Starve.Org White Noise Usenet Archive: "July 7th as Machiavellian State Terror?"

An article for J7 by Professor David MacGregor 1

Introduction

Early reports likened the 2005 July 7th London bombings to Nazi air
attacks on Britain more than sixty years earlier. A Sun leader on July
8 declared: "Our spirit will never be broken: Adolf Hitler's Blitz and
his doodlebug rockets never once broke London's spirit."2 The
comparison stuck, though the July explosions appear dwarfish beside
savage Luftwaffe devastation of London, Coventry and other civilian
targets. Indeed ever since September 11 media commentators have
portrayed Islamic fanaticism as an eruption of evil unprecedented
since Hitler's bloody European rampage.

In this essay I want to draw a different parallel, though one that
returns to World War II aerial warfare and its relation to so-called
Islamofascism. July 7th resembles in many respects two other instances
of terror on a world-historical scale: the Dallas shooting of
President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and bin Laden's nightmarish
September flights into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Like these
earlier incidents, the London bombings may be an instance of what I
have called Machiavellian state terror, spectacular violence
perpetrated against the state by elements of the state itself.3 This
form of terror advances domestic and/or foreign policy goals of the
established order, and may involve assaults (real or fabricated) on
the state's own military, on innocent civilians, or on political
leaders. Government sources and compliant media rush to blame a
convenient foe, whether another nation, a political or ethnic group,
or a "lone nut."

Success of such episodes of terror, especially in advanced capitalist
democracies, relies on inability or unwillingness of effective
oppositional power centres to challenge the official account. Both the
1964 Warren Report on the Kennedy assassination and the 9-11
Commission Report issued 40 years later, offer profoundly flawed
narratives. Nevertheless, those responsible for protecting the public
interest, such as the media, or mainstream academic researchers, have
embraced these cover-ups as unvarnished truth. With regard to the 9-11
Report, for example, Guardian columnist George Monbiot contends that
dissenters "permanently wreck their credibility" and present a "crazy
distraction" that endangers "popular resistance movements."4 Yet
Monbiot admits the air assaults could have been averted by the Bush
administration. "I believe that they were criminally negligent in
failing to respond to intelligence about a potential attack by al-
Qaida, and that they have sought to disguise their incompetence by
classifying crucial documents."5 Incidentally, Monbiot's remarks are
clearly not supported by the 9-11 Commission, which found no
malfeasance on the part of the Bush White House.

It may be easier to recognize Machiavellian state terror when
practiced by nations other than our own. For example, The New York
Times-a long-time opponent of "conspiracy theory"-offered a sober
appraisal of the Putin government's possible involvement in terrorist
bombing of apartment buildings used to justify Russia's renewed
hostilities against Chechnya. "From the start, the bombings were
viewed with suspicion, especially after the discovery of federal
agents planting what turned out to be explosives in the basement of
another building. (A training exercise, officials finally said.) In
Russian politics, the violence clearly played to the advantage of hard-
liners like Mr. Putin."6 The respected U.S. intelligence site,
Stratfor.com, surmised that recent highly-publicized attacks carried
out by ethnic Uighur separatists on the Chinese border may have been
manufactured by Beijing in order to curry favour with the United
States as an effective opponent of Islamic expansionism, and torpedo
the nomination of an Uighur activist for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Besides, noted Stratfor, "by raising the Uighur "terrorist" issue,
Beijing can create a sense of trouble and a rallying point for
national unity without needing to threaten its foreign relations."7

Events long in the past also may be less difficult to recognize as
instances of Machiavellian state terror. Anti-Japanese hysteria
generated by government and the press in the United States and Canada
during World War II justified internment of tens of thousands of
American and Canadian citizens and offered a rallying point for the
war effort. Evidence of potential Japanese terror attacks on North
American soil was totally imaginary, as now acknowledged. Far from
offering opposition to a cruel and racist policy, writers and
intellectuals of every political stripe supported "sending Japanese
Americans [and Japanese Canadians] to concentration camps." As
historian Gary Okihiro observes, little was learned from the inhuman
treatment of ethnic Japanese. Thirteen years after the belated Civil
Liberties Act of 1988, accepting U.S. responsibility for wartime
ethnic cleansing, "Congress passed the U.S.A. Patriot Act of 2001,
under which racial and religious profiling enables a secret and
arbitrary government sponsored program of registration, expulsion, and
indefinite detention."8

The JFK Assassination, 9-11, and July 7th

In the first few hours following the Kennedy murder, suspicion fell on
all three possible culprits usually impugned during episodes of
Machiavellian state terror: a foreign state, a marginalized group (in
this case, domestic Communists), and then a lone nut.9 The spotlight
shone briefly on Cuba and the Soviet Union (as sponsors of "Communist
assassin" Oswald), and then fatally illuminated only Lee Harvey Oswald
himself, an individual with ties to both the former USSR and the Fair
Play for Cuba Committee (a CIA-front whose ostensible goal was to
encourage more congenial relations between the United States and
Cuba). Oswald's supposed Communist connections were downplayed by the
Warren Report, which famously denied any conspiracy.

