Capitalist terror and madness:
George bin Laden & Osmana son of Bush
incorporated.
Towers may blow up and crumble, while fortifying the very social structures
they stood as a symbol for. The words You can't blow up a social relation, ring
truer than ever.
There are good reasons to begin talking about terror as such and within a global
context. To a large extent terror can also be viewed apart from whatever motives
that may hide behind particular
expressions of it, or whether it is carried out of states or not. If the end
result is the same, in both a shorter and longer term perspective, such distinctions
become less important. Which does not mean we should overlook the question of
ideological legitimisation It is no coincidence that terror has formed such
a central part within fascist movements. Nor that words such as class are absent
in Osmana bin Laden's as well as George Bushs legitmisation of terror.
Terror has a long history in the service of counter-revolution, and will always
work towards undermining the very foundations of a new, free, postcapitalist,
society, or even one where forces of death, oppression and exploitation are
significantly weakened. The Red Terror orchestrated by the Bolsheviks, directed
against, they claimed, the old rulling classes, had essentially two effects,
apart from that of immediate, indiscriminate death. It brought into existence
the repressive forces of the new state which were again redireced against the
workers and peasants, and served as the most "vital" recruiting ground
for the White Army (or armies). For the rest of the Civil War period, the terror
within these two armies, combined with and constituted a precondition for the
terror directed against workers, and even more so against the peasants masses.
This produced an even greater army of deserters, but also a situation where
two camps, becoming increasingly indistinguisable from each other, in effect
recruited solidiers for the other side. The Red Army victory was finalised through
a massive war against the peasantry and the working class, and the greatest
famine that the Russian Empire, had
seen. 5 million starved to death. Further down this historical blind alley,
followed the rule of Stalin.
Terror can be reduced to the following: To rule through fear. The target is
not the persons directly hit but those who fear they might be the next. Thus
the more indiscriminate the better. Terror produces or
reinforces counter-terror, and imposes internal terror in both camps. In the
late Yugoslavia, this Rule was played out as civil war. On another level, in
Northern Ireland, the sectarian killings are not only in
themselves a manifestion of terror but also its trueborn children. While having
roots and precendents further back in Irish history, organisational terror of
more recent date have been effective in
reproducing this madness. Any terror group, even those who start out with social
revolutionary pretensions, will tend to reproduce the state from within, as
well as reinforcing the one whose power they set out to "ex-terminate;"
a favorite expression of Lenin, who tended to confuse social relations with
biology. However, to have assisinated Hitler during World War II or Stalin in
his might, would not have consitituted terror if carried out from the conviction
that their removal alone could lessen sufferings and save many more lifes. These
are two of the rare historical cases where this very likely also would have
been the result.
In what follows it is important that readers clearly distinguish between Islamism
as a political project (with numerous historical precedents in the history of
European Christianity, the time when such a term still had a real meaning as
a rule and not only exception) and muslims as fellow workers and friends.
The abstract words of justice and honour of Islamists such as Osmana bin Laden
and feyadeen of Imperial Order, as George Bush, turns to corpses within and
without the United States. Like the national socialism of the Ba'ath, Islamism
shares with the governments of the United States of America and Israel, in being
far more effective in taking the lifes of "muslims" - or human beings
of flesh and blood and lifegiving kaffir (heathen) dreams, as I would say -
than other such human creatures, as Israeli "jews," or U.S. "christians".
That is not likely to change. Nor is this a coincidence.
In 1981, Lafif Lakhdar wrote in Khamsin: Journal of revolutionary socialists
of the Middle East:
"In a Moment of frankeness, Hasan al-Banna' admitted in 1947
to the members of his [Muslim] Brotherhood [in Egypt] that the
first obstacle they would meet on the path to the
re-Islamisation of secular Muslim society, in his opinion, would
be the hostility of the people. 'I must tell you,' he said, 'that
your
preaching is still a closed book to the majority. The day when
they discover it and realise what it aims for, they will resist
violently and oppose you tentaciously.'"
