The New York Times and Washington Post say the strike the USA proclaimed as a targeted drone strike against an Islamic State terrorist who was an imminent threat actually killed an aid worker on daily duties in Kabul.

The Hellfire missile fired from a Reaper drone on 29 August killed 10 members of one family, including six children.

The NYT and the WP analysed videos and photographic evidence, spoke to experts and witnesses, and both concluded that the evidence suggested there were no explosives in the vehicle which undermines the evidence of US military reports that explosives in the car caused a secondary blast. There is scant evidence of this. Images of the scene to experts for analysis. One, Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, said it was highly unlikely there was a substantial amount of explosives in the car. He said fuel vapours may have triggered a secondary blast. Post-blast assessments expert Brian Castner said the second blast was probably “just the car burning or related to the gas or oil”. Three other weapons experts pointed to the lack of nearby explosive evidence – only one dent on a nearby gate, no blown-out walls, no sign that a second car in the courtyard was overturned and no destroyed vegetation.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Mark Milley, at the time called it a “righteous strike” against the Islamic State group. The US military said it tracked the vehicle from an IS safe-house and it made several suspicious stops that involved collection and delivery of items.

The dead driver turned out to be Ezmarai Ahmadi, 43, who worked for the California-based Nutrition and Education International (NEI) aid group and who was applying for resettlement in the US. Ahmadi was dropping off colleagues at various places in Kabul, picking up laptops and water bottles. Ahmadi later drove back home. Ahmadi had worked for NEI since 2006, lived at the compound with two of his brothers and their families. The 10 victims were all related to him, including three of his own children, aged between 10 and 20, and five other relatives aged two to seven.

 Up to 660,000 jobs will be at serious risk if the UK continues to fall behind other countries in the amount it invests in green infrastructure and jobs research by the TUC reveals.

 79,000 jobs are at risk in the UK rubber and plastic sector, 63,200 in the UK chemicals sector and 26,900 in iron and steel. In total it says that 260,000 manufacturing jobs could be at risk as well as 407,000 in supply chains.

The report by the TUC makes clear that the impact on employment in the UK as a result of jobs moving “offshore” to countries in the vanguard of green investment and technology will be particularly acute in the UK’s industrial heartlands in the north-west, Yorkshire and the Humber.

 The TUC in June found that the UK is second from bottom in the league table of G7 economies for its record in investment in green investment and jobs.

While the UK  is expected to invest only about £180 per person on green recovery and jobs over the next decade, Biden plans to allocate more than £2,960 per person on a green recovery in the US: jobs and programmes involving public transport, electric vehicles and energy efficiency retrofits.

Relative to population, the UK’s green recovery investment is just 24% that of France, 21% that of Canada, and 6% that of the US.

Jobs in UK sectors such as the steel industry are at grave risk because manufacturing is still dependent on the environmentally damaging process of burning coal at high temperatures. Other countries are blazing a trail in technologies that allow “green” production of high-grade steel without coal and these pioneers will prosper and expand while “dirty” old producers will wither and die.

The TUC is calling on the government to fund an £85bn green recovery package to create 1.24 million green jobs.

Job protection schemes exist in Germany, Japan and many US states, producing significant savings on redundancies, training and hiring costs, and enabling firms to keep skilled staff on their books.

The TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, said: “The world is moving very clearly in one direction – away from carbon and toward net zero. The UK must keep up with the pace of change. There’s still time to protect vital jobs in manufacturing and its supply chains. But the clock is ticking. Unless the government urgently scales up investment in green tech and industry, we risk losing hundreds of thousands of jobs to competitor nations. If we move quickly, we can still safeguard Britain’s industrial heartlands.”

660,000 jobs at risk as UK’s green investment lags | Green jobs | The Guardian

  British American Tobacco (BAT) one of Britain’s biggest companies, paid a bribe to the former Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe.

Documents show it was involved in negotiations to pay between US$300,000 and US$500,000 to Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party in 2013.

It is against UK law for a British company to pay bribes, no matter where the payment takes place.

Other documents also reveal BAT was paying bribes in South Africa and using illegal surveillance to damage rivals.

 BAT funded a network of almost 200 secret informants in southern Africa. Most of this work was outsourced to a South African private security company called Forensic Security Services (FSS).

 FSS staff were instructed to close down three cigarette factories run by BAT’s competitors in Zimbabwe.

British American Tobacco negotiated bribe for Mugabe, new evidence suggests – BBC News

Don’t hold your breath for any criminal prosecutions to take place.

 Behind the dark cloud of terror, there was a silver lining for the wealthy.

Big Tech corporations are “complicit in” and have “profited from” the so-called war on terror by at least $44 billion since 2001, according to the report,  Big Tech Sells War by the Action Center on Race & the Economy (ACRE), MPower Change, and LittleSis.

Corportions such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have been providing tools ranging “from databases to drones” to U.S. government agencies to prop up the ‘war on terror’ for nearly two decades since  the Patriot Act “opened the doors for Big Tech to become, first and foremost, the brokers of our personal data, selling to government agencies and private companies at home and abroad and unleashing the era of the data economy.”

The arms industry feeds fear so that nations’  budgets are spent on the latest improvements in the weaponry of warfare. They goad politicians into bellicose policies. In 2020, the five biggest armament contractors spent $60 million on lobbying. In the last twenty years the defense industry has spent $2.5 billion on lobbying and directed another $285 million in donations to political candidates. Their aim is always to make a profit out of war. The label “merchants of death” has long since disappeared from the media’s vocabulary. Corporations dependant on wars are respectable enterprises, their CEOs are highly regarded and lucratively rewarded.

 A report by the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, found that the US government has spent $21 trillion on war and militarization both inside the U.S. and around the world over the past 20 years. That’s roughly the size of the entire U.S. economy.  US politicians have written blank checks for militarism year after year, yet they’ve said the State cannot afford the social spending  to address the most urgent issues facing U.S. families and their communities.  It might seem logical to end the money invested in the military-industrial complex and its ever more expensive weaponry but it is an option capitalism never chooses.

The “forever war” the media progressives have adopted as their anti-militarirst mantra is really the class war

America’s leaders exploited the public’s fears in the wake of 9/11 to justify wars that have killed and maimed millions of people who had nothing to do with those crimes. 

Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz compared this in a speech  to the actions of the German Nazis he prosecuted at Nuremberg, who also justified their invasions of other countries as “preemptive first strikes.”

