This Is Not a Religious War

Usually during a talk about this fraudulent "war on terror" someone raises the specter of a religious war. We are fighting Islamo-fascist-terrorists or some sort thing. But the basic idea is that it is the Christian West defending itself against the crazy Muslim fanatics. As far as I know Sam Huntington made this view quite popular in his book: Clash of Civilizations. It's crap.

"The income ration of the one-fifth of the world's population in the wealthiest countries to the one-fifth in the poorest countries went from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 74 to 1 in 1995. (United Nations. Human Development Report 1999).

Poverty is growing. Nearly 30,000 people die every day because they can't get enough to eat in a world that is overflowing with food. Thousands more die because they don't have access to medicines that cost pennies to produce. Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University put it another way:

More than eight million people around the world die each year because they are too poor to stay alive...The $450 billion the United States will spend this year on the military will never buy peace if it continues to spend around one thirtieth of that, just $15 billion, to address the plight of the world's poorest of the poor, whose socitieis are destabalized by extreme poverty and thereby become havens of unrest, violence, and even global terrorism.

The Clash of Civilizations paradigm is just crap. But it's a wonderful piece of crap because it leaves those who believe it the solemn option of perpetual war for perpetual peace. If some nut wants to kill you, you must defend yourself. But what if that "nut" has some honest grievances? You'd still protect yourself, of course, but wouldn't you want to maybe address those grievances, specially if they were valid?

The truth of the matter is, the Global Capitalist system is failing the great majority of people in this world. It is a system of exploitation ran by some of the most totalitarian institutions the world has ever seen: the modern corporation. People are tired of having their land and resources stolen from them while our corporations poison their air and water. People are tired of seeing the great majority of the wealth from their country go to Washington and London.

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