The Ugly New Face Of Terrorism

By Kumar David –

What on earth is happening? An unprecedented election victory for Vladimir Putin followed on the morrow by a savage terrorist attack on mainly young people gathered at the Crocus concert venue on the outskirts of Moscow! The death toll is over 150 and still rising. Th number wounded of course is larger. This is the deadliest terrorist attack that Russia has suffered in 20 years.

In Palestine, genocide and carnage in plain view of all the worlds TV cameras and Bibi Netanyahu gets away with it in plain defiance of the whole world forcing Israel’s principal benefactor, the United States to cringe in dumb-struck embarrassment. It is most improbable that the Israel-Palestine conflict will find a solution within decades – sigh! A powerful pro-Israel lobby and right-wing extremist Christians march on in defiance of the world. Islamic State claims responsibility for the attack but does not say why. Confusion all round! We are indisputably on the cusp of a new wave of global terrorism, as is to be expected when capitalism enters a period of steep global decline as the post-WW2 Welfare-state evaporates, but with sharper than usual intensity. I have to pause and take stock. [Though I promised my regular readers a discussion of JVP/NPP electoral prospects this week, that will have to wait].

Allow me to go step by step in didactic fashion. The American Jewish lobby, which backs-up the power of the Jews in politics, includes the American Jewish Committee, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, B’nai B’rith, and the Anti-Defamation League. However, the most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group is Christians United for Israel with over seven million members. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is a leading organization within this lobby. Extremist right-wing Christians proclaim that the Lord God swore to grant the Promised Land to the Jews in the first two books of the Bible (Tora is the Jewish name for the Old Testament). My regular readers know that I avow that religion is the opium of the people (If you dissent, ok let’s agree to disagree and leave it at that). Religious beliefs run deep and override other affinities. For example, the Seraphic Jews and the Palestinians are both Arab peoples, but now religion has become an unbridgeable divide. Muslim-hater Modi will rather eat pork than recognise Muslims as legitimate sons and daughters of India.

To repeat, we are on the cusp of a new wave of global terrorism as is to be expected when capitalism enters a period of steep global decline. What is significant is that this is happening in the context of big global shifts of power and expectations. Expectations? Yes, for example, seven million people have been displaced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and tens of millions more are marginalised all over Africa. Population is exploding, especially the eastern part including Nigeria. Expectations and ambitions of young people all over is surging and illegal and undocumented immigration to America and Europe is swelling. This is a new ball-game and this ball is a very big.

Was Ukraine complicit in the Crocus Concert Hall attack? My two cents worth is that the Ukrainian Government and Zelensky were not parties to the attack unless they harbour a secret death wish. They have provided Russia and an enraged Russian population with reasons for hitting back with the full force of Russia’s considerable arsenal. If the Ukrainian Government is complicit, NATO and the West will not intervene and provide Kiev and the western portions of the country with defensive nuclear capability. Of course, it seems that rogue elements in the Ukrainian (and Germany) military were hatching nefarious plots in pursuit of surreptitious objectives. This shows how uncertain the global political climate has become; a perfect breeding ground for terrorism of all shades.

This raises who-done-it questions. Islamic-State claims responsibility, but who is Islamic-State. Wikipedia says “Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and by its Arabic acronym Daesh, is a transnational Salafi jihadist group and a former unrecognised quasi-state”.

I need to divert to talk about the ‘Bomb’ in view of provocative global trends. A Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova asserted that it is “extremely hard to believe” that Islamic State had the capacity to launch an attack on Moscow. She repeated that Ukraine was behind the attack though a more cautious Putin only said that “Ukraine benefited and Kyiv may have played a role”. He did add that someone on the Ukrainian side had prepared a “window” for the gunmen to escape across the border before they were captured but that did not work out. Belarusian leader Lukashenko claimed that the gunmen had sought to cross into his country before being turned away and heading towards Ukraine. The director of Russia’s FSB security agency accused Ukraine, along with the United States and Britain, of involvement in the attack. The Weast stoutly denies this allegation as cold-war politics. A cold-war atmosphere not seen since the climactic days of Soviet-American standoff, known as McCarthyism, have surfaced and this is grist to the mill of terrorism. So, now people talk about the ‘Bomb’.

The ‘Bomb’

Physicists Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller together with writer Raymond Briggs, drafted a letter in October 1939, had it signed by Einstein, and delivered it to President Roosevelt. The letter said that Nazi Germany was probably quite advanced in developing a nuclear bomb. FDR called on Lyman Briggs of the National Bureau of Standards to head an Advisory Committee to investigate the matter. Briggs met Szilárd, Wigner and Teller in October 1939 and reported back to FDR that the fears of the scientists were true and that uranium “would provide a possible source of bombs with a destructiveness vastly greater than anything now known”.

FDR acted. At first, the US nuclear project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the Army. Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was director of the Los Alamos Laboratory where the bomb was designed. The project resulted in two types of atom bombs: a relatively simple gun-type weapon and a more complex implosion-type weapon. The Thin Man gun-type design proved impractical to use with plutonium, so the famous Fat Boy that used uranium-235 was chosen. The first nuclear device ever detonated was an implosion-type bomb during the Trinity test at New Mexico’s Alamogordo Range on 16 July 1945. Fat Boy and Thin Man were used a month later in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively. In the postwar years the US conducted weapons testing at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Islands – Castle Bravo was the world’s first thermonuclear (fusion or hydrogen) bomb.

Later, in 1946, Szilárd jointly with Albert Einstein, in an apparent change of heart created the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists that included Linus Pauling. It was a last ditch failed attempt to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The nuclear bomb that has gone down in history by the nickname of Tsar Bomba was a monster — the emperor of nuclear bombs. That name was no exaggeration. Its yield is estimated to have been roughly 57 megatons, about 1,500 times the combined power of the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Andrei Sakharov, one of the bombs lead designers, persuaded Nikita Khrushchev to reduce the blast power from a possible 100 Megatons to the 50 Megaton region.

Unlimited power and unrestrained irresponsibility

Let us pray that the ‘Bomb’ remains unexploded and let’s get down to something no less disturbing. In the United States it is clamed there are no restrictions on freedom; people are free to say and do as they please and enjoy the good life. Well, yes, there is truth to this. Americans assert themselves without restraint, carry guns, shout loudly and indulge in reckless car-chases. Apparently, this is all protected by the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment or Whatever! “All balls said the monkey milking the bull!”  (Editor, please can I get away with this?)

But this “freedom” also goes with excessive selfishness and a reckless willingness hurt other people though it is a macho image much admired in popular culture. Nevertheless, there is a hold-up, rape, house-break-in, murder or violent crime every 13 seconds in the US (“True Crime” channel on American TV). Shooting incidents in schools are almost unknown in other countries but happen often in the US.  Something is not right here. Racism, sexism, social prejudice (caste) and gang violence is as prevent in other societies, but is perhaps more abrasively expressed in the US.

Honestly, I do not wish to bandy words or invent clever sounding terminology, but doesn’t this have a bearing on the topic I started off with; social failure that encourages terrorism? Genocide before all the world’s TV cameras in Palestine, evaporating Ukraine, the world polarising like we have not seen for decades since the worst of the cold-war, a palpable swing to the right in the West and the Global-North while polarising the other way in the “South” and now ‘The Bomb’. When I was young, I would exclaim: “It’s revolution that turns the wheel of history”, but now I don’t even enjoy a bad pun.

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