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The last week or so has seen a spate of jihadist attacks in widely scattered locales- symptomatic of the transnational nature and ambitions of this violent totalitarian movement.[1]
In Turkey, a clutch of German tourists were blown to kingdom come, or heaven, or Valhalla, their spirits liberated from their physical molecules (if indeed spirit can exist apart from its material manifestations).
In Mogadishu, Somalia, first a hotel was attacked, then a base of African Union foreign troops. The attackers claim they killed 100, and they took some prisoner. (Or "hostage," if you prefer.)
On the other (western) side of Africa, jihadists struck a "soft target" in Bamako, Mali, a hotel.
Also, in the capital of Burkino Faso, 28 civilians were killed and 50 wounded in attacks on a hotel and a cafe. Six were Canadian missionaries headed to a village to do aid work. It took 12 hours to polish off the four attackers. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb were proud to take responsibility.
In Afghanistan, a welcome home party for a freed prisoner of the Taliban was spoiled by a party-pooping suicide bomber, who killed 13 people and wounded 14 others. And the "Islamic State," a recent arrival in Afghanistan, attacked the Pakistani consulate in Jalalabad, killing seven. (One is tempted to say "serves you right, Pakis." But I'll restrain myself.) And a rocket hit the the Italian embassy in Kabul, injuring two guards.
Speaking of Islamic State (I'd rather not, but they make themselves hard to ignore), in Deir al-Zor, Syria, which they just overran a few day ago, they slaughtered a bunch of people Saudi-style, beheading them, and kidnapped 400, according to the well-regarded Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Finally, in Pakistan, one of the plethora of primitive fanatic terror groups just killed 14 people, mostly police protecting vaccination workers. (Contra Noam Chomsky, these barbarians aren't violently opposed to modern medicine because a few years ago the CIA used a fake vaccination program to try and surreptitiously gather DNA samples from people in the compound in Abbottabad where they suspected Osama bin Laden was holed up, after a Pakistani officer told them about it to collect the reward the U.S. was offering. They obviously oppose vaccination, period. That's why they consistently murder the mostly-female government vaccination personnel. Of course, the CIA's underhanded little ruse gives the Talibanoids a ready-made "justification," at least in their minds.) And some Taliban group ("Taliban" is an umbrella term in Pakistan) attacked a university in northwest Pakistan, killed 22 students and instructors. One Talib took "credit," and another denied it was Taliban.
But lest we forget, far greater violence is meted out from U.S., Russian, French, British and other warplanes trying to beat back either ISIS and/or challengers to the Assad regime in Syria, and by Saudi and other Gulf state warplanes destroying what's left of Yemen, where over 70 medical facilities have been hit, and mosques and weddings are fair game. We hear much, much less about that violence, and never graphically, in U.S. media, nor in some other western media either, such as the British government's main propaganda outlet, the BBC. [2]
Over fourteen years after the arranged events of September 11, 2001, the second "Pearl Harbor" used to put in motion the invasion of Iraq and a suffocating secret police state in the U.S., the "terrorist" problem is far more widespread now. It's hard to see how the U.S. is "winning." Which, like the "wars" on drugs, and on crime, is besides the point. The point is to maintain the increased state power that a state of war gives to those in power, indefinitely. [3]
The Western toleration of Saudi and Pakistani (military) extremism has led to the Islamofascist chickens coming home to roost.
Al-Qaeda was birthed in the U.S.-sponsored jihad against the Soviet Union and the regime backed by it in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda is the granddaddy or first generation of the Islamist "terrorist" groups the U.S. and its "partners" is waging war against. It of course was created in the ideologically red-hot political furnace of the anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan fueled by the U.S., Saudi and other Gulf arab states, and Pakistan. It spawned an unruly son it couldn't control, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, after the American invasion smashed that country into sectarian pieces. Out of Al-Qaeda in Iraq sprang ISIL, which seized territory, declared a caliphate, and became IS, the most virulent form of the Islamofascist movement yet. So what the U.S. is fitfully battling has become both more virulent and move geographically widespread and dispersed.
