Your View
WTC-catastrophe, the 16th Letter of an Autonomous Thinker
Amsterdam, September 18 2001
Dear reader,
I like catastrophes but not this kind. The wrong people are hurt, it takes too much technical knowledge to organise such a catastrophe and it is not directed against the real culprits.
I like catastrophes because I hold the opinion that only catastrophes can change the world so that misery will vanish. Or does someone think that the misery will vanish when we proceed on the way we now go forward? When the present situation continues to exist, every year another fifty million humans will die only because food is not fairly shared. I will publish shortly more about my kind of catastrophes in my series about catastrophes. (http://www.geocities.com/powerandelite/catastrophes.htm ).
This catastrophe will have a profound influence on our world. But Osmana Bin Laden is not the problem. The problem is why people like Osmana Bin Laden exist. And the most important reason is the misery and the inequality that continues to exist. I am still convinced that the elite of the USA, the highest financial and economical elite, is the first responsible for the misery. An elite is a group that wants to possess always more than other people and that has given itself the right to leave this excess of wealth and power to its progeny. The American elite and the supporting elites in other countries have to be attacked will the world change in the right direction.
The WTC-catastrophe has given the elite a possibility to rally the masses around it by pointing at new enemies who attack our society. But remember, what the elite says always boils down to its demand for more power and wealth and for the continuing possibility to transfer this power and wealth to its progeny. The WTC-catastrophe hinders the struggle against the elite.
The last catastrophe, The Fall of the Wall in 1989, was also primarily caused by the elite. It looked a bloodless coup d’état but many people died indirectly. The life expectancy in the countries of the former Soviet-Union was reduced by many years and many millions of people died who would not have died when the Wall should have remained where it was. Before the Fall of the Wall the elite could say that anyone who was against capitalism and the unequal partition of wealth and power was promoting communism and that system was worse than capitalism. After the Fall the capitalist elite was the only power left and indeed the proportion of wealth of the 20% richest people in the world rose to far more than 80%. But resistance was growing.
The think tanks of the elite came up with several new enemies.
Drugs are a problem but when the money earned in drugs trade is vanishing
in the capitalistic banking system and when the farmers in Colombia are
sprayed with Roundup so they cannot grow any crops, the credibility of
drugs as an enemy of the masses is undermined.
Racism and ethnicity is a next weapon. People who lived for ages peacefully
next to each other, even families, were broken up because one should be
a Croat and the other a Serb. Yugoslavia was partitioned in several small
states lead by warlords and the danger to the top-elite was diminished.
The same happened in the Soviet-Union. Other countries as Indonesia, India
or China are also on the hidden agenda of the elite. But the emphasis
on visible characteristics caused by the origin of people failed to rally
people behind the elite because a part of the coloured masses were forced
to live together in comparable (and not too well) circumstances in the
rich countries. The refusal of the Western leaders to condemn the only
openly racist country in the world, Israel, is even beginning to work
contra-productive for the elite.
The Fall of the WTC has given the elite the chance to invent two new enemies, terrorism and the Islam. The propaganda machine was already working in that direction but the response of the masses was negative.
Now they have new arguments even if these arguments are fundamentally wrong. The growing support of fundamentalist Islamic (and other) religions is caused by the growing gap between poor and rich countries and by the unconditional support of corrupt and rich elites in Third World countries. The fundamentalist Christian ideas in Europe started to vanish when the economic situation of the masses improved. The elite tries to replace the economic based discussion of the capitalist system by discussions about religion, race and terrorism. Opposition to the capitalist system will be branded as terrorism. The greatest danger on the world will be terrorism and Islam and not poverty that kills every year at least four million children before they reach the age of one month, not Aids that cannot be fought because the pharmaceutical leaders want to get still more money from its patents, not the many deaths after natural catastrophes because money to improve the infrastructure has to be used to repay the expensive and useless loans from the West, not.......
Blair, the English prime minister, dares even to say that the WTC-catastrophe is an attack on our civilisation. The continuing worldwide misery says already much about our civilisation, the training of Osmana bin Laden, the donating of weapons to the Taliban, the ......... no I stop adding still more awful facts. Blair’s civilisation is not very refined, there is not much to defend.
The elite tries to conceal the inequality in the rich Western world behind a new Wall that is drawn up between the Western and the Islamic world and tries to hide the widespread poverty and misery in the Third World behind the Wall that has to protect the West for international terrorism. This can have a profound influence on the anti-globalisation movement, which is still in its infancy. I cannot yet predict if this influence will be negative or positive but in each case the power instruments of the Western elite against the own masses will be strengthened. Maybe this will force the Movement to look for other methods of action among which direct action against members of the elite I propose.
By the way, in the Netherlands seven ministers have formed a special task force to combat international terrorism. This is part of the propaganda that terrorism is the biggest enemy of our ‘civilisation’ and that every one has to rally behind the leaders. Never ever has anyone thought about a special task force to combat the fact that 50,000,000 humans (and not 5,000 humans as in the WTC) every year die only because they do not get enough food. Terrorism is a greater threat to the power of the elite than 50,000,000 poor humans.
New enemies are created to thwart attacks on the real power in the world, the financial and economic elite. I do not want people to discuss much about what the other side is doing and planning. Then the other side is still determining your agenda. I want people to think about the possibilities to change this world and then to act on that theory. And I hold the opinion that actions have to include direct attacks on persons from the elite, but that you could already read on my site.
Sorry, this Letter is too long, but yes, the WTC-catastrophe is indeed important.
Still a last remark. Many people are rightly mourning the more than 5,000 innocent people that died in the WTC-catastrophe. Are these people also openly mourning the FIFTY MILLION humans that die every year only because they do not have enough food? Will these people also mourn the innocent victims that will die because of the coming bombardments of the American and the other Western elites?
Yours, Joost van Steenis
http://www.geocities.com/powerandelite