Terrorism in the modern era is the means by which oligarchies wage secret wars against the people which it would be politically impossible to wage openly. Oligarchy, in turn, always has one and the same political program, which has not changed since the time of Thuclydides, Plato and the writer that classical historians call The Old Oligarch: the purpose and program of oligarchy is to perpetuate oligarchy. The specific political and economic form of the oligarchy is much less important. The nomenklatura of the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was supposedly based on state property of the means of production, the primacy of the Commmunist Party, and Marxist ideology, but they proved more than willing to throw all that out the window when they saw that their oligarchical status and special privilege could not be preserved under communist auspices. Having realized this, the Soviet oligarchs were eager to transform themselves into stock-jobbers, speculators, profiteers, and young wolves (as Zhirinovksy put it) under the auspices of wild laissez-faire capitalism. What was important to them was to preserve their status as an oligarchy. This is an important lesson, since it shows that we must be deeply suspicious of the ruling elite of the United States, which is of course also an oligarchy, but an oligarchy which operates behind the mask of democratic institutions and formal democracy. The experience of the USSR suggests that the US oligarchy will be more than willing to trade in its democratic costumes for a bureaucratic-authoritarian or even totalitarian garb if the democratic forms prove to be impossible to maintain, most likely because of financial and economic difficulties.
The naive view of terrorism is that it grows up directly out of oppression, economic misery, and political despair. Oppressed and exploited people, or those who have been colonized by a foreign power, supposedly come together spontaneously in ones and twos, create an organization, and after a certain time of preparation go over to armed struggle against their oppressors or occupiers. But this is the rarest of explanations.
This naive view is blind to the most important institutional actors in the world of terrorism -- secret intelligence agencies like CIA, FBI, NAS, KGB, Stasi, MI-6, and the rest. Secret intelligence agencies are institutions in which the very essence of oligarchy is at work: as the enjoyment of oligarchical privileges comes inevitably at the expense of the people, covert methods of control become indispensable. Secret intelligence agencies in their modern form go back to the Republic of Venice, which was famous for its intelligence directorate, the Council of Ten,, and its pervasive network of spies, informers, and provocateurs -- and the Republic of Venice was the longest-lasting oligarchical system in world history. Despite their cultural differences, all of these secret intelligence agencies are fundamentally alike. Terrorism generally starts within these secret agencies, or nowadays more likely in their privatized tentacles -- such as the intelligence community in the United States has had since President Reagan's Executive Order 12333.
//snip//
We start from the strong presumption that terrorism is intrinsically an activity which is controlled by a faction of government, probably acting under the influence of financier factions which are generally the ultimate source of authority in the globalized universe after 1991. Terrorism cannot be described as a spontaneous sociological phenomenon, as the old saying goes -- it must rather be seen as a phenomenon developed by sociologists, along with psychologists, profilers, psychiatrists, case officers, handlers, and cut-outs. For every terrorist and terrorist group in the field, an extensive bureaucratic support system is necessary. Spontaneous combustion is the last thing that should be expected.
This is an important point, to which we will return. The naive or spontaneous theory of terrorism sees the terror group as sprouting up directly out of the compost of misery, poverty and desperation. Our point here is that this explanation neglects the crucial, indispensable role of the secret intelligence agency, which is usually present at the creation of the terror group, or very soon thereafter. The well-known Indian author, Arundhati Roy, told the American Sociological Association in San Francisco on August 16, 2004 that "terrorism is the privatization of war" and that "terrorists are the free marketers of war." These are striking formulations, but this does not prevent them from leading in the wrong direction. Synthetic terrorism remains very much under state control; it is only that the puppetmaster's strings are well concealed from those who do not know what to look for, or who do not want to know. Thus, a CIA front corporation is not really part of the free-market private sector -- it is an emanation of Langley just as surely as the local station chief and his staff.
It should also be clear that state sponsored terrorism cannot call itself by its own real name. It must necessarily masquerade as an authentic voice of the oppressed -- be they Arabs, Muslims, workers, national minorities, or whatever. The terror groups cannot be labeled CIA or KGB -- they must call themselves Red Brigades, Red Army faction, ETA, or al Qaeda. The false flag and false ideology allows the terror group to pretend to be something it is not, and to convince billions of naive viewers of CNN or al Jazeera that the false dumb-show is reality.
From Webster Tarpley's "9/11 Synthetic Terror; Made in the USA"
See also:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x64853and
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x58043edit typo
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