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Don't swat mosquitos - drain the swamp!

By Graham Macafee
Canberra, Australia
1 September 2006

When Jack Thomas was hit with a 'control order' recently, his home was converted into a federal prison on somebody's suspicion of what he may do, not on what he would do, or had done, to harm others.

In its quest for total control and total security, the Howard government has trashed civil liberties going back to Magna Carta and Habeas Corpus. With Parliament's connivance, 'innocent until proven guilty' also vanished.

The real gorilla in our midst is not Jack Thomas, it's the Howard government's total denial of the root cause of terrorism - a seething swamp of Third World deprivation and oppression orchestrated by and for rich nations.

Hence my suggested cure for terrorism: Don't swat mosquitos - drain the swamp!

Most attempts by Western nations to come to grips with what goes on inside the mind of a suicide bomber as they strap on a Semtex belt before blowing themselves to pieces fail to comprehend the chasm of self delusion that separates how we see Western civilisation (as perfectly normal) and how less fortunate cultures may see it - as an alien force hellbent on cultural desolation.

Two hundred years ago, Robert Burns wrote: "Oh wad some power the giftie gie us to see oursels as others see us!"

Some insight into the vast difference between how we see Western civilisation and how an idealistic Arab teenager may see it (with white-hot jihadist passion) came to me while watching the film Independence Day.

The hero of the film is a dissolute American crop duster who redeems himself and saves civilisation by suicide-bombing a huge alien spacecraft with no interest in Planet Earth, except to pillage its resources.

If Independence Day was recast with an Arab suicide-bomber as 'Cultural Saviour' and rampant Western economic imperialism as the 'Alien Spacecraft', two hijacked planes ramming into the World Trade Centre, while despicable, makes far more sense (if we want to understand terrorism) than dismissing all jihadists as evil or insane.

To discover what our MPs can do (apart from carpet bombing Arab hovels) to cure terrorism, they need to know that September 2001 was not the first time New Yorkers have flung themselves from tall buildings to escape being burnt to death.
Front page of the New York Times

March 26, 1911

141 Men and Girls Die in Waist Factory Fire; Trapped High Up in Washington Place Building; Street Strewn with Bodies; Piles of Dead Inside

Three stories of a ten-floor building at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place were burned yesterday, and while the fire was going on 141 young men and women at least 125 of them mere girls were burned to death or killed by jumping to the pavement below.

Most of the victims were suffocated or burned to death within the building, but some who fought their way to the windows and leaped met death as surely, but perhaps more quickly, on the pavements below.

All Over in Half an Hour.

The fire was practically all over in half an hour. It was confined to three floors the eighth, ninth, and tenth of the building. But it was the most murderous fire that New York had seen in many years.

The victims who are now lying at the Morgue waiting for some one to identify them by a tooth or the remains of a burned shoe were mostly girls from 16 to 23 years of age. They were employed at making shirtwaist by the Triangle Waist Company, the principal owners of which are Isaac Harris and Max Blanck. Most of them could barely speak English. Many of them came from Brooklyn. Almost all were the main support of their hard-working families.

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Conclusion relevant to my suggested cure for terrorism:

The heart of darkness in the 1911 New York tragedy was not a shadowy, jihad obsessed movement. It was profit obsessed American bosses who crammed their cheap labour into excactly the same kind of sweatshops that globalised capital uses in the Third World today -  if it can get away with it!

Dozens of trapped garment workers plunging to their deaths on New York's stone-hard pavements finally convinced American law-makers that rampant stone-hard capitalism needed curbing at home.

A century later in lands where trade unions, labour parties and arbitration courts are unknown, who (apart from Christian missionaries and jihad movements) are trying to moderate the worst excesses of globalised deprivation and oppression?

Nobody!

And that's the real gorilla in our midst - not dirt-poor Muslim youngsters who believe 70 virgins await them in Paradise.

In Australia (circa 1890) before trade unions, the Labor Party and arbitration courts had been invented, the only way shearers could express their outrage at low wages and ghastly conditions was to fire-bomb shearing sheds - seeing them as the embodiment of upper-class cruelty, deprivation and oppression.

Then as now, a conservative government blinded itself to the cause of shearer terrorism, preferring to add fuel to the fire by relying on heavy-handed law-and-order measures.

It's been over a century since an Australian shearing shed has been fire-bombed.

Did extra doses of Howard-style law and order cure the problem? What a ludicrous idea.

Peace reigns (where terror once ruled) because worker grievances can be dealt with (without violence on either side) by trade unions, labour parties and (until the Howard government abolished it) an independent Abritration Court.

So why was the world's tallest 'shearing shed' of cheap foreign labour (the World Trade Center) fire-bombed?

Could it be that, in the absence of a global equivalent to Australia's trade union movement, Labor Party and independent abritration, jihadist movements offer the only 'solution' to globalised Western oppression of impoverished peoples.

If a tenth of the trillions Western nations squander on spotting and swatting terror's bomb-laden mosquitoes (and erecting thicker weldmesh screens to keep them out) was spent on a global equivalent to what ended the terror-bombing of Aussie shearing sheds, the world's most perplexing problem could slip into our history books under the heading of:

How we defeated terrorism - by draining the swamp!

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