There are many reasons for this. One is the increased number of weak states and failed states. Afghanistan and Somalia were the first. Since then we can add Mali, Libya, Nigeria, and parts of Egypt. In some cases the U.S. helped destroy the state (Afghanistan and Libya being prime examples), and then lost interest, leaving a power vacuum. In the case of Iraq, the U.S. knocked Humpty-Dumpty off the wall, and all its drones, gunships, and armored vehicles (and braggart bloodthirsty snipers) couldn't put the pieces back together again.
Venal, repressive, corrupt regimes, as in Egypt and Nigeria, provoked extremist resistance in the form of violent jihadi movements. The U.S. consistently supported (and armed) the repressive regimes, sometimes justifying this as pragmatic necessity, which does nothing to avoid the crises that have come to pass.The more the U.S. has gone down the road of supporting repressive regimes, the more it has painted itself into a corner.
The refusal to support democracy and human rights (and cynical lip service to those things while creating death squad regimes, such as in Latin America, does not constitute support) has created what the CIA terms "blowback," and not just in the form of Al-Qaeda growing out of the anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan. The horrible societies in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras (where the Obama regime supported the anti-democratic coup that has plunged that nation into a nightmare of murderousness and insecurity for the populace) has created a relatively minor blowback problem for the U.S. in the form of refugees (mostly women and children) fleeing to the U.S., where the U.S. denies them their rights under international refugee law and has a public relations headache on its hands as it once again needs to paper over its repression, contempt for human rights and international law in practice, by once again spouting cynical rhetoric, a threadbare velvet over a mailed fist of cruelty.
As the economic state of growing numbers of Americans continues to decay, it seems a day of reckoning for the U.S. itself lies a few decades in the future. The more astute individuals within the establishment elite, including some economists, have lately fretted about the long-term threat to the stability of the system from what is euphemistically called "growing inequality," i.e., increasing concentration of wealth at the top of the socioeconomic pyramid.
Still, as an empire founded on the twin pillars of genocide and slavery, and spread relentlessly around the globe with military force and secret police crimes, the U.S. has had a spectacular run.It grew rapidly in geographical spread and power, and came to closest to any empire in history to achieving literal world domination. But even the fall of the Soviet Union did not allow for complete world hegemony, and the rise of China puts paid to that dream. Yet the struggle for ever more anti-human power is an addiction that the U.S. ruling elites cannot kick, because they don't want to. We are living with the consequences of that. Meanwhile the propaganda system helpfully shields our eyes from the sight of Yemen reduced to destitute rubble by Saudi bombing, beheadings of protesters by the Saudis (somehow not at all horrifying, unlike beheadings by ISIS), and the usual U.S. atrocities and war crimes. (Bombed a hospital? Just a mistake.)
Caught between U.S. imperialism and its lackeys and grotesque clients on the one side, and the intolerable Islamofascism on the other, the populations of both the countries in the fire, and we who live outside it yet are conditioned to be afraid by lurid media emphases on the few and far between terrorist attacks in our "homelands" such as San Bernardino, Charlie Hebdo, and the recent Paris massacre, are faced with an unpalatable choice and no obvious alternative option- especially since attempts to create alternatives, whether in Egypt, or in the U.S. (such as the Occupy Movement) are vigorously repressed and suppressed. [4]
All in all, not a very hopeful situation. So Obama feeds us upbeat messages in a "State of the Union" address, and the narcissist and demagogue Donald Trump plays on fear and despair and promises a "return to greatness." Pick your poison.
An antidote will only arise if somehow a pro-human mass movement can arise. The continued refusal of most "whites" in America to see "blacks" as fellow human beings, to not be outraged even at the most outrageous police murders, such as the gunning down of a 12-year-old boy, Tamir Rice, playing with a toy gun in a park, by cops who zoomed up in their car, leapt out, and shot him dead in two seconds, (and then manhandled and "arrested" his 14-year-old sister who tried to help him as he was left to die on the ground like a rabid dog), does not bode well. If a populace cannot unite around even such a blatant atrocity on their home turf, much less support a movement like the Black Lives Matter one, it's hard to see them uniting coherently on any ethical grounds. Instead there will be a fragmented collection of single-issue interest grouplets on what pathetically constitutes the "left" in America (capital L in the fevered imaginations of fascists such as the National Review crowd, who seems to included establishment pillars such as the New York Times and Washington Post in "the Left,")
1] I say totalitarian not as an epithet, but as a factual descriptive. Islamofascism insists upon total control of every aspect of people's lives, including their thoughts and beliefs, enforces strict conformity to its dictates, tolerates no opposition or dissent or political force other than itself, and rules without democratic consent. Not that such consent would legitimize it. No majority group has the right to impose oppression on individuals who do not wish to be part of such a system. U.S. racial segregation and oppression was "democratic" in that the majority- whites- supported it.
