional political modes of communication have become frustrated as global decisions are increasingly made in smaller exclusive circles. i.e. International finance institutions, and corporate bodies. And we have seen how the military power is stacked up against the Nation State..

I guess its a case of wait and see, I don't think that I personally have much freedom to resist either model of politics..