What are the constituent parts of authority?

Many politicians in the West claim that those who would kill such fine upstanding examples of American youth must be terrorists. We have conveniently forgotten the French resistance movement who fought the Nazi occupiers of their country and whom we then regarded as heroes. Whether it is the Chechen militants, Palestinian fighters, Afghani resistance fighters, or Iraqi resistance groups, they, we are told, must be terrorists. First, they are predominantly, though not entirely, Muslim; second, they are opposing the established order of either the Americans or the Americans’ current “best friends”; and third, we don’t like the fact they won’t do what we want them to do.

We have little understanding of those:

• who would stand in the way of the new world order (which is dedicated to the liberation of Iraq “one barrel of oil at a time”);
• who are driven by desperation or poverty or both to use whatever weapons they have at their disposal; or
• those who are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the liberation of their homelands.

We see suicide bombers as crazed psychopathic killers, yet we ignore:

• the Israeli Army’s demolition of homes, the regular assassination of militants and the shooting of civilians and combatants throughout the West Bank and Lebanon;
• the repeated US invasion of any country they decide needs to be “democratised”; and
• Australia’s involvement in the 11-year blockade of Iraq that led to the deaths of 6,000 Iraqi children each month.

We welcome home our servicemen and women, acknowledging them as heroes, after they have dropped bombs on other peoples’ cities. If we were consistent, we would recognise that those we call terrorists and those we call servicemen and women are both killers. If we want to distinguish between them, I would suggest we adopt the terms our killers and their killers.

About 40,000 people in the world die each day of hunger and malnutrition, yet there is enough food in the world to feed everyone. It is not as if those in authority don’t know about the starvation and maldistribution. In fact they choose to let “The hunger of the many fill the bellies of the few”.

If we diverted one-twelfth of the military expenditure of all the countries in the world (from guns and bombs) and used it to fight hunger then we would have enough money to feed, house, clothe, educate and provide basic health services for all poor people on the planet. If we refuse to be sucked into the “profits first, people last” mentality and struggle to ensure that no poor person goes to sleep hungry then we might have sufficient moral authority to convince people that we really do want to live in a better world.

Any authority which coerces proclaims to the world that it lacks sufficient “moral” authority to persuade. Some coercive authority figures attempt to enforce their authority by suggesting that they derive their authority from some higher power: God, democracy, the national interest, the common good, the general will or the rule of law. But when they do make such claims, we should remember the old demonstrators’ slogan that says, “When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty”.