Constructing the other

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxx>]

The need for dissent

Voices from Britain and the US highlight the risks of a hasty response

Special report: terrorism in the US

George Monbiot
Tuesday September 18, 2001
The Guardian

If Osama bin Laden did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
For the past four years, his name has been invoked whenever a US
president has sought to increase the defence budget or wriggle out of
arms control treaties. He has been used to justify even President
Bush's missile defence programme, though neither he nor his associates
are known to possess anything approaching ballistic missile
technology. Now he has become the personification of evil required to
launch a crusade for good: the face behind the faceless terror.

The closer you look, the weaker the case against Bin Laden becomes.
While the terrorists who inflicted Tuesday's dreadful wound may have
been inspired by him, there is, as yet, no evidence that they were
instructed by him. Bin Laden's presumed guilt appears to rest on the
supposition that he is the sort of man who would have done it. But his
culpability is irrelevant: his usefulness to western governments lies
in his power to terrify. When billions of pounds of military spending
are at stake, rogue states and terrorist warlords become assets
precisely because they are liabilities.

By using Bin Laden as an excuse for demanding new military spending,
weapons manufacturers in America and Britain have enhanced his iconic
status among the disgruntled. His influence, in other words, has been
nurtured by the very industry which claims to possess the means of
stamping him out. This is not the only way in which the new terrorism
crisis has been exacerbated by corporate power. The lax airport
security which enabled the hijackers to smuggle weapons on to the
planes was, for example, the result of corporate lobbying against the
stricter controls the government had proposed.

Now Tuesday's horror is being used by corporations to establish the
preconditions for an even deadlier brand of terror. This week, while
the world's collective back is turned, Tony Blair intends to allow the
mixed oxide plant at Sellafield to start operating. The decision would
have been front-page news at any other time. Now it's likely to be all
but invisible. The plant's operation, long demanded by the nuclear
industry and resisted by almost everyone else, will lead to a massive
proliferation of plutonium, and a high probability that some of it
will find its way into the hands of terrorists. Like Ariel Sharon, in
other words, Blair is using the reeling world's shock to pursue
policies which would be unacceptable at any other time.

For these reasons and many others, opposition has seldom been more
necessary. But it has seldom been more vulnerable. The right is
seizing the political space which has opened up where the twin towers
of the World Trade Centre once stood.

Civil liberties are suddenly negotiable. The US seems prepared to lift
its ban on extra-judicial executions carried out abroad by its own
agents. The CIA might be permitted to employ human rights abusers once
more, which will doubtless mean training and funding a whole new
generation of Bin Ladens. The British government is considering the
introduction of identity cards. Radical dissenters in Britain have
already been identified as terrorists by the Terrorism Act 2000. Now
we're likely to be treated as such.

The authoritarianism which has long been lurking in advanced
capitalism has started to surface. In these pages yesterday, William
Shawcross - Rupert Murdoch's courteous biographer - articulated the
new orthodoxy: America is, he maintained, "a beacon of hope for the
world's poor and dispossessed and for all those who believe in freedom
of thought and deed". These believers would presumably include the
families of the Iraqis killed by the sanctions Britain and the US have
imposed; the peasants murdered by Bush's proxy war in Colombia; and
the tens of millions living under despotic regimes in the Middle East,
sustained and sponsored by the US.

William Shawcross concluded by suggesting that "we are all Americans
now", an echo of Pinochet's maxim that "we are all Chileans now": by
which he meant that no cultural distinctions would be tolerated and no
indigenous land rights recognised. Shawcross appeared to suggest that
those who question American power are the enemies of democracy. It's a
different way of formulating the warning voiced by members of the Bush
administration: "If you're not with us, you're against us."

The Daily Telegraph has set aside part of its leader column for a
directory of "useful idiots", by which it means those who oppose major
military intervention. Perhaps the roll of honour will soon include
families of some of the victims, who seem to be rather more capable of
restraint and forgiveness than the leader writers of the rightwing
press. Mark Newton-Carter, whose brother appears to have died in the
terrorist outrage, told one of the Sunday newspapers: "I think Bush
should be caged at the moment. He is a loose cannon. He is building up
his forces getting ready for a military strike. That is not the
answer. Gandhi said: 'An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind'
and never a truer word was spoken." But when the right is on the
rampage, victims as well as perpetrators are trampled.

Mark Twain once observed that "there are some natures which never grow
large enough to speak out and say a bad act is a bad act, until they
have inquired into the politics or the nationality of the man who did
it". The left is able to state categorically that Tuesday's terrorism
was a dreadful act, irrespective of provenance. But the right can't
bring itself to make the same statement about Israel's new invasions
of Palestine, or the sanctions in Iraq, or the US-backed terror in
East Timor, or the carpet bombing of Cambodia. Its critical faculties
have long been suspended and now, it demands, we must suspend ours
too.

Retaining the ability to discriminate between good acts and bad acts
will become ever harder over the next few months, as new conflicts and
paradoxes challenge our preconceptions. It may be that a convincing
case against Bin Laden is assembled, whereupon his forced extradition
would be justified. But, unless we wish to help George Bush use
barbarism to defend the "civilisation" he claims to represent, we must
distinguish between extradition and extermination.

Tuesday's terror may have signalled the beginning of the end of
globalisation. The recession it has doubtless helped to precipitate,
coupled with a new and understandable fear among many Americans of
engagement with the outside world, could lead to a reactionary
protectionism in the US, which is likely to provoke similar responses
on this side of the Atlantic. We will, in these circumstances, have to
be careful not to celebrate the demise of corporate globalisation, if
it merely gives way to something even worse.

The governments of Britain and America are using the disaster in New
York to reinforce the very policies which have helped to cause the
problem: building up the power of the defence industry, preparing to
launch campaigns of the kind which inevitably kill civilians,
licensing covert action. Corporations are securing new resources to
invest in instability. Racists are attacking Arabs and Muslims and
blaming liberal asylum policies for terrorism. As a result of the
horror on Tuesday, the right in all its forms is flourishing, and we
are shrinking. But we must not be cowed. Dissent is most necessary
just when it is hardest to voice.