“You cannot run a country as Hitler did, feeding them a pack of lies to frighten them that they’re being threatened, so it’s justified to kill people you don’t even know,” Ferencz continued. “It’s not logical, it’s not decent, it’s not moral, and it’s not helpful. When an unmanned bomber from a secret American airfield fires rockets into a little Pakistani or Afghan village and thereby kills or maims unknown numbers of innocent people, what is the effect of that? Every victim will hate America forever and will be willing to die killing as many Americans as possible. Where there is no court of justice, wild vengeance is the alternative.” 

Today is Wigan’s Digger Festival, a day commemorating the Diggers, or the True Levellers, from the time of the English Revolution. 

The ideas of common ownership are part of the history of the working people of Britain. A number of people, including Gerrard Winstanley, started to build houses, and dig and plant their crops on the common land at St George’s Hill in Surrey. The Diggers, or True Levellers as they described themselves, were communists who wanted to abolish private property and unlike any other radical grouping, they tried to put it into practice. However, the Digger communes lasted barely a year. They were broken by the violent hostility of the landlords and the indifference of the poor. Ruffians were sent to the commons to physically attack the Diggers, tearing down their houses and trampling crops. The landlords took them to court and prosecuted them for trespass. A smaller group of the original St.Georges Hill Diggers who moved to close by Little Heath near Cobham received similar treatment, as did other communes established in Wellingborough in Northamptonshire, Iver in Buckinghamshire, Barnet in Hertfordshire, Enfield in then Middlesex, Bosworth in Gloucestershire and a further one in Nottinghamshire. Indeed, nine of the Wellingborough Diggers were arrested and imprisoned in Northampton jail and although no charges could be proved against them the justice refused to release them. The Diggers’ communist ideas were a powerful attraction to the poor. Winstanley produced a utopian blueprint entitled Law of Freedom, a detailed plan for a future society.

“The earth is to be planted, and the fruits reaped, and carried into barns and storehouses by the assistance of every family; and if any man or family want corn, or other provision, they may go to the store-houses, and fetch without money. If they want a horse to ride, go into the fields in summer, or to the common stables in winter, and receive one from the keepers, and when your journey is performed, bring him where you had him without money. If any want food or victuals, they may either go to the butchers shops, and receive what they want without money; or else go to the flocks of sheep, or herds of cattle, and take and kill what meat is needful for their families, without buying and selling. And the reason why all the riches of the earth are a common stock is this, because the earth, and the labours thereupon, are managed by common assistance of every family, without buying and selling . . .” Gerald Winstanley c.1652

While the Levellers and the Diggers are both relatively well-known groups, the Ranters have attracted less attention, but they were perhaps the most radical of all the sects and groups existing in this period. A prominent Ranter, Abiezer Coppe, called the abolition of property “a most glorious design” and called for it to be replaced with “equality, community and universal love.”

Many countries are holding meetings with banks, financial institutions and NGOs to clarify how to provide humanitarian aid to Afghanistan without breaching US or UN counterterror sanctions. The takeover of the country by the Taliban, which is internationally designated as a terrorist organisation, presents a legal minefield for charities trying to provide aid to the population.

The UN has imposed two sets of sanctions resolutions against more than 130 members of the Taliban – many now members of the government – and five Taliban “entities” including the entire Haqqani network. The US has long imposed broader sanctions on the Taliban as an organisation, raising questions about how banks or other financial channels can send aid into Afghanistan without risking falling foul of US Treasury penalties.

A senior UK Foreign Office official, said, it would be a complex task to find “safe, legal and transparent payment options into Afghanistan”.

Afghanistan’s population of 38 million people risks being plunged into near-universal poverty faced with a “catastrophic deterioration” of the country’s heavily aid-dependent economy, according to a warning issued by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The study, which examines a series of scenarios facing the already impoverished country under the Taliban’s new hardline rule, suggests a worst-case scenario where as many as 97% of Afghans would sink below the poverty line by next year – a staggering increase of 25%.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres pleaded with the international community to maintain a dialogue with the Taliban in Afghanistan, warning that an “economic collapse” with possibly millions dying must be avoided.

“We must maintain a dialogue with the Taliban, where we affirm our principles directly — a dialogue with a feeling of solidarity with the Afghan people,” he said. “Our duty is to extend our solidarity to a people who suffer greatly, where millions and millions risk dying of hunger,” Guterres added.

Kanni Wignaraja, the UN assistant secretary general, explained, “We are facing a full-on development collapse on top of humanitarian and economic crises.” The report warns of the need to avert a “national implosion at all costs”.

“Half of the population is already in need of humanitarian support. This analysis suggests that we are on course for rapid, catastrophic deterioration in the lives of Afghanistan’s most vulnerable people. A transition to new authorities, a pandemic, a drought, an oncoming winter season – each of these on their own would already pose a major challenge. Taken together, they form a crisis that demands urgent action,” Wignaraja said.

Deborah Lyons, the UN special envoy to Afghanistan said, the freezing of funds in a bid to keep money out of the hands of the Taliban could end up causing a lot more harm to the people of Afghanistan. Lyons pointed out that if funding were to stop there would be “a severe economic downturn that could throw many more millions into poverty and hunger, may generate a massive wave of refugees from Afghanistan and indeed set Afghanistan back for generations.”

An injection of money into Afghanistan is needed “to prevent a total breakdown of the economy and social order,” Lyons said. Much of the Afghan central bank’s assets are not held in the country and the Taliban is unable to access the International Monetary Fund’s $440 million (€372,000) emergency reserve.

China’s deputy UN ambassador Geng Shuang, said the US using the Afghan central banks assets as a bargaining chip is ultimately hurting the people of Afghanistan. “These assets belong to Afghanistan and should be used for Afghanistan, not as leverage for threats,”

The UNDP appraisal itself paints a grim picture, showing the worsening situation can only drive more people into displacement.

 It says: “Afghanistan is facing a financial crisis following the takeover, with much of the international aid that had propped up the economy frozen. With skyrocketing food prices and an interruption in economic activities and essential services, food insecurity is rising precipitously. The health status of much of the population, already compounded by Covid-19, is also of immediate concern. These ‘life shocks’ are felt hardest in poor urban and rural communities, where the most vulnerable are facing the unenviable choice of either finding a way to sustain their livelihoods while remaining in place or joining the large numbers already displaced.”

