For the Byron Echo, March 2005

Maybe what God was up to in the two earthquakes in Aceh was a thumbed nose to George Bush: You call THAT an act of terror? THIS is an act of terror. You want to argue? Here's another. Because the numbers of the dead after the first earthquake -- four Hiroshimas, twelve Gettysburgs, one-third of a Rwanda -- show what small potatoes terrorism is, and always was, in comparison. To the 3,000 dead on 9/11 you add the 1,000 dead in Israel since 2000, the 3,000 dead in Ireland and England since 1969, the 200 in Bali, the 200 in Madrid, the 300 in Spain since 1950, the 200 in Italy, the 14 in Columbine and about 100 miscellaneous, you have 8,000 dead from 'terrorism', if the word means anything, on this planet in the last fifty years.

And since this is one quarter of the dead in the US in any one year from domestic (usually in-the-family) gunfire, one seventh of the dead in the US in any one year in road accidents, and one half the number of Australians dead in any one year from smoking cigarettes, you begin to see what a con it is, and what a waste of the three hundred billion spent on it thus far, since 9/11, is. That's about 375 million dollars per corpse, 380 million if you add the extra presidential bodyguards and outriders, trained crack snipers and terrorist-busting hit squads currently playing stud poker in small back rooms in thirty Western countries.

The Right have always done their business this way, drumming up our big fears about immigrant Irish, cunning Jews, stand-over Union bosses, rorting wharfies, greedy student radicals, setting up bogeymen, diverting attention while they rat the till, but never before on this scale, I think, or not since they had us believing a Soviet Union smashed to bits by world war was about to nuke, enslave and atheise America, subduing it with 30 million prim conscript soldiers impervious to its temptations.

This time, and the Bush gang are very shrewd, they've taken over a lot of the hypochondria of the Left: Saurin gas, WMDs, a nuke in the hands of a rogue state, a madman with his finger on the button, all echo what the Left were whimpering about in the 1950s and 60s, and so does their window-dressing, the black single female Secretary of State, the bootstrap Latino Attorney-General, the sensitive Jewish Deputy Secretary of Defence defending innocent Israel against invading fundamentalists. It's hard for the Left to attack Condoleeza, despite her moronic assertions about the WMDs and her sackworthy failure when repeatedly warned to at least try to stop 9/11. It's hard to go after Colin Powell who lied to the United Nations (or unwittingly repeated 'mistaken intelligence') and directly caused maybe 150,000 deaths, because he's a sensitive black man of the kind played by James Earl Jones in so many small-'l' liberal Hollywood movies. Or Paul Wolfowitz, who's so like Kevin Costner in Thirteen Days.

And the upshot is the biggest con since Goebbels had people believing that Jews were simultaneously the evil capitalists and the evil Communists at the root of everything nasty in the world. It's more likely to be the Texas oil businessmen who with their current senseless war are hyping the price of oil to a hundred dollars a barrel and imperilling economies everywhere. All because of eight thousand deaths from terrorism -- that's a hundred and sixty a year in the past fifty years; the number of deaths, probably, by backyard pool drownings in that time. If you believe in terrorism as anything more than an advertising construct, you're an idiot. Like 50 million Americans. And John Howard.

Is it only I who has picked up the recent rapid return of socialism in the western world? Putin's undisguised renationalisation of Russia's oil fields, Blair's frantic new 'partnerships' with fraying railway companies, the Chavez 'land reforms', the Indian peasant-health-care reforms, Costello's call for government-subsidised personal home nursing from retirement to cremation and Helen Clark's revival of union power all point this way. So does the routine weekly gaoling somewhere on earth of some CEO, the mounting trade deficits of the USA and Australia, the ever-plummeting dollar, the tripling price of oil, the brave toppling by 'people power' of the Georgian, Ukrainian and Krygistan oligarchs, the rise of Red China as the new economic leviathan, and the worldwide popularity of Motorcycle Diaries.

It's happening as quickly as the withdrawal of Spain, Japan, Holland, the Ukraine, Italy and now Poland from Iraq, and the exponential growth of the big crowds urging America to leave Iraq. Capitalism after 1989 was given its head, and it hasn't worked. And it's proved, especially in Russia, to be a racket. And ordinary people everywhere are beginning to notice. Discuss.