(Times-UK) Ben Macintyre - In The River War, his account of the reconquest of the Sudan that ended in the battle of Omdurman in 1898, Winston Churchill saw the Sudan campaign as a conflict between barbarity and civilization. Of the battle of Omdurman he wrote: "Civilization - elsewhere sympathetic, merciful, tolerant, ready to discuss or argue, eager to avoid violence, to submit to law, to effect compromise - here advanced with an expression of inexorable sternness." That, undoubtedly, would have been Churchill's response to the suicide bombings in London: these are not disasters to be "tamely survived" but an immoral assault on civilized values, to be fought with "inexorable sternness."
2005-07-26 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive