jim writes: "Terrorism and the Struggle for Peace

Manning Marable

It is still mourning time here in New York City. It has
been weeks since the terrorist attack destroying the
World Trade Center towers, but the real tragedy remains
brutally fresh and terribly real to millions of
residents in this over-crowded metropolis. The horrific
sights of thousands of human beings incinerated in less
than one hundred minutes, of screaming people free
falling more than one thousand feet plummeting to their
deaths, is nearly impossible for anyone to comprehend
or even to explain.



The criminals who obliterated the World Trade Center
and part of the Pentagon attempted to make a symbolic
political statement about the links between
transnational capitalism and U.S. militarism. But by
initiating acts of mass murder, any shred of political
credibility that those who plotted and carried out
these crimes was totally destroyed. There can be no
justification, excuse or rationale for the deliberate
use of deadly force and unprovoked violence against any
civilian population. This was not essentially an act of
war, but a criminal act, a crime against not only the
American people, but all of humanity. Those who
committed these crimes must be apprehended and brought
to justice under international law and courts.



In the immediate days following the terrorist attacks,
some elements of the American left, including a few
black activists, took the sectarian position that those
who carried out these crimes were somehow "freedom
fighters." These "left" critics implied that these
vicious, indiscriminate actions must be interpreted
within the political context of the oppression that
gave rise to those actions. In short, the brutal
reality of U.S. imperialism, including America's
frequent military occupation of Third World countries,
to some degree justifies the use of political terrorism
as a legitimate avenue for expressing their political
resistance.



It is certainly true that the American Left must
vigorously and uncompromisingly oppose the Bush
administration's militaristic response to this crisis
because the unleashing of massive armed retaliation
will inevitably escalate the cycle of terror. However,
progressives must also affirm their support for justice
-- first and foremost, by expressing our deepest
sympathies and heartfelt solidarity with the thousands
of families who lost loved ones in this tragedy. We
should emphasize the fact that among the victims, over
one thousand labor union members were killed in the
World Trade Center attack; that more than fifteen
hundred children in metropolitan New York were left
without a parent; that hundreds of undocumented
immigrants undoubtedly perished in the flames of
September 11th, but their families are unable to step
forward to governmental authorities, due to their
illegal residence in the U.S.



Although there was a generous outpouring of charitable
donations to the victims' families after September 11,
less attention has been given to the most disadvantaged
workers whose lives or livelihoods were destroyed.
Kitchen workers, for example, at the World Trade
Center's Windows on the World, have only $15,000 life
insurance policies. Over 100,000 jobs were destroyed,
along with hundreds of small businesses in the area.



However, our criticisms of the Al Qaeda group should
not support their "demonization," and description as
"cowards" or "evil doers," in the incoherent
denunciations of President Bush. We can denounce their
actions as criminal, while also resisting the Bush
administration's and media's racist characterizations
of their political beliefs as "pathological" and
"insane." Bush's demagogical rhetoric only feeds racist
attacks against Middle Eastern people and other Muslims
here in the U.S.



Perhaps one of the most effective criticisms would be
to highlight the important differences between the
sectarianism of Islamic fundamentalism, versus the rich
humanism that is central to the Islamic faith. In the
eloquent words of the late Muslim intellectual Eqbal
Ahmad, Islamic fundamentalism promulgates "an Islamic
order reduced to a penal code, stripped of its
humanism, aesthetics, intellectual quests, and
spiritual devotion." It manipulates the politics of
resentment and fear, rather than "sharing and
alleviating" the oppression of the masses in the Third
World.



We must also make a clear distinction between "guilt"
and "responsibility." The Al Qaeda group is indeed
guilty of committing mass murder. But the United States
government is largely responsible for creating the
conditions for reactionary Islamic fundamentalism to
flourish. During Reagan's administration, the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) provided over three billion
dollars to finance the mujahadeen's guerilla war
against the Soviet Union's military presence in
Afghanistan. The CIA used Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence or secret police, to equip and train tens
of thousands of Islamic fundamentalists in the tactics
of guerilla warfare.



According to one 1997 study, the CIA's financing was
directly responsible for an explosion of the heroin
trade in both mujahadeen-controlled Afghanistan and
Pakistan. By 1985, the region had become, states
researcher Alfred McCoy, "the world's top heroin
producer," supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand. Heroin
addicts in Pakistan subsequently rose "from near zero
in 1979 . to 1.2 million by 1985." Our Pakistani
"allies" operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. The
Taliban regime consolidated its authoritarian rule in
the mid-1990s in close partnership with Pakistan's
secret police and ruling political dictatorship. And
the Clinton administration was virtually silent when
the draconian suppression of women's rights, public
executions and mass terror became commonplace across
Afghanistan.



