So how is your war on “terrorism” going? I’m not doing too well at it since I have no idea who the enemy is. Like the American black comedian, Dick Gregory, who, on hearing that President Johnson had declared a war on poverty, ran out onto the street with a hand grenade to throw it at some poor people, I have no idea who the real enemy is, who to throw a grenade at. That makes me think.
We are told, the world over, by every government, that we are in a “war against terrorism.” But terrorism is an action, a tactic, a strategy. It’s a method not person, a group, a country. How can there be a war against a method of war. But they want us to fight a method and never ask the why or the who. That doesn’t seem to matter anymore. They tell us not to be concerned with why something happens, only how it happens.
Let’s face it, the Americans, with all the creative skills of Madison Avenue, have got us all to use a phrase that George Bush first used in 2001after the strange event in New York that has all the indicia of a state attack on its own people to justify the invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq. It has become a euphemism and a justification for all the wars they have waged since. The people don’t need to know why “terrorists” exist, or who they are and what motivates them, or even whether they really exist, for they are just “terrorists.”
Sometimes the war is against a “regime” that is “terrorising” its own people according to the “responsibility to protect” mafia that act as the chorus to the principal players in this theatre, as was done to Yugoslavia and Libya; or a regime that “terrorises the world”, as we saw with Iraq. Sometimes the war is a phony war against ‘terrorists” who are really mercenary forces fighting for the USA and its allies. We see this in Syria. We have seen it used against Russia. The result is the same.
When the Americans say they are fighting “terrorists” in Iraq, they really mean they are fighting the resistance to their invasion and occupation. When they same the same thing in Afghanistan, the same holds true, they are fighting a national resistance. The Russians, when they say they are fighting “terrorism” in Syria, know that in fact they are fighting the United States and its allies and proxy forces.
The bombings and shootings in Europe, Asia, the US, and Russia are all connected to the real war that is being conducted by the United States against the world it wants to control, and, in fact, can better be described as a war of terror being waged against the rest of us by the United States and its vassal states.
The War On Terror is in fact The American War Against The World. For isn’t that what we are dealing with from the United States itself to Latin America, to Africa, Europe to Asia, non-stop wars since World War II ended? You can even say that World War II never did really end. It just went through different stages, from the defeat of the German and Japanese empires in 1945 to the war by the American corporate state against all socialist and worker oriented governments worldwide afterwards and against any country, even of a capitalist orientation, that demanded or demands a fair price for its resources or that won’t obey orders from Washington.
The acts of terrorism by US proxy elements and forces in Syria and Ukraine for example are a type of hybrid warfare, used both against the targeted country, for instance Syria, Libya and Russia, and a type of hybrid warfare against its own people and the peoples of its allies to create the necessary propaganda to obtain their support for the very wars in which they are the first victims. In other words, they get the people to cut their own throats.
For the result is the same, new oppressive security laws and surveillance, more calls for war on the middle east, and the use of emergency laws, as we see in France, being used to terrorise working people with the threat of harsher working conditions for less pay in order to give industrialists more profit. Is that not a form of terrorism, class terrorism?
With each set of ‘terrorist” bombings from London to Madrid, to Paris to Boston and the shootings in which the claimed attackers always end up dead instead of arrested, and in which all the alleged attackers apparently have some connection to the intelligence services of the countries involved, and which attacks often occur at the same time that the police are conducting “anti-terrorist” drills, cause many to question whether some of the events are staged by the state itself and those that are clearly not, whether they are also the work of the state intelligence services as the famous Bologna bombing in Italy turned out to be; the work of state secret services to discredit the left using the Operation Gladio network to conduct the attack.
The NATO build-up of forces in Eastern Europe threatening Russia, is that not an attempt to terrorise the Russian people? The American build up of forces around China, is that not an attempt to terrorise the Chinese people with the threat of war unless they kowtow to the American president?
The American renewal of its nuclear arsenal, the British promise to do the same, the constant threats of world war coming from the foul mouths of the decaying leadership campaigning for the American presidency, the lies and distortion propagated by the western mass media against their own peoples to make them fear even their own shadows, are these not acts of terrorism against the people of the entire world?
The use of the word “terrorism” says nothing. It contains no useful information that can lead to an understanding of events and circumstances. It is a word used to dope the mind, paralyse thought, to sap the will. Language is an important tool of control of the people. To accept the terms of propaganda used by the powers that want to control us is to surrender to them completely because once we do that we lose the ability think rationally, to analyse, to question, to think for ourselves.
Finally, terror is an act that is used by those that can’t get what they want legitimately. Individual acts of terror, carried out by the lone terrorist or small group are carried out because they have no other political power than to try to frighten the populace. But acts of terror carried out by those factions of society that hold state power proves that they know their objectives and methods are criminal. That is why they have to resort to the terrorism of their own peoples in order to maintain control and dominance. And this is the state of affairs to which the world has been reduced after a century of war beginning with The Great War, World War I, through the Second, and the Third, euphemistically called the Cold, War, and now the Fourth, and final war that is now on-going and has been since the NATO terrorist bombing of Yugoslavia.
If we want to eliminate terrorism in this world then we have to eliminate the conditions that bring to power those willing to use terrorism to rule. In the United States, a democratic revolution would have to take place, but the disorganised mob that is now the American people is more easily swayed by the demagogues of fascism, like Donald Trump or Hilary Clinton, than by ideas of social and economic justice.
The situation is bleak and getting darker by the day as the violence increases, as the drones assassinate at a distance, as international law is ripped to shreds, as the climate continues to warm and change without any real attempt to stop it, as every day life becomes more precarious each passing day.
Maybe someone out there has the answer to all this. I don’t. But we are not going to find it, even look for it, unless we know when to call a spade a spade, and not “terrorism,” unless we define our own terms and talk to each other with real meaning, instead of being trapped in the matrix of lies and deceit that define the modern world.
Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto, he is a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada and he is known for a number of high-profile cases involving human rights and war crimes, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
