THE BALANCE OF TERROR

BY NAIWU OSAHON

The world is a very violent place thanks to its dominating selfish culture. A culture that believes it can verbalize virtue to clothe evil and hatred or marry love with its opposite number, capitalism. A culture that thrives on perpetually attempting to play God to the detriment of others.

Life was not always like this. A spiritual (African) culture launched mankind into the merry-ways of modern civilization before it was abruptly aborted two thousand years ago by White culture’s excessive greed, selfishness, racism, blind arrogance and a shortsighted religion.

The dominating culture substituted spirituality with materialism, and enslaved and colonized the native people of the Old World. They rapidly annexed, stole, and confiscated huge tracks of precious indigenous estates around the world, to increase their holdings from about 6% to 65%, or nearly 40m sq. miles of the earth’s land mass by the mid 20th century.

From the Americas to Canada to Australia to New Zealand, natives were massacred, their food poisoned, their homes and farms destroyed, to give way to Christopher Columbus’ siblings who ‘discovered’ the ‘virgin’ estates. They laid claim to Southern Africa too because of its land, favourable weather and gold. Gold is still the issue there now. Mosquitoes helped to dislodge them eventually from the rest of Africa but not before they had put neo-colonialism in place. Whites maimed, tortured and brutalized Africans. They truncated aborigine/native populations around the world to 1.6 billion, a two-fold growth rate, while theirs jumped twelve folds to a billion by the middle of the twentieth century.

The elite culture exploited the labour and resources of their slaves to herald their industrial revolution, which in the last five hundred years, set them up as the economic and political giants of the world. Today, with Capitalism, Christianity, Democracy, and Human Rights, as their war cries, they have turned the entire human race into wimps of their decadent culture, and unleashed AIDS and hunger on the hapless original natives of the old world. Of course, civilization galloped in limps and bounds but at a price. The masters control everything including our God-given raw materials and we have nothing. Every time we raise our heads to try to pick crumbs from under their tables, they crush us with unmitigated vengeance with their jackboots, so how can the world know peace?

They have caused two world wars in quick succession already, because they are not prepared to consider the equitable share of the world’s commonwealth with the rest of mankind. They set up the UN to try to temper greed among themselves not envisaging that their erstwhile slaves would mature enough one-day to begin to demand their rights at UN deliberations. To checkmate the unsavory trend, they devised undemocratic institutions like the Security Council, IMF, the World Bank, the WTO and the WHO. And despite these institutions, America, leading the NATO pack, continues to behave like a spoilt child, walking out on UN caucuses to avoid taking responsibilities, and setting out on her own to police the world and impose her hegemony.

Despite the marginalization of the Soviet Union, America and her NATO family continue to build and stockpile formidable military arsenal obviously against the rest of us. A few years ago, they came up with the secret strategy called COLOMBIA PLAN. It incorporates support for germ warfare, economic strangulation, AIDS infestations and genetically modified GM crops, as weapons of elimination, not of the Soviet Union who has since joined their G7, but against the economically disadvantaged world.

Lenin once described capitalism as horror without end. One does not have to be a socialist or communist to agree. Capitalism without spirituality is a sin against a basic law of nature by largely trying to reap where it has not sowed. Whoever sows a wind must expect to reap a whirlwind surely. When we strike against our adversaries, they call it ‘terrorism.’ Their atrocities against us have steeled us against them, but because they employ superior military arsenal and win all the time, they call their efforts ‘peace’ or claim that they are protecting ‘civilization.’ The peace of the graveyard. Tacitus, the Roman historian once said: “…when they have created a wilderness they call it peace.”

Trotsky predicted before the Second World War that America would win the war and establish world hegemony but with dynamite built into its foundation. America has not only won the war, the Soviet Union disintegrated seventeen years ago, encouraging Bush’s father to describe current American hegemony, as the ‘New World Order.’ What George Bush Sr. meant in effect is that multinational companies like the Dow Union Carbide, Exxon, AT&T, Du Pont, Shell, Mobil, Microsoft, and ITT, now determine the fate of the world. Big business corporations now fix state Presidents and economic policies, leaving a trail of misery, hunger, diseases, oppression, war and chaos, along their tracks. From the Congo to Angola to Liberia to Palestine, the story is the same, land or raw minerals are the prizes at stake.

Palestine on the West Bank and Gaza, suffer bomb attacks daily from Israeli imperialism. Their homes are being demolished and kids killed in the streets in broad daylight, but Bush Jr., as the President of America, did not see Israeli action as an “attack on civilization.” Rather, Bush Jr. continued to give unflinching support to Israel without a heart for the Arabs. I am not holding brief for the Arabs. I am not a Muslim. I think the Arabs are the most vicious racists in the world. From Libya to Mauritius to Mauritania to the Sudan, Africans are catching hell in the hands of their Arab settler usurpers of their land. Arab racism is without conscience.

