Neo-imperialism versus ISIS terrorism

This article seeks to redress this glaring omission, and utter the bleeding obvious. ISIS has claimed the attack, and France has already bombed their stronghold in Al-Raqqa. In truth, the investigations into the attacks are still in their infancy. In the wake of the November 13 terror attacks in Paris, the old great lie that is always repeated after such terrorist incidents directed at Westerners was again trotted out by every Western leader, and again parroted by a sycophantic and complicit mainstream Western media. The lie goes like this; ‘Nothing in our foreign policy actions could have possibly caused or contributed to the terrorist event in any way. The terrorists only did this to us because they hate us, and they only hate us because we stand for freedom, love, peace and goodness’.

However, I doubt whether any of the Western political elite who vomit this nonsense in the wake of terrorist events actually believe it themselves. They all parrot the line with such monotonous exactitude that it must be an official statement from an internal memo once circulated to all spokes-people about how they must respond to media questions about the causes of terrorist incidents.

The recent waves of terrorist attacks throughout the Middle East and in Paris are a sad reminder that no amount of surveillance, legislation, and ‘anti-terror’ operations by state security forces can keep civilian populations safe.  There is, in fact, only one way for governments to remove the threat of non-state terrorism and to ensure the safety and security of their civilian populations. That is, for those governments to themselves stop committing acts of terrorism. The indiscriminate urban terrorism employed by non-state terrorist groups is characterised by an ever-increasing savagery, sophistication, frequency and effect. However, that continue to be dwarfed by that of state-sponsored varieties.

ISIS are rightly condemned as a pack of religious fanatics who are willing to kill in the most brutal and indiscriminate fashion in the advancement of their religious ambitions. But are the Western corporate elite and their politician puppets really substantively any different? The savagery and the zealous hatred are the same, only the god is different. Whilst one murders for Allah and for a place in heaven, the other murders for Mammon (money), and for a place on the Forbes super-rich list. The only real difference lies in their access to resources. Non-state terrorists usually operate with relatively limited means, unless they have been ‘sponsored’, that is, supplied with arms by a state or corporation, or unless they have managed to take weapons often recklessly abandoned by retreating Western armies or their proxies. State terror apparatuses have a virtually unlimited tax-funded war machine with which to advance the corporate interests of those who really run the show; the contractors, the lobbyists, the agencies: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc.

One way and another, ISIS is a creation of the West as ample evidence shows that ISIS is a CIA asset that grew out of American efforts to cultivate a radical form of Islamic fundamentalism to combat Soviet influence in the region during the 1980’s. Again the foreign policy initiatives of the West are informed by a radical corporate neo-imperialism that creates millions of victims and thousands of survivor’s intent on avenging the suffering and deaths of those millions.  ISIS has been very clear in explaining its actions, continually reminding the West that it is the occupation of Iraq and other interference in the Middle East by the USA and its allies that motivates it.

Were the Western world not run by fanatical neo-imperialist psychopaths, events that occurred in Paris would have spelled the end of the age of imperialism. Most honest commentators realise that if you attack countries without cause or provocation, as occurred, for example, in Iraq in 2003, blow-back is inevitable. If Western politicians really wanted to keep their citizenry safe, then they would immediately abandon their murderous neo-imperialist adventurism, apologise to every nation they have ever invaded and terrorised, pay reparations, stop occupying the lands of others and quietly and humbly withdraw to their own borders.  But, sadly, the Western world is run by psychopaths, and they are firmly in the pocket of the corporate elite who run the show at a higher level still. The Western political elite know very well that their recent foreign policy decisions have caused the deaths of millions of people in the Middle East. And they know that those decisions are now causing ‘blow-back’ on the streets of their own cities on an unprecedented scale. And they know how to fix the problem over-night in the way I have already described. But this would require the yielding up of their neo-imperialist ambitions, and their pay-masters would never allow that. The industrial military complex and the petro-barons have invested in maintaining a perpetual state of war to ever allow something as dangerous as peace to break out. Their modus operandi is always the same; secretly foment war, arm both sides in the conflict and hope it never ends, sit back and reap the profits. People are all being held ransom by an unelected corporate elite who run the show at the highest levels of Western governments, and who have already decided that the best way to advance their greed is by sustaining a never ending state of war.

 Obama candidly observed in 2009.

 ‘The reason we’re not getting things done is not because we don’t have good plans. The reason is because it’s not our agenda that’s being moved forward in Washington – it’s the agenda of the corporate companies who dominate in terms of legislative activity’. Now, whether this apparently anti-corporate rhetoric by Obama really fits with the actualities of his policy initiatives regarding corporations, you get my point about who really runs the USA. Spontaneous grass-roots anti-war movements have erupted on the streets of Western capitals before, but they are vehemently resisted and suppressed by politicians who have already been bought by their corporate masters, who remind them that peace is simply not good for business.

Now Hollande and other Western leaders are calling for ‘vengeance’ on a grand scale. Of course, the many civilians who will die in many rounds of allied raids will never be mourned by the Western main-stream media. Those victims are not Europeans, rather, they are only sub-human “barbarians” that need not be counted, let alone mourned. Such is the vengeance now being called for by Hollande and the other Western leaders. One thing is sure: for every Parisian life lost, hundreds, of those ‘barbarians” must die in the indiscriminate ‘shock and awe’ total war campaigns that have now received a new impetus and rally cry: ‘For Paris’.

Solly Rakgomo