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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 569
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WCL 21 Jan 1999
Terrorism
Terrorism: a way of achieving political ends by means of widespread fear and coercion. Not a new device, but the age-old method employed by tyrants and others since the earliest history. Too often seen as a problem for governments, mostly it is used by governments against their subjects.
The worst terrorists of our dying century have been the rulers of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, but they have been copied or anticipated by governments in Turkey, Spain, South America and numerous other places. The Israelis learnt enough from the Nazis to employ similar methods against the Palestinians. And so on. But the terrorism that fills the columns of our newspapers is of another breed: it is the retort of the downtrodden and dispossessed against the rule of the rich, the powerful and the callous.
It happens that some of the most striking examples of terrorism which frighten the good law-abiding folk of the western world are now coming from Moslems, becausethe oppressed of Moslem countries are often worse dealt with by their rulers than any others of the poor. After all, slavery, where it exists in the world today, persists in countries like Saudi Arabia, ruled by some of the richest and most dissolute men to be found anywhere, with women kept in their abased places and a religious mafia that drives out even some of the most devout believers.
Iran to the west is a den of terrorists, but its recent history is the result of the most repressive, aggressive and wasteful country in the Middle East, when the Shah had the ambition to make his regime the best-armed in the region. And when the flow of arms from the West was hastened and encouraged by irresponsible governments that soon afterwards spent years trying to deal with his successors. Nor is the murderous state of Algeria any more than a reaction against the years of corrupt tyranny by the army which seized power after the colonial wars.
Two things about Islamic terrorism are often forgotten. The worst excesses of the terrorists are wreaked upon their fellow-believers. When Saddam Hussein wasn't gassing the Kurds, he was decimating the Shi'as of southern Iraq, or launching a war against the Shi'as in Iran, where a million Moslems perished. And the fanatics who have been running Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini are already suffering the hostility of the other fanatics now in control of Afghanistan.
During the Cold War the world became stocked with enough weapons to destroy civilization a hundred times over. We are indeed fortunate that no small group of fanatics then stole a nuclear bomb, to hide in a western city and demand a king's ransom as the price of not exploding it. That may yet come, because the nuclear powers have lied and schemed to avoid disarmament. We are now seeing the results, with not four or five, but ten or eleven nuclear Powers; and a stock of surplus nuclear bombs in Russia waiting to be sold off to the highest bidder who can find the gangsters capable of stealing them.
Behind world terrorism, unfortunately, lurks the figure of the Great Satan. Not that the USA has that character for most of its citizens, except those who see the action at Waco as typical of its behaviour. However, it is seen in the devotion with which successive American governments have acted: maintaining corrupt dictatorships, supplying arms to every military regime throughout 50 years, selling anything and everything to keep business in American happy and raw materials flowing to the US. The real theme of American policy for 50 years has been that anything to satisfy democracy at home is legitimate. That leads to terrorism on the part of those who suffer from it and can see no other way of having their voices heard.
John Roberts
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