11 SEPT 2001 -- THE FIRST WORLD SPECTACLE Already historians term the years 1989 - 2001 The Long Decade. This goes along with Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes for the short Twentieth Century 1914-1989. The fall of 1914 saw the assasination of an Austrian Prince and the successful invasion of the 'State that Supported Terrorism' aka Serbia. The same closing summer months of 1989, called 'The Fall' in American speech, saw the 'Collapse of Communism' in Europe. Between 1914 and 1989 we had two world wars, the development and use of nuclear weapons, genocide in Europe and Asia, and the emergence of computer networks along with AIDS/SIDA. The long decade 1989-2001 saw the complete impoverishment of much of the former Soviet regions, genocide in Central Africa, The Second Gulf War, a failed Middle East Peace process, the continued growth of China, and the full commercialisation of the Internet and mass use of mobile phones. AIDS has not quite kept pace with these technological changes. After the 11th September and the reaction of the USA and UK to the extinction of terrorist states we wonder whether history is being replayed as farce. Some anti-war activists see poor attendance at vigils and meetings because people have much news to watch on TV. Let us make no mistake: the attackers made sure that their war was seen on TV. It's not like the minorities in Algeria who are fighting ethnic and religious discrimination. Minority people deprived of their rights generally get little mainstream TV coverage. Sometimes it's illegal, like for Kurds in Turkey or more often just unprofitable to cover genuine grievences. History as farce has to go further back. Tariq Ali has plenty of opportunity for jokes in his conversational fantasy of the crusades. We await either the Apotheosis or the Occultation of Osama Bin Laden. The Islamic spin doctors can say what they like, but Osama has been made into a cult figure for more people than mere muslims. If the people look seriously at murder as a religious duty they don't have to turn far. The Bible, in Leviticus and many other religious works advocate murder for 'adultary'. Luckily the human race had other religions: Jainism for example abhors all violence, and Jains are prepared to hold debates on what is violence. Some would say Buddhism allows murder. The man gives up his soul to do good. So the planner of the kamikaze attack on the WTC sacrifices not his life now, but his whole future in paradise? Christ did it the other way round. The members of the suicide teams sacrificed their souls to do good? But what good? Is it economic good? Did they want to shift the focus of world trade away from New York? Tokyo is in slump, and Europe has many mutual rivals. FOUR DAYS OF BOMBING Wed Oct 10 18:56:10 /etc/localtime 2001 The first American bombs fell on Kabul on Sunday 7 October 2001. It's more of the same. Instead of CNN it was Al-Jazira that had had the cameras in the attacked and already ruined capital city. Vladimir Putin has offered both Blair and Bush a bit of rope. Rather a lot really. Hardly any objections to the Americans using some of the Central Asian states as forward bases. These states were already ecologically ruined by big 'Communist Cotton Projects' which set up ruinous irrigation systems. The Western leaders, Bush and Blair come from a pedigree of men who have made false promises before. GULF WAR II was CNN's big event. WS1 was covered by cameras in a democratic state. The bombing of Kabul is dealt with by Al-Jizira, the Qatari based broadcaster. Qatar is flirting with democracy. It's dangerous because Qatar could easily be invaded by a bigger neighbour. The false promises of Western governments don't just annoy Arabs. There have been a series of lies about reforming trade and seeking peace in the Middle East, along with a badly botched policy in the Balkans not to mention the ongoing 'War on Drugs'. The hard men of capitalism wish to impose their morals on the world just like the hard line Taliban or the 'Pol-Pots' of Marketing. DAMMAPADA Conquer anger by love, Conquer evil by good, Conquer the miser by liberality, Conquer the liar by truth. Satienpong Winnapok. Translation of Dammapada. So American and British governments have a track record of telling lies. Luckily the power of judges is able to repair some of the damage although after excessive delay. The people of Diego Garcia, a useful base for bombers and spy planes, should know this all too well. These people were evicted from their island a few decades ago, but eventually their expulsion was accepted as illegal in the last few months. A legal remedy has yet to be determined. Much of modern mass marketing is based on lies, although sometimes the products still sell themselves: cigarettes, drink, mobile phones and other pleasure products. Sometimes you get convergence of truth and marketing while at other times there is too much hype. There are many useful and efficient devices on sale: the bicycle and the motor scooter or the