They started the African slavery holocaust and are still at it even now. Their religion supports the exploitation of man by man. They say the sense to cheat is like any other gift from God. All that one needs to do for receiving the blessing is give alms to the poor after. The Arabs have commandeered all of Northern Africa, condemning the indigenous Africans to the life of servitude, destroying their languages, history, customs and traditions, and denying them knowledge of their scintillating past as former leaders of the Arabs and the rest of mankind. No, I am not a mouthpiece of the Arabs; I just want justice and fairplay to prevail in the world that’s all. I want the cycle of violence to stop. The earth needs a breather from wars and mayhem. Mankind cannot afford another world war.

I have heard the call of war drums from several quarters. NATO says it is ready to join in the fray. They have turned Iraq into a desert already so what would they be bombing next in Iraq? Russia too wants the opportunity to finish off what they and the British left behind in Afghanistan from previous wars. A dust track outpost of the poorest people on earth. They have no electricity, no water, no homes, nothing but poverty and prayers. Don’t they have the right to be angry too and to hope? May be this is the time to put them out of their suffering permanently. Wipe them off the face of the earth once and for all. But we have been taken through that road several times before and it has not stopped the cycle of violence in the world.

President Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada in 1983 after a truck bomb exploded at a US Marine Corps base in Lebanon. US aircraft bombed Tripoli and Benghazi in Libya after the 1986 discotheque explosion in Germany. Hundreds of civilians including children were killed in the mid night surprise attack. Gaddaffi, whose tent-home was bombed, escaped death by the whiskers.
The US and Britain blocked the UN Security Council resolution condemning Iraq’s aggression against Iran in 1980. In exchange for technical information on Soviet weapons in 1986, the CIA gave Iraq satellite pictures of Iranian troop movements. In July 1988, Reagan blocked US congress sanction against Iraq for gassing 3,000 Kurds and armed Iraq against its neighbours while steeling Israel at the same time to defy UN resolutions 242 and 338.

When Saddam Hussein, goaded by the Americans foolishly burgeoned, America ordered allied troops to bomb and butcher defeated and fleeing Saddam soldiers and move 100 miles into Iraq’s territory to try to force a civil war. That strategy failed so Bush Sr. destroyed Iraq’s major economic facilities and cut off water and electricity supplies to the civilian population. Then his contractors invaded Iraq like a swarm of locusts to make fortunes from cash strapped Iraq, cleaning up the oil smeared beaches of Bush’s one noonday madness. If there was order in their methods it would not be so bad. One minute they are on your side, the next minute they are blitzing your home. It has been one endless mayhem since they took control of the world from their African ancestors.

On Christmas eve in 1989, at mid night, Bush Sr., while pretending to be fighting a drug war, invaded Panama killing over 2,000 civilians, and kidnapping their President, a former CIA protégé. Over one million children, not to talk of adults, died from the US continued blockade and bombardment of Iraq. Cuba’s blockade has dragged for years and was designed to destroy Cuban economy and encourage the population to revolt against their government. Do these acts portray the US as a just and democratic society imbued with the milk of human kindness, which they call human rights? Since all atrocities and aggression by the US are directed at the non-White people of the world, it is difficult to see them as honest arbiters or brokers in world affairs. The Pentagon, in August 1998, destroyed the Al Shifa Pharmaceutical factory in Sudan without evidence that it was linked with the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that same year. The factory was Sudan’s leading pharmaceutical factory, and thousands of innocent Africans lost their lives as a result of the bombing.

Nostradamus (1503 – 1566) was quoted in a 1654 CE publication as predicting as follows: “In the City of God there will be a great thunder, two brothers torn apart by chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb. The Third big war will begin when the big city is burning. On the 11th day of the 9th month that…two metal birds would crash into two tall Statues…..in the new city…..and the world will end soon after.”
On the 11th day of September 2001, the worst terrorist attack in US history, sent two planes crashing into the World Trade Center in New York at 18 minutes interval, toppling the twin storey towers. The first crash happened at about 8.45 am. Simultaneously the terrorists crashed another plane into the Pentagon, the defence headquarters of the most powerful nation on earth. The terrorists were apparently heading another hijacked plane for the White House when it crashed in Western Pennsylvania, due to skirmish in the plane with the plane’s Black pilot who thwarted the hijacker’s efforts. A car bomb exploded outside the State Department, although this was promptly denied by security forces that came out to patrol the White House with automatic weapons. Military jets took to the skies of the two cities, and FAA grounded civilian aircrafts nation wide, for the first time in US history.

The death toll from the atrocities is said to be over three thousand of innocent souls of various nationalities of the world. The sophistication and audacity of the attack took the world by storm. It is obvious that some well-trained pilots were among the terrorists. The logistics of the operation is mind bugging. Months, if not years, must have been employed to put together the staggering planning and organization that hijacked four planes simultaneously inside America without alerting the security forces who pride themselves as the best in the world.

