“The terrorist threat” and militarization of society against the re-emergence of class war
A (very) small example: France and Belgium
Not content with having served as a base at the rear to what the international press calls “the terrorist threat”, notably the commandos who brought death to Paris on Friday, November 13th, 2015, where 130 citizens, “satiated” and “satisfied” with their small ordinary life of submissive and obedient slaves in the service of capital, have involuntarily participated in a great jihadist “jaunt”…
Not content with having militarized the whole of the society as a result of this act of war against the French national State, whose armies of killers and mercenaries participate in bringing death and destruction all over the planet (Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Mali, Central Africa, etc.) in the name of freedom, democracy, justice and (bourgeois) human and civil rights but, in fact, more accurately and truthfully in the immediate and historical interest of capitalist profit and dictatorship of value…
Not content with having imposed on proletarians, as on all the “useful idiots” in France and Navarre and elsewhere (in other words on the “reproducers of social peace”), the citizens’ gathering behind the defence of “our values” or the “living together” (correctly meaning the “harmonious” cohabitation between the owners of means of production on one hand, and on the other hand the dispossessed and wretched of the earth)...
Not content with recruiting the exploited for the defence of democracy in all its ”splendour” and its “abundance” and its murderous horror, democracy which is finally nothing but the ideological and practical negation, in actuality, of class antagonism and therefore the ever more terrorist affirmation of capitalist dictatorship…
Not content with having mobilized masses of wage slaves behind the small national flag (rag), calling thus for unity and united front in backing the nation and “the country in danger” faced by the “Islamist threat”, “threat” labelled this way today, when tomorrow the same scenario will justify the excessive struggle against the “communist threat” or against “anarchy”, against the proletarian armed insurrection, against total subversion that will shake up to its foundations the whole of this society of exploitation and alienation, wars and dead, sacrifices and misery…
Not content with having participated in developing the so-called “anti-terrorist campaign” that is supposed to get the unconditional and galvanized support of “the people”, that is to say atomized, scared, frightened citizens, who are less paralyzed by fear and terrorized by the attacks as such than by the “security” propaganda that is reflected and gets materialized by the presence of patrols of hundreds of heavily armed cops and soldiers in the streets and neighbourhoods, by constantly flying over the city with helicopters, by the endless stream of police cars with their sirens wailing, creating thus an always more anxiety-provoking social and societal mood…
Not content with all this and other things, the Belgian national State – its government, its bourgeoisie, its central apparatuses of repression, propaganda, social control, etc. – certainly didn’t greet without a hint of satisfaction, or at least without some relief, the bloody attacks in Brussels on March 22nd, 2016, as somehow a “necessary” and “inevitable” after-shock to Paris attacks. It must be said that in terms of lethal and murderous international policies, Belgium and its army is historically not more outdone than France and other European powers…
Finally, the Brussels attacks sounded like a justification for all the police-military arsenal deployed for several months in Belgium to return back to the lines of social peace, rather than against the jihadists and their “terrorist threat” – who in their own way and at a certain level of abstraction partake in the society of permanent spectacle and bourgeois order – but rather against the “common people”, that is to say proletarians likely at some point to put forward their own class interests in a mood of rebellion against their working and living conditions…
The 32 dead and over 300 injured in Brussels were mostly composed of “holidaymakers” departing from the national airport and travelling to magnificent beaches – supposed to transport them away for a while from the contradictions and tumults of the present society – along with workers circulating in the subway station close to the headquarters of various transnational political offices such as the European Commission and its parliament; in short, all these victims are a representative cross section of the local population taking part in the everyday life experienced by our class brothers and sisters the world over, day after day, and this usually in the generalized indifference of the “satiated” and “satisfied” European populations. And for a few hours, we felt closer, Paris and Brussels became Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, Kabul, Kunduz or Aden, crushed by the everyday life of bombs, terror, fear, tears, blood, dead, ad nauseam…
Today indeed, it’s no longer simply the “men-at-arms” of the State, its mercenaries or its leaders who are concerned and targeted or likely to be, but rather and also its “ordinary people”, its “average citizens” (as said by the media), who think to be shielded from the deadly contradictions that bathe the world in blood without mercy for the human species. Today it’s out of the question to “have a drink at a terrace” or to go quietly to the concert (like the bourgeois were the only to do so just one century ago) and imagine for a single moment to escape the horrors that happen every day all over this planet: i.e. wars, bombings, starvation, malnutrition, diseases, tortures, pollution, destruction of the ecosystem, etc. “We are either part of the problem or of its solution, between both there is nothing!”, as said by someone. Or to be more dialectical, let’s say that if we are both the problem and the solution, the transition from one to the other is made by the violent and active negation of the present state of things, and therefore through conscious and voluntary emergence of the future state of things…
Unlike what happened in New York and Washington in 2001, London in 2005, Paris (twice!) in 2015 and Brussels in 2016, where the proletarians who are over-submitted to the “citizenist” ideology have marched according to the tempo given by their own bourgeoisie, our class who is in total programmatic disarray should feel to be concerned by the way how important sectors of the proletariat in Spain reacted after the Madrid bombings on March 11th, 2004. Let’s remind the facts: after bombs had exploded in suburban trains in the early hours where 200 people, all of them going to work, were killed, thousands of proletarians took to the streets displaying their contempt for “the terrorists” but also and above all denouncing the politics of their own government and the involvement of their own army in the war in Iraq. “Your wars, our dead!”, was the main motto of this movement that turned its hatred of “the terrorists” on its own bourgeoisie… as a result the Spanish government being obliged to withdraw its troops from Iraq to forestall the dispute at the local level.
From all that we can and must conclude and emphasize that the only way the proletarians can come out of all “this hatred” or “this madness” alive, is above all to not collaborate with his own bourgeoisie, his own government, his own antiterrorist repressive measures.
It’s not the over-armed soldiers patrolling the streets who will protect us in any way from “the terrorists”. We can and must rely only on ourselves and our own abilities to overthrow this world and its internal contradictions (oh so murderous!), to revolutionize it completely…
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