Walkman and the mobile phone can all be sold by mere telling of the truth. Other products like financial services often require distortion of the truth for a successful sale. RAM RAIDERS The terrorists flew airplanes with many passangers straight into buildings as a deliberate act of destruction. It was a very nihilistic act. The FBI claim to have found letters from the hijackers in conveniently delayed luggage. One of the letters contained moral encouragement for the last night on Earth. But during their time in the USA had these people watched American TV? Did they see there were hundreds of channels filled by triviality and a little bit of religious intolerance? Did they decide that American TV was so horrendous that they had to prepare to massacre thousands of people? It reminds me of the despots which told their bodyguards to turn their guns on the people, when the people no longer cheered them. Sayid Barre in Somalia, and Nicolae Caucescu of Romania both ordered their security services to fire into crowds of the common people. The desire of these tyrants to be worshipped was thwarted. They made the people suffer, but during their lives they had enjoyed much flattery. With muslims it's different. They expect everyone to worship Allah. Many christians also expect everyone to abide by their standards even if these standards contain internal contradictions. Tyrants are keen on usurping religion, especially worship. IDIOCY A Brtish politician bewails the absence of an educated middle class of Afghanis who might support the West, but seems unaware that these same people have often been subject to murdrous racist attacks on his own soil which he is supposed to have fought to defend. It's terrible that the army supports people like that. POLITICAL ECONOMY "If the Americans could build electronic factories here we would not need to grow opium." Afghan opium farmer. It seems opium has a farm gate price of about one dollar for the amount needed to make a kilo of heroin which gets filtered on to the streets at about $10000 per kilo to the end user. Despite the war ravaged areas cited as primary producers there is supposed to be a world surplus with at least two years normal consumption stockpiled in various places. The links between drugs and terrorism are often drawn by politicians but most of them advocate solutions involving violence: paramilitary squads to destroy crops and village livelyhoods in producer areas and police action, with arrest and imprisonment, with the occassional execution in consumer areas. The Qing dynasty rulers of China in the 1840s were much vexed by these policies. Control of opium was part of both British and Japanese foreign policy in Asia. Narco-terrorism, waged by the state is a key stone of American Foreign Policy. Many people from undemocratic states accuse the West of double standards, but they fail to appreciate the internal conflicts in the West. During the age of colonialism the West sent out spies and scholars to collect data on the natives. Saudi Arabia has Dr Mal Yamani, daughter of a former oil minister. She knows anthropology, and has explains some Arab views to Western audiences. To study primitive societies much is made of races, tribes, and to a more limited extent language. The ethnographical study of advanced capitalist economies is much harder, with loyalty to tribe being replaced by loyalty to brands. 'Republican' and 'Democrat' or 'Liberal' and 'Conservative' are well known brands. The have been imposed with apparent success on Germany and Japan in the mid twentieth century. Germany had in fact had 'Socialism' for many years but 'Socialism' got tarnished both by the Hitler cult and the Stalin cult. The moslems have every right to complain that their religion has been badly branded for so long. They have had 'Islamic' parties banned and treated just as badly as the already mostly illegal communist parties in their lands. Political policies are sold, just as much as washing powder brands; but there is no consumer protection from bad policies. The only protection is consumer awareness. We can see consumer awareness being hijacked by extremists when McDonald's regularly gets burned down at anti-capitalist festivals. Legal and illegal drugs are also sold by brand. XTC is very popular, as a dance drug, while Methadone has a sort of 'loser' quality about it. Drugs associated with 'losers' are a very valid market proposition because in advanced capitalist societies not everyone can be a winner, and so there is a very large potential market. More expensive drugs like coke and heroin are still regarded as 'status symbols' by far too many people for comfort. Former US President Clinton denounced 'heroin chic' amongst models. The politicians like to blame urban decay on 'Drugs'. Unfortunately they usually follow up with policies likely to accelerate urban decay: splitting up families by jailing people is just part of the process. Even companies with a 'drug free' workforce can lose business because of global business