Few, if any, mainstream historians query the Oswald story, but a
growing number recognize that Kennedy's assassination removed a
serious obstacle to escalation in Vietnam, a policy vigorously pursued
by his successor Lyndon Baines Johnson, after the 1964 U.S. election.
10 As documented on this site,11 the July 7th bombings helped weaken
civil liberties in the U.K, providing motivation for Tony Blair's ever
more draconian anti-terror legislation. The terror events also
severely discombobulated the global justice movement that had
successfully raised issues of poverty, war and atmospheric change at
the Gleneagles G-8 Summit, opened the day before the blasts.

Peter Dale Scott notes the striking similarities between the JFK
murder and 9-11, including "the ability of the government to establish
a guilty party or parties immediately, and the press and media
consumption of that product to the exclusion of all other
possibilities."12 I would add that these resemblances extend to the
London bombings. In Dallas on 22 November, the FBI targeted Oswald
within minutes of the assassination, even though Oswald did not
physically match his own description in the FBI file. Police
surrounded the Texas Theatre, where Oswald had secluded himself, only
seconds after he entered the movie house. In another feat of
astounding investigatory prowess, the FBI had identified the 9-11
hijackers before Tower Two collapsed at 9:59 am. The FBI list included
Flight 93 hijackers, even though NORAD "wasn't aware that Flight 93
had been hijacked until 10:08, which is nine minutes later."13

Shortly after the 7/7 bombings, Tony Blair announced from the
Gleneagles G-8 Summit that terrorists had attacked the capital.14 The
official story jelled rapidly although police did not mention four
perpetrators until five days after the blasts.

The investigation led us to have concerns about the movements
and activities of four men, three of whom came from the West Yorkshire
area. We are trying to establish their movements in the run up to last
week's attacks, and specifically to establish if they all died in the
explosions.15

By July 18th the police had identified all the bombers to the press.16
Somehow police found identification for bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan
at three of the four bomb sites.17

Scott's remarks about the investigative parallels that join and extend
from JFK and 9-11, may also be true of July 7th.

So it's worth thinking about that for a moment, the two events
together. And then in the other cases that we know about, how the
identity of the person who is ultimately going to be identified as the
culprit is established at the very beginning - Sirhan Sirhan [alleged
killer of Robert F. Kennedy] the bag with the gun that identifies
James Earl Ray [supposed assassin of Martin Luther King] - it isn't
investigative work AFTER the assassination, that finds these people,
it is just following up what is already there, from the very beginning.
18

There are similarities between 9-11 and 7-7 that do not apply to the
killing of President Kennedy. There was no training exercise on the
morning of 22 November in Dallas that mimicked the Dealey Plaza
shooting, for example, though a number of such exercises were in play
on September 11, and at least one existed in London on July 7th.

Unlike the JFK assassination and 9-11, no commission has yet been
formed to investigate 7-7. As predicted by makers of the extraordinary
documentary Ludicrous Diversion, such an official body would, in all
likelihood, merely validate the official story. As with the Hutton
Inquiry on the "suicide" of Dr. David Kelly19, its task would be to
conceal the truth rather than reveal the facts. Philip Zelikow, now an
advisor to Condoleezza Rice and former executive head of the 9-11
Commission, mentioned that the 9-11 Report did not make the same
mistake as the Warren Report. While the latter contained 26 volumes of
documentary evidence that proved very useful to assassination
researchers, the 9-11 Commission Report includes no primary evidence
at all. Interestingly, Zelikow is also in charge of the White House
tapes recorded during JFK's thousand days in power.20

The Anglo-American Heritage of Evil

No crime attributed to Islamic fundamentalism bears remote comparison
with Nazi destruction of the European Jews, or Hitler's grotesque
reign of terror against German political resistors, Poles, Slavs,
Gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled, and mentally challenged. Equally,
the melancholy Allied wartime experience-my subject in the following
paragraphs-looms over anything supposedly perpetrated by
Islamofascism. Anglo-American revocation of human values discloses a
vein of calculated cruelty recalling the worst excesses of the Roman
Empire-though on a colossal scale undreamt of by the ancients.21

Scientific eugenics likely played a role in plans by President
Roosevelt and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau to castrate
every German male following Hitler's defeat.22 They decided against
genital mutilation, but hardly for reasons of compassion. A relentless
five-year campaign of aerial massacre had borne Germany to the abyss;
a disembowled Reich would never again challenge the new Imperium.

