Memories are short and Western Imperial propaganda is ubiquitous. We conveniently forget, even assuming that we ever knew, the bloody march of European and more latterly, US colonialism. After all, we in the West are the beneficiaries of these past five hundred years of European colonial plunder. We hesitate to remind ourselves of it, but the plain historical truth is that European development was largely at the expense of the rest of the world. We industrialised and, at the same time, deliberately de-industrialised the opposition. Those that stood in the way were mercilessly eliminated.

The casualties are not to be measured in the thousands, nor tens of thousands, nor even hundreds of thousands, No, we are definitely forced to count in the millions and, despite the whitewashing of this human toll by Tory historians like Niall Ferguson, the real figure is comfortably in the hundreds of millions. It is estimated that some ninety million indigenous peoples of the Americas were slaughtered during the initial stages of European conquest. Similar grisly figures are needed to account for the Africans who did not survive the traumas of Western imposed slavery.

Just in recent decades, in pursuit of cheap labour, cheap resources and ever expanding markets, it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that the United States of America, backed by its junior partners, has directly slaughtered some ten million citizens of planet Earth in the 56 years since the formal conclusion of World War Two. That’s a pretty diabolical sort of world peace that the imperialists claim to have created. That sort of human culling puts the US of A right up in the premier league of imperial butchers alongside Britain, Spain and Nazi Germany.

Just consider for a moment the US record in this department. Some two million Koreans perished at the hands of the US military, quickly followed by three million Vietnamese and one million Cambodians. The majority of these six million deaths were peasants whose only crime was to support their respective country’s expectation of national sovereignty after the conclusion of the Second World War. Another million perished in Indonesia, as the US industrial military complex sanctioned the slaughter of all opponents to US commercial interests. Then came a whole series of US orchestrated coups in South and Central America, Africa and the Middle East, where the true casualty lists are still being assembled by the relatives of the victims.

That brings us to the modern era where two wars in Iraq and a twelve year programme of imperial slaughter in Afghanistan has comfortable notched up, in collateral damage, another two million bodies, and the piles of bodies just gets higher and higher. Not content with this bloody record, NATO is now happily at work in Libya bombing the country towards a fantasy democracy while at the very same time conveniently ignoring a whole host of brutal injustices by its puppet regimes, not least those committed by its arch client states, Israel and Saudi Arabia. And the bodies just keep on piling up. No doubt at all that the 10 million mark will soon be surpassed if it hasn’t already done so.

All this ‘collateral damage’ rather puts the ten thousand or so victims of Bin Laden and his Islamo-fascistic al-Qaida network into some kind of historical perspective.

But here we have only spoken of the direct military slaughter at the hands of the US Imperialists. What of the indirect results of their economic policies dictated by the IMF, World Bank and the World Trade Organisation. Here the figures are so truly staggering that we can hardly comprehend them at all. By UN estimates some 14 million children die every year due to poverty, malnutrition and easily preventable diseases. Add to that figure the millions of adults that perish prematurely due to the exact same causes and we are conservatively talking of fifty million casualties every year. Multiply that appalling figure by the 56 years since 1945 and we discover that well in excess of two thousand million humans have perished needlessly due to an economic system that perpetually creates pockets of extreme wealth and gigantic wastelands of abject poverty.

When the US propagandists talk of a war on terror, they ought to be talking not of a two-bit feudal tyrant like Bin Laden, but the economic terror of the world trade system a system that the US created at as it emerged as top imperial power at the end of WW11 a system that condemns two billion citizens to grinding poverty and premature death every year, every day, and every second of every day.

Now, either one puts this humiliating, life sapping poverty down to an ‘act of god’ or an act of man, but either way someone or something is accountable. If it is an act of god, then that god is a genocidal murderer who needs to be dragged down from his metaphysical throne and publicly horsewhipped for a thousand millennia. If however it is an act of man, as it surely is, then the guilty parties need to be hunted down with the same ruthlessness that was applied to Bin Laden and subsequently tried for crimes against humanity.

