The War on Terror helps protect the claims of the rich to large concentrations of property even as it helps downplay the plight of those whose marginalized socio-economic status gives them the greatest reason to reject assertively the proprietary status quo. For all these reasons the War on Terror is first and foremost the most concerted and most broadly cast campaign of psychological warfare ever attempted in the global community. The aim of this so-called war is to perpetuate oligarical governance rooted in popular fears and thereby counter the possibility of anti-authoritarian governance rooted in popular hopes.
The main modus operendi of this dubious campaign of control through fear is to manufacture consent for a continuing license for global domination as policed through the instruments of the national security state and its attending military-industrial complex. The War on Terror's propganda, as epitomized by the work of David Frum and Richard Perle, lend legitimacy to entrenched plutrocacies everywhere even as it arouses suspicion that those who question authority are outright evil. [xxxix]
Hence the global War on Terror gives cover to the propensity of ruling elites to repress rivals and dissenters through the denial of civil liberties and suppression of the rule of law. The War on Terror gives credence to the erroneous assumption that history is approaching an end; that there can be no basis for any legitimate revolutionary challenges to the proprietary advantages enjoyed by those who have gained disproportionate amounts of influence over the dominant means of political, economic, military and technological exploitation in today's world .[xl]
It makes no sense to try to vanquish terror from the world through increased warfare, more systematic and broadly applied methods of torture, or the militarization of space. In the long run global security through peace is only attainable through concerted efforts to ease the maladies identified at gatherings such as the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance.
The people and government of Cuba are engaged in their own War on Terror. Only for them the terrorists are often anti-Castro Cubans who work with the US government to inflict arbitrary murder and mayhem in the effort to undermine and destroy the Cuban Revolution. The most blatent example of this pattern was the full-fledged US military invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. But the violent interventions did not end there. It is widely known that Fidel Castro has faced literally dozens if not hundreds of US-engineered and US-backed assassination attempts since his revolutionary government replaced the US-puppet regime of Fulgencio Batiste in 1959.
Luis Posada Corriles is for many Cuban people the very personification of terrorism. In 1976 this Cuban-American CIA agent engineered the bombing of a Air Cubana passenger jet killing 73 innocent people. This expert in explosives is also thought to have been responsible for many other bombings including those that rocked the tourist district in Havanna in 1997.
The Cuban government has sound reason to believe that over 3,000 of its citizens have been murdered and about 2000 maimed in US-engineered or US-backed terrorist terrorist incidents. Several Cuban citizens went to Florida to investigate the possibility of more terrorist attacks directed against their own brothers, sisters, children and parents. Five of them were arrested to face a broad range of charges including those of espionage and conspiracy to commit murder. Like the US legal proceedings surrounding the case of Poseda Corrlies, the legal proceedings surrounding the Cuban Five illustrate the deep internal corruption plaguing the criminal justice system and its political masters in the United States.[xli]
Given their own experience with US-engineered and US-backed terrorism there is nothing particularly surprising in the lies and crimes of 911 from the perspective of many people in Cuba and in Latin America more generally. There is nothing to arouse dismay among the millions who have refused, and continue to refuse, the inevitability of the universalization of capitalism as the primary goal and end of history. The same cannot be said, however, for millions of us who have grown up in the relative comfort of the predominantly White, middle class of North America.
It was predominantly for us that the public mythology of 911 was created. It is predomonately in our communities in North America where the public mythology of 911 has acquired the strongest hold over the symbolic cosmologies of the imagination that inform our basic sense of right and wrong, good and bad. Until we can replace the mythology of 911 with the truth of 911, however difficult that inevitably will be, the terror economy shall continue to engulf us all with the devastating implications that it must have for humanity's future and for that of our many relatives in life's fragile interconnected web.
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