SCUM AT THE TOP

Life in the 21st Century?

Coming to grips with the horror that befell New York and Washington -- and the rest of the world -- is almost impossible. A group of single-minded terrorists gave up their lives and murdered thousands of others to destroy the twin towers of capitalism and the arcanely structured seat of America's military power. It is a colossal disaster.

I am neither prepared nor qualified to analyse the ramifications of what has happened, but like everyone else I have my opinions.

For intelligence I've been glued to the radio and television for the wisdom of the world's talking heads. But without an editor to instruct me to write about this or that aspect of the catastrophe, I am all over the place.

Unlike the people directly involved in the destruction, people whose priorities were instantly sorted, the rest of us are having to deal with it several times removed. When we turn away from media reports, our lives remain, albeit surrealistically, as they were. We forget almost instantly that we live in a scary world and that we are not immortal. We have to make an effort to stay with it, to comprehend the incomprehensible.

In our conversations with others, we face the gamut of human responses: horror, shock, grief, anger, revenge, racism. Many people no doubt feel like retreating into permanent disbelief. Some may even contemplate suicide; why remain in such a distressing world? Because it will only get worse. The dawn of a new era is not around the corner.

About the only emotion I can claim not to have experienced is racist hatred. When humanity awakes every morning, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, non-believers, all of us open our eyes in natal innocence. The child, the husband, the wife. At the moment of wakening, we are pure; we all share the blessing (or penance) of life on this planet. As the day progresses, the colour of our skin, the god to whom we pray, the beliefs we hold dear, the nations to which we belong begin to separate us. But in the face of eternity, humanity is made up of billions of variations on just one theme: conscious life. And none is more or less worthy than any other. We are all in this together.

Yes, I'm no racist, but for the rest, I am a mess. One minute the anger of an eye for an eye brings my blood to a boil: I want revenge and I want it now! I want terminal bombs to burst over all those centres of hatred. But then in the next -- with the endless images from every angle of the plane entering the tower as if it were a knife slicing into a soft cake; or of wives and husbands and lovers throwing themselves off the upper floors to leave forever their children, their lovers; or the heart-stopping comprehension of the accumulated terror of the people in the planes and the people in the building; or the eerie, skeletal remains of the towers afterwards, like an ancient woodcut of Dante's Inferno -- I realise that compassion and the will to understand are the only ways out of this horror.

But we live in a world where ignorance is a priority for governments. They talk education, but mostly provide it only to those who can pay, and then limit its scope to the acquisition of jobs. Beyond the basics, the poor are not encouraged to learn and to think because a thinking population would so easily see through the lies of their leaders. The Arab world is suffering a dearth of scholarly pursuit, leading to desperation and fundamentalist fanaticism. But so is the Western World. If this were not the case, then blind racism would not exist to the extent it does. Racism is the most malignant form of ignorance.

Our economic system, capitalism, is one of exclusion and greed for those able to enjoy it, and of envy and resentment for those left behind. Capitalism must be modified.

Injustice anywhere should be as clear as the light of day. But governments obfuscate and make it selective for their own ends. There is no better evidence of this than in America today, in the aftermath of the horror. Reporters and commentators have yet to ask WHY. Americans seem oblivious of successive government atrocities in the Middle East, in South-East Asia, in South and Central America. America's century old fear of Communism has led to desecrations almost matching those of the Communist dictatorships. Like the Israelis, America will likely be sucked into an unending round of retribution to be met with counter-retribution as it pounds the rubble of today into the dust of tomorrow.

A response is indeed required. One that surgically removes the perpetrator or perpetrators, but that does not engage in collateral damage. It is unlikely that such a target will be found. These are not the old days, where the enemy was an easily identifiable nation state. These are the days of David and Goliath revisited. The difference is that there are thousands upon thousands of Davids. The United States cannot possibly find the guilty party. A new world order is indeed required now.

Whoever is responsible, the free world will shortly become less free. Here in Australia, the government is no doubt drooling over the prospects of legislating against dissent. A talkback caller to the ABC said a Federal Policeman suggested to him that the S11 group (from last year's protest at the WTO meeting in Melbourne) might be behind the bombing. Well, let's swoop on Trades Hall then, search every dreary room and round up those dozen or so international terrorists. You can tell by the nose-rings, the sloppy clothes and their earnest dedication to the cause of egalitarianism that these are the true culprits. No, but what the Fed was really saying is that everyone who dissents should be rounded up and silenced. And that includes web sites such as this one. Let's not forget that John Howard's Coalition, with it's totalitarian suppression of news surrounding the Tampa crisis, is still running this country.