Even before the Taliban takeover, nearly half the population needed some humanitarian aid and more than half of all children under the age of 5 were expected to face acute malnutrition. Nearly 11 million people in Afghanistan, the almost one-third of the population, are already in desperate need as a result of drought, displacement, chronic poverty and a sharp increase in hostilities as the Taliban swept to power last month have pushed the country to the brink of economic collapse. A trickle of aid has been reaching the country, including from Pakistan and Qatar, since the Taliban took power, but with shortages of cash and some countries and institutions suspending aid, concern has been mounting rapidly. The Taliban’s current annual income, much of which is raised from taxation and criminal activities, is estimated to be somewhere between $300m and $1.5bn. While those funds bankrolled a successful insurgency, it is nowhere near meeting the needs of running a nation, experts say.

Most Afghans live on less than $2 a day, 80% of the country’s budget has been covered by international funds over the past 20 years, and no industries of note have emerged to provide employment to a mostly young population. Tens of thousands of Afghans have fled, most of them members of the educated professions, taking their much-needed knowledge and skills with them.

Afghans at risk of near-universal poverty, UN report warns | Global development | The Guardian

 One-third of all Americans live in a county that experienced a weather disaster this summer, according to an analysis from The Washington Post. 

Over 32 percent of Americans lived in a county or state declared a disaster area by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

64 percent of Americans live in an area that experienced a multiday heat wave over the past months.

Americans living in a weather-disaster-afflicted county or state has increased steadily since 2018, when it was only 5 percent. Even 2020, which was a landmark year for climate disasters, saw a smaller share of Americans — 28 percent — affected by natural disasters where they lived.

 In June, high temperatures broke records in the area where a large share of residents don’t have air conditioning; nearly 200 people in Washington and Oregon died. 

The overlapping disasters demonstrated that the climate crisis isn’t a far-off crisis; it’s here and now. All of these weather events were either caused directly by or intensified drastically by the climate crisis. They show no sign of stopping, as carbon dioxide concentrations increase year by year and fossil fuels continue to dominate the energy industry.

If corporations, financial institutions and governments agreed to begin drawing down emissions immediately — a more realistic but still  improbable scenario — it would still be logistically difficult to stop the world from reaching 2 degrees Celsius of warming, much less the 1.5 degrees Celsius agreed upon in the Paris agreement.

“What we are doing with global warming is making ourselves play a game that is rigged more and more against us because of our own actions,” climate scientist Claudia Tebaldi told The Washington Post.

 As most other media outlets are featuring the atrocity of September 11th 2001, the blog re-publishes the longer than usual Socialist Standard editorial condemning such actions.

Usama bin Laden’s photograph has been splashed across every newspaper front page in the world. He has replaced Saddam Hussein as the World’s No. 1 Mad Man. Already there is a $10 million price on his head. George W Bush has spoken of the old Wild West wanted posters and how bin Laden’s name is now on one. But who is bin Laden and how did he come to prominence?

Usama bin Laden is a billionaire Islamic fundamentalist, former US ally and protégé, who fronts a terrorist organisation whose fighters were trained and financed by the CIA during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. The US, in fact, were arming groups like the notorious Mujahedin a full six months before the Russian invasion of December 1979 and it is estimated that at the Russian withdrawal, US aid to them totalled $5 billion (this monetary support for some seven fundamentalist and extremist groups beginning after 1980 when Reagan quadrupled the CIA budget to £36 billion). Even after the Russian withdrawal, the US still supported the Mujahedin, though more covertly now and through Pakistan’s version of the CIA, the ISI. What they were—and still are—up to is perhaps best revealed in the words of Jimmy Carter’s adviser Zbigniev Brzezinski who described Afghanistan at the time as “the greatest chessboard”.

Most favoured status

The Islamic zealots the US are prepared to annihilate in Afghanistan were afforded most favoured status during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Under the Carter administration and beginning in 1980, they were trained in their thousands at the CIA’s Camp Peary and at the ex-army base at Harvey Point in Carolina; by the Green Berets at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and indeed by the SAS in Scotland. They would go on to be trained at Fort A.P. Hill, just off the Washington-Richmond interstate highway, and at Camp Picket in Virginia by Green Berets and US Navy SEALS. This was not simply “basic” training. They were trained in over 60 deadly skills, including the use of sophisticated fuses, timers and explosives, remote control devices for land mines, incendiary devices and the use of automatic weapons with armour-piercing shells. Thus the US went about supporting a ten-year long Jihad in the hope of preventing Russian state capitalism expanding its empire in central Asia southwards towards the Indian Ocean.

Following the car bomb attack at the World Trade Centre eight years ago, four of those arrested and charged with the attack were found to be linked to bin Ladens’s al-Qaeda organisation and amongst those trained by the US (Robert Fox, New York’s regional FBI director revealed this in a TV interview in 1993). When the US attacked bin Laden’s bases near the village of Khost in Afghanistan (along with the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory) following attacks on US embassies in Africa, they could do so with pin point accuracy for the CIA had planned and designed them.

The US is now reaping the bitter harvest of its foreign policy which used Islamic fundamentalism as a puppet in its perennial game of globo-political profit-making. For years it courted some of the most dangerous, conservative and fanatical followers of Islam, but the capitalist globalisation process, which the US has pursued obsessively, has served to make political Islam more reactionary in defence of its own culture and strategic interests.

Covert terrorism

Whilst the world is outraged at the terrorist attacks on the USA mainland, it must be remembered that the US has been conducting and supporting just as deadly covert acts of terrorism around the globe for 50 years. For instance, the US and Britain supported Suharto’s military coup in Indonesia in 1966, which resulted in the deaths of 600,000 mainly ethnic Chinese supporters of the Indonesian “Communist” Party, the PKI. And it was the US who toppled (also on an 11 September) the elected Allende government in Chile which resulted in thousands of deaths and countless disappearances. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and massacred 17,500, this act of terror was supported by the US.

Since 1945 the US has toppled some 30 governments and supported every dictator imaginable (Pol Pot, Mobuto, Amin, Marcos, Papa Doc Duvalier and Saddam Hussein) whilst seriously interfering in the domestic affairs of almost 70 countries.

