The lessons of Madrid
The explosions in Madrid have brought home the truth about the
so-called War on Terror.
The victims, workers of eleven different nations, had their lives
blinked out of existence by the simple deadly efficiency of modern
chemical explosives carefully applied to devastate the complex systems
upon which modern humans rely for survival. Their assassins had
been able to move freely in their midst to unleash their chaos and
carnage.
In his speech following the bombings, Tony Blair was forced to admit
that such atrocities cannot be prevented. In modern
industrialised society, too many people are moving and crowding
together to control. Explosives are too small and
concealable. He went on, that alone in history, the likely
perpetrators Ä Al Qaeda, or their sympathisers Ä are immune to reason
and rationale and that they cannot be defeated except by main force.
The likes of the trotskyist Paul Foot see terrorism as “the weapon of
the weak”. To many leftists, weakness and being the underdog is
ennobling. Indeed, John Pilger and Tariq Ali, whilst professing
to be in favour of “Stopping the War” actually are fully in
favour of it, only they favour the side that now uses bombs to kill
crowds of Iraqi workers with the same sort of technology as murdered
the Madrid workers. They support the “Resistance”. They support
it because America is big and powerful, so it must use the vicious
weapons of the weak, to defeat the great power that is immune to reason
and cannot be defeated except by main force.
Of course, weakness is not of itself ennobling, still less does it make
its possessor deserving of support. The perpetrators of many of
the atrocities of modern terrorist war are not the starvelings from the
slums, the children struggling beneath the occupying soldier's
boot. Osama Bin Laden is a Saudi Arabian capitalist Ä waging war
on his homeland's government and its American backers. His
followers are college-educated professionals, usually from well-off
families, the aspirant ruling classes of Middle Eastern states.
They would use the same weapons all ruling classes have historically
used to climb to power Ä brute force, mayhem and murder. That the
resources they possess to do this with are small does not change that
underlying intent
They seek to use their weapons to maximum effect: imposing costs, in
terms of chaos, fear, disruption and increased security, on their foes
- chiefly the American government and its allies - to the point at
which they will find the cost too great to continue with their current
policies.
Those governments themselves, of course, have a tremendous abundance of
the sort of means of destruction which the terrorists deployed in
Madrid. They have themselves, with a year, used those resources
for terrorist purposes - or for “Shock and Awe” as they termed
it. They too have slaughtered workers in pursuit of their ends.
Of course, the politicians that run those governments try to make out
that they are different to the terrorists, they have values. They
did not target civilians deliberately though they did unleash
destructive power in the full knowledge that “bystanders” would die.
The truth of Madrid is that there is no essential difference, that the
victims of that bomb were as equally human as those dead Iraqis as the
bombs that killed them were equally bombs. As human as the
deluded workers who form the potential supporters that the terrorists
are trying to win to their cause. They died amidst the pass and
fell of warring powers, even if those powers are “asymmetric”.
While Blair would attempt to cover this truth with his call for
everyone to take the side of the tiger against the fleas, socialists
declare that the only way for the workers to defend themselves against
the prospect of the permanent threat of obliteration is to wage war
against the very causes of the conflict - the division of the world
into property.
Our weapons though, are not those of destruction. The workers are
the force of creation, and can build a better world. The truth
and the message of Madrid is that the war on terror must be transformed
into a battle between the free association of producers, versus the
nihilistic battalions of destruction.
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