UK Guardian journalist George Monbiot recently made some pretty outrageous claims, equating the international civilian efforts to block the rising tide of fascism in the 1930s with today’s ridiculous Western intelligence-run ‘jihad’, a.k.a. the ‘War on Terror’, which plainly runs interference for imperial greed abroad and instituting police state measures at home.
George Orwell et al were making a last stand before the West plunged into the fascist darkness it’s still in today, and which ‘al Qaeda’ is a creature of. If you think fascism ended with Russia’s defeat of Germany in 1945, think again. The Dulles brothers were sizing up Nazis for relocation en masse to the Americas as early as 1943, in preparation for taking up positions in the new U.S. National Security State, aka the Military-Industrial Complex, the vehicle through which the Reich has gone on to near-total ‘full-spectrum dominance’.
The civilian International Brigades, with barely any support from Soviet Russia, and with obstacles thrown in their way by Winston ‘anti-Nazi’ Churchill and Franklin ‘anti-fascist’ Roosevelt, fought for a noble cause when they gathered in Spain to defend the democratically-elected Republican government against the fascist coup led by Franco, and subsequent civil war from 1936-1939. The Spanish fascists were explicitly supported Hitler and Mussolini, and implicitly supported by most other Western regimes.
‘Al Qaeda’ has no cause because it’s not a real organization with defined goals that have any hope of appealing to large numbers of people – ever. Sure, there are, now, as a consequence of U.S. wars, growing numbers of Muslim men driven mad with the injustice of it all, and who believe themselves to have just cause for doing whatever they must to satisfy their thirst for retribution. But this is inherently reactionary – there is nothing noble about what they want, nor is there anything noble in the way they go about trying to achieve whatever the hell their goals are supposed to be. I mean, seriously, cutting off the hands and feet of children in Syria, filming the slaughter, then passing it off as an attack by Syrian government forces? Raping young Syrian girls, then receiving the blessing of Saudi clerics to have been retroactively and temporarily ‘married’ to them for the duration of the rape; medieval, barbaric, sanctioned by the U.S., French and UK governments… but noble?
If Orwell were choosing where to fight abroad today, he’d be going to Syria to fight FOR Assad’s efforts to make Syria secular, progressive and peaceful – and to maintain its current status as a bulwark against Western psychopatholgical inroads into the region.
Monbiot is also forgetting about the thousands of ‘jihadis’ going to Syria annually from the U.S., Canada, Sweden, UK, France, Australia, and elsewhere in ‘the West’, a trend which our dear leaders say they’re “worried” about. Worried, that’s it?! Radicalized teenagers just ‘happen’ to be turning up in Syria? We can’t for one moment escape Big Brother’s All-Seeing Eye in this dystopian age. We’ve had no-fly lists and Total Mass Surveillance since 9/11, and even earlier, for god’s sakes! Think about it. Yes, they’re officially ‘terrorists’, but they’re clearly sanctioned to do what they do because they’re ‘our terrorists’. They’re being flown in and out, supplied, financed and trained, thanks to billions of dollars channelled through Saudi Arabia and Qatar, logistics support via Israel, Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, and Western Special Forces coordinating operations.
What does Monbiot think Mohammed Merah was doing meeting with senior members of French intelligence in the months before the Toulouse shootings? Hint: they weren’t just swapping holiday snaps of the part-time employed 22-year-old’s paid-for ‘vacations’ to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria and Israel! Someone is clearly going around recruiting, indoctrinating or otherwise brainwashing mentally-challenged kids in ‘the civilized West’ to go join this most ignoble of causes where the super-retarded in power are leading the retarded to execute bloody mayhem… just coz they can:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzbyOHT5C2M
So, no, if Orwell were going to ‘wage jihad’ in Syria or anywhere else today, he would not be hailed as a hero – he’d be a an agent of empire, unwitting or otherwise, and he’d be as reviled as they are.