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Capitalism's Final Solution - what took so long...?

By FLACO

Though isolated from the thoughts of the majority of the planet, George Bush is not crusading alone. Last week, pollsters at ICM and Gallop jostled to tell us exactly how big a majority of Britons are clamouring for blood in the Afghan hills. The phrasing of the Daily Telegraph-sponsored questions, or the persuasions of the target poll group, are not important. After all, pressmen and broadcasters have spent the last week valiantly enforcing the illusion that leaders speak for people and governments speak for nations.

Yet outside of Texas and Kandahar, this is not necessarily the case. Many people, though sympathetic with the innocent victims of the Manhattan attack, are saying: "Well, they [America] had it coming."

Perhaps a debate on the levels of innocence between Deutche Bank Fund Managers and Iraqi babies killed by American pilots is inappropriate right now, but greater TV coverage and more expensive real estate does not make their deaths more 'important'.

Unlike American Airlines Flight11, and the subsequent baffled response of the media, the motivation for Tuesday's attack did not 'come out of the blue'.

"The idea that we've done something to provoke them is repellent," one ex-US government employee come expert commentator told the BBC's Radio 5Live. The saturation bombing of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia never happened of course. Neither did the bloodletting in Guatemala, Chile or Nicaragua. Invasions and incursions in Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Libya, Iran, Iraq and the Balkans were all carried out in the name of 'stability', as was the manufacturing of state terror by Turkey, Israel, Iraq and Indonesia. For fifty years or more US banditry has left a global trail of dead and landless in its quest for control.

Liberal voices in the Guardian newspaper have described Bush's crusade as heralding a "reversal" of globalisation. I don't agree. Globalisation - or more accurately the securing of global control of resources, wealth and power by the West - has never been about market freedom and has always been steered and supported by Western governments. If George W Bush and Tony W Blair have their way, we may be about to witness 100 years worth of global capitalist power expansion in as many days. This is globalisation in fast forward. Whitehall is threatening a "lengthy" campaign against "terrorism" that could last ten years. A decade to complete world domination? Sounds like fast work to me. No more squeezing, no more loans, no more gerrymandered puppet governments, threats or sanctions - just, give us the keys and shut the fuck up! Job done. - and what a result.

Democracy (remember democracy - it's the thing Osama bin Laden and the rest of the terrorist demons are out to destroy) well that'll just have to be put on hold (you mean it wasn't - ed). The language says it all. Blair goes to the US to be BRIEFED, Blair TELLS Parliament (Channel 4 News 14.9.01) how far Britain will tag along with America's battle plan. And George W stomps around the oval office like some charicature DC-Comics despot President plotting his mythical 'war on terrorism'. "You're either with us or you're against us!" There is no complexity, there is no history. Either you support the messaniacal lunacy and imminent bloodbath of 'Operation Infinite Justice' (read Operation Infinite Control) or you're a scumbag dancing on the graves of New York's finest. Taliban or Texan, Turban or Stetson - there ain't no third way now!

America, we are told (in every UK Newspaper, every day since 11.9.01) has 'every right' to avenge itself for an attack on its homeland. Yet - nobody else no right to avenge themselves for America's rolling genocide against their lands and people. Despite cursing the 'terrorists' "cowardly" tactics the "allies" are out to "defeat the enemy at it's own game" (The Times 20.9.01). Why weren't the CIA out assassinating these foreigners - how could it possibly be the other way round? The Taliban's jihad/holy war is the strategy of killers and madmen, yet Bush's jihad is a reasonable response by a nation under siege. Similarly, fundamentalists are okay if they're on your side. The Osama bin Laden/Mullah Omar - a man so deranged he refuses to be photographed - double act, draws gasps of 'how can we let them live?' Yet when Bush appears in a New York Cathedral alongside reactionary-TV evangelist-nutter Billy Graham, all is well with the western world.

One arsehole's holy crusade is another's act of provocation. You can tell who's in the right by asking for receipts. If you've given billions of dollars to multinational arms manufacturers in order to equip your army - then you're the good guys. If you dared to nick your missiles and machine guns from the last invader - then you're gonna get whats comin! If this is to be the valley of death - how fitting that we are shepherded into it by a couple of minted oil barons who soared to the crest of their respective waves of bogus legitimacy on daddy's ill-gotten gains, greasing palms and executing their own people along the way. Bush's village-idiot status is tempered by the constant 'reminder' that Colin Powell and Dick Cheney are a couple of steady hands pulling his strings. Well that's okay then - what the fuck are we worrying about?

So America is off to central asia - to where empire's go to die - a holy war in a dusty minefield against a people living on grass and animal feed. Donald Rumsfeld tells us Amerikkka has the stomach for a long fight - just as they did during Vietnam (ahh - the luxury of rewriting history). The catch is, we're all coming too.

Meanwhile, back in the belly of the beast, assimilated Muslims are being cornered into apologising for Islam's excesses. The BBC's Newsnight produces a London Afghan who says: "America has every right to invade my country," (19.9.01) while upstanding UK Muslims "disown the lunatic fringe" (Daily Telegraph 20.9.01). The Muslim Council of Britain dutifully disown any dissenters as "clowns". We all defer to our leaders.

In a posting to YearZero.org's message board, Rachel from Yorkshire summed it up quite nicely: "I know that most folk will carry on with their three minute silences and ignorance - not for the folk who jumped out of the WTC towers, not for the ordinary people who have lost friends and family... but because the US is the most powerful country in the world and, like when royalty dies, the world has to join in showing fealty."

Then we had the cheering Palestinians. Pre-teen kids who have spent their short lives watching their friends and fathers gunned down by American armed troops with US supplied M16s and Apache helicopters. Children whose homes have been bulldozed by American tanks at the whim of an American crutched oppressor. Kids whose only direct experience of Uncle Sam is when he strafes arabs with bombs and fire and depleted uranium - how dare these young upstarts feel anything but sorrow and remorse when America takes a direct hit in the seat of its financial and military powerbase.

There is an ongoing debate over when these images were taken - but that is to deny these feelings exist. Okay it suits the rabble rousing agenda of the press to whip up enough anti Islamic fervour to back the new crusade - but America is hated and feared throughout the planet. But, as long as the cellphone calls from the World Trade Tower keep getting played on our radios and the aircraft carriers keep gliding across our screens no-one will ask why. After all, a result is about to be had - A few days after the towers fell, the brother of one of the victims, said he thought war was not a legitimate response to the attacks and that Bush "should be caged". Unfortunately Bush's crusade is less a response to the attack, and more an escalation of America's existing imperialist agenda that caused it in the first place. US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld shed some light at the end of the tunnel last week when he told the Pentagon faithful of his government's plan to "end" non-compliant states. The world has just subjugated itself to American supremacy - and despite the implied transience of a 'war coalition', this is not intended to be a temporary state of affairs - all that remains to be done is sweep up a few dissenting arabs - and who said capitalism's days were numbered?