Ben Carson, commenting on last night's atrocity in Paris, said we need to eliminate global jihadism.  He spoke as if killing all existing Muslim terrorists will permanently annihilate the threat.  Nothing he said wasn't believed by naive good versus evil philosophers like George W. Bush in 2001.
     Eyewitness reports from inside the Bataclan theater, where concertgoers were gunned down, with few places to hide except underneath corpses, indicate that the killers looked like young men, "under twenty-five."  That puts their birthdates in the early 1990s--they were under the age of ten when 9/11 happened, when Bush began bombing Afghanistan.
     "Killers who hate our freedoms," "terrorists," whatever you want to call them, cannot be wholly eliminated, as Ben Carson believes, as long as the War on Terror pot keeps getting stirred by the U.S. and other first world powers as they continue to support, following long-standing policies, repressive regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere.
     Last night's terrorists in Paris were young enough to have grown into their roles, backgrounded by endless warfare, political and economic destabilization, and manipulation by outside governments and corporations.
     A crime, any competent cop knows, should never be regarded as occurring in a history-free vacuum.  Unfortunately, the crime of 9/11 was regarded in the United States, by most of its people and also its leaders, as a bewildering "What the fuck did we ever do?" bolt from the blue.  The reaction was fairly swift, making sense only from the standpoint of helping war and security industries.  Killing and displacing thousands of Afghan citizens who knew nothing of the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, and in any case had nothing to do with him, but happened to live in the country run by the Taliban government which offered him sanctuary for a time, was as senseless as last night's God-obsessed young bastards slaughtering innocent civilians.
     The logic of "I have been wronged, therefore I shall kill someone who did not wrong me, instead of those who have," only makes sense to people willing to become professional death dealers, rationalizing their violence with holy books or the memory of a day when "the whole world changed," as 9/11 is regarded.  It certainly did change the world.  It could be that 11/13, Friday the 13th, will be a major turning point in the War on Terror, the war against ISIS, but more violence will beget more violence, and those stirring the pot making up the War on Terror, terrorists and politicians alike, will only succeed at extending what Dick Cheney called "the long war," a gift to arms dealers and political opportunists.

                                                                             Vic Neptune