This the Taliban knows, and this is also the reason for their state-building
terror. What they do not recognise is that they in a longer perspective are
paving the road for the McDonaldisation and
secularisation of Afghanistan. Thus Lafif Lakhdar could write 20 years ago about
a country bordering Afghanistan: "Contrary to what Islamic propaganda claims,
and many western leftist believe, today's Iran does not represent the reinvogation
of Islam but its swan song, except that it lacks any beauty"
Our social revolutionary friend made another significant observation:
"The cult of death may well fascinate a large number of middle
class youths, who are the victims of emotional blocks, and are
frightened of freedom and and libertarian ways. It is however
no solution in the face of the real problems which shake the
very foundation of the Iranian society. A person such as
Khomeini, who suffers from historical scleroris, and who in his
book "Islamic Government" deals with such serious problems
as the buggery of a poor donkey by poor muslims, and who is
incapable of creating an Iranian bourgeoisie, can only return to
to the American fold or fall under Soviet influence. "We are
less independent today," admits Badi Sadr, "than we were
under the Shah. Our budget depends on the credit of foreign
banks. Our dependence on arms and foreign military experts
is quite simple tragic." Has Bani Sadr, the spiritual son
of the
Imam, finally grasped that in a world unified by the violence of
the laws of the market Iran cannot be independent, whether
the Imam is present or absent, likes it or not? .... The middle
classes, who first idolised Khomeini in the belief that they had
found in him an universal miracle cure, now turn away from
him to await the coup d'õtat. The sub-proletariat who served
him as cannon foder, now suffer more than ever with the
repression of the Khalkhali. The proletariat are engaged in a
permanent struggle in their workplaces to counter the
intervention of the Islamic committees, and only stop specific
strikes to return their permanent go-slow."
Through one of those ironic twist of history, Osmana Bin Laden and Taliban are
preparing the incorporation of Afghanistan into the "American fold."
If a further tens of thousands of Afghanis do not die in the process, it is
through no merit of theirs. Nor should we thank them if September 11 does not
produce an inflation of death, carried further to other countries and continents
as massacres, civil wars, pogroms and famine, nationalist and religious hysteria,
foreign military intervention and terror. Whether or not the verdict of history
will show al-Qaeda was directly responsible for the World Trade Center graveyard
is not the question here, but that this expression of Islamism have been disseminating
a Culture of Death, Terror, Oppression, Self-oppression and Stupidity, which
nutures such acts.
All with the complicity of global financial institutions, the governments of
"the West," as well as of of Israel, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the
military regime of Algeria, Iraq, and others. In implicating all these other
actors, I am not promoting some weird conspiracy theory, but an understanding
of how social forces de facto tend to reinforce each other, knowingly or unknowingly.
The extremely central role Saudi Arabian petroleum money has played, and very
likely will continue to do, is almost comical but also very telling.
The World Trade Center massacre must be comprehended within an agenda of nuturing
xenophobic hysteria. As a means for ends that geographically lie elsewhere.
That the airborne suicidal guiders of the
will of God were human beings with crushed dreams, and victims of capitalist
alienation as much as everyone else whose lives exploded, like the numerous
children who suffer a far less spectacular death in Iraq under the rule of Washington,
D.C. and Baghdad, does not change this.
Within such an agenda, US might and wealth and the settler colonialism of Israel,
become the best of allies, but can only function as such by being portrayed
as the incarnation of "Satan" within an
endless rhetorical monologue, where the distinction between rulers and ruled,
and every class perspective, is wholly blurred. Just as the US propaganda apparatus
never can make any real critique of
Islamism, the Islamist leaders, as the Panarabic before them, cannot put forth
any real critique of the global social order that the United States is a manifestation
of. This would have undermined their own
power basis and ends. Instead their "anti-imperialism" and Jihads
serve as a means to enslave their "own" working classes: to reproduce
"Satan," as the rule of fascist terror within an Islamic or
nationalist ideological framework, even more oppressive in many aspects than
"Satan himself." Only to soon be fully reintegrated into the capitalist
world order they always were a particular expression of.
And in the meantime, all social struggles pointing beyond the present order,
all efforts of bringing into life a confederation of globalised wokers-to-workers
solidarity, is undermined.
Terror works in seemingly mysterious ways. If looked at not from the perspective
of New York, but from people coming from regions where Islamist terror forms
part of, or is on the verge of becoming, part of daily fear, the message of
September 11 spoke loud and clear. The turning of the World Trade Center into
a graveyard was from this point of view a de facto declaration of war by rulers
and would-be-rulers against the masses in the Middle East and Central Asia,
North Africa and beyond. Not a struggle against oppression and exploitation:
but a call for total submission through terror, and an expression of inter-capitalist
competion. A terror that did not start and will not end in New York, which never
was its real target. Which is yet another reason to oppose NATOs war-efforts.