cycles. It seems that 'Drugs' is one of the economies most resistant to this type of crisis. Drug Enforcement is also an economy in its own right, with privileged access to most state security systems world wide. The Drug Enforcement industry is usually massively corrupt with leaks of contrabrand material going right down the chain, and undoubtedly some money going up the chain. Indeed, South Africa, not having local poppy fields, and dissatisfied with the idea of a government monopoly on marijuana, decided to brand the sedative 'Mandrax' as a good commercial 'downer'. The money was used as a useful source of revenue for BOSS, the state security service of apartheid days. It is often much easier to get informers from inside the ranks of drug distribution rings than terrorist rings. It is also easy enough to get people to risk death as is evident from the execution statistics of China, Iran, Malaysia and Singapore. PUBLIC HEALTH The recent terrorist attacks have initiated a jump in the number of infectious disease alerts. No one should be surprised. There is nothing like fear of biological attack to fill the media with public health scares. Previously these stories would be covered by conference reports and articles in the scientific press. Because of the attempts to classify and censor biological warfare, or restrict its discussion to circles where there would be no dissent the hard scientific evidence often has to be replaced by speculation. Informed speculation will find its way into genre literature, such as science fiction but it is not considered material fit to tax the minds of the masses. So far terrorist attempts to use chemical and biological warfare pose no threats to the survival of the species. A sick person with TB AIDS is still presents more of a risk to society than the Aum Shinryiko nerve gas attackers. The sick outnumber terrorists, and expensive diagnosis and treatment may still represent a better defence to the dangers of sickness rather than intense security operations. The 'Powder in the Post' attacks are more psychological warfare than mass murder at the moment. They are good to divert some of the less progressive trends away from the dangers of GM foods. For a while people will be able to talk about GM mass-extinction pathogens, undoubtedly breedable in almost any tropical country by sufficiently knowledgable scientists. Attacks which may make us sick, or fearful to open the post require defenses which involve treating the sick better than we do now, and reducing the amount of uneccessary post. The point of the 'Powder in the Post' attacks is that they want to cripple beaurocracy. INTELLIGENCE WAR Cave man versus the Global Beaurocracy Osama Bin Laden Da'i of developing intelligence ? Da'i of ossified intelligence ? Bombarded by the Killer Robots. Bush tries to put the conflict in human terms, but the adversaries live in a world of men, angels and jinns. It is a conflict within the human species, but even so there are different levels of intelligence. These intelligences could once be measured in terms of IQ, or test answers, but that is only a small part of the spectrum. A.I. Artificial intelligence. B.I. Beginning intelligence. Animals. D.I. Developing intelligence. Ask questions. O.I. Ossified intelligence. Think all answers are known. The Cruise Missiles are really terribly distorted versions of what robotics can deliver. What about clearing the landmines? The trouble is that the Pentagon's robots are produced by that network demonised not by Bin Laden, but by Eisenhower. That is the Military- Industrial complex. The Military-Industrial Complex is alive and kicking. The prestige jobs are still in nuclear weapon making and rocket science, but the practical work remains logistics and the engineering of bases. The Military Industrial Complex sucked skills out of other spheres of human activity and it has generally resisted the efforts of free markets and privatisation. It's clear that those people who think all answers are in some revealed book are in a mental stasis. Karl Popper seemed to think that 'Western Philosophy' itself was at fault. His book 'The Open Society and it's Enemies' uses hundreds of references to classical Western Philosophy to show that both twentieth century forms of totalitarianism, that is to say National Socialism or the Nazi ideology, and degraded Marx-Leninism as practiced by Stalin, were logical developments of Greek and Roman classical thinking. It is the military themselves that have most to gain by attacks on legislative chambers and the media. The Taliban's traditional idea of war is the war of tents and horse movement, except that Saudi Arabia has given them Japanese pick-up trucks. When Francis Fukiyama wrote about 'The End of History' he seems very much to bolster support for the ossified intelligence shown by our great nation state based institutions. America and England in particular embrace a very distorted view of human relations not substantially changed since the great charters of 