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September
18, 2001
The Need for Dissent
Radicalism
is retreating, but it's more necessary than ever before
By George Monbiot
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 in the world may have been
inspired by him, there is, as yet, no evidence that they were
instructed by him. Bin Laden's presumed guilt rests 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 onto the planes was
the result of corporate lobbying against the stricter controls
the government had proposed. Some reports suggest that so many
died in the south tower of the World Trade Centre partly because
some of the companies there instructed their employees to return
to work after the north tower had been hit.
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 near certainty 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, radical 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.
One of the peculiar problems
we radicals face is that the targets of Tuesday's terror represented
more clearly than any others the powers we have long opposed.
For those of us who have campaigned against the predatory behaviour
of the financial sector and the defence industry, the World Trade
Centre and the Pentagon had come to symbolise all that was rotten
in the state of the world. So, though ours is a movement built
on peace, it has not been hard for our opponents to equate our
dissidence with terror.
The authoritarianism which
has long been lurking in advanced capitalism has started to surface.
In the Guardian 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 United States.
William Shawcross concluded
by suggesting that "we are all Americans now", a terrifying
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 now 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. Doubtless I will find my name on the roll of honour
there tomorrow. So, perhaps, will the 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 radical 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, I
feel, be justified. But, unless we wish to help George Bush use
barbarism to defend the "civilisation" he claims to
represent, we on the left 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 United States,
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.
(Originally published in the
Guardian 18th September 2001. Reprinted with permission from
the author.)
George Monbiot's book Captive
State: the corporate takeover of Britain is now published in
paperback.
http://www.monbiot.com
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