Philosopher A.C. Grayling compares the murderous Allied feint that
leveled Hamburg in 1943 with September 1123. Yet most of New York's
social life went on as usual when the Twin Towers collapsed into dust.
24 The story was different for Hamburg.

RAF bombers deliberately bypassed Hamburg one sweltering July night in
1943, but veered suddenly toward the city as civil defense units
relaxed. Bomber Command had known for some time that cities are easier
to burn down than blow up. Before the raid, fire engineers ordered
fire insurance maps precisely detailing the layout of Hamburg
residences; they noted flammability of various items in typical
Hamburg homes, no doubt including baby clothes and wooden cribs.
"Operation Gomorrah," writes Jorg Friedrich in the German best-seller,
The Fire,

[m]elted between forty thousand and fifty thousand people.
Seventy percent of them were in the Hamburg-Mitte district, where the
weapon achieved a kill rate of 5.9 percent. In the strictly
residential streets of Hammerbrook, 36 percent of the residents were
killed. Seven thousand children and adolescents lost their lives, and
ten thousand were orphaned . . . The munitions had been unloaded in 43
minutes, and they were followed by atmospheric reactions that raged
for three hours with the force of a Pacific hurricane. And then there
was nothing left to burn. Unable to protect itself, the city consumed
itself. Nine hundred thousand people fled the smoldering skeletons of
buildings, in which the plague of rats was the only thing left alive.
25

Hamburg suffered a total of five major raids in late July and early
August 1943. The second (described above) was the most devastating.
Munitions dropped in the raids were designed to kill and seriously
injure civilians; incendiary bombs included phosphorus that stuck to
the skin, could not be doused with water, and burned to the bone. Time-
delayed munitions disrupted rescue and fire-fighting efforts, ensuring
maximum casualties.

The victims of the first attack [on Hamburg] were either blown
up, suffocated in air raid shelters from which the air had been sucked
away, or cremated instantly in the raging fires outside. Many bodies
were found so shriveled by the heat that adult corpses had shrunk to
the size of infants.26

The Hamburg raids "marked a beginning; the real beginning of the kind
of bombing campaign that the British government and its Air Force
commanders in the bomber force had been planning since early in the
war." Hamburg itself experienced 213 air raids; nothing was left but
rubble by V-E day.

The 40,000 deaths from the July 1943 Hamburg raids, in
addition to those of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are codes
for the extremes of what can be inflicted by force of arms. Not
because of the rivers of shed blood, but due to the quick, deadly
breath with which life was taken from the world.27

Hamburg was one of six German cities that suffered "five digit
casualty figures within a single raid . . . Kassel, Darmstadt,
Pforzheim, Dresden, and Sweinmunde."28 These deaths accounted for less
than a third of total civilian bombing casualties. The RAF targeted
more than a thousand German towns and cities; hundreds of thousands of
civilians were massacred. Victory over Nazi Germany was clearly
inevitable by early 1943, but the remorseless Anglo-American bombing
campaign gathered momentum until the closing weeks of the war. By May
1945 "40 percent of the seventy largest cities had been demolished,
mainly by bombing." A.C. Grayling remarks that Anglo-American
destruction of Germany and Japan amounts to culturecide, the
"concerted smashing" of a people, its cultural heritage and collective
memory.

Destroying cities meant-in addition to killing and
traumatizing many thousands of people-destroying monuments, libraries,
schools and universities, art galleries, architectural heritage, the
cultural precipate and the organs of corporate life that make an
identifiable society.29

Lessons for the July 7th Truth Campaign

Facile comparisons of July 7th with Hitler's air raids on England
point to a more disturbing reality: the Anglo-American capacity for
boundless evil in pursuit of empire. Demonization of the British
Muslim community encouraged by the official story of July 7th has its
analogue in wartime hatred of Germans and Japanese that countenanced
erasure of whole peoples. The British public dimly understood the
horrific import of so-called area bombing, and many applauded
destruction of an entire culture. Yet this was not universally true.
Vera Brittain's courageous pacifism reminds us-as does the July 7th
Truth Campaign itself-that evil, provided the facts are known, can be
confronted and resisted. Commenting in 1944 on British press reports
that the people of Coventry were gratified by Germany's pulverization,

she wrote:

