The myth of the lone wolf and non-state actors in the war on terrorism

Saturday, 25 October 2014

The term “state-sponsored terrorism” is a distinction without a difference. All terrorist organizations that exist today are sponsored in some way by the state – that is of course if you include global financial interests as part of “the state”. If you accept the long-demonstrated seamless relationship between capital pools and political power (in fact the latter is simply an operating arm of the former) as the norm and not the exception, then the entire concept of state-sponsorship of terrorism becomes moot, and the mere attempt to construct such a narrative amounts to a clever attempt to return to the good versus evil paradigm that only serves to obfuscate the truth.

Seen through this lens, the decades-long struggle for control of Central Asia by the West (The New Great Game) becomes clearer. For example, if the last remaining source of petro-dollars were situated in North America, the Eastern States’ political and cultural narrative about the West would be that Christian Fundamentalist Extremists are an outgrowth of the nature of Christianity itself, owing to its bellicose and savage nature; and that religious divisions among Lutherans, Protestants, and Catholics are systemic and will forever destabilize the region. This is why the East must strongly support the lone democratic stronghold in the region – Cuba – against these barbarous regimes. Of course these critiques are distractions designed to focus the mind of the average citizen on simplistic, Manichaean distinctions.

States are extensions of financial interests, not the inverse. “The State” is an economic institutional structure that functions in the interests of those that control global capital pools. Terrorist organizations exist in order to further the interests of those global capital pools. Terrorist organizations could not exist without money and weapons, which are provided by government actors – directly by “arming the democratic opposition” or indirectly by supporting proxy wars against “rogue states” by funneling drug money, arms, and training to “non-state actors” (e.g. the Contras, Al Qaeda [aka Mujahedeen], ISIS [aka Sunni Baathists et al.]). Their operations are funded by governments and foundations, their money is laundered by banks, and they are trained within the borders of nations.

The notion that people like Oswald, McVeigh, Bin Laden (aka, Tim Osman), Mohamed Atta, or al-Awlaki (all CIA assets), are non-state actors belies copious evidence to the contrary. A careful reading of CIA Document #1035-960 of 1967 is instructive on this point, as well as the countless testimonies of whistleblowers prevented from testifying publically under the States Secrets Privilege and prosecuted under the Espionage Act, insofar as it illustrates the concern of the ruling elite when these facts become widely known by the public. Further, the fact that the Bolshevik Revolution – and the subsequent industrial development of the Cold War USSR – was financed and led by western banking interests (not Lenin or Trotsky), is important to consider because today these once “non-state actors” would undoubtedly be considered terrorists. But without the massive financial support funneled to these persons and groups by institutionalized economic interests, they would be nothing more than charismatic speakers, obscure intellectuals, or mediocre painters.

The fight against terrorism and terrorist actors is merely a sophomoric horizontal framing of the world (much like the Left-Right political “debate”) depicted in terms of good versus evil, i.e., terrorists hate democracy and freedom, and they must be stopped. An explicit example of this ethos is the terror group Boko Haram, literally “western education is prohibited,” in case their mission was not clear. A deeper understanding of the nature of terrorism and its origins is rooted in a vertical framing of the world in terms of haves versus have-nots, where diminishing resources and scarcity – real, perceived, or contrived – is, for example, driving the ongoing destabilization of Iraq and Central Asia through NATO/Gladio operations for the purpose of global political hegemony and control of diminishing natural resources. Terrorists and terrorism are nothing more than the groups and actions that are facilitated at the periphery by global economic institutional interests that we call governments.