As the self-proclaimed Deputy Sheriff of America, John Howard has trumped NATO by offering America open-ended support in whatever they do. I assume this means donating Australia's sons and daughters for active duty. Alexander Downer has replaced his fish net stockings with a helmet and an blunderbuss. He's almost frothing at the mouth as he puts up his hand to the Americans, "Us too, us too!" But it's quite likely the American "leadership," striving to comprehend the futility of its position, will stride past his pipsqueak offer as if he, and by association we, were a gnat.

Furthermore, John Howard will have drawn terrorist attention to Australia by being just about the only country to support Dubbya's Missile Defence System, seen now by those who supported it, and as always by those who didn't, as a cost-ineffective delusion.

Finally, because of his racist, opportunist, vote-buying stance against the Afghans aboard the Tampa, people who were trying to get away from terrorism, John Howard has incited racial violence in this country. In his absence, Unterführers Philip Ruddock and Peter Reith kept the racist line well oiled. Ruddock indicated that terrorism is the reason we don't want the boat people, while Reith made a definite association between the boat people and the terrorists.

We have yet to hear from Howard since he returned from America, but you can expect more of the same. He liked inflaming the rabble. In fact the 62-year-old adolescent became so worked up that his nuts finally dropped. Before the Tampa, he was just a little fascist without balls. But his newfound manliness as the active promoter of racism achieved for him a sort of anti-apotheosis. We can only hope that his petulant, reedy voice will also drop an octave.

Shortly after the disaster, Howard said that the world had lost it's innocence. But the world has never been innocent. Alone among nations and cultures, America has attempted to cocoon itself in a gauzy, gilded, freckle-faced fairy tale of innocence. It will grow up now, and join the rest of us. (Well, maybe not Australians, of whom 77 per cent have willingly, pridefully revealed their larval state.)

But before it does, it will have to change leaders. (Many are grumbling that the bombing would not have happened if Bush hadn't stolen the presidency from Al Whatshisname.)

It must be clear by now that Dubbya is entirely without a neurological substrate. In other words, brainless. By the look and sound of him on the day of the tragedy and since, he would appear to be the son George Senior should have kept locked in the barn all these years; if not the village idiot, then the family idiot. It is positively alarming to view this man. If you saw him presiding at the scene from hell, with one hand around a stunned old firefighter and the other with a megaphone, acting as if he were calling everyone to join in a barbecue at the ranch, you will be very, very afraid.

In contrast, the much maligned New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani rose to the occasion in almost presidential style. Except for Governor Pataki, Giuliani stood alone among all the government authorities appearing on our screens as a person commanding respect. Undoubtedly chastened by his bout with cancer, he was responsive and compassionate, a man in charge.

Others in the government came across like Burt Lancaster in "Fail Safe" and/or Sterling Hayden in "Dr Strangelove." And these are the people who will tell ineffectual Georgie what to do. The terrorist attack has erected the withered weanies of the hard right in America and they mean to ejaculate. As Robert Fisk and others say, this is exactly what Osama bin Laden wants. He wants hard core retribution to be visited on the Middle East so that the remaining worldly leaders of Muslim nations such as Mubarek in Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan are overthrown and replaced by fundamentalist Sunni fanatics ready for an all out Muslim Jihad.

We're talking about an untold number of Muslims who hate America to the point of committing suicide to destroy it. And their hatred stems from decades of American led or backed atrocities against them. The two Bush's and Bill Clinton showed them no mercy and refused to hear their grievances.

If terrorism begins to strike hard, then we can perhaps expect it to come from the non-Islamic world too. Richard Nixon layed waste to Cambodia after taking up Lyndon Johnson's mentally challenged role in Vietnam. Then there are the Central and South Americans, the Chileans and Guatemalans during Nixon's regime and the Nicaraguans and El Salvadorians during Reagan's calamitous rule. Perhaps too much time has passed for retaliation from these widespread peoples, but then again maybe not. Maybe everyone with a grievance is now feeling a blood lust, including the militias and survivalists living amongst the amber waves of grain.