Do the inhabitants of Coventry really enjoy the thought that
the citizens of Hamburg-the most anti-Nazi city in the Reich, with its
once large Jewish population-have suffered 60 times as much as they
did? Does it really fill them with glee to reflect that sixty times
their number of children, expectant mothers, women in childbirth,
invalids, and aged people have perished in terror and anguish? . . . .
What I do believe . . . is that they either do not know the facts, or,
where they suspect the truth, they have consciously put shutters over
the windows of their imagination. Many deliberately turn their backs
upon knowledge, ashamed and fearful of accepting the realities which a
determined facing of the facts would disclose.30

Notes

1. David MacGregor [macgregor12b@mac.com] (PhD London School of
Economics, 1978) is the author of a number of books and articles on
Hegel and Marx. He has also written two articles concerning the
September 11 terrorist attacks. He lives in Toronto. [return]
2. See the interesting analysis in Damien McGuinness, "British
Papers: 'Our Spirit Will Never Be Broken,'" July 08, 2005, Der Spiegel
Onlinehttp://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,364306,00.html
[return]
3. David MacGregor, "September 11 as 'Machiavellian State Terror,'"
pp. 189-222 in Paul Zaremba, (ed.), The Hidden History of 9-11-2001,
Research in Political Economy, volume 23, Amsterdam: Elsevier Limited,
2006. See also Webster Griffin Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror, Made in
the USA, Joshua Tree, California: Progressive Press, 3rd Edition,
2006. [return]
4. "A 9/11 conspiracy virus is sweeping the world, but it has no
basis in fact," The Guardian, Tuesday February 6, 2007 [return]
5. "9/11 fantasists pose a mortal danger to popular oppositional
campaigns,"
The Guardian, Tuesday February 20, 2007 [return]
6. Steven Lee Myers, "The World: There's a Reason Russians Are
Paranoid," New York Times, December 3, 2006. [return]
7. "China: Exploiting the Uighur 'Terrorist Camp' Raid,"
Stratfor.com, January 09, 2007. [return]
8. Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro, (eds.) Impounded: Dorothea
Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment, New
York, W.W. Norton and Company, 2006, pp. 6, 79-80. [return]
9. Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993.[return]
10. See, for example, James K. Galbraith, "Exit Strategy" Boston
Review, October/November 2003. (bostonreview.net/BR28.5/
galbraith.html) [return]
11. The July 7th Truth Campaign, "Capitalising on Terror: Who is
really destroying our freedoms," February 25, 2007. [return]
12. Peter Dale Scott, JFK and 9/11 Insights from Studying Both,"
Coalition on Political Assassinations, Dallas, November 18, 2006,
Video (http://video.google.com/videoplay?
docid=7404458118476453937&hl=en). The paper presented at the
conference was made available by Scott to this author. [return]
13. Peter Dale Scott, "JFK and 9/11." [return]
14. James Ball, "After the bombs: The key political events that
followed the London bombings," The Guardian, July 4, 2006. (http://
www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,,1812299,00.html) [return]
15. Metropolitan Police Service, "Press Conference, 5 pm July 12,
2005". [return]
16. Metropolitan Police Service, "Latest News: Police investigation
continues into the 7/7 bombings," 18 July 2005. [return]
17. The July Seventh Truth Campaign, "July 7th Timeline of Events,".
[return]
18. "JFK and 9/11." [return]
19. Michael Chossudovsky "Who Ordered the Assassination of Dr. David
Kelly?" Global Research, February 26, 2007 (Global Research).
[return]
20. See Joan Mellen, "The Kennedy Assassination and the Current
Political Moment," Talk at the 92nd Street Y, January 28, 2007 (http://
www.joanmellen.net/truth.html). [return]
21. [British] Bomber Command and two US air forces had ravaged
Germany as no civilization had ever before ...." Jorg Friedrich, The
Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945, New York: Columbia University
Press, 2006, p. 101. [return]
22. Herman Knell, To Destroy A City: Strategic Bombing and its Human
Consequences in World War II, Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003, p.
7. [return]
23. Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII
Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan, New York: Walker and
Company, 2006, p. 278. [return]
24. Adam Gopnik, Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York,
New York: Knopf, 2006. [return]
25. The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945, New York: Columbia
University Press, 2006, pp. 96-7. [return]
26. Among the Dead Cities, pp. 20, 18. [return]
27. Jorg Friedrich, The Fire, p. 166. [return]
28. The Fire, p. 100. [return]
29. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities, pp. 168, 22. [return]
30. One Voice: Pacifist Writings from the Second World War, London:
Continuum, 2005, p. 117. [return]