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G-8 policies create the terrorists of this world
2005-07-16 07:58:34
By Nyasigo Kornel
As Caribbean Pan-Africanist Horace Campbell often says, terrorism is built into the structure of a society that leaves people starving or poor.
The London bombings have focused international attention on the issue of terrorism, but there is much more heat than light being generated by the mass media. NYASIGO KORNEL elaborates on the responsibility of the Group of Eight for the ill of terrorism.
In more modern times, political groups have used terrorism to press their demands. Whether in Africa, Europe, Asia or South America, terrorism is a well-known political tool. While its victims have always deprecated it, the political terrorism of the past was of the species that could be understood and managed.
For whatever reason, the idea of turning innocent persons to mincemeat to make a terrorist point clearly shows the complete absence of humanity in the perpetrators.
But the point remains that like flies to sugar, malcontents, especially the eternal variety, would always flock to good causes to ply their terrorist trade.
Nearly half of us human beings (2 billion) have no reliable source of safe water. 15 million of us, of working age, die each year from avoidable disease and starvation. 450 million of us are hungry. 250 million of our children have had no education.
But the richest 20 per cent have 45 times the income of the poorest 20 per cent, and in government spending they are over 80 times better off for education and 200 times for health, besides what they buy ‘privately’ for themselves.
I don’t know what message the London terrorists wanted to send across. But it certainly could be the global hype to “Make Poverty History” was itself an affirmation that a large chunk of the world was plain tired of being dirt poor while Europe and America lolled in opulence.
This is not a question of envy. Be it slavery, colonialism, Cold War, unfavourable terms of trade, policies to secure access to oil in the Mid-East and natural resources of other regions, global warming and the Kyoto protocol, international court of justice, agricultural subsidies, debt burden, and a host of other things, the West is held responsible for the plight of the world’s underprivileged.
Any anti-terrorist policy must also be an anti-imperialist policy, and neither the Bush nor Blair administrations can enact such a policy.
Regional economic and social co-operation and reconstruction in areas like the Middle East, the Balkans, India-Pakistan, the former Soviet central Asian Republics and areas of Africa and Latin America are necessary to remove the material conditions that produce the conflicts that both imperialists and terrorists manipulate for their own purposes.
A real global war against poverty with a global affirmative action program to provide healthcare, infrastructure and development for the Southern Hemisphere, not the IMF-World Bank “free trade” policies tempered by small change foreign aid from the rich countries.
It is necessary to produce a world in which the resources of 85% of the people of the earth will not be wasted to produce profit for their ruling classes, the ruling classes of the remaining 15%, and cheap imported consumer goods for the 15% who reside in the rich countries.
Lenin saw imperialism as capitalism’s decaying final stage - more brutal than ever before but more vulnerable to revolutions at its centre and anti-imperialist wars at its periphery.
The “terrorists,” whatever their motives (and most were associated in Lenin’s time with some variation of the left) saw imperialism as all powerful and the people as passive and inert.
So they mimicked imperialist methods by killing both symbols of imperialist power and often innocent individuals in the wrong place at the wrong time, giving the imperialists ammunition to increase their repressive policies.
Each round of talks shows clearly that the West is not prepared to alter the world as it is. While it is natural for the favoured to try to conserve the world as it is, there is bound to be agitations from the disfavoured for radical re-configuration of the world.
This has nothing to do with envy or morals but hard-headed reality. What globalisation has now done is to give the malcontents among the disfavoured the power to inflict greater damage on the favoured in the name of re-constructing an evil society into a just and equitable one.
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