As The Nation columnist Katha Pollitt recently
observed, under the Taliban dictatorship, women "can't
work, they can't go to school, they have virtually no
healthcare, (and) they can't leave their houses without
a male escort." The Bush administration's current
allies in Afghanistan, the so-called Northern Alliance,
are no better. As Pollitt notes, both fundamentalist
groups are equally "violent, lawless, misogynistic
(and) anti-democratic."



One standard definition of "terrorism" is the use of
extremist, extralegal violence and coercion against a
civilian, or noncombatant population. Terrorist acts
may be employed to instill fear and mass intimidation,
to achieve a political objective. By any criteria, Al
Qaeda is a terrorist organization. Most Americans have
rarely experienced terrorism, but we have unleashed
terrorism against others throughout our history. The
mass lynchings, public executions and burnings at the
stake of thousands of African Americans in the early
twentieth century was home-grown, domestic terrorism.



The genocide of millions of American Indians was
objectively a calculated plan of mass terrorism. The
dropping of the atomic bomb on Japanese cities during
World War II, and the fiery incineration of several
hundred thousand civilians, was certainly a crime
against humanity. The U.S.-sponsored coup against the
democratically elected government of Chile in 1973,
culminating in the mass tortures, rapes and executions
of thousands of people, was nothing less than state-
financed terrorism. There is a common political
immorality that links former Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet, Osama Bin Laden, and former U.S. Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger: they all believe that the
political ends justified the means.



Moral relativism has no place in progressive politics.
For oppressed people to triumph over political evil, we
must not become that which we have struggled against
for so long. The wages of sectarian hatred and
indiscriminate violence cannot purchase our freedom.

A consensus now exists across the American political
spectrum, left to right, that everything fundamentally
changed in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks.
To be sure, there was an upsurgence of patriotism and
national chauvinism, a desire to "avenge" the innocent
victims of the Al Qaeda network's terrorism.



I would suggest, however, that the events of recent
weeks are not a radical departure into some new,
uncharted political territory, but rather the
culmination of deeper political and economic forces set
into motion more than two decades ago.



The core ideology of Reaganism -- free markets,
unregulated corporations, the vast buildup of nuclear
and conventional weapons, aggressive militarism abroad
and the suppression of civil liberties and civil rights
at home, and demagogical campaigns against both
"terrorism" and Soviet Communism -- is central to the
Bush administration's initiatives today. Former
President Reagan sought to create a "national security
state," where the legitimate functions of government
were narrowly restricted to matters of national
defense, public safety, and providing tax subsidies to
the wealthy. Reagan pursued a policy of what many
economists term "military Keynesianism," the deficit
spending of hundreds of billions of dollars on military
hardware and speculative weapons schemes such as "Star
Wars." This massive deficit federal spending was
largely responsible for the U.S. economic expansion of
the 1980s. Simultaneously, the Soviet Union was
pressured into an expensive arms race that it could not
afford. The fall of Soviet Communism transformed the
global political economy into a unipolar world,
characterized by U.S. hegemony, both economically and
militarily.



The result was a deeply authoritarian version of
American state power, with increasing restrictions on
democratic rights of all kinds, from the orchestrated
dismantling of trade unions, to the mass incarceration
of racialized minorities and the poor. By the end of
the 1990s, two million Americans were behind bars, and
over four million former prisoners had lost the right
to vote for life. "Welfare as we know it," in the words
of former President Clinton, was radically
restructured, with hundreds of thousands of women
householders and their children pushed down into
poverty.



Behind much of this vicious conservative offensive was
the ugly politics of race. The political assault
against affirmative action and minority economic set-
asides was transformed by the Right into a moral
crusade against "racial preferences" and "reverse
discrimination." Black and Latino young people across
the country were routinely "racially profiled" by law
enforcement officers. DWB, "Driving While Black,"
became a familiar euphemism for such police practices.
As the liberal welfare state of the 1960s mutated into
the prison industrial complex state of the 1990s, the
white public was given the unambiguous message that the
goal of racial justice had to be sacrificed for the
general security and public safety of all. It was, in
short, a permanent war against the black, brown, and
the poor.