Simultaneously this act of terror is exploited as a means to impose "security"
on the working class of "the North," and throughout the globe. Around
and within Fortress Europe, and all the other Fortresses
of the world, the walls are now being built taller, and a whole new level of
control is being imposed. Refugees, legal and illegal immigrants - and those
who from their appearance can be suspected to belong among "Them"
- will be hit worst. Increasingly they will become victims of a more subtle
terror, a phenomenom which started long ago but which now has gained force.
Without ever reaching the headlines, a greater number of human beings seeking
a better future for themselves and their children, trying to reach the shores
of Spain, Italy, Australia and elsewhere, will drown, be shot (as happens on
the US-Mexican border), or die for other reasons. Increased "security"
will extend worldwide, and lead to the full imposition of a global capitalist
world (dis)order.
Nothing of this is predetermined, but such an agenda has gained force after
September 11, 2001. It has been become even more critical to wage also an ideological
struggle against forces of terror, state-sponsored or not, on a local and global
level. We are all part of the one same bloody civilisation, of alienation and
silent and spectacular death and boredom, but also of compassion, love and
broken hearts, tears and laughter, hopes and dreams, and a capacity for globalised
solidarity.
The capitalist world order is an order that rules by being everywhere, and increasingly
so, and not only in a restricted economical sense. If all its force was concentrated
in the Pentagon it would have been easy to overcome. Instead it rules as much
through small and large Ayatollahs, small and large Saddam Huseyns and Assads,
Milosovics and Tudjmans, Sharons and Arafats and, as well as through the
"humantarian" rulers of the Scandinavian countries. The latter is
true as well. But terror is still among the phenomenoms that most effectively
reproduces the monster, state-sponsored or not. Afghanistan has been one of
this centres of capitalist world disorder in the last decades. There another
manifestation of modern alienation was born, created out of many worlds, of
old and new ones, linked to the global market in numerous ways. That the Taliban
soldiers, together with Pakistani border guards, in these very days are being
bribed to turn their heads the other way, so to let refugees pass a
closed border, and that this is all organised as an enterprise, selling the
fear of famine and death for what amounts to several months salary, is just
another example on how the force of commodity
production and the spirit of George Bushs is very much is alive in the realm
of Taliban.
The world is increasingly moving towards a triadic American-European-Asian Empire.
The enforced alliance-building we are now seeing around the Pentagons campaign
of Infinite Terror (which magnitude is still quite unclear), and the seeking
of legitimation for this through the United Nations, is not just a facade. We
are moving towards a global order, also politically, in a whole new sense. Just
as the increased speed and magnitude of communication and transportation on
a global leve,there is increasingly also further blurring between terror, policing
and war. But we should also be aware
of the new positive possibilities for a struggle of global resistance founded
on solidarity this opens for us, with a potential to take us beyond capitalism.
Capitalism is a complex, globally interlinked social system that only can be
surpassed through a collective creative effort on the basis of human communication
and practical, non-hierachical and globalised solidarity of the working classes.
There never was and never will be any other road. Now less than ever.
A last word about terror. In a play of words: Out of the ruins of anarchy, anarchy
cannot arise, only the rule of the Market and the State in their most brutalised,
authoritarian manifestations. In its proper
sense, anarchy of course does not signify disorder and the struggle of each
against all, however common such a belief may be, but the overcoming of the
Rule of the Siamese Twins of Market and State through the human creation of
a global classless society, where people in cooperation rule over their own
lifes and destinies, and the freedom of all becomes the condition of the freedom
of each, as the freedom of each is the condition for the freedom of all.
Written by Harald Beyer-Arnesen, born and living in
Oslo, Norway. Anarco-syndicalist and anarchist communist. Inspired by social
revolutionaries from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and India, and the reading of too
many books during the last decades about the past and contemporary history of
this troubled part of the world.
Lafif Lakhdar's article "Why the return to Islamic archaism?", quoted
from above, was publised in the first of two Khamsin special issues on
"Politics of Religion in the Middle East." ("Khamsin: Journal
of
revolutionary socialists of the Middle East" no. 8 + 9, Ithaca Press,
1981. Possibly still available through Zed Books.)