Tuesday, September 06, 2011

The true threat is not a super-villain skulking in the desert...

(...)

Caught and interrogated, one terrorist coldly explains that even though no one has died, millions of lives will be shortened and made materially harder as a result of the coming recession - and hence the human cost of this piece of global sabotage will be far higher than any one dramatic act of mass murder.

The remarkable prescience of this chilling little book, published a month before the toppling of Lehman Brothers, has stayed with me since. Because it turns out, ten years after history appeared to be rewritten in plumes of smoke across the Manhattan skyline, that we have all been looking in the wrong place. It turns out that the grand story of the early part of the 21st century is not the clash of civilisations, of Islamist terrorism versus western democracy, but the struggle of the financial and political elite against their own people as the free market buckles under its own weight, a new bankruptcy hastened by two desert wars and years of cheap post-9/11 credit. The greatest threat to democracy is not external attack, but internal collapse. Full story...

Don't miss:
  1. Who are the real terrorists?
  2. Who commits terrorism?
  3. Focus on Islamists in Norway let non-Muslim extremists go under radar...
  4. Daylight robbery, meet nighttime robbery: wealthy looters, meet poor looters...
  5. Bankers, looters and the politics of envy...
  6. Wall Street aristocracy got $1.2 trillion in loans...

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