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Threat Behind Terrorism

The current threat to the West lies less in terrorism than in its own failure to achieve a universal standard of life that respects nature and allows all people, the world over, a happy and sustainable place within it (what globalism should mean). This failure manifests in growing class extremes, political divisiveness, alienation in overdeveloped as well as in underdeveloped countries, and violation of human rights. To focus on terrorism puts the cart before the horse. Whether random and domestic or political and imported, terrorism has always been a catchword to distract attention from the realities of the economic system both at home and abroad. Now, as a thousand years ago, having an apparently external enemy masks the complicity of nominal Christendom in exploiting the poorer world, as well as its own growing exploitation by corporate power. This mechanism of scapegoating, and distraction by irrelevant and trivial pseudo-issues that dominate American media (bread and circuses), are symptoms of a mentality that sees neither its own subtle manipulations nor the way it is controlled by others through fear and greed.

RELATED TAGS: [terrorism, terrorist threat, universal standard of life/human rights, true globalism, what globalism should mean, escalating poverty, class/political division, haves and have-nots, world elite, catchword of terrorism, scapegoating, external(ized) enemy]