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The Giddy clowns of capitalist exploitation and religious extremism

IN PERSPECTIVE…

In the second week of September, large numbers of innocent occupants were killed in the bombing of big city buildings at the instigation of Islamist terror groups run and financed by Arab Muslims.

New York in 2001. Of course. And Moscow two years before.

Responding to a wave of anger and revulsion, staring at the prospect of a centre that could not hold, of a state no longer able to protect its citizens, the President ordered the armed forces to move in and to bomb and blast the perceived source of the terror.

That’s how Bush saw it and did it in Afghanistan; that’s how Putin responded two years before, in Chechnya.

We all know the differences. But what are the similarities?

It was three decades earlier, in the third week of September 1970, that the Jordan Army went into the Palestinian refugee camps, bombing and blasting. They killed 5,000 people. That was Black September.

The historical times of the first black September were very different to those of the second and third…2 and 3 happened in a world gone crazy with capitalist exploitation and speculation, and religious extremism, operating globally, feeding each other – with socialism so left out, and secular nationalism so constantly slapped down that almost the entire geo-political stage is taken up by two mad, ungovernable forces pitted against each other. Criminal Lunacy Sans Frontieres.

How did it happen?

The world in 1970 was going into the last phase of a long period of standoff, if not balance, between post-colonial, state mediated capitalism, and giant state socialism.

Tony Hall - Donkeyshott

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