EDITORIAL
Bombing in Britain:
One Terrorism Doesn’t Justify Another

Jul 18, 2005

The official toll of the July 8th London bombings is 54 dead and more than a hundred wounded, but the final numbers will be greater. The bombings paralyzed the British capital for an entire day, creating an interminable ordeal for millions of workers left without transport in the greater London area.

These blind and ignoble acts of terrorism can only arouse revulsion. The fact that their authors claimed the bombs were a response to the war led by the British army in Afghanistan and in Iraq changes nothing about this matter.

The terrorists didn’t take on the state institutions defending British imperialism, nor the war-mongering politicians and generals, nor the big business magnates who profit from the war.

On the contrary, the terrorists attacked the working population. They placed their bombs on three subway trains and a bus at the height of the morning rush, when each was packed with workers going to work.

It didn’t matter to them that the British workers never had a say in Blair’s war policy! They didn’t care that British workers from the beginning vigorously demonstrated their opposition to this dirty war!

The authors of the bomb attacks in London made a political choice by aiming at the working population, seeking to sow terror in the population, hoping that the blood of the victims and the fear of the survivors would be enough to force the Blair government to change its policy. They relegate the population to the role of cannon fodder, caught in a bloody escalation between rival military apparatuses. This is true of the London terrorists, just as it is for the Baghdad terrorists, who each day assassinate dozens of the unemployed whose sole crime is to seek work from the only bosses who hire–the army and the police.

Terrorism is a politically ineffective policy against the powerful state machines of imperialism. Far from reinforcing the camp of the oppressed people that it claims to defend, terrorism threatens to reinforce the position of the imperialist leaders who demagogically use it to sway public opinion in favor of their wars. No one should forget that the attacks on the World Trade Center allowed Bush to impose the invasion of Afghanistan and then of Iraq on the U.S. population.

We can hope that British workers do not fall into the trap that Blair tries to set for them today, the one that Bush used against workers in this country.

Today, we should have learned enough about this bloody business so we don’t rally once again around Bush. If today there is a much larger pool of people ready to become suicide bombers, their existence has been nourished by Bush’s criminal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush and Blair have become the main recruiting sergeants for fundamentalist terrorism.

Contrary to what Bush, Blair and other imperialist leaders claim, the worse scourge today isn’t terrorism coming from fundamentalists. The worst scourge is the state terrorism of the big powers, used against all the peoples of the world, including against us in our own countries. Behind this state terrorism stands a system of exploitation which nourishes poverty, oppression and despair around the world–the breeding grounds of terrorism and religious fundamentalism.

It is more urgent than ever to rid the planet of this system, this capitalist system.