In recent years the US has devastated Iraq in continuous bombing raids – even for using radar to scan airspace from which its air force is excluded. During the 40-day Gulf War, US planes dropped 177 million pounds of explosives on Iraq – the greatest aerial bombardment in history. It has imposed sanctions on Iraq that have resulted in the deaths of perhaps two million people and bombed Iraq in defence of the Kurds from the same air bases Turkey has used to bomb Kurdish villages. In the wake of the Gulf War, the US mercilessly attacked a retreating Iraqi army on the Basra road and quite literally fried to death 60,000 ill-equipped, ill-trained soldiers, the vast majority never wanting any part in the conflict in the first place. Two weeks ago, the US and Britain again joined hands in a bombing raid on Iraq. It wasn’t even reported in most Western newspapers. And where is the three-minutes’ silence for the 500,000 Iraqi children who have died of hunger and disease as a result of US sanctions in the past 10 years – a figure which Madeleine Albright described recently as “a price worth paying”?

There was of course a time when the US couldn’t help Iraq enough. During the Iran-Iraq war, the US gave its full blessing to Iraqi atrocities, even supplying Iraq with the chemical weapons it used on the small town of Halabjah in 1988 with the loss of 5,000 innocent lives. Indeed, in 1987 when Iraq attacked the USS Stark, killing 37 servicemen, there was no US response as the White House was keen at the time that Iraq got the upper hand in its war with Iran so as weaken Iran’s threat to the West’s oil supplies.

The US has launched attacks upon Libya, Somalia and Grenada, propped up right wing tendencies in Panama, Chile, Brazil, Haiti, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Colombia. In Africa it supported the gangster Savimbi as he tried to make Angola more hellish for its impoverished millions, adopted a policy of “constructive engagement” with South Africa’s apartheid machine and was all to willing to shoulder up with South Africa in its war with the frontline states. In the Middle East it has propped up despotic regimes in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf whilst at the same time backing Israel. This year alone Israel is receiving $6 in free US aid, in direct contravention of Congress rulings. During the retaliatory raids following the attacks on the US embassies in Africa, the US fired 70 cruise missiles into Afghanistan and killed many thousands in Sudan (a true figure is not available because the US blocked the proposed UN inquiry). The US ruling class’s catalogue of shame is indeed a deep one and we can only begin to scratch at its surface

Appalling losses of life

Whilst the 11 September attack resulted in an appalling loss of innocent life which no sane person could condone, the wonder is that the US has escaped the attention of terrorists for so long. For the poignant truth is that there are millions who have been murdered defeated, demoralised, impoverished and crushed by the US ruling class and its allies and who could well have turned to the pathos of terrorism as a means of evening up the score. Who knows the number of US-created Frankensteins walking the world, prepared to destroy the life of their master? This is not to suggest the US “deserves” to be bombed, but hints at the number of enemies the US ruling class has created in pursuit of global domination, forever trying to carve out larger chunks of the world on behalf of its corporate elite.

If we set this terrorist attack in a wider context, however, the loss of life in New York and Washington, whilst horrendous, is by no means the worst there has been. For instance, we can’t realistically comprehend the horror of the dying days of World War Two when, in one night alone, 100,000 died in a 1000-bomber raid on Dresden. If we make a comparison to the present, is it not an atrocity that 40,000 children die of starvation each day? Is it not a most heinous crime when 1,000 children die each hour of preventable disease (these are UNICEF statistics) and do we not find sickening the thought that twice that number of women die or suffer disability during pregnancy because of a lack of simple remedies or medical attention? We are speaking here of a Hiroshima a day which never gets reported, which is taken as accepted because it is so much a part of our way of life in capitalist society. Where is the 25-page newspaper pull-out that accompanies the recent WHO revelation that more people died of starvation in the last two years than were killed in two world wars?

Whilst we gasp in disbelief at the deaths of 5,000 workers in the biggest terrorist attack in history, it is worth pausing and remembering that the US, Britain, France, China and Russia have between them thousands of nuclear weapons capable of destroying the planet a hundred times over. Any one of these war-heads is indeed capable of creating death and destruction on a scale that would make the attack in question look like a playground firecracker. Where are the protests at this arsenal of destruction?

This in no way diminishes the fact that there has been an enormous loss of life in the USA. Those lying dead beneath the rubble in New York are our fellow workers—make no mistake about it—members of the working class, murdered whilst they were being exploited. Whilst we are revolted, as socialists we certainly do not crave the comfort of revenge. We take a more considered view.

Civilisation?

Western leaders have claimed the attack to be an assault on civilisation. But what is this civilisation that has been attacked, where 600 million have no home, where 800 million are chronically malnourished, where 1 billion have no access to clean water? What is this civilisation where three individuals have more wealth than the combined income of the world’s 48 poorest nations? How can we defend a “civilisation” where food is destroyed to keep prices high and scientists employed on weapons programmes whilst children die of preventable disease?

Since the attacks on New York and Washington, The US and British media has become a history exclusion zone, feeding only the whipped-up contagion of patriotism, whilst flag-waving and the repetitious singing of anthems trigger, in Pavlovian fashion, a national epidemic of jingoism, the only cure for which is reprisals. The dominant view is that extremists the world over are intent on destroying democracy and western civilisation – a near sighted perspective which washes well with a news-hungry audience whose knowledge of US foreign policy and basic international affairs makes it impossible for them to separate reality from distortion.

US Vice President Dick Cheney has demanded bin Laden’s head on a platter whilst his liege, Bush, informs the world that the US will not only target terrorists but those who harbour terrorists. The popular vision now is of US F-16’s and stealth bombers leaving US bases in Diego Garcia, Incilirik and from the carriers of the 5th and 6th fleets in the Middle East, their mission to level the breeding ground of Islamic terrorism – Afghanistan and any other states suspected of wittingly giving them refuge.

For the belligerent Bush, a war-monger long before his ascendancy to the White House, the terrorist attacks on mainland USA must be a blessing in disguise, providing Republican hawks and their bellicose corporate backers with a prime pretext with which to reinforce US hegemonic credentials and perhaps forge ahead with a costly National Missile Defense System now that the reality has struck home that the USA, or rather its profit-mongers and military machine, are loathed around the world.

The attacks on the US will perhaps serve to show Republican hawks the futility of this proposal. These hijacked planes could well have flown into nuclear power stations or bases containing US stockpiles of biological weapons (the US is the world’s biggest stockpiler of such weapons). They may well have carried small nuclear devices. The most sophisticated missile defence system imaginable simply cannot be programmed to read the mind of a religious fanatic incensed with the notion that his death (and those of 10,000 infidels with him) is a passport to heaven.

