opinion "The priest and the politician, these two, are the enemies of humanity," a spiritual leader once said.

"They are in a conspiracy because the politician wants to rule your body and the priest wants to rule your soul. And the secret is the same: Destroy love. For if a man has love, there can't be nations; nations exist on hate. To be a nationalist is to be full of hate for other nations."

All this, however, will not be possible without the support of the industrialists who, using modern-day slaves, are in cohorts with the politicians and priests; they invent weapons to destroy love.

"The M16 bullet travels almost at the speed of sound and as it travels it spins and entering the flesh it goes on spinning and breaks and tears and shatters so that if you're wounded only in a muscle you die in a quarter of an hour," writes Orianna Fallaci in her book, Nothing, and so be it, about the Vietnam war.

"A horrible bullet and even more horrible to think that someone had invented it, that a government had adopted it, that an industrialist had got rich from it.

"But it is just as horrible to think that workers in a factory would make it, scrupulously, conscientiously, with the approval of their unions, their socialist and pacifist parties, rejecting it if a tiny flaw made it slower and prevented it from breaking and tearing and shattering: equally horrible that soldiers of an army would fire it, aiming carefully so that it wouldn't be wasted, feeling themselves absolved by the foul slogan 'But I'm obeying orders'."

Futile strategy

Since the Sept 11 attacks on New York City's World Trade Center and Washington DC's Pentagon, and now America's attacks on Afghanistan for habouring prime suspect Osama bin Laden, everywhere politicians and priests, unionists and workers ask the very same question: Will acts of war or terrorism ever achieve any political end?

Socialists believe that the political strategy of both terrorism or war, that is the killing of hated figures of an oppressive regime or the massacre of thousands of innocent people, simply does not work. As in the case of hated oppressive figures, the ruling class can always replace individuals.

Likewise, when thousands of innocent people die, no one gains except the ruling class who will find more reason to perpetuate their hegemony over others. Employed as a strategy, such terrorist acts actually demobilise the mass movement.

Only the struggle of the masses can change society, they say. This may take time and space of a generation or more but at least they are participants in their own liberation. At least the people are not dismissed into the periphery. Nor would they be turned into mere spectators of a tussle between the terrorist and the oppressive regime.

Domestic repression

The Sept 11 attacks, with the kind of wanton and indiscriminate killing of civilians, seem to be a part of the methodology of imperialism and its accomplices. It is not part of the progressive forces fighting for liberation from an 'inhuman' system.

Far from administering an omnipotent force against imperialist militarism, terrorism plays into the hands of those elements within the establishment who seize on such events to justify and legitimise the recourse to war in pursuit of the ruling elite's own geopolitical and economic interests.

The murder of innocent civilians enrages, disorients and confuses the public. It undermines the struggle for the international unity of the working class, and counteracts all efforts to educate the American people on the history and politics that form the background to contemporary events in the Middle East.

Following the attacks and US President George W Bush's warning to fellow government leaders that "Either you're with us or them" it was obvious to all that the Bush administration will use this current crisis as a means to justify a further expansion of the Pentagon's war budget at the expense of money for housing, education, health care, jobs and other human needs.

Throughout the country, the military, FBI and local police authorities were sealing off large urban areas, blockading bridges, tunnels and roads, and mobilising a massive presence of police and the National Guard.

All this reveals an advanced stage of planning for domestic repression that can be used against the progressive and labour movements, and the Black, Latino, Asian, Arab and other oppressed communities.

Bogeyman

Yet others, especially the people of Afghanistan, are of the opinion that maybe the United States is looking for a bogey man as always.

At his lecture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in March this year, Sayyid Rahmatullah Hashemi, the roving Ambassador from Afghanistan who recently visited the United States, said, "Remember what Gorbachev said? He said, that he's going to do the worst thing ever to the United States. And everybody thought that he's going to blow the United States with nuclear weapons. But he said, 'I'm going to remove their enemy'.

"And then he fragmented Soviet Union. And he was right. After he fragmented Soviet Union, a lot of people lost their jobs in the Pentagon, in the CIA, and the FBI, because they were not needed anymore.

"So we think that maybe these guys are looking for a bogeyman now. Maybe they want to justify their annual budget, maybe they want to make their citizens feel that they are still needed to defend them.

"Afghanistan is not a terrorist state; we cannot even make a needle. How are we going to be a terrorist state? How are we going to be a threat to the world?

"If the world terrorism is really derived from the word terror, then there are countries making weapons of mass destruction, countries making nuclear weapons, they are terrorist states; we are not."

SUSAN LOONE is a member of the malaysiakini team.