It is part of the natural order of things that an act of imperialist aggression gives birth to its opposite: an antagonist shaped by the political and ideological forces in the history of the invaded nation. These in turn depend on the strength and cohesion of the indigenous bourgeoisie and the level of class struggle.

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Terrorism and Democracy: Imperialism's Final Frontier

Capitalism’s latest theme is the struggle to defend democracy against terrorism. But what is this democracy? It exploits labour power, impoverishes the proletariat by progressively eroding its health, its pensions and its standard of living through the intensification of the working day and the lowering of its purchasing power. It guarantees only more unemployment and uncertain conditions in the future. This democracy is a ferocious military predator on the international scene in order to acquire strategic raw materials. It uses terrorism when it coincides with its own interests and opposes it only when it no longer suits it. This democracy poses as the bulwark of economic liberalism, demanding the overthrow of barriers to its capital and goods whilst it practices protectionism within its own market. This is the democracy which bleats about unfair competition from those countries which have much lower labour costs, without unionisation and labour protection, and then uses those very same conditions by switching its own production and capital investment to them. This democracy which, through the IMF, imposes on poorer countries, all sorts of virtuous policies like privatisation, balanced budgets and restrictions on the workers, simultaneously operates with huge budget deficits which go way beyond anything seen in the global economy previously. A democracy which permits itself the luxury, in the name of anti-terrorism, of carrying out the most odious and violent actions against the civilian population of the countries which it invades, allowing its own armies to carry out every act of violence, torture, ethnic cleansing and terrorism, without having to answer to international criminal tribunals, because American [and British – CWO] soldiers are only answerable to their own civilian or military courts of law. This is the same democracy which, in not signing the [in any case, very weak] Kyoto treaty, massively contributes to the pollution of the world, because it does not want taxes which weaken the competitiveness of its own companies. This is the democracy which, in pursuit of its own interests is taking its contradictions onto an international stage, making the world a scene of wars and unending barbarism.

Preventative wars are being waged in the name of this democracy, creating tens of thousands of civilian victims abroad, whilst at home 50 million of its citizens remain below the poverty line. It is in the name of this democracy that prisoners are tortured before it is even known whether they belong to a hostile force or are simply citizens caught up in the net of military repression. And in this democracy a profit has to be made immediately and at all costs. Economic objectives are achieved through barbaric tragedies of war, enacted in an orgy of blood and death.

The special lie about exporting democracy (which democracy and whose?) through the horrible concept of the preventative war against terrorism has not just served the American government to justify the attacks on and. It is also useful in the present imperialist phase in all those political and economic situations in any international market involving the ’s most important strategic interests.

The planning, and then the execution, of such an attitude of ferocious aggression stems, in the first place, from growing economic crisis of the. In the second half of the ’90’s, but especially this decade, the American economy has gone through an extraordinarily deep and widespread crisis.

Having lost out to the challenge from Europe and in previous decades, and more recently, it is up to its neck in debt, so that if the debt owed by families and firms is added up it reaches a figure of more than 300% of GNP. Ever more dependent for its energy needs on international oil (70%) and requiring $3bn per day to satisfy the need to finance its economic and productive apparatus, in which the military seems to have an insatiable appetite, America’s solution is to use force everywhere its vital interests are concerned.

Most significantly there is the oil market, which has been literally devastated by military incursions made by the. Then there is the continuing need to impose the dominant role of the dollar on international finance markets, to play at will with interest rates to allow the flow of capital towards American financial centres [1], and, finally, to force its allies and enemies alike to agree to all sorts of decisions whilst remaining happy with the justifications adopted, however crude and unbelievable.

It all started with 9/11, which was for the Bush government the primary cause of its entire response, the mother of all its legitimisation, the axis around which the struggle against international terrorism turned. The first armed action was the war in, already planned well before the 11th September, the second was taken against Saddam Hussein, who had no links of any kind with international terrorism or Al Qa’eda. From that tragic moment every act of opposition to the military ferocity of American imperialism has been labelled as terrorism. The responsibility for this is clearly down to the American government and the majority of its intelligence services.

The equation was that terrorism equals absolute evil. If all opposition to Washington’s strategic objectives is seen as terrorism, it then follows that it is right to combat it and annihilate it with all means possible, legal or not, in a kind of illusion of military omnipotence behind which hides the enormous weakness of an economic and social system in free fall. The corollary of this, true at all times and particularly for the present war in Iraq, is that there is no opposition to the war, to the puppet government which exists thanks to the military presence of the occupation forces, but only terrorists who must be exterminated everywhere, by any the means, with torture and thousands of civilian deaths as inevitable collateral effects.

Imperialism’s ferocity utilises terrorism to justify its own barbarity without granting room or legitimacy to any form of opposition. This does not mean that terrorism does not exist, that it is not to be denounced, nor that it should not be fought in the appropriate fashion. On the other hand, those who feel the need, in the name of any ideology, to defend, to politically support or to morally justify groups and organisations which, for their own ends, kill civilians, young and old, women and children, do they not make of their own work an inhuman massacre of innocents? And when this happens, terrorism creates, in the long term, exactly the opposite of what it wants to achieve in terms of support for its strategy. But it is not a question of this, it is that those who deliberately confuse the concepts of terrorism with those of national liberation struggles, of civil war or of revolution, in order to discredit all social movements by burdening them with the negative definition of terrorism. Thus, we will begin by defining what we mean by terrorism and legitimate defence against an invading army, leaving aside for the moment the ideological and programmatic content of the concept of defence. It is also necessary to confirm how acts of terrorism can be part of the clash between occupiers and occupied, and, finally, that state terrorism exists though it is never called that, but only because it is produced by a regular army, and, above all, hidden by the media’s sophisticated news management.

For a distinction between terrorism and guerrilla war

In order to move from a high level of abstraction, we will shift the question to the real and well-defined context of the war in. Every day, for two and a half years, we have witnessed the same story where the terrorists kill civilians and are against the legitimate government and the democratisation process. There is no sign of the opposition or of guerrilla war. And it is bourgeois international law, although in terms congenial to it, that is clearly providing the terms for the reportage, and is also present in the articles of the UN and other international organisations. In this case we would like to take into consideration the definitions provided by the Istituto Studi Ricerche Informazioni Difesa [ISTRID, the Defence Information Research Institution], which is an institute of the Italian government, and cannot be dismissed as a coven of subversives. As regards the definition of terrorism, they say: “Terrorism does not exist as a doctrine or political programme, but only as a ‘violent mode of action’