Bush may well speak of the terrorism the US faces from Islamic fundamentalism, but what about the global threat from US fundamentalism? Since coming to power, Bush has helped scupper the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on emissions and all but wiped his presidential backside on the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. His attitude to treaties and conventions suggests he has already declared war on the planet and that US foreign policy will continue as before and with one aim – to ensure the 21st Century is another “American Century”.

Bush claims that this is the first war of the 21st Century but it is just one battle in a larger war that began in 1945 with the US determined to control the world’s resources, and there is more than ample evidence to prove this. More importantly, though, The entire episode serves to show the insanity of the system we live in, and the desperate need to wrest control of our planet away from the madmen before it is indeed too late. In the 20th century, some 220 million lost their lives in wars, in conflicts over trade routes, areas of influence, foreign markets, mineral wealth and the strategic points from which the same can be defended or in other words, in the name of profit.

The solution to the ongoing insanity, we insist, remains the same. There is one world and we exist as one people in need of each other and with the same basic needs. There is far more that unites us than can ever divide us along cultural, nationalistic or religious lines. Together we can create a civilisation worth living in, but before that happens we need the conscious Cupertino of ordinary people across the world, united in one common cause – to create a world in which each person has free access to the benefits of civilisation, a world without borders or frontiers, social classes or leaders and a world in which production is at last freed from the artificial constraints of profit and used for the good of humanity – socialism.

Editorial: Terrorism versus terrorism – spgb.net (worldsocialism.org)

20 years have now passed since the Socialist Standard’s editorial committee made these comments. Have they stood the test of time? You tell us. 

 As most other media outlets are featuring the atrocity of September 11th 2001, the blog re-publishes the longer than usual Socialist Standard editorial condemning such actions.

Usama bin Laden’s photograph has been splashed across every newspaper front page in the world. He has replaced Saddam Hussein as the World’s No. 1 Mad Man. Already there is a $10 million price on his head. George W Bush has spoken of the old Wild West wanted posters and how bin Laden’s name is now on one. But who is bin Laden and how did he come to prominence?

Usama bin Laden is a billionaire Islamic fundamentalist, former US ally and protégé, who fronts a terrorist organisation whose fighters were trained and financed by the CIA during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. The US, in fact, were arming groups like the notorious Mujahedin a full six months before the Russian invasion of December 1979 and it is estimated that at the Russian withdrawal, US aid to them totalled $5 billion (this monetary support for some seven fundamentalist and extremist groups beginning after 1980 when Reagan quadrupled the CIA budget to £36 billion). Even after the Russian withdrawal, the US still supported the Mujahedin, though more covertly now and through Pakistan’s version of the CIA, the ISI. What they were—and still are—up to is perhaps best revealed in the words of Jimmy Carter’s adviser Zbigniev Brzezinski who described Afghanistan at the time as “the greatest chessboard”.

Most favoured status

The Islamic zealots the US are prepared to annihilate in Afghanistan were afforded most favoured status during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Under the Carter administration and beginning in 1980, they were trained in their thousands at the CIA’s Camp Peary and at the ex-army base at Harvey Point in Carolina; by the Green Berets at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and indeed by the SAS in Scotland. They would go on to be trained at Fort A.P. Hill, just off the Washington-Richmond interstate highway, and at Camp Picket in Virginia by Green Berets and US Navy SEALS. This was not simply “basic” training. They were trained in over 60 deadly skills, including the use of sophisticated fuses, timers and explosives, remote control devices for land mines, incendiary devices and the use of automatic weapons with armour-piercing shells. Thus the US went about supporting a ten-year long Jihad in the hope of preventing Russian state capitalism expanding its empire in central Asia southwards towards the Indian Ocean.

Following the car bomb attack at the World Trade Centre eight years ago, four of those arrested and charged with the attack were found to be linked to bin Ladens’s al-Qaeda organisation and amongst those trained by the US (Robert Fox, New York’s regional FBI director revealed this in a TV interview in 1993). When the US attacked bin Laden’s bases near the village of Khost in Afghanistan (along with the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory) following attacks on US embassies in Africa, they could do so with pin point accuracy for the CIA had planned and designed them.

The US is now reaping the bitter harvest of its foreign policy which used Islamic fundamentalism as a puppet in its perennial game of globo-political profit-making. For years it courted some of the most dangerous, conservative and fanatical followers of Islam, but the capitalist globalisation process, which the US has pursued obsessively, has served to make political Islam more reactionary in defence of its own culture and strategic interests.

Covert terrorism

Whilst the world is outraged at the terrorist attacks on the USA mainland, it must be remembered that the US has been conducting and supporting just as deadly covert acts of terrorism around the globe for 50 years. For instance, the US and Britain supported Suharto’s military coup in Indonesia in 1966, which resulted in the deaths of 600,000 mainly ethnic Chinese supporters of the Indonesian “Communist” Party, the PKI. And it was the US who toppled (also on an 11 September) the elected Allende government in Chile which resulted in thousands of deaths and countless disappearances. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and massacred 17,500, this act of terror was supported by the US.

Since 1945 the US has toppled some 30 governments and supported every dictator imaginable (Pol Pot, Mobuto, Amin, Marcos, Papa Doc Duvalier and Saddam Hussein) whilst seriously interfering in the domestic affairs of almost 70 countries.

In recent years the US has devastated Iraq in continuous bombing raids – even for using radar to scan airspace from which its air force is excluded. During the 40-day Gulf War, US planes dropped 177 million pounds of explosives on Iraq – the greatest aerial bombardment in history. It has imposed sanctions on Iraq that have resulted in the deaths of perhaps two million people and bombed Iraq in defence of the Kurds from the same air bases Turkey has used to bomb Kurdish villages. In the wake of the Gulf War, the US mercilessly attacked a retreating Iraqi army on the Basra road and quite literally fried to death 60,000 ill-equipped, ill-trained soldiers, the vast majority never wanting any part in the conflict in the first place. Two weeks ago, the US and Britain again joined hands in a bombing raid on Iraq. It wasn’t even reported in most Western newspapers. And where is the three-minutes’ silence for the 500,000 Iraqi children who have died of hunger and disease as a result of US sanctions in the past 10 years – a figure which Madeleine Albright described recently as “a price worth paying”?

