The "War on Terrorism" as currently formulated by the Bush Administration is a war that in its own terms cannot be won. Because its true enemy is the very adversary it is continuing to create by its policies of marginalizing local cultures and fostering top-down forms of economic dependency, the war can only continue indefinitely, eroding traditional democratic values and alienating ever larger numbers of peoples by increasing the inequitable and oppressive dominance of a hierarchical globalist economic system. Moreover, insofar as this evanescent war takes the form of overt military combat involving territorial conquest as a substitute for addressing the conditions that produce and reproduce cadres of terrorist and terrorism as an instrument of the otherwise political powerless, it is a war that creates its own growing enemy as consequence of its implementation. Because there is now only one global super power and only one dominant economic system, such a war cannot be successfully confronted by alternative forces. There is however, a local alternative. A bumper sticker in the 1960s read, "What if they held a war and no one came?" Perhaps the only way to end this war is to opt out of it.
The only way to end this war is remove political leaders who use fear as their principal weapon for appealing to their electorates.
No comments:
Post a Comment