Political Uses Of The Boston Marathon Bombing

[I use the singular, bombing, to denote a single incident. Two bombs were set off seconds apart, in relatively close proximity.]

This latest “terrorist” bombing has in many ways been a godsend for the U.S. establishment. (The term terrorist is so politicized at this point that one is almost compelled to put it in quotation marks, yet to do so immediately subjects one to attack for “apologizing for” or “justifying” terrorism- whatever “terrorism” is- or at the least for being insufficiently appalled, grief-stricken, shocked, horrified by the particular bombing or attempted bombing.) [1]

Most obviously, it provides an opportunity to administer a booster shot of War On Terror indoctrination to the public. As “9/11” recedes in time, and the effects of the massive propaganda campaign that was launched around that one-day event wanes, reinforcement of the indoctrination is necessary.

Notice that “9/11” is used as a totem. All they have to do to press people's buttons is say “9/11.” All the hours and hours of pictures of the burning Twin Towers are permanently embedded in people's minds now on a deep level, as “a horror.” Every invocation of “9/11” causes a mental vibration, an emotional harmonic to occur. It “strikes a chord.” Over and over, the media strums that same note. [2]

I think it no accident that the year is omitted from the date, 9/11. How different to say, 9/11/01, as I do. Now you see how old it is, how long ago it was. Putting it in the past makes it part of history, an event that once occurred, not an ever-present, timeless reality hovering over your shoulder like a malevolent god, a bad dream that never ends or a recurring nightmare stirred up every time some nasty fanatics set off a bomb inside U.S. territorial borders or tries to blow up his underwear or shoes on a plane.

The propaganda system doesn't want people to get over it. They want to keep people in a permanent state of anxiety and fear. (Contrary to what they say, such as Obama saying after the Marathon bombing that “we” will not be frightened. In fact they want people to be frightened, or they WOULDN'T HARP ON IT SO MUCH. I guess politicians lie- who knew?)

Keeping people anxious and fearful makes them submissive to “authority” (the people in power). It makes people feel dependent on those in power for protection and security. (Not for nothing is the word “security” bandied about constantly, in dishonest ways, when they're really talking about the power of the people in power, as in “security services,” or “national security.” This is true in other countries too of course.) It makes people accept living in a police state, submit to paying for a gigantic military establishment and constant wars. I.e. life in an Imperialist state.

The timing of the Marathon bombing was also very fortuitous for the establishment, as two other events occurred around the same time that they wouldn't want too much attention focused on. First, a private group called the Constitution Project came out with a report that finally called U.S. torture, torture. Furthermore, it blamed the top officials of the U.S. for it. (That would be Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.) The 11-person panel that produced the report was co-chaired by Asa Hutchinson, of all people, a former GOP Congressman and deputy Secretary of Bush's Department of Homeland Security. It did make the front page of the NY Times on April 16th, the day after the bombing, on the bottom. (The bombing took up more than the top half of the front page, including a large photo of the bloody scene.) The second to last paragraph of the article lets drop that the report contains dozens of cases of the U.S. prosecuting similar treatment or denouncing others for doing the same things. That is, it exposes utter U.S. hypocrisy. The report also confirms that the CIA is lying through its teeth when it claims it only ever water-boarded three people. (Which in the article the NY Times still falsely calls “near-drowning,” as if you have to die to be drowned. Drowning means getting water in your lungs, which is what water-boarding does.)

Later that week, a fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas, blew up, killing 14 firemen and injuring 200 residents. The significance of that: first, notice that almost five times as many people were killed by that explosion as by the bombs in Boston, which killed 3, and more were wounded than the 170 in Boston. But that was “just an accident,” so not worthy of week after week of wall-to-wall obsessing over.

Was it an accident? More like an accident waiting to happen. That is, when one examines the details (which I won't go into here but you can easily find information about it) one discovers that it's that old U.S. story of a paper-thin facade of regulation, reckless practices, wrist-slap penalties, and a dominate ideology that insists that regulation of business is BAD. This noxious ideology is especially powerful in Texas. And this explosion will change nothing. Just watch. Because this has happened before. In fact it happens often. 

In 2005 there was another major explosion in Texas, in a BP (remember them) refinery. That "accident" killed 15 workers (5 times the death toll in Boston last week) and injured 170. BP chronically refuses to follow reasonable safety procedures, and after every "accident" it promises regulators to reform itself and shape up, and then proceeds to violate its promises. In Texas, in Alaska, everywhere. Every single time.

I know nothing will change because the U.S. is in the iron grip of an anti-human ideology that elevates private profit over all other values, including human life. The other way I know this is from history: for example the Texas City explosion of 1947 that killed at least 581 people, including all but one member of the local fire department. Thousands were injured. At least 1,000 homes and other buildings were damaged or destroyed. Like the latest disaster, this explosion started with a fire. 

Yet look where we are today. Toothless regulators on the Federal level (OSHA) and regulation-hating “regulators” on the state level in Texas and most other states. Both are feckless and ineffective. The West, Texas plant, situation in a populated area and near a school (they don't even care about children) was effectively unregulated, subject to a mere facade of oversight. As the phenomenon of Ronald Reagan proved, ideology is more powerful than reality. (Religion proves this too, even more starkly. How can people believe that absurd stuff?)