There was of course a time when the US couldn’t help Iraq enough. During the Iran-Iraq war, the US gave its full blessing to Iraqi atrocities, even supplying Iraq with the chemical weapons it used on the small town of Halabjah in 1988 with the loss of 5,000 innocent lives. Indeed, in 1987 when Iraq attacked the USS Stark, killing 37 servicemen, there was no US response as the White House was keen at the time that Iraq got the upper hand in its war with Iran so as weaken Iran’s threat to the West’s oil supplies.

The US has launched attacks upon Libya, Somalia and Grenada, propped up right wing tendencies in Panama, Chile, Brazil, Haiti, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Colombia. In Africa it supported the gangster Savimbi as he tried to make Angola more hellish for its impoverished millions, adopted a policy of “constructive engagement” with South Africa’s apartheid machine and was all to willing to shoulder up with South Africa in its war with the frontline states. In the Middle East it has propped up despotic regimes in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf whilst at the same time backing Israel. This year alone Israel is receiving $6 in free US aid, in direct contravention of Congress rulings. During the retaliatory raids following the attacks on the US embassies in Africa, the US fired 70 cruise missiles into Afghanistan and killed many thousands in Sudan (a true figure is not available because the US blocked the proposed UN inquiry). The US ruling class’s catalogue of shame is indeed a deep one and we can only begin to scratch at its surface

Appalling losses of life

Whilst the 11 September attack resulted in an appalling loss of innocent life which no sane person could condone, the wonder is that the US has escaped the attention of terrorists for so long. For the poignant truth is that there are millions who have been murdered defeated, demoralised, impoverished and crushed by the US ruling class and its allies and who could well have turned to the pathos of terrorism as a means of evening up the score. Who knows the number of US-created Frankensteins walking the world, prepared to destroy the life of their master? This is not to suggest the US “deserves” to be bombed, but hints at the number of enemies the US ruling class has created in pursuit of global domination, forever trying to carve out larger chunks of the world on behalf of its corporate elite.

If we set this terrorist attack in a wider context, however, the loss of life in New York and Washington, whilst horrendous, is by no means the worst there has been. For instance, we can’t realistically comprehend the horror of the dying days of World War Two when, in one night alone, 100,000 died in a 1000-bomber raid on Dresden. If we make a comparison to the present, is it not an atrocity that 40,000 children die of starvation each day? Is it not a most heinous crime when 1,000 children die each hour of preventable disease (these are UNICEF statistics) and do we not find sickening the thought that twice that number of women die or suffer disability during pregnancy because of a lack of simple remedies or medical attention? We are speaking here of a Hiroshima a day which never gets reported, which is taken as accepted because it is so much a part of our way of life in capitalist society. Where is the 25-page newspaper pull-out that accompanies the recent WHO revelation that more people died of starvation in the last two years than were killed in two world wars?

Whilst we gasp in disbelief at the deaths of 5,000 workers in the biggest terrorist attack in history, it is worth pausing and remembering that the US, Britain, France, China and Russia have between them thousands of nuclear weapons capable of destroying the planet a hundred times over. Any one of these war-heads is indeed capable of creating death and destruction on a scale that would make the attack in question look like a playground firecracker. Where are the protests at this arsenal of destruction?

This in no way diminishes the fact that there has been an enormous loss of life in the USA. Those lying dead beneath the rubble in New York are our fellow workers—make no mistake about it—members of the working class, murdered whilst they were being exploited. Whilst we are revolted, as socialists we certainly do not crave the comfort of revenge. We take a more considered view.

Civilisation?

Western leaders have claimed the attack to be an assault on civilisation. But what is this civilisation that has been attacked, where 600 million have no home, where 800 million are chronically malnourished, where 1 billion have no access to clean water? What is this civilisation where three individuals have more wealth than the combined income of the world’s 48 poorest nations? How can we defend a “civilisation” where food is destroyed to keep prices high and scientists employed on weapons programmes whilst children die of preventable disease?

Since the attacks on New York and Washington, The US and British media has become a history exclusion zone, feeding only the whipped-up contagion of patriotism, whilst flag-waving and the repetitious singing of anthems trigger, in Pavlovian fashion, a national epidemic of jingoism, the only cure for which is reprisals. The dominant view is that extremists the world over are intent on destroying democracy and western civilisation – a near sighted perspective which washes well with a news-hungry audience whose knowledge of US foreign policy and basic international affairs makes it impossible for them to separate reality from distortion.

US Vice President Dick Cheney has demanded bin Laden’s head on a platter whilst his liege, Bush, informs the world that the US will not only target terrorists but those who harbour terrorists. The popular vision now is of US F-16’s and stealth bombers leaving US bases in Diego Garcia, Incilirik and from the carriers of the 5th and 6th fleets in the Middle East, their mission to level the breeding ground of Islamic terrorism – Afghanistan and any other states suspected of wittingly giving them refuge.

For the belligerent Bush, a war-monger long before his ascendancy to the White House, the terrorist attacks on mainland USA must be a blessing in disguise, providing Republican hawks and their bellicose corporate backers with a prime pretext with which to reinforce US hegemonic credentials and perhaps forge ahead with a costly National Missile Defense System now that the reality has struck home that the USA, or rather its profit-mongers and military machine, are loathed around the world.

The attacks on the US will perhaps serve to show Republican hawks the futility of this proposal. These hijacked planes could well have flown into nuclear power stations or bases containing US stockpiles of biological weapons (the US is the world’s biggest stockpiler of such weapons). They may well have carried small nuclear devices. The most sophisticated missile defence system imaginable simply cannot be programmed to read the mind of a religious fanatic incensed with the notion that his death (and those of 10,000 infidels with him) is a passport to heaven.

Bush may well speak of the terrorism the US faces from Islamic fundamentalism, but what about the global threat from US fundamentalism? Since coming to power, Bush has helped scupper the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on emissions and all but wiped his presidential backside on the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. His attitude to treaties and conventions suggests he has already declared war on the planet and that US foreign policy will continue as before and with one aim – to ensure the 21st Century is another “American Century”.

Bush claims that this is the first war of the 21st Century but it is just one battle in a larger war that began in 1945 with the US determined to control the world’s resources, and there is more than ample evidence to prove this. More importantly, though, The entire episode serves to show the insanity of the system we live in, and the desperate need to wrest control of our planet away from the madmen before it is indeed too late. In the 20th century, some 220 million lost their lives in wars, in conflicts over trade routes, areas of influence, foreign markets, mineral wealth and the strategic points from which the same can be defended or in other words, in the name of profit.