Even America's friends hate it. For decades Europeans have been content to vent their anger with America in jokes. Keep them drinking long enough and the jokes turn to anger. Anger at the seemingly boundless hubris of Americans who think of themselves as innately superior to everyone, who think of themselves as the saviour of the world while refusing to understand it or even know where on the map any of its countries lie. Of the hypocrisy of a God-obsessed nation which treats others as if they were inferiors, as if their lives were worth less, and worse, as if they simply didn't matter. Of their self-conscious thickheadedness, of their inability to get it no matter what it is, of their refusal to take part in the political life of their country when for so many people political awareness is a matter of life and death.

This is the naivety that America projects over and above its image as a nation of good natured boofheads. It is a naivety Americans seem to be totally unaware of. They must come to terms with it, or their equally unaware shadow side may go berserk.

All this is a shame of colossal proportions because we love the Yanks too. Without America's incredible ingenuity and a society that cherishes it rather spending all its energy putting it down, the world would be a less challenging place.

Likewise, and not altogether tangentially, without the Jews the human race would likely still be on all fours. We owe a great deal to the Jews and the Americans.

Yet these two nations, America and Israel, for reasons of similarly delusional chosen race hubris, are causing no end of strife in the world. Israel's intransigence with the Palestinians is simply wrong. I don't know any Palestinians but I do know many Jews, remarkable, wonderful people all. But at the bottom of their otherwise bountiful hearts they regard Palestinians as little better than animals. I don't pretend to know why, but any conversations I have with them come to a tense halt when the Palestinian issue comes up. The leaders of people may be "animals" but the people themselves are not.

Thus the recent description of "blood feud" between these two closely linked peoples is apt. It is an ancient, tribal, primordial hatred. And it is an insult to the "God" they both worship.

We owe a great deal to the Europeans too, for laying the foundation of civilisation. And we owe a great deal to the Islamic nations for keeping civilisation alive when Europe was still in the Dark Ages.

We owe every person alive or dead on this planet. Not their governments, not their dictators, but the people themselves. We are all in this God damned life together.

People are already talking in print about the New York attack being the beginning of World War III. Apropos, there is an email circulating concerning Nostradamus' predictions. Here is what the old Frenchman says:

"In the City of God there will be a great thunder,
two brothers torn apart by Chaos.
While the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb.
The third big war will begin when the big city is burning.
Terror will come from the sky on the seventh month of the newmillennium."

In the old calendar, the seventh month was
September. The official millennium is 2001.

You can take that or leave it. But there is no reason to think a world war is not in the offing. On the one hand there are the trained suicide bombers of Osama bin Laden with their almost unstoppable goal of the destruction of the United States. On the other, George W. Bush. How ironic it is that the sins of Bush Senior, with his inept Gulf War, the war that turned bin Laden into a monster, are now visited on Bush Junior, whose ignorance is completing the circle.

Then again, maybe a world war is what we need to snap us out of this apparently inescapable treadmill of greed and hate, of attack and counterattack. Let's just hope the history of this tortured species prevails in the end.

If the pundits and Nostradamus are right, then we are in for massive destruction. It has been said that the terrorists were only playing with America this time. That each plane could have been loaded with anthrax. If the American counter attack is not clearly limited to the perpetrators, the next terrorist attack will be biological/chemical. What will the retribution be then? A massive nuclear attack on the entire Middle East? But the very nature of cell terrorism means this would be ultimately ineffective. The next lot or terrorists are most likely living within America's borders.

Rather than bomb half the world into oblivion, America should announce to the world that it wishes to summon everyone together, every leader of every country, friendly or unfriendly, to explicitly understand WHY things have come to this dreadful moment. Better yet, with the communications in place today, allow every human being the chance to voice his or her grievance. Allow every human being on the planet a vote as to what should happen next. We are all in this life together, whether we like it or not.

Fat chance.

Up to now the globalisation being rammed down everyone's throats has been economic. It has been a disaster. With the financial markets about to suffer convulsions, the globalisation of the future must be humane. It must be a globalisation which is not merely economic, but which includes people, all people. The failure of exclusive globalisation has fuelled terrorism. David has wounded Goliath. But no matter what Goliath does, there will be always be another David to wound it further.

The future should be in our hands.

Top    Next Issue