The major terrorist around the world is the US ruling class and its military. It subjugates the world to the interests of US capital.
As Thomas Friedman (one of the most influential journalists in the US) wrote some years ago in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree:
The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.
With troops killing millions in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a proxy army dispossessing hundreds of thousands in Pakistan, and with bases in 132 countries, the hidden fist is not so hidden.
The rise of China as an imperialist challenger to US dominance makes the world a more dangerous place now and into the future as the declining American empire more and more uses its military power to contain and control China.
The US wants a strong China economically (since its own capital base benefits from that) but wants that growth in economic strength to be for US capital, not Chinese. It is at best a balancing act; at worst an encirclement before battle.
Iraq and Afghanistan are part of the US encirclement of China.
Iraq, together with US imperialism’s pit bull, Israel,and friendly dictators in the Middle East, enable the US to control the price and flow of oil to China if needed.
They are also an attempt to show the military power of the American killing machine to China and the rest of the world, although with the country mired in Afghanistan and Iraq a defeat in slow motion, that goal has failed at least in any message it wants to send to China.
It does of course tell any uppity nations (for example Iran and Venezuela) what terrible retribution the US can unleash on them if needed.
This American encirclement strategy in part explains China’s manic search for energy security around the world,a small echo of which is found in Australia with Chinese attempts to buy key iron energy and minerals suppliers.
And so the United States had invaded over 200 countries in its history as part of its development and now consolidation as the dominant imperialist power in the world.
To carry out this terrorising of the world America needs a steady supply of cannon fodder from the working class.
The rabid ideology of patriotism, of the flag, is part of that process.
The military then dehumanises working class kids to kill for capital.
But given the priorities of capital, those who fight are mere pawns in a giant chessboard game, to be sacrificed for the continued and expanding exploitation of American and non-American workers around the world to supply US based companies with their regular profit fix.
The soldiers are expendable cogs in the profit machine. Nowhere is this clearer than in the treatment of returned soldiers.
The US State uses its own working class to destroy the lives of millions overseas, and in doing so, destroys those lives too. Having served their usefulness to capital, the beast then spits them out.
Many soldiers are traumatised by what they have done, seen or experienced. They return to a country whose leaders mouth platitudes of support but won’t pay for services for these discarded and jilted soldiers.
Their priority is profit, not the soldiers who have killed in the name of.
The brutality of US capitalism overseas reflects, mirrors, reinforces, telescopes and escalates its brutality at home.
The wars abroad are the flip side of the coin to the war on American workers. Those who deny 50 million workers health care, who cut wages and jobs, wage war abroad.
They imprison and electrocute many black men, attack Muslims and other immigrants and foster homophobia, often with a heavy overlay of Christian superstition as justification.
The US defence forces, in their incapacity to address the needs of their own war ravaged soldiers for support, express the reality of the brutal dog eat dog system that is American capitalism.
The American Army is desperate for doctors. It will ignore pleas for help from its own psychiatrists and other medical officers. Despite requests, it will not let them go.
It will promote them. It will continue to overwork them, and force more and more returning soldiers with more and more traumatic responses onto the back of fewer and fewer doctors. And in doing this it will destroy their lives, their health too.
It will ignore any signs of reaction against the madness that is its purposes – a killing machine for US profit.
And so a lonely man, overwhelmed with the human consequences of US terrorism on its very perpetrators, borne down with the weight of racism against him and his fellow Muslims, torn between righteousness and reaction, mentally anguished, guns down 13 of his colleagues.
And the madness, the rape of the world, continues unabated.
Fort Hood is the logical expression of the US pillage of the world. Until the American working class liberates itself and us from the beast, that beast will kill again, and again, and again.
http://enpassant.com.au/?p=5542
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