The solution to the ongoing insanity, we insist, remains the same. There is one world and we exist as one people in need of each other and with the same basic needs. There is far more that unites us than can ever divide us along cultural, nationalistic or religious lines. Together we can create a civilisation worth living in, but before that happens we need the conscious Cupertino of ordinary people across the world, united in one common cause – to create a world in which each person has free access to the benefits of civilisation, a world without borders or frontiers, social classes or leaders and a world in which production is at last freed from the artificial constraints of profit and used for the good of humanity – socialism.

Editorial: Terrorism versus terrorism – spgb.net (worldsocialism.org)

20 years have now passed since the Socialist Standard’s editorial committee made these comments. Have they stood the test of time? You tell us. 

 As most other media outlets are featuring the atrocity of September 11th 2001, the blog re-publishes the longer than usual Socialist Standard editorial condemning such actions.

Usama bin Laden’s photograph has been splashed across every newspaper front page in the world. He has replaced Saddam Hussein as the World’s No. 1 Mad Man. Already there is a $10 million price on his head. George W Bush has spoken of the old Wild West wanted posters and how bin Laden’s name is now on one. But who is bin Laden and how did he come to prominence?

Usama bin Laden is a billionaire Islamic fundamentalist, former US ally and protégé, who fronts a terrorist organisation whose fighters were trained and financed by the CIA during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. The US, in fact, were arming groups like the notorious Mujahedin a full six months before the Russian invasion of December 1979 and it is estimated that at the Russian withdrawal, US aid to them totalled $5 billion (this monetary support for some seven fundamentalist and extremist groups beginning after 1980 when Reagan quadrupled the CIA budget to £36 billion). Even after the Russian withdrawal, the US still supported the Mujahedin, though more covertly now and through Pakistan’s version of the CIA, the ISI. What they were—and still are—up to is perhaps best revealed in the words of Jimmy Carter’s adviser Zbigniev Brzezinski who described Afghanistan at the time as “the greatest chessboard”.

Most favoured status

The Islamic zealots the US are prepared to annihilate in Afghanistan were afforded most favoured status during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Under the Carter administration and beginning in 1980, they were trained in their thousands at the CIA’s Camp Peary and at the ex-army base at Harvey Point in Carolina; by the Green Berets at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and indeed by the SAS in Scotland. They would go on to be trained at Fort A.P. Hill, just off the Washington-Richmond interstate highway, and at Camp Picket in Virginia by Green Berets and US Navy SEALS. This was not simply “basic” training. They were trained in over 60 deadly skills, including the use of sophisticated fuses, timers and explosives, remote control devices for land mines, incendiary devices and the use of automatic weapons with armour-piercing shells. Thus the US went about supporting a ten-year long Jihad in the hope of preventing Russian state capitalism expanding its empire in central Asia southwards towards the Indian Ocean.

Following the car bomb attack at the World Trade Centre eight years ago, four of those arrested and charged with the attack were found to be linked to bin Ladens’s al-Qaeda organisation and amongst those trained by the US (Robert Fox, New York’s regional FBI director revealed this in a TV interview in 1993). When the US attacked bin Laden’s bases near the village of Khost in Afghanistan (along with the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory) following attacks on US embassies in Africa, they could do so with pin point accuracy for the CIA had planned and designed them.

The US is now reaping the bitter harvest of its foreign policy which used Islamic fundamentalism as a puppet in its perennial game of globo-political profit-making. For years it courted some of the most dangerous, conservative and fanatical followers of Islam, but the capitalist globalisation process, which the US has pursued obsessively, has served to make political Islam more reactionary in defence of its own culture and strategic interests.

Covert terrorism

Whilst the world is outraged at the terrorist attacks on the USA mainland, it must be remembered that the US has been conducting and supporting just as deadly covert acts of terrorism around the globe for 50 years. For instance, the US and Britain supported Suharto’s military coup in Indonesia in 1966, which resulted in the deaths of 600,000 mainly ethnic Chinese supporters of the Indonesian “Communist” Party, the PKI. And it was the US who toppled (also on an 11 September) the elected Allende government in Chile which resulted in thousands of deaths and countless disappearances. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and massacred 17,500, this act of terror was supported by the US.

Since 1945 the US has toppled some 30 governments and supported every dictator imaginable (Pol Pot, Mobuto, Amin, Marcos, Papa Doc Duvalier and Saddam Hussein) whilst seriously interfering in the domestic affairs of almost 70 countries.

In recent years the US has devastated Iraq in continuous bombing raids – even for using radar to scan airspace from which its air force is excluded. During the 40-day Gulf War, US planes dropped 177 million pounds of explosives on Iraq – the greatest aerial bombardment in history. It has imposed sanctions on Iraq that have resulted in the deaths of perhaps two million people and bombed Iraq in defence of the Kurds from the same air bases Turkey has used to bomb Kurdish villages. In the wake of the Gulf War, the US mercilessly attacked a retreating Iraqi army on the Basra road and quite literally fried to death 60,000 ill-equipped, ill-trained soldiers, the vast majority never wanting any part in the conflict in the first place. Two weeks ago, the US and Britain again joined hands in a bombing raid on Iraq. It wasn’t even reported in most Western newspapers. And where is the three-minutes’ silence for the 500,000 Iraqi children who have died of hunger and disease as a result of US sanctions in the past 10 years – a figure which Madeleine Albright described recently as “a price worth paying”?

There was of course a time when the US couldn’t help Iraq enough. During the Iran-Iraq war, the US gave its full blessing to Iraqi atrocities, even supplying Iraq with the chemical weapons it used on the small town of Halabjah in 1988 with the loss of 5,000 innocent lives. Indeed, in 1987 when Iraq attacked the USS Stark, killing 37 servicemen, there was no US response as the White House was keen at the time that Iraq got the upper hand in its war with Iran so as weaken Iran’s threat to the West’s oil supplies.

