Don't believe the war
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The attacks in New York were gruesome and horrible. Killing and wounding people is always wrong, and even worse on this large scale.

But this counts for everybody, not only Islamic people, but also Americans and Europeans. Killing people is wrong, very wrong.

Bush has declared war, and so did Prime Minister Kok of the Netherlands. At this moment, September 17 2001, it is not clear to whom this war is declared. They declared war on international terrorism, but what is that? Who will be marked as terrorists? Who will be marked as target for the vast armies of NATO and their allies?

At this moment, we can only guess and speculate. But still, there are many things we already know.

For one thing: listening to the cowboy speeches of Bush and friends, ("We will get Ben Laden, dead or alive") it is clear that on this moment the words freedom and democracy are just empty phrases. Those that will be marked as terrorists or supporters of terrorists, or even those accidentally living in a place where also so-called terrorists live; all those people are as good as dead. Only few of them, probably none of them, will get a fair trial. They will not get a lawyer, they will not be able to defend themselves against the accusation of terrorism. They are not innocent until proven otherwise.

They will get executed, guilty or not, and that’s all.

Please, step out of the nationalistic frenzy of hate for a while. Forget the war propaganda, and just try to think about things objectively, no matter how mad you are, no matter how justified your anger is. Think about Afghanistan for example. Ninety percent of the Afghan people don’t live in Kabul or any other city. They live in little villages, without water, electricity, TV or newspapers. They don’t know how to read or write. They don’t know much, because of that. For example, they don’t know about the attacks in the US. My god, some of them don’t even know that the US exists!

Those are the people we will bomb in a few days. Those are the people that will die in a terrible war "against terrorism". People that have never heard of America in their lives.

This is how we promote freedom and democracy?

Afghanistan endured so much already. So much more then we can comprehend. Until a few years back they had the Soviet Union on their backs. The Afghan War was one of the dirtiest wars of the last century. It was Russia’s Vietnam. Then, after the Soviet Union fell apart, they have a civil war that’s still going on. And now they have the Taliban. It’s not for fun that there are 2.3 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan, and many more in other countries.
Then there is the worst drought in many years. People and cattle are starving everywhere. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world. Families over there think about their only goat, and whether it will live through the next week. Even when they did have the incredible luxury of a television set, they wouldn’t have the opportunity of mourning the deaths that fell on the other side of the globe. They are completely occupied with surviving themselves!
We do have television sets. We don’t have to be occupied with survival. We do have the time and opportunity to mourn deaths. Do we care much for people starving in Afghanistan? If so, why do they still die?

No, we have other things on our minds. We think about our second car, about Jerry Springer, about the stock market. We were prepared to start a cold war against the Soviet Union, to bomb Vietnam, Nicaragua, Colombia, Iraq, Serbia, etcetera, all in the name of freedom and democracy, which are our nicknames for hegemony and economical interests. So we can start worrying about our third car.

And then, all of a sudden, some planes fall out of the air, and smashes our false sense of security to smithereens. At once we are forced to think, in a modest way, about some of the same things that the rest of the world population thinks about daily. Am I safe? Will I live tomorrow?

That can’t be allowed. Dying and the struggle for survival are meant for Africans, Asians, Afghans and beasts, not for us. So we are ready to bomb everybody who thinks otherwise.

It’s time we become honest. We, the US and Europe, are not interested at all in freedom, equality or democracy. Those are just words to produce consent with.

We are living in a racist society that’s trying to conquer the world. The difference between us and a warlord in the Middle Ages is in our methods and our words, nothing else. No, we don’t literally conquer each country we can find. After the colonization we found out that making countries dependent instead of conquer them, is safer and cheaper; you get more profit from it.

We keep those countries in our line with different methods. Our secret services manipulate them (For example Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were once financed by the CIA, the same CIA that’s after their heads now); our superior economy suppresses them (free trade, except for the Third World. For example banana’s can only be imported in Europe when they’re not too small, too brown or too bended. This is because the little farmers in the Third World grow another banana-race as Dole and Chiquita, our big multinationals. A race that’s thus not allowed), our banks lend them the money they need but can not make themselves because of that, so we have a firm grip on their economies and can demand whatever we want. (WTO and IMF always demand excessive measures in trade for loans, like the demands to sell out all mineral supplies to us, to forget about any social securitysystem they still might have, and to open their markets completely for our products, even environmental or healthstandards aren’t allowed)

This is all making their dependency grow. It’s not meant to help them, that’s just nice, hollow words.

And then, once in a while, there’s someone who threatens some of our interests. Like Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait. Then we have our armies, to keep them in line the old-fashioned way. We yell about democracy threatened, and then we start to defend a dictatorship against another dictator: Kuwait, where 80% of the people have no rights at all, against Hussein. Of course, the real reason is that Kuwait was a nice country, depending on us and full of oil.

The Gulf War is not that difficult, but what about Afghanistan? Why attack such a poor country, what does that have to do with our economy?

With communism gone and Russia becoming a third world country, the "new" threats to our hegemony is the Islam. Why? Let’s take a look at some Islamic countries.

Although Afghanistan is very poor, many other Islamic countries aren’t. Especially the Arab countries. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and some others have oil, lots of oil. This gives them power, because we need much more oil as we can produce. And once in a while they use this power. Since the oil crisis in the seventies, the Arabs know they can. We don’t like that. We want to be the only one at the top. They should depend on us, not the other way around.

A likeness, purely accidentally, between these countries is their religion and culture. Our trick is to attack and humiliate the weakest country of them, to show them all that we’re superior and they should listen. Iraq was weak, because the other Arab countries were afraid that Hussein would try to conquer them. He was preparing to infiltrate Saudi Arabia for one. So they wouldn’t support him, but would become allies of the US. This made Iraq a weak opponent.

Afghanistan is even easier. The country is far away from the Arab countries, and it believes in another kind of Islam, like we have the difference between catholic and protestant people. This means it doesn’t have support, and it has no means to defend itself. But the likeness between Afghanistan and Arab countries is still big enough to make an example out of it, a warning to oil producing countries. So it’s very suited for the task.

A difficulty is that this could have far more destabilizing effects then the Gulf War, and this could be the only reason – besides resistance in our countries against war – why a big war could be avoided.

 

But our economy isn’t the only reason why we act like we act. There’s also politics. Bush is an idiot, who likes to execute poor people instead of helping to build a country where people don’t have a reason to steal anymore. And Bush (or rather his advisors) is smart enough to know that he was losing his support. So what do you do if you want to stay on top, and you notice people start to question your right to be there? You make a common enemy. Communism, Islam, terrorism, whatever. And your problems are gone. Everybody ready to fight the bad guys, everybody looking upon their society as a holy group of chosen people in a heavenly system. Up with nationalism, down with thinking straight. The attack came just in time.

Please don’t fall for it. Refuse to cooperate.

Think. Act. There’s only one kind of true democracy, and that’s where people choose freely what they want with who they want, without representation like a president or a parliament to think for them. Bush has nothing to do with democracy. The biggest difference between Bush and Bin Laden is a difference of scale.

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