Alexander Cockburn, a reporter for a US newspaper, the Nation, described the attacks as “near miracles of logistic calculations, timing, execution and devastation of targets.” All the missiles the terrorists needed were full tanks of jet fuel, and the knowledge of how to fly the commercial planes. The devastation is already being compared with Pearl Habour. Of course, the pride of the US security forces was wounded, but that was not enough excuse to plunge the world into another catastrophic war. Whoever started this war, why could America not go in quietly and pick him up and try him in an open court of justice? That is what civilization is about, isn’t it? And if bin Laden is the culprit, why create a monster and punish the rest of us for your blunder?

Leaders of the West should stop to think now and accept blame for the way they have impacted on the rest of the world in the last two thousand years, instead of spinning off into their usual orgy of state terrorism, massacring thousands of innocent people around the world. May be this is the time for a New World Order in earnest. A world devoid of hatred and racism. A world in which we are our brothers’ keepers. A world where the most powerful and powerless have nothing to fear from each other. But, of course, this is a very tall dream indeed. What moral right has the US, with her devastating stockpile of nuclear weapons, for instance, to try to prevent a threatened foe like North Korea, from preparing to defend herself? These are some of the contradictions the rest of the helpless world finds difficult to understand.

When Bush Jr. rigged his way into power, I told myself that the end time had come. The Bush family had unfinished business in the oil-rich Gulf peninsula, particularly in Iraq, where they had been denied lucrative oil contracts. The Bush family needed a seemingly credible excuse, which the 11th day of September 2001 terrorist attack in the US provided. The attack was generally believed to have been facilitated with the support of elements in the US and Israeli intelligence. Although many Israeli nationals worked in the twin towers, none of them went to work on the day of the attack. The entire project was too audacious and sophisticated to be true especially against the most powerful nation on earth.

The September 11 episode helped to divert public attention in the US from Bush Junior’s flawed presidential elections. Bush Jr. needed that to sell himself as a man of steel and the defender of America’s patriotic interests. The US economy was going down and unemployment soaring when Bush Jr. took out Afghanistan. A perfect scenario for annexing alien lands, resources and people, to open up new markets for the conquerors’ junk and decadence. The official excuse to the US Congress was to eliminate Osama bin Laden and yet Osama remained at large and as deadly as ever, whether physically or through cells. It is not possible to solve the problems of terrorism with counter terrorism, but who was going to be bold enough among the super powers to educate Bush Jr. on that.

Iraq had been under severe UN sanctions for ten years. They had not been allowed to sell their oil or raise funds in any other way to take care of even their basic national needs. A chunk of their land was cordoned off for international surveillance. Weeks before the mayhem, under US pressure, Iraq was forced to destroy much of her critical weapons, including missiles she could have used to defend herself against the US aggression. The US unleashed thousands of their most lethal bombs on airports, roads, hospitals, schools, civil institutions and facilities, to turn Baghdad into a wasteland, killing and maiming thousands of innocent citizens, including women and babies, in the guise of searching for the non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

By defying UN resolution 1441, America destroyed the credibility and relevance of the UN. This happened at a time an African was the Secretary General of the UN. China was as a result freed to take over Taiwan at will. North Korea could over run South Korea any time too and Russia could make mince meat of her satellite neighbours because might is right and the UN is no longer relevant. Consensus at the UN Security Council was the only guarantee of peace in the world. With that compromised, the respectable thing for Kofi Annan (the Secretary General of the UN) to do, was to give the US immediate ultimatum to stop hostilities and withdraw her forces from Iraq.

Iraq had not violated any regulations of the UN at the time. If any thing, she was under UN sanctions and was co-operating with UN inspectors fully. Refusal by the US to respect the Secretary General’s ultimatum, issued on behalf of the marginalized UN authority, should have led to Annan’s resignation and the handing over of what was left of the UN’s worthless charter to the remaining UN veto powers of China, Russia and France opposed to the US adventure. This was the minimum Africa expected of Annan, for Africa’s honour, and the judgment of posterity. I said this much when I first posted this article to several Internet media and groups, and published it in the Nigerian press some nine years ago. The three veto powers should then have assumed the responsibility of stopping the US aggression in Iraq by force if necessary, and set about trying to put together a new world institution to promote global peace. The new institution should have borne a new name and sanctioned the US, for peace to be restored to the world.

NAIWU OSAHON Hon. Khu Mkuu (Leader) World Pan-African Movement); Ameer Spiritual (Spiritual Prince) of the African race; MSc. (Salford); Dip.M.S; G.I.P.M; Dip.I.A (Liv.); D. Inst. M; G. Inst. M; G.I.W.M; A.M.N.I.M. Poet, Author of the magnum opus: ‘The end of knowledge’. One of the world’s leading authors of children’s books; Awarded; key to the city of Memphis, Tennessee, USA; Honourary Councilmanship, Memphis City Council; Honourary Citizenship, County of Shelby; Honourary Commissionership, County of Shelby, Tennessee; and a silver shield trophy by Morehouse College, USA, for activities to unite and uplift the African race.

Naiwu Osahon, renowned author, philosopher of science, mystique, leader of the world Pan-African Movement.