Islamic Terrorism Has Its Roots in US/UK Foreign Policy

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

GED/HEO

"Capitalism teaches the people the moral conceptions of cannibalism are the strong devouring the weak; its theory of the world of men and women is that of a glorified pig-trough where the biggest swine gets the most swill.” James Connolly 1910

 
This is a good account of some of the history with regard to Islamic terrorism and the present situation in Afghanistan.

 

However it falls very short indeed when it comes to explaining the forces at play here and what drives the policies he is describing that meant misery, death and destruction to millions of people throughout the world.

 

It’s a positive thing that he points out some of the major culprits in this mass murder and that they are not held to account; Blair, Bush, Thatcher, Rumsfeld and that mass killer Wolfowitz and others. Obama, Trump and all of them are guilty it’s true.

 

The section showing Zbigniew Brzezinski, US President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor talking to a group of would be Taliban in Pakistan about God and their religion and how God was on their side tells all.

Brzezinski told a reporter in France: “What is more important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold war?” (My added emphasis). Well we know what that mistake led to now don’t we.

US Meddling in Afghanistan Goes Back Much Longer than 20 Years.

 

According to the narrator in the video, the architects of this mad foreign policy are just bad people without principles. He avoids mentioning the term capitalism or capitalists like the plague, his fear of this plague is so great that he doesn’t mention either.

Capitalists become the “elite” which they are, and elite is defined as: “a group or class of people seen as having the most power and influence in asociety, especially on account of their wealth or privilege” But on what basis is this power and influence constructed? Are the US and the UK dictatorships? Are they feudal regimes? Are they regimes based on a slave system? For the narrator we do not live in system of production with a political superstructure at all. We just have to “democratize” things.

 

His omission of these important aspects of world events is a reminder that not every incorrect statement by an individual is a conscious lie. He does not have an alternative to the present social system we know as capitalism so he avoids bringing it up. If he criticizes the system itself, then he has to offer some sort of alternative. But he has none.

 

So he avoids the issue and instead of bringing the idea of democratic socialism and workers’ control to the table, he talks of democratizing society which translated means, capitalism can be made nice. He intends to leave it intact, just "tweak" it a little.

 

He is wrong about Blair and Bush, we can throw Michelle Obama in there as she says that Bush is a good man, a “friend” and “partner in crime”. They do have principles and that is the worship and preservation of the free market. They have free market principles; they’re capitalists, representatives of capital.

 

Capitalism is a system of production. It has laws to it. It is a competitive and ruthless system of production. Two world wars were fought for control and domination of the world’s resources by competing capitalist states. Nuclear bombs were dropped on urban centers by US capitalism to secure its interests globally. Their main principle is that profit is sacrosanct and in the rapacious struggle for it against all competitors and especially workers on whose backs it is made, has no limits.

 

Listen to what Thatcher and Brzezinski say in this video. Of course they are liars, but from their perspective it’s not immoral to lie when their material interests are at stake and at that particular time in Afghanistan, the alternative to the Soviet Union, a totalitarian system that threatened capitalism, the market and profits, financing and arming a bunch of backward, 7^th century religious fanatics, “Some stirred up Moslems” as Brzezinski put it, was a no brainer.

 

Morality and social values have a class character. From the capitalist’s point of view, a strike is mass terrorism, it is immoral as it hurts profits. All the forces of the state will brought to bear on workers for this activity and has; the National Guard, the police, the courts and (reluctantly the army). For the working class though the strike is the most important weapon we have, it is sacrifice when we engage in it, but it is liberating and certainly not immoral.

 

It is important to recognize that sometimes we get good information from sources that fail to understand the forces and conditions that shape events. Endless wars, violence and destruction are integral to the capitalist system. The “elite” the capitalist class and their political representatives are driven to war by the laws of this system. Capitalism cannot be “democratized” as the narrator suggests; it has to be overthrown and human society and the forces of production controlled and managed collectively. Social need must replace profit as the driver of production and human activity.