As far as the fascist part, I wrote previously about the commonalities between "classical" fascism- all fascism, really- and the jihadists. Couldn't find it so don't have a link. In brief, what they have in common are a total lack of moral limits, great ruthlessness, an easy resort to extreme violence, fanatical dedication to achieving their desired ends (by any and all means), utter untrustworthiness, refusal to genuinely compromise (they always double-cross those they do deals with, eventually), and maybe there was some other stuff I forgot.
You could say that it sounds like any imperialism, for that matter, but imperialisms often have a veneer of civilization, which makes them more viable as systems that can last.
2] I'm not a pacifist. Unfortunately violence is part of life at the current backward stage of evolution of our species. Pacifism can only work when everyone's a pacifist, and maybe someday they will be. Personally I'm not a violent person, and like most people I don't enjoy physical fighting.
What's wrong with Saudi violence inflicted on Yemen is both its criminal nature (targeting civilians, hospitals, etc.) and its immorality (no moral justification). And blaming Iran is absurd.
Even some U.S. violence has been justified. Helping the Libyan people overthrow Qaddafi was morally proper. Unfortunately, Qaddafi had destroyed the institutions of state and society, so with his fall there was nothing except people with guns.
The U.S. was very late to put an end to Serbian depredations in the former Yugoslavia, but in that case it proved to be better late than never.
In Syria it's been a case of too late. There was a year of opportunity after Assad turned an outbreak of non-armed protest into an insurrection by his vicious, murderous repression. During that year, U.S. military support for the uprising could have succeeded in toppling Assad. After that it was too late. It has taken the inroads of IS to provoke a serious U.S. military intervention, but at this point a bad outcome is guaranteed.
So we must reject the simplistic thinking which attempts to apply the same lesson and a single rule to every situation, as the anti-war people on the left do and the John McCain bomb everybody establishment right does. A situational analysis is necessary. Reality, and Life, is more complicated than that,
3] Some of us, such as dissidents as myself, have never had any rights. No warrants were ever needed for phone taps, surreptitious home burglaries, room bugs, and searches of medical and financial records. Now under such legislation and the PATRIOT Act, the population generally has no rights. Every year the FBI issues tens of thousands of "national security letters" to search all kinds of personal records held by banks and any other institution under the excuse of "investigating terrorism." Under the rubric of the NDAA signed into law by Obama, any U.S. citizen labeled a "terrorist," no evidence or court finding necessary, can be indefinitely imprisoned without charges, much less trial and conviction, by the military. So far the U.S. courts have upheld this. And currently the number of people officially branded as "terrorist" on various lists is around a million.
Meanwhile the U.S. has expanded military operations to numerous nations. So the "war on terror" has no end in sight. But the very term misunderstands what the adversary is. As even the occasional establishment figure points out, terrorism is a tactic. One cannot wage war on and defeat a tactic. The root from which jihadi violence springs is an ideology. Western propaganda so far as proven ineffectual in defeating that ideology. It deals only with the surface. Nor should we expect that to change, as the U.S.' "allies" in its war are Saudi Arabia, the taproot and spreader of the intolerant and oppressive Wahhabist fundamentalism from which Islamofascism springs, and Pakistan, whose military has been using terrorism as a strategy against India and in Afghanistan. Thus all three nations- those two and the U.S.- are deeply enmeshed in their own contradictions.
4] A "terrorist" attack is one with a specific ideological content, namely jihadist. If the ideological content is, say, opposition to abortion, as in the Colorado Springs attack on the Planned Parenthood clinic there, in which three people were murdered, including a police officer, and nine wounded, it is NOT "terrorist." Got that?
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