The fall of Communism transformed a bipolar political
conflict into a unipolar, hegemonic "New World Order,"
as the first President Bush termed it. The chief
institutions for regulating the flow of capital
investment and labor across international boundaries
were no longer governments. The International Monetary
Fund, the World Trade Organization, and transnational
treaties such as NAFTA exercised significantly greater
influence over the lives of workers in most countries
than their own governments. By the year 2000, fifty-one
of the world's one hundred wealthiest and largest
economies were actually corporations, and only forty-
nine were countries. The political philosophy of
globalization was termed "neoliberalism," the demand to
privatize government services and programs, to
eliminate unions, and to apply the aggressive rules of
capitalist markets to the running of all public
institutions, such as schools, hospitals, and even
postal services. The social contract between U.S.
citizens and the liberal democratic state was being
redefined to exclude the concepts of social welfare and
social responsibility to the truly disadvantaged.



A new, more openly authoritarian philosophy of
governance was required, to explain to citizens why
their longstanding democratic freedoms were being taken
away from them. A leading apologist for neo-
authoritarian politics was New York mayor Rudolph
Giuliani. In 1994, soon after his election as mayor,
Giuliani declared in a speech: "Freedom is about
authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every
single human being to cede to lawful authority a great
deal of indiscretion about what you do and how you do
it." As we all know, the Giuliani administration won
national praise for reducing New York City's murder
rates from two thousand a year down to 650 a year, and
violent crime rates plummeted. But the social cost to
New York's black, brown and poor communities was far
more destructive than anything they had known
previously. The ACLU estimates that between 50,000 to
100,000 New Yorkers were subjected annually to "stop-
and-frisk" harassment by the police under Giuliani. The
city's notorious Street Crimes Unit functioned not
unlike El Salvador's "Death Squads," unleashing
indiscriminate terror and armed intimidation against
"racially profiled" victims.



Many white liberals in New York City passively
capitulated to this new state authoritarianism. It is
even more chilling that in the wake of the September 11
attacks, New York Times journalist Clyde Haberman
immediately drew connections between "the emotional
rubble of the World Trade Center nightmare" and Amadou
Diallo, the unarmed West African immigrant gunned down
in 1999, with forty-one shots fired by four Street
Crimes Unit police officers. "It is quite possible that
America will have to decide, and fairly soon, how much
license it wants to give law enforcement agencies to
stop ordinary people at airports and border crossings,
to question them at length about where they have been,
where they are heading, and what they intend to do once
they get where they're going," Haberman predicted. "It
would probably surprise no one if ethnic profiling
enters the equation, to some degree." Haberman
reluctantly acknowledged that Giuliani may be "at heart
an authoritarian." But he added that "as a wounded New
York mourns its unburied dead, and turns to its mayor
for solace," public concerns about civil rights and
civil liberties violations would recede. Haberman seems
to be implying that the rights of people like Amadou
Diallo are less important than the personal safety of
white Americans.



As the national media enthusiastically picked up the
Bush administration's mantra about the "War On
Terrorism," a series of repressive federal and state
laws were swiftly passed. New York State's legislature,
in the span of one week, created a new crime --
"terrorism" -- with a maximum penalty of life in
prison. Anyone convicted of giving more than one
thousand dollars to any organization defined by state
authorities as "terrorist" will face up to 15 years in
a state prison. When one reflects that, not too many
years ago, that the U.S. considered the African
National Congress as a "terrorist organization," and
that the Palestinian Liberation Organization is still
widely described as "terrorist," the danger of
suppressing any activities by U.S. citizens that
support any Third World social justice movements now
becomes very real.



At all levels of government, any expression of
restraint or caution about the dangerous erosion of our
civil liberties was equated with treason. The anti-
terrorism bills in the New York State Assembly were
passed with no debate, by a margin of 135 to five. The
U.S. Senate on October 12, passed the Bush
administration's anti-terrorism legislation by 96 to
one. In the House of Representatives, when the
administration demanded authorization to use military
force in Afghanistan, only California Democratic
Representative Barbara Lee had the courage to vote no.
She immediately was subjected to death threats, and in
her own words, was "called a traitor, a coward, (and) a
communist." But as Congresswoman Lee alone had the
integrity to declare, "As we act, let us not become the
evil that we deplore." To resist the reactionary
mobilization towards war, we must have the principled
courage of Barbara Lee.

The militarism and political intolerance displayed in
the Bush administration's response to the September
11th attacks created a natural breeding ground for
bigotry and racial harassment. For the Reverend Jerry
Falwell, the recent tragedy was God's condemnation of a
secularist, atheistic America. The attacks were
attributed to "the pagans, and the abortionists, and
the feminists and the lesbians," according to Falwell,
"the ACLU (and) People for the American Way." Less
well-publicized were the hate-filled commentaries of
journalist Ann Coulter, who declared: "We should invade
their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them
to Christianity."



