9/11 and the relentless terror

At the
same time the mullahs will be blaring on about the victory of piety and
faith against evil and immorality from the pulpits to whip up a
religious hysteria that has wreaked havoc in the entire region. In
reality the attack on 9/11 was a grotesque act of the fundamentalist
bigots in which most of the victims were American workers already
oppressed and exploited by crisis ridden US capitalism.

It is not
just in the US where these religious fanatics have wreaked havoc but
they have killed and maimed thousands of oppressed Muslims in Pakistan
and other countries with a population of predominantly Islamic
background. These forces of dark reaction are the product of a vacuum
produced after the collapse of the left, an epoch of mild reaction with
societies in the throes of a spiralling economic crisis and malaise that
has set in with a relative lull in the movements of the youth and
workers for radical change.

However, it is also true that this
temporary phenomenon has been exaggerated and abused in their own
interests by the imperialists. Rather than conducting a prophetic
analysis of the horrific episode of 9/11, conspiracy theories have been
proliferating. Mostly absurd and mysterious they were biased and merely
expressed religious and racist prejudices. On the other hand the
official report of the 9/11 commission is inarticulate and is
conveniently vague in order to circumvent the motive of the perpetrators
of this gruesome act. This has added to the confusion of the ordinary
people not just in the US but around the world.

After the fall of
the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union the glorified
imperialist ideologue Francis Fukuyama came up with his thesis of the
‘end of history’. This ingenious thesis was demolished by history even
before the ink had dried. Capitalism plunged yet again into a crisis
that destroyed the notion of it being the ultimate destiny of the human
race. Then his contemporary genius, Samuel Huntington came up with his
reactionary idea of a crusade in ‘the clash of civilisations’ in 1997.

After
the fallout with the fundamentalists in Afghanistan and elsewhere the
Americans tried to inversely use this reactionary phenomena as an
external threat to ‘western civilisation and use it to oppress the
workers of the advanced capitalist countries to prop up exploitation and
profits. They crafted Islamic fundamentalism and figures like Osama in
such a manner that suited their propaganda machinery and inculcated fear
in societies to subvert and retard the class struggle.

In his
latest book, ‘The Rise and Fall of Al Qaida’, Fawaz Gerges of the London
School of Economics writes the following, “Al Qaida was never the
monster many imagined it to be. The only thing that keeps it alive is
fear stoked by self-serving politicians and ignorant media. A decade
after September 11, over-reaction is still the hall mark of the US war
on terror.”

Al-Qaida and its ilk were not a unified axis as
depicted by the bourgeois media. It was a fragmented and amorphous
enterprise based mostly on personal relationships and megalomaniac
delusions like the myth of the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan by
the Mujahidin etc; bolstered up by the western media. After the
Americans abandoned their fundamentalist protégés who were nurtured by
the CIA in Afghanistan, it was the sponsorship of some state agencies in
Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and other despotic states who wanted to use
these frenzied fundamentalists for their own strategic manoeuvres, that
has kept them running. The conflicts around the financial stakes in the
black economy to which these outfits were wed instigated frictions that
ended up in further splintering and fragmentation amongst them. The
split-away factions defying the ‘agencies’ controlled outfits, had to be
more ferocious and bestial to prove their worth. Hence the spiral of
terror and barbarism unleashed further suicidal bombings and slaughter
that are still devastating Pakistan and Afghanistan.

However, the
imperialists have been using the thesis of the ‘clash of civilisations’
even more in the aftermath of 9/11. The Islamic fundamentalists have
enormously benefitted from this policy. Even Jonathan Freedland
confessed in a recent article in The Guardian, “A new foreign
policy doctrine was hastily assembled. It said that the world faced a
single, overarching and permanent threat in the form of violent
jihadism… And the call went beyond foreign policy. Culture, too, was
to be enlisted in a clash of civilisations between Islamism and the
West…” Just a few years before 9/11 jihad and mujahedeen were exalted
concepts in the western vocabulary. With honest hindsight, looking at
the last 70 years it becomes more than clear that imperialism and
fundamentalism are two sides of the same coin. After all they subscribe
to the same economic doctrine.

But this war of attrition has been a
very profitable venture for the military industrial complex especially
in the US. A huge security empire was built up. Some 1,271 government
organisations and 1,931 private companies work on programmes related to
counter-terrorism. Companies from Martin Lockheed to General Dynamics
and from Halliburton to DynCorp have made astronomical profits. The
imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the sales to tension
plagued India have boosted the armaments industries in the US.

But
the working class in America has suffered tremendously. They face a
wage freeze for 20 years, unemployment has soared to unprecedented
levels and the US masses are facing draconian austerity cuts and more
and more are being deprived of health benefits. But for how long will
they tolerate such vicious attacks? The American people are losing the
civil liberties they fought for and gained in the last two hundred
years. The US president has given the Joint Special Operations Command a
rare authority to select individuals to kill, rather than capture them.

Yet the US is another imperialism that is in historical decline. The Economist
Editorial in its latest issue says, “The world-bestriding hyper power
of ten years ago has lost its confidence and craves a chance to
regroup.” Under capitalism that chance has gone. The mighty American
proletariat will have to rise to take power and overthrow this system
that is horror without an end. Trotsky wrote long ago, “The United
States is the foundry of the future of mankind”. The working class and
the youth in America have a historical task to accomplish. They have a
pledge to redeem.