Every day of war is a dead day as well as a death day. More death, more future servitudes, less and less liberty of any variety – Ezra Pound.

Perception is all – or almost all. Perception can be shaped and moulded by the conditioning of the mass media, which unkind folk might prefer to call 'brainwashing'. We, playing follow my leader to the Americans, are now part of what is termed a 'War against Terror'. Whilst involved in this war we can afford to send forth large convoys of vehicles to some desert, at the same time as NHS dentistry crumbles at home, and water bills rise to extortionate levels. If these trends continue, maybe we can look forward to seeing an élite of Mandelson clones in smart suits lording it over grubby, toothless proles!

But this not the first 'War on Terror'. Sixty years ago Germany and the other Axis powers were convinced that they were fighting a war against terror.

The French Resistance were termed terrorists: even RAF Bomber Command were referred to as the terrorflieger. The Soviet partisans were seen as terrorists who had slain several hundred thousand German soldiers. Looming over all this was the perceived Judaic role in Communism which had almost annihilated the old, predominately Germanic ruling élite in Russia. According to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the chief concentration camp boss supervising this slaughter was Naftaly Frenkel, a Turkish Jew.

Indeed the association of certain highly-placed Jews with Communism wasn't just a perception of the Germans, but a reality noted by many different commentators. A novel such as John Buchan's Thirty Nine Steps used that fact as a plot background. Eric Hobsbawm recorded in one of his histories that the small Egyptian communist party had an almost wholly Jewish membership. Writing in the 50s, Daily Telegraph Foreign Correspondent Lovat F. Edwards commented that Communism had very little appeal to Arabs because they were inclined to equate it with 'Judaisation'.

Today the US régime goes to war, and justifies slaughter and destruction on massive scale by a perceived 'offence', but are their reasons perhaps less convincing than those of the Germans? I have written myself on the many anomalies surrounding the September 11th attacks (see Spearhead No. 423). From the five dancing Israelis filming the collapsing Twin Towers, to a crashing aircraft at the Pentagon that leaves no debris or lawn damage, almost nothing makes sense if we follow the official story. Indeed, the most wacky conspiracy theory of all now seems to be that it was all planned and perpetrated by a man with a beard and turban stuck in a fortified Afghan cave.

No top Americans killed

Then again, while Germans such as Ernst von Rath and Wilhelm Gustloff fell to the bullets of 'Jewish extremist' terrorists, no American politicians or officials have been shot down by 'Islamic extremist' gunmen from the possibly semi-mythic Al Qaeda. We are also expected to surrender our ancient liberties in favour of ID cards and iris scans, when Al Qaeda has caused no injuries or damage in this country whatever. This is in stark contrast to the IRA or even the Irgun, who blew up Rex Farran and injured three postmen in Britain during 1946.

Beyond this, there are no connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq, and never were outside the fevered minds of Perle and Co. In fact, recommended reading for everyone should be: 'How the US helped to create a monster' by John Clarke, which appeared a few years ago in the Irish Examiner.¹

Yet this flimsy excuse has been used to wreak a trail of havoc and destruction. At Fallujah, US forces have bombed hospitals, cut off water supplies to civilians, and used napalm bombs. Like their Israeli twins, snipers have targeted not only insurgents, but also old men, women and children. Seventeen doctors and nurses were even gunned down as they attempted to cross the Euphrates to aid the wounded. Civilians have been shot as they attempted to wave white sheets to surrender. The entire countryside has been poisoned by depleted uranium shells. Germans were hung or imprisoned after World War II, often for doing much, much less than has been perpetrated in Iraq over the past year or two.

But the neocon journalist Ralph Peters, writing in the New York Post took a sanguine view of the Fallujah slaughter, saying that:

'We don't need more complaints about our treatment of prisoners from the global forces of appeasement. We need terrorists dead in the dust. And the world needs to see their corpses...

'Even if Fallujah has to go the way of Carthage, reduced to shards, the price will be worth it. We need to demonstrate our strength of will to the world, to show that there is only one possible result when madmen take on America.'

Incidentally, I've read through quite a number of articles in the German wartime magazine Signal and never managed to find anything remotely as bloodthirsty as this NYP piece. Has the USA reverted back to the thinking behind the Book of Joshua and the injunction to "destroy everything that breathes?"

What's happened in Iraq since the fall of Saddam has been simply disgusting – more or less the murder of an entire society.

The man responsible

The article 'Apocalypse Now?'² by Jonathan Mark, published in The Jewish Week, had some remarkable things to say about the man with ultimate responsibility for prosecuting the so-called 'War against Terror'. Although – at times – coming over a lot like an 'anti-Semitic' parody, the essay was worthy of note for revealing the thinking of some leading lights of the Lubavitch movement. Before reading the quote, it should be explained that the word 'Ishmael' symbolises the Arab and Muslim peoples, just as 'Esau' indicates Christians and Europeans. It goes:

'"We usually think our ultimate enemy is Esau," says Rabbi Butman of the metaphorical representative of Christianity. "Here, we see it is Ishmael. Esau – the president and the Christian right – support us and Ishmael is the culprit we're going to break now."

'Jewish religious conservatives aren't nervous, they're delighted. Radio talk show host, Dennis Prager, writing for Jewish World Review, an Orthodox online magazine, says, "To the extent that one is ever able to see the hand of God in history... I believe that either divine intervention or good luck on the magnitude of a lottery win explains George W. Bush's rise to the position of president." Bush is "remarkable," Rabbi Fund tells The Jewish Week, "the ultimate Shabbos Goy."'³

There you have it: the "ultimate Shabbos Goy" has presided over a holocaust of some 100,000 Iraqis, plus over 1,000 of his own troops.

Yet, finally it all comes down, as it usually does, to money, power and (dis)information. The BBC or NBC will never reveal the truth, so the misinformed and easily deceived can still go on believing in a nice clean 'War against Terror', against all those evil men who hate our freedoms blah blah... There could be endless TV documentaries on the expulsion of the Palestinians, or memorials and museums of the Iraqi Holocaust, but there are none.

It is also just a matter of perception: the perception of what is a 'War against Terror,' and what is a 'Holocaust.'

1. http://archives.tcm.ie/irishexaminer/2001/09/18/story12972.asp

2. http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=7577