9/11

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For more on Chile click HERE.

By Roger Burbach

September 11, 2013 -- Futuresocialism.org -- The coup d’etat by General Augusto Pinochet in Chile on September 11, 1973, transformed the history of socialism. Almost a thousand days before, Salvador Allende and the Popular Unity coalition had taken office promising a “Chilean Road to Socialism” based on democratic principles. The government launched an agrarian reform program, recognised the right of workers to take over factories and run them collectively, took control of most of the country’s banks and expropriated multinational corporations like Kennecott and ITT, all within the framework of the Chilean constitution.

The following article is the editorial for the upcoming edition of ML Update. It is posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission.

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By the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation

May 7, 2011 -- The US has proclaimed its success in its decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden, culminating in the killing of bin Laden by US military operatives in a house in Abbotabad in Pakistan. As the televised triumphalism and images of hyper-nationalist celebrations in the US fade, however, Washington's heroic narrative is being subjected to uncomfortable questions.       

Ironically, Osama bin Laden’s death has come, not in the wake of 9/11 when he was at the peak of his strength, but at a time when bin Laden and his al Qaeda were effectively sidelined in an Arab world that is witnessing a democratic awakening and upsurge. This fact too robs the US narrative of some of its sheen.

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By Norm Dixon

[This article was first published on September 11, 2002, on the first anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Its observations remain relevant to this day.]

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In the week before the first anniversary of the devastating September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, TV networks aired a seemingly never-ending string of ``special events'' featuring ``exclusive'' or ``never before seen'' footage of the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) and its aftermath. People around the world again experienced the horror, anger and tragedy of that terrible day, when almost 3000 working people were murdered.

Culminating on the anniversary of the day itself, thousands of journalists and TV presenters from across the globe will converge at ``ground zero'' in New York for ``remembrance and reflection''. Solemn ceremonies will be telecast and patriotic speeches by top US politicians broadcast, restating Washington's determination to pursue its ``war on terrorism''.

By Norm Dixon

May 5, 2004 -- Even while working people were still coming to terms with the shock of witnessing the unimaginable and traumatic collapse of the World Trade Center, top US officials were describing this mass-murder of 3000 people as “an opportunity”, recent books by government “insiders” and Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward have revealed.

As the country went into mourning, Bush's war cabinet quickly began to coolly debate just how soon it could get away with shifting the enemy in its coming “war on terrorism” to Iraq, a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks.

In the days that followed September 11, 2001, the US rulers immediately recognised that those awful acts of mass murder had provided them with a golden opportunity to achieve the US capitalist ruling class' long-held objective of unchallenged world domination — the “American century” it predicted was at hand at the end of World War II.

`Topic A'

In January, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill was published. O'Neill, a former CEO of the giant Alcoa corporation, was Bush's treasury secretary until December 2002, when he was sacked.

September 19, 2001

BY NORM DIXON

“Throughout the world ... its agents, client states and satellites are on the defensive — on the moral defensive, the intellectual defensive, and the political and economic defensive. Freedom movements arise and assert themselves. They're doing so on almost every continent populated by man — in the hills of Afghanistan, in Angola, in Kampuchea, in Central America ... [They are] freedom fighters.”

Is this a call to jihad (holy war) taken from one of Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin Laden's notorious fatwas? Or perhaps a communique issued by the repressive Taliban regime in Kabul?

In fact, this glowing praise of the murderous exploits of today's supporters of arch-terrorist bin Laden and his Taliban collaborators, and their holy war against the “evil empire”, was issued by US President Ronald Reagan on March 8, 1985. The “evil empire” was the Soviet Union, as well as Third World movements fighting US-backed colonialism, apartheid and dictatorship.

How things change. In the aftermath of a series of terrorist atrocities — the most despicable being the mass murder of more than 6000 working people in New York and Washington on September 11 — bin Laden the “freedom fighter” is now lambasted by US leaders and the Western mass media as a “terrorist mastermind” and an “evil-doer”.