None of this will of course happen because those with the military and economic muscle, control what we know, what we think and what we can realistically do. Through a finely tuned machine that draws in even the socially progressive press, our thoughts are both censored and in turn, self censored. Things, as in an Orwellian dystopia, are perpetually turned on their head, so even the more clear sighted amongst us busy themselves with trivia while the truly barbaric state of our planet is relegated to the ‘too hard’ basket. In this regard I am as guilty as the next. Instead of bringing to account the Bush’s and the Blair’s et al, for war crimes, we instead demonise a crazed Saudi obscurantist who maniacally sought to distract the world’s dispossessed and disenfranchised with some half-baked feudal nonsense of a return to a childlike eighth century glorious world-wide Islamic caliphate.

Now if there is one thing that the world most definitely does need, it is yet more infantile religious fantasy. It was of course, the sickening Christian notions of European racial superiority that enabled successive waves of European colonialists to brutally subjugate entire continents without a single qualm of conscience. (A bible in one hand and a Gatling gun in the other). Bin Laden’s imagined Islamic caliphate would be no less barbaric. No, what the world’s dispossessed desperately need is a return to some socialist rationality, not to be led down another quasi feudal cul-de-sac.

And so to Bin Laden and his al-Qaida network of networks. Twice in the past 100 years Afghanistan attempted to take the first faltering steps to modernity, and twice these tentative steps were crushed by western intervention; first by the British in 1929 and secondly by the US in the 1980’s. Instead of promoting and nurturing these embryonic democratic developments, the British and American imperialists did the exact opposite they armed and financed reactionary oppositions which has kept Afghanistan in a feudalistic, tribal backwardness to this day. It is out of this quagmire of western orchestrated reaction that the Taliban and its Arab associate, al-Qaida, flourished.

Everything that motivated Britain and more latterly the US was a pathological hatred of socialism and a determination that the Soviet Union should never emerge as a successful model for others to follow. For the Western imperialists, capitalist markets must never be restrained by social considerations. Of course, one of the great ironies of modern history is that the very same reactionary forces that the US secretly funded to drag down the Soviets, eventually turned against their paymasters and relaunched their jihad against the ‘Great Satan’. To coin the words of Malcolm X; ‘the chickens had truly come home to roost’.

A book that I find myself continually returning to is Tariq Ali’s ‘The Clash of Fundamentalisms’. In a powerful mix of autobiography, history and contemporary politics, a good deal of the mist is lifted from the many disputes that are presented by the imperialist media machine as intractable. The Middle East, Kashmir, Pakistan and Afghanistan are all rationally de-mystified by the author and done so with compelling historical documentation. Hear is an example with TA quoting President Carter’s National Security chief Zbigniew Brzezinski;

According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was 3 July 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention. P207

If that is not damning enough of US complicity in Afghan affairs, the following lengthy quote from US Army General Butler (1888-1940) rather puts not just the US government but the entire US capitalist class in the dock. And on the basis of Butler’s evidence there can only be one verdict.

War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the very few at the expense of the masses.

Continuing to reflect on his military career, Butler explains: ‘There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its ‘finger men’ to point out enemies, its muscle men to destroy enemies, its brain men to plan war preparations and a big boss super nationalistic capitalism. It may seem odd for me, a military man, to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty three years in active military service. I served in all commissioned ranks from second lieutenant to major general. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.’ P260

Getting down to specifics, Butler spills the beans on US foreign policy in Central America during the early part of the 20th century: ‘I helped make Honduras ‘right’ for American fruit companies in 1903. I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall St. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.’ P260

A similar insider account will no doubt emerge from America’s intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan and dozens of other countries that Uncle Sam unilaterally declares to be a legitimate part of its national interest. Bin Laden was just a minor pawn in a much, much larger game a game of securing oil and other vital resources for corporate America. As the old saying goes; the business of America is business, and as that business becomes increasingly threatened by the rapidly emerging BRIC nations, expect corporate America’s response to be even more ruthless. Butler’s career of military racketeering may well come to be regarded as tame by comparison.