Getting spooked about the White Widow

Where would we be without the spooks? They keep us safe at night. Don’t they?

And, boy, do we need protection. Right now, for instance, we live under the dreaded peril of the ‘White Widow’.

Isn’t that blood-chilling? For a few months as a teenager, my direct route home took me through a graveyard with a church tower from which, I was assured, many had seen the local ghost, the ‘Grey Lady’, leap. It certainly made the walk home an edgy experience. But what’s a ‘Grey Lady’ to a ‘White Widow’? Particularly as the widow really exists and, as an international terrorist mastermind, she has real weapons to hurt us with.

Samantha Lewthwaite, the 'White Widow'

At least, so we like to believe. Samantha Lewthwaite is the widow of one of the 7/7 bombers who killed 26 people in London in 2005, though it's possible she doesn’t really have any capacity to harm us at all. But who cares? She’s just too perfect a villain for us not to shiver at her name.

I mean, she’s white after all. Our terrorist bogeymen are supposed to be Middle-Eastern looking – and they’re supposed to be men. A woman, and a white woman at that? Wow. That’s the stuff real nightmares are made of. She’s a traitor, to her race, by Jove, as well as a deadly menace. All she needs is to make poison her weapon of choice to become a latter-day Lucrezia Borgia.

She’s been officially dubbed the ‘world’s most wanted’ by no less prestigious a voice than Britain’s Sun, which speaks with all the authority we’ve come to expect of a tabloid newspaper. Kenya has asked for an international arrest warrant to be issued against her, and Interpol has been happy to oblige, even though there’s no suggestion she was involved in the Westgate Mall attack, or even that she’s in Kenya.

In fact, that’s precisely the odd thing about this business. Not only can we not be sure she’s in Kenya, but nobody seems to know where she is. The phrase regularly used about her is that she’s ‘dropped off the intelligence radar.’

Now isn’t that interesting? Thanks to Assange and Snowden we now know that Britain’s GCHQ and the American NSA can find out pretty well anything they like about pretty much any one of us in pretty well no time. They can quickly establish whether I’ve ordered Jessie Keane’s Black Widow from Amazon, however underwhelming that novel may be, but they can’t locate the ‘White Widow’, though we’re assured she might overwhelm us all.

All that snooping. All that reading of e-mails. All that tracking of internet activity.

Come on, spooks. You tell us you only do it to keep us safe.

Doesn’t the vanishing ‘White Widow’ make it a bit hard to sustain that claim?

Nations trek from progress, as empty causes devour flames of genius

For doomed youth, Wilfred Owen wrote, there would be flowers formed by ‘the tenderness of patient minds, and each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.’

Wilfred Owen: outstanding voice of the First World War
sacrificed to it

On 4 November 1918, with German resistance collapsing in France, French, British and American troops launched a new offensive. Apart from the war historians, nobody very much remembers what that was all about. We remember even less whether it was particularly important or not to force a way across the Sambre canal.

In fact, I have only the vaguest idea where the Sambre canal is. And in a world in which the only German soldiers on French soil are there by invitation, the idea of their fighting with each other for the possession of that obscure waterway strikes me as nothing short of madness. Germany is, after all, the most powerful and wealthiest nation in Europe and we tend to dance to its tune, without a bayonet or a bullet to enforce its will.

But back on that day in November 1918, Second Lieutenant Owen tried to take a group of men across that insignificant canal. He paid for that attempt with his life. A slow dusk came when the drawing-down of the blinds was for the poet himself. One more week and he’d have made it: yes, he died a mere week before the violence stopped in any case.

We were deprived of perhaps the finest war poet of that particularly senseless war. We may have been deprived of an outstanding poet of the peace that followed. A peace shot through with conflict, but of the social rather than the shooting kind, and which quickly degenerated again into renewed military butchery – in a single generation, as the second world war followed the first.

What words might Owen have found to sing that decline?

Poetry, of course, lived on, so that today we can read about ‘raising earthwards our cathedrals of hope’, a longing for this life rather than heaven, a hope that Owen would have recognised. As he would have resonated in sympathy with the idea of raising cathedrals ‘in demand of lives offered on those altars for the cleansing that was done long ago.’ Owen’s life was offered for a cleansing that left the world no less tainted.

Those cathedrals raised earthwards were celebrated by Kofi Awoonor, a Ghanaian prisoner of conscience who later became a Ghanaian politician and diplomat, but who was at all times a poet.

Kofi Awoonor:
another poet sacrificed to a cause

He died last weekend in the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital. He died when Islamist militants decided to wreak vengeance against civilians for Kenya’s military engagement against their movement in neighbouring Somalia. He died when armed believers decided to kill or maim at random, sparing only Muslims.

The blinds have come down for him too. Awoonor has been offered like Owen on an altar for a cleansing just as misguided. Owen proclaimed that ‘nations trek from progress’; so it seems do movements sure of their faiths, and one has now claimed his successor.

Nearly a hundred years ago, the imperial dreams of France, Britain, Germany, Russia and America, seemed important enough to sacrifice millions, including a poet of world stature. Today all those concerns are of little moment, but the poems maintain their capacity to move and amaze. How did the world gain by Owen’s death?

A century from now, I wonder whether the points of theological controversy that seem so crucial today, the beliefs that drive some to persecute Muslims, others to kill in the name of Islam, won’t also have lost their burning urgency.

And people will wonder what was served by the deaths of all those innocents in the Westgate mall. Or how the world was made a better place by depriving it of Kofi Awoonor.