Similar voices of racist intolerance are also being
heard in Europe. For example, Italian Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconi recently stated that "Western
civilization" was clearly "superior to Islamic
culture." Berlusconi warmly praised "imperialism,"
predicting that "the West will continue to conquer
peoples, just as it has Communism." Falwell, Berlusconi
and others illustrate the direct linkage between racism
and war, between militarism and political reaction.



Even on college campuses, there have been numerous
instances of the suppression of free speech and
democratic dissent. When City University of New York
faculty held an academic forum which examined the
responsibility of U.S. foreign policies for creating
the context for the terrorist attacks, the university's
chief administrator publicly denounced them. "Let there
be no doubt whatsoever," warned CUNY Chancellor Matthew
Goldstein, "I have no sympathy for the voices of those
who make lame excuses for the attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon based on ideological or
historical circumstances." Conservative trustees of
CUNY sought to censure or even fire the faculty
involved. According to the Chronicle of Higher
Education, hundreds of Middle Eastern college students
have been forced to return home from the U.S., due to
widespread ethnic and religious harassment.



At UCLA, library assistant Jonnie Hargis was suspended
without pay from his job when he sent an email on the
university's computers, which criticized U.S. support
for Israel. When University of South Florida professor
Sami Al-Arian appeared on television talking about his
relationships to two suspected terrorists, he was
placed on indefinite paid leave and ordered to leave
the campus "for his (own) safety," university officials
later explained. The First Amendment right of free
speech, the Constitutional right of any citizen to
criticize policies of our government, is now at risk.



Perhaps the most dangerous element of the Bush
administration's current campaign against democratic
rights has been the deliberate manipulation of mass
public hysteria. Millions of Americans who witnessed
the destruction of the World Trade Center are still
experiencing post-traumatic anxiety and depression.
According to the Wall Street Journal, during the last
two weeks of September, pharmacies filled 1.9 million
new prescriptions for Zoloft, Prozac, and other anti-
depressants, a 16 percent increase over the same period
in 2000. Prescriptions for sleeping pills and short-
term anxiety drugs like Xanax and Valium also rose 7
percent. The American public has been bombarded daily
by a series of media-orchestrated panic attacks,
focusing on everything from the potential threats from
crop dusting airplanes being used for "bio-terrorism,"
to anthrax contaminated packages delivered through the
U.S. postal service. People are constantly warned to
carefully watch their mail, their neighbors, and each
other. Intense levels of police security at sports
stadiums, and armed National Guard troops at airports,
have begun to be accepted as "necessary" for the
welfare of society.



We will inevitably see "dissident profiling": the
proliferation of electronic surveillance, roving
wiretapping, harassment at the workplace, the
infiltration and disruption of anti-war groups, and the
stigmatization of any critics of U.S. militarism as
disloyal and subversive. As historian Eric Foner has
recently noted, "let us recall the F.B.I.'s persistent
harassment of individuals like Martin Luther King, Jr.,
and its efforts to disrupt the civil rights and anti-
war movements, and the C.I.A.'s history of cooperation
with some of the world's most egregious violators of
human rights. The principle that no group of Americans
should be stigmatized as disloyal or criminal because
of race or national origin is too recent and too
fragile an achievement to be abandoned now." You cannot
preserve democracy by restricting and eliminating
democratic rights. To publicly oppose a government's
policies, which one believes to be morally and
politically wrong, is expressing the strongest belief
in the principles of democracy.



We must clearly explain to the American people that the
missile strikes and indiscriminate carpet bombings we
have unleashed against Afghanistan peasants will not
make us safer. The policies of the Bush administration
actually put our lives in greater danger, because the
use of government-sponsored terror will not halt brutal
retaliations by the terrorists. The national security
state apparatus we are constructing today is being
designed primarily to suppress domestic dissent and
racially-profiled minorities, rather than to halt
foreign-born terrorists at our borders.



Last year alone, there were 489 million people who
passed through our border inspection systems. Over 120
million cars are driven across U.S. borders every year,
and it's impossible to thoroughly check even a small
fraction of them. Restricting civil liberties, hiring
thousands more police and security guards, and
incarcerating innocent Muslims and people of Arab
descent, only foster the false illusion of security.
The "War on Terrorism" is being used as an excuse to
eliminate civil liberties and democratic rights here at
home."