The US has launched attacks upon Libya, Somalia and Grenada, propped up right wing tendencies in Panama, Chile, Brazil, Haiti, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Colombia. In Africa it supported the gangster Savimbi as he tried to make Angola more hellish for its impoverished millions, adopted a policy of “constructive engagement” with South Africa’s apartheid machine and was all to willing to shoulder up with South Africa in its war with the frontline states. In the Middle East it has propped up despotic regimes in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf whilst at the same time backing Israel. This year alone Israel is receiving $6 in free US aid, in direct contravention of Congress rulings. During the retaliatory raids following the attacks on the US embassies in Africa, the US fired 70 cruise missiles into Afghanistan and killed many thousands in Sudan (a true figure is not available because the US blocked the proposed UN inquiry). The US ruling class’s catalogue of shame is indeed a deep one and we can only begin to scratch at its surface

Appalling losses of life

Whilst the 11 September attack resulted in an appalling loss of innocent life which no sane person could condone, the wonder is that the US has escaped the attention of terrorists for so long. For the poignant truth is that there are millions who have been murdered defeated, demoralised, impoverished and crushed by the US ruling class and its allies and who could well have turned to the pathos of terrorism as a means of evening up the score. Who knows the number of US-created Frankensteins walking the world, prepared to destroy the life of their master? This is not to suggest the US “deserves” to be bombed, but hints at the number of enemies the US ruling class has created in pursuit of global domination, forever trying to carve out larger chunks of the world on behalf of its corporate elite.

If we set this terrorist attack in a wider context, however, the loss of life in New York and Washington, whilst horrendous, is by no means the worst there has been. For instance, we can’t realistically comprehend the horror of the dying days of World War Two when, in one night alone, 100,000 died in a 1000-bomber raid on Dresden. If we make a comparison to the present, is it not an atrocity that 40,000 children die of starvation each day? Is it not a most heinous crime when 1,000 children die each hour of preventable disease (these are UNICEF statistics) and do we not find sickening the thought that twice that number of women die or suffer disability during pregnancy because of a lack of simple remedies or medical attention? We are speaking here of a Hiroshima a day which never gets reported, which is taken as accepted because it is so much a part of our way of life in capitalist society. Where is the 25-page newspaper pull-out that accompanies the recent WHO revelation that more people died of starvation in the last two years than were killed in two world wars?

Whilst we gasp in disbelief at the deaths of 5,000 workers in the biggest terrorist attack in history, it is worth pausing and remembering that the US, Britain, France, China and Russia have between them thousands of nuclear weapons capable of destroying the planet a hundred times over. Any one of these war-heads is indeed capable of creating death and destruction on a scale that would make the attack in question look like a playground firecracker. Where are the protests at this arsenal of destruction?

This in no way diminishes the fact that there has been an enormous loss of life in the USA. Those lying dead beneath the rubble in New York are our fellow workers—make no mistake about it—members of the working class, murdered whilst they were being exploited. Whilst we are revolted, as socialists we certainly do not crave the comfort of revenge. We take a more considered view.

Civilisation?

Western leaders have claimed the attack to be an assault on civilisation. But what is this civilisation that has been attacked, where 600 million have no home, where 800 million are chronically malnourished, where 1 billion have no access to clean water? What is this civilisation where three individuals have more wealth than the combined income of the world’s 48 poorest nations? How can we defend a “civilisation” where food is destroyed to keep prices high and scientists employed on weapons programmes whilst children die of preventable disease?

Since the attacks on New York and Washington, The US and British media has become a history exclusion zone, feeding only the whipped-up contagion of patriotism, whilst flag-waving and the repetitious singing of anthems trigger, in Pavlovian fashion, a national epidemic of jingoism, the only cure for which is reprisals. The dominant view is that extremists the world over are intent on destroying democracy and western civilisation – a near sighted perspective which washes well with a news-hungry audience whose knowledge of US foreign policy and basic international affairs makes it impossible for them to separate reality from distortion.

US Vice President Dick Cheney has demanded bin Laden’s head on a platter whilst his liege, Bush, informs the world that the US will not only target terrorists but those who harbour terrorists. The popular vision now is of US F-16’s and stealth bombers leaving US bases in Diego Garcia, Incilirik and from the carriers of the 5th and 6th fleets in the Middle East, their mission to level the breeding ground of Islamic terrorism – Afghanistan and any other states suspected of wittingly giving them refuge.

For the belligerent Bush, a war-monger long before his ascendancy to the White House, the terrorist attacks on mainland USA must be a blessing in disguise, providing Republican hawks and their bellicose corporate backers with a prime pretext with which to reinforce US hegemonic credentials and perhaps forge ahead with a costly National Missile Defense System now that the reality has struck home that the USA, or rather its profit-mongers and military machine, are loathed around the world.

The attacks on the US will perhaps serve to show Republican hawks the futility of this proposal. These hijacked planes could well have flown into nuclear power stations or bases containing US stockpiles of biological weapons (the US is the world’s biggest stockpiler of such weapons). They may well have carried small nuclear devices. The most sophisticated missile defence system imaginable simply cannot be programmed to read the mind of a religious fanatic incensed with the notion that his death (and those of 10,000 infidels with him) is a passport to heaven.

Bush may well speak of the terrorism the US faces from Islamic fundamentalism, but what about the global threat from US fundamentalism? Since coming to power, Bush has helped scupper the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on emissions and all but wiped his presidential backside on the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. His attitude to treaties and conventions suggests he has already declared war on the planet and that US foreign policy will continue as before and with one aim – to ensure the 21st Century is another “American Century”.

Bush claims that this is the first war of the 21st Century but it is just one battle in a larger war that began in 1945 with the US determined to control the world’s resources, and there is more than ample evidence to prove this. More importantly, though, The entire episode serves to show the insanity of the system we live in, and the desperate need to wrest control of our planet away from the madmen before it is indeed too late. In the 20th century, some 220 million lost their lives in wars, in conflicts over trade routes, areas of influence, foreign markets, mineral wealth and the strategic points from which the same can be defended or in other words, in the name of profit.

The solution to the ongoing insanity, we insist, remains the same. There is one world and we exist as one people in need of each other and with the same basic needs. There is far more that unites us than can ever divide us along cultural, nationalistic or religious lines. Together we can create a civilisation worth living in, but before that happens we need the conscious Cupertino of ordinary people across the world, united in one common cause – to create a world in which each person has free access to the benefits of civilisation, a world without borders or frontiers, social classes or leaders and a world in which production is at last freed from the artificial constraints of profit and used for the good of humanity – socialism.

Editorial: Terrorism versus terrorism – spgb.net (worldsocialism.org)

20 years have now passed since the Socialist Standard’s editorial committee made these comments. Have they stood the test of time? You tell us.