1600 allowing capitalist venturers to go forth and plunder. APOCALYPTIC NIHILISM The Kanto earthquake of 1923 was the 'End of the World' for tens of thousands of people. The Tokyo Firestorm of March 1945 was even worse. Nowadays the main concern of the Nipponese in their relationship with America seems to be the occasional rape of a schoolgirl by American employees of some base. American militarism became ossified as the USAAF became a big world employer, but better than Delta and Swissair, because they are still getting the work. We call Aum Shinryiko and Osama Bin Laden 'Apocalyptic Nihilists', but the USAAF looks like 'Industrial Apocalypse'. Unfortunately it's not just the USAAF which gets brains and sometimes claims to be a form of 'Socialism'. The Chinese government still make claims for being Socialist, or Communist, and it runs nuclear weapons laboratories full of people who don't really care whether they are nihilists or not because the work is so interesting. 'Industrial Apocolypse' is what the Greens fear most. They perhaps read more of the science fiction, or perhaps even wrote it. CRACK TROOPS The Brits & Yanks intend sending in crack troops to catch Osama. We know that the Brits never controlled South Armagh 100% so that they had to supply troops in communications enclaves by helicopter, and also had to ship out human waste by the same means. If the British had such flakey control of South Armagh, in its own country then it is hard to see how they will 'take out' Osama. A massacre of people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time is a far more likely result. The idea of American 'Crack Troops' is just ludicrous. For a long time the American idea of waging war against the poor has been the interdiction of the South American 'Cocaine Trade'. Crack is slang for a derivative of the coca plant. Helicopter gunships over the jungles of Colombia fly with the complicity of a government under great pressure. The Americans could now spray the poppy fields now they have air superiority. Surely they should just go and ask for an affirmative vote in the United Nations. This would at least give the delegates something to think about. HUMAN DETONATOR A cruise missile may cost a million dollars while a human suicide bomber can be bought for much less. A Hamas bus bomber may well be just a few thousand dollars. Computer guided munitions serve the rich while a walking man with a load serves the poor. General Giap, scourge of the French and the American armies, was well versed in this technique. The 'human wave' assaults of the Viet-Namese helped to overwhelm the armies of the West. Life was cheap in Viet-Nam. That was in the 1960s and 1970s. Move forward twenty years to the long decade 1989-2001. This saw the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. Refugees from the Serbian ethnic cleansing squads were charged 200 Deutsch marks for their lives. The value of human life became much cheaper in Europe. Most people did not seem to care. The failed 'Middle East Peace Process' saw a wave of suicide bombings. Palestinian life was made too cheap. It's easy to imagine that the engineers found it harder to discourage suicide bombers rather than to recruit them. GHOST IN THE MACHINE The Israeli Palestinian conflict shows the need for the reform of human institutions such as states and religions. The 'War Against Terrorism' would be easy if detonators of both the robot and human kind were put under control of something like Asimov's laws of robotics. 1. Robot must obey master, subject to rule 2. 2. Robot must not harm its master. 3. Robot must not harm other robots. The international community recognises nothing like this form of harm reduction. Few people want the Star Wars systems to include ethical robotic systems to prevent accidental nuclear war. For the super rich the ideas of harm reduction go towards protecting the agressor. Area denial munitions and long range bombing are prposed solutions. Harm reduction is used as a reward for the agressor. Robot mediated warfare was tested out on a large scale in Kosovo. Humans are taught to behave like robots. Spinoza and Asimov gave robots ethics. Arther Koestler, a Hungarian Jew, wrote a book titled 'The Ghost in the Machine' and also became an early post-Zionist. The clear solution to problems such as Israel / Palestine and indeed India / Kashmir is to attack the institutions such as state and religion with robots which will minimise the harm of these institutions. When State and Religion organise armies including suicide bombers then of course we have to oppose those who hide behind the cloak of state and religion and accuse the rest of us of 'moral relativism'. The very people who talk of war against terrorism are those who wanted to limit popular international control of landmines and other area munitions such as cluster bombs. Indeed recent wars in Iraq, Kosovo and now Afghanistan see the widespread deployment of industry backed munitions with an expensive transport infrastructure.