Old Wounds

Olavo de Carvalho
O Globo, October 6, 2001

To deny a victimized country the right to react, force it to submit to the decision and command of foreign organisms over its defense operations, is certainly a more devastating attack on its national sovereignty than would be the destruction of a thousand World Trade Centers.

In toppling the towers, Osama Bin Laden is accused around the world of a colossal crime. But much more to blame are those who take advantage of the victim�s momentary disorientation to attack on all sides and demand it not only to abdicate its elementary right to self-defense but to abdicate to it on its knees, with humility and contrition, accepting the terrorist attack as a divine sentence, whose superior justice is not minimally affected by the accidental detail of being implemented through criminal means.

With the smoke barely cleared from the crumbled towers, thousands of voices have raised up in order to turn around the spontaneous indignation at terrorists against the U.S. In unisonous, like a well-disciplined chorus, leftist leaders and intellectuals dedicated themselves to complete in legal, political, and diplomatic arenas, the work Bin Laden started on the battlefield. Yes, what other objective could Bin Laden have had in the September attacks if not to bend the U.S. spine, humiliate and weaken the strongest and most prosperous nation? And how best to reach this objective than by stealing its right to respond and forcing it to weaken itself in an extemporaneous �mea culpa� at the very moment it most needs to concentrate its forces and national pride in defense from its aggressor?

The logic articulation of the attacks and of the much too artificial wave of anti-American sentiment in the following days is so clear, that all affectation of good sentiments on the part of the supporters of this perverse campaign unmasks itself, right away, as the patent hypocrisy of the greatest and, in fact, only real benefactors of the crime.

Yes, the only ones. What benefit could Islamic countries reap from Bin Laden�s attacks? Expose themselves to the world as barbaric nations, murderers, fanatics? Welcome the cannons and nuclear warheads of the U.S.? Only if they�re crazier than the most hateful anti-Islamic sentiment could picture them.

What benefit could Israel expect? Position itself between two fronts in a war of global proportions? Expose New York, London, Paris Jews to the vengeful anger of Muslims who live in these places in greater numbers than they? Unthinkable.

And what could the U.S. expect to gain, whether with the September attacks or with involvement in a war that could spread and attract the animosity of half the world?

No, the U.S. has nothing to gain, Israel has nothing to gain, and Islamic countries have nothing to gain.

The only ones to gain, which by the way is already gaining, is a well defined class of people who are unidentified with any one particular nation but united under a common ideology and strategy. It�s� the International Leftist.

The indecent speed in which, following the initial shock, the global anti-American propaganda machine entered the scene to unleash a second and more powerful attack on the weakened victim cannot be explained if not by the complete continuity of aims between the first and second attacks, between Bin Laden in the Afghani mountains and the thousands of Bin Ladens in diplomacy and the media.

To suggest that Bin Laden unleashed his Boeings in pure isolation and singular, anarchic initiative and with no overarching political support, is so childish as not to merit discussion. Even more so when the unity of the motives no longer hides himself, rather, without fearing countermeasures, impundently shows off the similarity in speeches from Kofi Annan to Fidel Castro, passing by an infinitude of helpful Baltazars Garzons.

I don�t know if these forces armed Bin Laden. But, armed by him, these forces present a much more fearful threat to the U.S. than all the kamikazes and Talibans of a thousand and one nights full of nightmares.

What is undeniable is that something is learned in the urgency of these events. They destroy in one fell swoop the myth of a uni-polar world. A uni-polar world never existed. The Cold War was simply replaced by a new duel of giants: on one side the U.S., and on the other a multinational collection of powers including the world leftist intelligentsia, international organizations (UN, Unesco, IMF, World Bank), thousands of NGOs, and a handful of financial conglomerates that, even when mostly owned by Americans, have interests far from those of the U.S.� nation and often against them. This collection clearly represents the nucleus of the New World Order, a controlling and socialist force that exists from sucking the vital energy of the U.S., use it in megalomaniacal projects of universal control that restrict U.S. national sovereignty and that of other countries, and finally lay the blame on the U.S.

I know no more than three or four Brazilians who are aware of the mortal conflict today waging between American interests and those of globalism. Common people and the elite, not only in Brazil but in all other countris of the Third World, are fooled into believing that international organisms, for example, represent branches of American power while they actually choke, subjugate, and weaken this power each day. I know no more than three or four Brazilians who are aware of the desperate protests by U.S. nationalists against global oppression, which represents to us the supreme incarnation of American national ambition.

The sudden and unified mobilization of spokespeople from this collective in an apparent attack on U.S. national sovereignty serves to show this long hidden conflict to the world. There has never been a uni-polar world. The opposing pole was merely invisible because it had no state identity; its cohesion, camouflaged in plurality of its faces spread all over the world could only be captured in an effort of abstraction, which is difficult to most, repugnant to others. The sudden radicalization resulting from the attacks has forcibly brought forward this unity. Before, anyone could refuse to see it, for fear of opening up old wounds from the Cold War. Now, those wounds have opened again.