Ending Terrorism
By James A. Lucas
25 May, 2011
Countercurrents.org
As I personally recall, the period shortly after World War II was a time when we Americans started to be subjected to an atmosphere of grossly exaggerated fear of communism and the Soviet Union which made it easy to gain public support for the profits gained by the military-congressional-industrial complex.
The Soviets were the ogre, we were told, and we had to constantly keep ahead of them, especially in the size of our nuclear arsenal. In other words, if you wanted Americans to waste big bucks, contrary to their own best interests, scare them. Actually, this was an era when the US was expanding its empire and the Soviets were mostly trying to counter our moves.
This charade was unmasked when the Cold War ended with the demise of the Soviet Union. Since the threat of the hammer and sickle demon no longer existed, it was logical to have assumed at that time that we should have had a “peace dividend,” with our swords being converted into plowshares. But this did not happen, and new bogeymen were created to scare us, one being the alarmist assertion that some other nations constituted an “axis of evil.”
So these giant hoaxes change with the times. All this proved that the American people were, and still are, the pawns in a massive campaign of indoctrination designed to gain meek acquiescence to the preeminence of greed-driven profits for the elite in our society.
Now we are being conned by another deception, and we appear to be as gullible as our forefathers of not long ago. We have been obsessively fearful of terrorists since the attacks of September 11, 2001, despite the fact that people in the rest of the world are more justified in fearing the US than vice versa.
Assuming that our panic about the danger posed by Osama bin Laden since that traumatic day almost a decade ago was justified, one would expect that that now our hit men would no longer roam the earth killing suspected terrorists at the behest of our leaders who act as if they are a law unto themselves, and that instead our resources would now be employed productively for human betterment.
And last but not least, we should support our troops by bringing them home and simultaneously we should also start to dismantle our hundreds of military bases in other countries.
In order to have an effective solution to counter terrorism against the US we must primarily take steps to end the unrelenting state terrorism that we are exerting against others throughout the world, primarily by our wars.
Rip Van Winkle finally woke up. Will we?
James A. Lucas, a retired social worker, is an anti-war and anti-imperialist activist member of the September 11 Coalition/Dayton Peace Action. In 2010 he was the recipient of the first Dayton Peace Hero Award granted by the Dayton International Peace Museum.
Comments are not moderated. Please be responsible and civil in your postings and stay within the topic discussed in the article too. If you find inappropriate comments, just Flag (Report) them and they will move into moderation que.