In fact, things will get worse. The NY Times has just reported that the evil Koch brothers are scheming to buy the newspapers of the Tribune Company, which include the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, the better to foist their noxious anti-regulation ideology on the public. (As if those rags were ever pro-regulation.) These papers have long been the propaganda tools of rich reactionary families- the Chandlers in L.A., and the McCormicks in Chicago. Tribune Company bought the Times from the Chandlers, and then the crude and vulgar philistine real estate hustler Sam Zell seized control of Tribune Company with a leveraged buyout, gutted the newsrooms, and bankrupted the company. [3]

1) Yes, even attempted bombings are supposed to elicit shock and horror and terror, no matter how ludicrous- the sad sack “underwear bomber,” the moronic “shoe bomber” (Richard Reid), both lame attempts to bring down passenger planes, or the inept Pakistani whose defective car bomb made some smoke and fizzled in Times Square, or the various “plots,” some fabricated by the FBI. All these trivial things the media won't stop reminding us of. (Yes, trivial It's not as if people are being blown apart weekly, as in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Nigeria, for example, or less often in Indonesia, or India, or in the Gaza Strip, in many of these cases by U.S. munitions. The U.S. media apparently is in the threat-exaggeration business, to justify the relentless increase in domestic repression and global aggression. There is a threat- there are always threats, that's just life- but there are reasonable responses and uses of force to deal with it. What the U.S. ruling system is doing is deliberately portraying itself- and us- as being in mortal peril to justify its own crimes and human rights depredations and flat-out terrorism.)

At exactly the same time that the U.S. media was in a hysterical tizzy over the “terrorist” bombing in Boston, political bombings in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan were described in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, to take examples from the apex of the U.S. propaganda system, as being the work of “militants.” It is standard practice to describe bombings aimed at civilians in those places as committed by “militants,” never “terrorists.”

Unless the victims are “white.” So bombings by jihadists in Indonesia are done by “militants,” except that the Bali bombing that killed 200 mostly Australian tourists is a “terrorist” bombing.

And of course, the U.S.' own bombings can never be “terrorist.” Right now, a young Yemeni man* who went to high school in the U.S. and, ironically, was mentored by a USAF officer, just testified before Congress about a recent U.S. strike on a Yemeni village that slaughtered people, blowing them apart, literally into bits of flesh, with cluster bombs far more devilishly murderous than the crude bombs the Boston Marathon “terrorist” bombers constructed out of pressure cookers, black powder, nails and ball bearings. The “target” was a known man, not in hiding, who the Yemeni government could have easily arrested. But the U.S. under Obama is apparently in a take-no-prisoners mode, so poor villagers must be randomly slaughtered and live in terror, in Yemen, in Pakistan, in Somalia, in god knows where else. Because the U.S. is “fighting terrorism,” don't you see? So how fortunate that its obsession with the Boston Marathon bombing gives the U.S. media a convenient excuse to ignore this, and a distraction for the public.

The U.S. doesn't even bother using the words consistently, let alone logically. Nor does it follow its own official definitions. The U.S. government and media uses the words when it wants to whip up hatred and outrage towards a political target or, and justify a war, or aggression, or “suspension” of civil liberties, or get away with gross human rights violations, or draconian punishment.

Terrorist, like Communist, is a political curse word,.That's all it is when they use it. And terrorism and communism are ill- or never-defined terms that are understood and used as synonyms for Pure Evil.

So using the words “terrorism” and “terrorist” in the way the U.S. establishment uses them is to play Simon Says, with them as Simon and us as copycats.

The same with “terrorist states.” Cuba is a “terrorist state.” Says who? Says the U.S. The U.S. puts nations on its “state sponsor of terrorism” list as a political punishment, NOT because of any actual actions by the targeted state.

Of course, one nation that will never be on that list is a nation that actually has created terror in the hearts and minds of millions of people around the world, for many decades. A nation that mercilessly bombed and slaughtered millions of people in Indochina not too long ago. A nation that has overthrow governments around the world, and installed fascist dictatorships in their places (which killed hundreds of thousands of people in two cases- Iran and Guatemala- and killed almost a million in Indonesia in a political holocaust instigated and orchestrated by the instigating nation's global secret police); a nation that assassinates routinely, with impunity, in several nations at once, spreading chronic fear among impoverished villagers who live under killer drones; the world's greatest sponsor of state terrorism,the good ole self-righteous U.S. of A.

*Farea al-Muslimi was the Yemeni who testified on April 23 before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee convened to examine the drone war. The Obama regime didn't send a representative to testify. [See “As Obama Shuns Hearing, Yemeni Says U.S. Drone War Terrifying Civilians, Empowering Militants," at democracynow.org.]

2) To me, the attacks that day were not a horror, but a disaster, a man-made one, and a tragedy for those who lost loved ones or suffered injuries or disease. As are many things. The idea that it was unique, or unusually awful, is simply counter-factual. More people die in earthquakes and tsunamis all the time. And all but the smallest wars kill more people. And Bashar Assad is doing the same thing on a smaller scale daily in Syria, bombing and shelling buildings with people in them. Every time Israel launches one of its wars on Gaza, again, same thing, only smaller buildings and fewer casualties. What difference does calling one thing “terrorism” and calling other attacks on populated buildings something else make? Dead is dead.

3) A so-called leveraged buyout is a form of theft. It's like a virus invading a bacteria or cell and hijacking the cell, turning it into its slave. In a leverage buyout, the thief doesn't buy the company with his own money. Instead he “buys” it by using the assets of the victim company- which he doesn't yet own- as collateral to borrow the “purchase” money, generally from an “investment bank,” heaping the resulting debt on the company he's “buying.” In other words, in effect the invader forces the company to buy itself and hand itself over to the invader. Mitt “Robber Baron” Romney used this invading-virus technique to make fortunes at Bain Capital, gutting workers' benefits and robbing them of their pensions and often their jobs in the process. In some cases, the companies were completely destroyed.