The Bali bombings: How can such acts be stopped?

Max Lane asks after The Bali bombings: How can such acts be stopped? He gives the main driving force for the bombings as being caused by despair and humiliation:

When Indonesia won its independence in 1945, the country was propelled forward by a sense of hope, a sense that once freed from colonial rule, from the dictatorship of Dutch and other Western commercial interests, the economy could be developed and society would prosper.

Sixty years later, this hope is gone. In 1945, Western colonialism left Indonesia with no education system of any worth, no industry, no scientific or technological capacity. While Europe, North America, Japan and Australia industrialised and modernised during the 19th century and continued to prosper through most of the 20th, Indonesia, like all the Western colonies, was used as a source of cheap raw materials and of coolie labour.

Sixty years later little has changed. The policies of the developed capitalist nations, backed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, have kept Indonesia non-industrialised, poverty stricken and technologically dependent.

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His solution is:

Such actions should be condemned as murderous, cruel and wanton and also as ineffective in achieving any change to the lives of Third World peoples. But they will continue as long as the huge gulf of power and wealth between the imperialist West and the underdeveloped, exploited Third World continues.

How to end these attacks? In the end, they will only stop when the movements to end this gulf grow, both in Indonesia and in the developed countries, and become forces that lead people to throw off the humiliation, national oppression and exploitation that the underdeveloped world now suffers.

Here in Australia, the movement against the US-led occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan must grow and force the US, Australia, Britain and other foreign armies out of Iraq and Afghanistan. The movement to "make poverty history" must go beyond an advertising campaign by celebrities and return to the streets, demanding the complete cancellation of the Third World's debt. That is what we can do to stop the continuation of terrorist attacks like those that took place in Bali.

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In other words, people with hope are less likely to kill. People with nothing to lose may want to kill as many of their tormentors as possible.

It is very hard to accept that one's lifestyle is based on the brutal exploitation of others. We are all guilty of the oppression of the Indonesians because we have not found a way to stop the exploitation. The guilt for the killings lies with the bombers and their associates. The guilt for their despair and anger lies with us.

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