The Need for Dissent

George Monbiot is a regular columnist for the Guardian newspaper in London:

The Need for Dissent
Radicalism is retreating, but it\'s more necessary than ever before

By George Monbiot

If Osama bin Laden did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
For the past four years, his name has been invoked whenever a US
president has sought to increase the defence budget or wriggle out of
arms control treaties. He has been used to justify even President Bush\'s
missile defence programme, though neither he nor his associates are
known to possess anything approaching ballistic missile technology. Now
he has become the personification of evil required to launch a crusade
for good; the face behind the faceless terror.

The closer you look, the weaker the case against bin Laden becomes.
While the terrorists who inflicted Tuesday\'s dreadful wound in the world
may have been inspired by him, there is, as yet, no evidence that they
were instructed by him. Bin Laden\'s presumed guilt rests on the
supposition that he is the sort of man who would have done it. But his
culpability is irrelevant: his usefulness to western governments lies in
his power to terrify. When billions of pounds of military spending are
at stake, rogue states and terrorist warlords become assets precisely
because they are liabilities.

By using bin Laden as an excuse for demanding new military spending,
weapons manufacturers in America and Britain have enhanced his iconic
status among the disgruntled. His influence, in other words, has been
nurtured by the very industry which claims to possess the means of
stamping him out. This is not the only way in which the new terrorism
crisis has been exacerbated by corporate power.

The lax airport security which enabled the hijackers to smuggle weapons
onto the planes was the result of corporate lobbying against the
stricter controls the government had proposed. Some reports suggest that
so many died in the south tower of the World Trade Centre partly because
some of the companies there instructed their employees to return to work
after the north tower had been hit.

Now Tuesday\'s horror is being used by corporations to establish the
preconditions for an even deadlier brand of terror. This week, while the
world\'s collective back is turned, Tony Blair intends to allow the mixed
oxide plant at Sellafield to start operating. The decision would have
been front page news at any other time. Now it\'s likely to be all but
invisible. The plant\'s operation, long demanded by the nuclear industry
and resisted by almost everyone else, will lead to a massive
proliferation of plutonium, and a near certainty that some of it will
find its way into the hands of terrorists. Like Ariel Sharon, in other
words, Blair is using the reeling world\'s shock to pursue policies which
would be unacceptable at any other time.

For these reasons and many others, radical opposition has seldom been
more necessary. But it has seldom been more vulnerable. The right is
seizing the political space which has opened up where the twin towers of
the World Trade Centre once stood.

Civil liberties are suddenly negotiable. The US seems prepared to lift
its ban on extra-judicial executions carried out abroad by its own
agents. The CIA might be permitted to employ human rights abusers once
more, which will doubtless mean training and funding a whole new
generation of bin Ladens. The British government is considering the
introduction of identity cards. Radical dissenters in Britain have
already been identified as terrorists by the Terrorism Act 2000. Now
we\'re likely to be treated as such.

One of the peculiar problems we radicals face is that the targets of
Tuesday\'s terror represented more clearly than any others the powers we
have long opposed. For those of us who have campaigned against the
predatory behaviour of the financial sector and the defence industry,
the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon had come to symbolise all that
was rotten in the state of the world. So, though ours is a movement
built on peace, it has not been hard for our opponents to equate our
dissidence with terror.

The authoritarianism which has long been lurking in advanced capitalism
has started to surface. In the Guardian yesterday, William Shawcross --
Rupert Murdoch\'s courteous biographer -- articulated the new orthodoxy:
America is, he maintained, \"a beacon of hope for the world\'s poor and
dispossessed and for all those who believe in freedom of thought and
deed\". These believers would presumably include the families of the
Iraqis killed by the sanctions Britain and the US have imposed; the
peasants murdered by Bush\'s proxy war in Colombia; and the tens of
millions living under despotic regimes in the Middle East, sustained and
sponsored by the United States.

William Shawcross concluded by suggesting that \"we are all Americans
now\", a terrifying echo of Pinochet\'s maxim that \"we are all Chileans
now\": by which he meant that no cultural distinctions would be
tolerated, and no indigenous land rights recognised. Shawcross appeared
to suggest that those who question American power are now the enemies of
democracy. It\'s a different way of formulating the warning voiced by
members of the Bush administration: \"if you\'re not with us, you\'re
against us\".

The Daily Telegraph has set aside part of its leader column for a
directory of \"useful idiots\", by which it means those who oppose major
military intervention. Doubtless I will find my name on the roll of
honour there tomorrow. So, perhaps, will the families of some of the
victims, who seem to be rather more capable of restraint and forgiveness
than the leader writers of the rightwing press. Mark Newton-Carter,
whose brother appears to have died in the terrorist outrage, told one of
the Sunday newspapers, \"I think Bush should be caged at the moment. He
is a loose cannon. He is building up his forces getting ready for a
military strike. That is not the answer. Gandhi said: \'An eye for an eye
makes the whole world blind\' and never a truer word was spoken.\" But
when the right is on the rampage, victims as well as perpetrators are
trampled.

Mark Twain once observed that \"there are some natures which never grow
large enough to speak out and say a bad act is a bad act, until they
have inquired into the politics or the nationality of the man who did
it.\" The radical left is able to state categorically that Tuesday\'s
terrorism was a dreadful act, irrespective of provenance. But the right
can\'t bring itself to make the same statement about Israel\'s new
invasions of Palestine, or the sanctions in Iraq, or the US-backed
terror in East Timor, or the carpet bombing of Cambodia. Its critical
faculties have long been suspended and now, it demands, we must suspend
ours too.

Retaining the ability to discriminate between good acts and bad acts
will become ever harder over the next few months, as new conflicts and
paradoxes challenge our preconceptions. It may be that a convincing case
against bin Laden is assembled, whereupon his forced extradition would,
I feel, be justified. But, unless we wish to help George Bush use
barbarism to defend the \"civilisation\" he claims to represent, we on the
left must distinguish between extradition and extermination.

Tuesday\'s terror may have signalled the beginning of the end of
globalisation. The recession it has doubtless helped to precipitate,
coupled with a new and understandable fear among many Americans of
engagement with the outside world, could lead to a reactionary
protectionism in the United States, which is likely to provoke similar
responses on this side of the Atlantic. We will, in these circumstances,
have to be careful not to celebrate the demise of corporate
globalisation, if it merely gives way to something even worse.

The governments of Britain and America are using the disaster in New
York to reinforce the very policies which have helped to cause the
problem: building up the power of the defence industry, preparing to
launch campaigns of the kind which inevitably kill civilians, licensing
covert action. Corporations are securing new resources to invest in
instability. Racists are attacking Arabs and Muslims and blaming liberal
asylum policies for terrorism. As a result of the horror on Tuesday, the
right in all its forms is flourishing, and we are shrinking. But we must
not be cowed. Dissent is most necessary just when it is hardest to
voice.