Terrorism: Who Benefits and Why

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/arti...ew/2477/1/140/

By Gary Tedman
12-29-05, 12:00 pm

(Preliminary note: I wrote much of this in reaction to the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. Finding myself in the middle of Hyde Park, London, on July 7, 2005, with sirens all around and the city in which I live under attack, it has a new and obviously rather more personal relevance for me.)

Before the events of Genoa, because of the fall of the Soviet Union, many of the peoples of the Western world had been led to believe the possibility of a global capitalism free from any hampering opposition. Yet, obviously, for those represented by the demonstrations at Genoa this was just a Hobson’s choice between exploitation either by one giant global capitalist corporation or another. This was underlined by the fact that recent democratic elections in much of the West seemed increasingly to be irrelevant, little more than a sport, and a pretty dull one at that.

Fewer and fewer people in the “advanced democracies” engaged in the process of voting, voter turnout in the general election in Britain had been, according to the BBC, the lowest for 80 years. This so worried politicians that they quickly began considering schemes that would allow for greater postal and Internet voting, newly unconcerned about the increased possibilities of electoral fraud; and of course there was the Bush election fiasco.

During this peculiar hiatus, no more could the Western powers use the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union to blame for its own failings, as the excuse for authoritarian measures, or to justify the still massive expenditure on arms and security, and there was now little reason for people not to look forward to what capitalism had always promised in its peacetime: a world of freedom from poverty and need, of cultural enjoyment and benign competition that (apparently) acted, in the end, for the good of all; a truly “postmodern world” in which grand designs had come to an end and we could relax in mutually respected “difference and diversity.”

But the large protests of Genoa sat strangely with this image; here was a massive demonstration against the world (G7) trade negotiations, up against high-tech portable military walls that seemed peculiarly to resemble the only recently departed Berlin wall, but in a postmodern version perhaps. Already in this period there were new concerns being raised by the media to take the place of the vacancy left by the old cold war and atomic bomb threats: the possibility of asteroid impact, global warming, HIV/Aids, genetic meddling, the upsetting of biological diversity, pollution, anything, in fact, that could draw the attention away from the usual economic crises. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the vacuum of a transparent peace seemed to be psychologically and affectively intolerable to the media.

Nevertheless, these threats were not in themselves enough to quell a certain kind of euphoria in the people, many of whom now simply desired, and could see no major obstacles to, the better future that had always been promised them. Genoa, however, was a good number of Western people showing their concern with the economics of capitalism, no matter how hard was the attempt by much of the media to paint them all in terms of the minority of crazed anarchists (the “black bloc” some witnesses saw coming from police vans). They could not easily be painted as “the enemy.”

Whoever meticulously and callously planned the attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, not long after Genoa, would clearly have known what the likely consequences of their actions would be, set against this political backdrop. The same is now true of the July 7, 2005 bombings in London. It was clear from the outset that, by “terrorists,” we were not talking about the poor and ordinary people of the world, such as the destitute Afghan and Iraqi civilians who were going to pay with their blood for 9/11, but about affluent and well-connected people. We were talking about a sophisticated, well-financed, cosmopolitan global “sect,” one that dealt in stocks and shares, and espionage, and who had access to the expertise capable of financing and directing a global terrorist network (no matter how loose or disorganized).

However, whilst it would be relatively easy to recount here all the economic reasons for the recent wars: economic competition and crisis, oil, drugs, arms, security and the struggle for new markets, along with the history of members of the US administration’s involvement in prior conflicts, of BCCI, of money laundering, of insider dealing and pilfering people’s pension funds, of family and political links to Saudi dictators and the terrorists held responsible for 9/11, and of competition between different secret agencies. Whilst this information is available and can be gathered together to make a resounding indictment, it all inevitably begins to sound, when doing so, like a grand conspiracy, and can be too readily dismissed as cranky.

But indeed, there are conspiracies here. It is well known that today’s powerful worldwide interests do not operate without their clandestine sides, governmental and corporate, and these two factions blend at their perimeters in a murky, unregulated gray area that overlaps with outright organized crime, drug warlords in Afghanistan being only the most obvious example. And what government does not conspire to achieve its aims? What capitalist does not conspire to gain more profits? Nevertheless, such a conspiracy, that would see such terrorism as 9/11 and 7/7 to be the result of a Western plot to generate a never-ending state of war to replace the cold war, would seem extreme and bizarre. Is it likely that the Western ruling class, or a strong faction of it, could allow, support, even cause, terrorist acts in order to conjure up a new state of war, a never-ending flexible (and thus very convenient) war that could justify state authoritarianism and interventions anywhere, in order to deaden the global class struggle? Surely not?!

It is possible, but we don’t have to suppose a grand conspirator, arch evil forces (Bush in his secret bunker, Bin Laden in his secret cave), above all the little conspiracies that happen day to day. All we need to understand is some commonly held feelings that are at work amongst the people that occupy the most crucial positions of power. Feelings that give to each connected, unconnected, and seemingly trivial event enacted by each human subject in the course of this history an unconscious, subliminal, group inflected motivation that adds to the whole underlying economic movement, and the rationalized interests which knowingly and unknowingly follow this.

Consider this: much has already been said about “blowback”: the fact that the terrorists held responsible were once financed by the US secret services and that this has now returned to haunt “us” (rebounded) after they have served their purpose against the Soviet Union. We must remember, however, that blowback is not an unquantifiable mystical phenomenon over which there is no control, like a force of nature. It is a consequence of direct human political intervention. Indeed, it is because of the constant evasion (a sign of repression) of the question of culpability for blowback evinced by the authorities involved that we are led to assume a link between the interventions and the class feelings that semiconsciously desire just such blowback.

As we see, the result of the recent interventions is that we find ourselves in wars when the majority of people in the developed democracies, the countries of the main perpetrators of these wars, have no wish to be, and we find that almost anything is used to justify these wars in the aftermath, indeed, the justifications change from one day to the next. Why? Because it is difficult for the ruling classes of the various nations involved to validate them precisely since they acted on their feelings for class survival, and to begin to rationalize such feelings would be to encounter the “unthinkable.” The latter is one of the fond expressions of apoplectic politicians when faced with something uncomfortable, an expression, which in this case is apt, because of the repression that must function to quell the horror of the realization of exactly their own class desires. For example, this is why, in April 2003, Donald Rumsfeld of the US administration, in the long aftermath of the prematurely “ended” war between coalition forces and “something or someone in Iraq,” in which the US’s chief weapon was the terror of aerial bombardment, included Lenin in a list of evil dictators who inflicted terror on populations. Notably, he omitted Hitler and Mussolini from this list. This was not simply a form of senile forgetfulness, or a deliberately staged historical falsification, although of course it was deliberately staged. It was a statement made by an individual embedded in his assignment, in its history, impelling him to do and say what was necessary for his personal allegiance to the shamefaced desires of the class he represented. And, peculiarly, in doing this, as if by cataleptic reflex action he refers to his most dangerous opponent, the one who could reveal the untruth of what he says, acknowledging that they (his class) were still arguing with him, Lenin, and that this was what it was really all about. It shows a certain obsession with Lenin, who, after all, has been dead some time now.

End Part I