Article published in THE REAL THING (Berlin off-scene periodical) Dec 2001.

Does Schröder think he's kidding anybody diverting that gang of drug-baron-warlords from his precious Hauptstadt Berlin over to Bonn? Of course, no-one cares if Bonn goes up in a cloud of atomic anthrax. I was looking forward to seeing some Afghanis in the skin. The contrast knob on our TV is broken and they all look so tanned and well fed. Saturated yellow is the friendliest colour. The yanks spray it on the food packets they drop on minefields and mosques; and on the food packet-sized smatter bombs they sprinkle about for kids to kick open during Ramadan. While American kids are safe indoors for Thanksgiving beneath their gas masks watching episodes of the Simpsons reworked since Rumsfeld's visit to Hollywood:
Top CNN reporter Bart on the road to Kandahar gets pulled over and brutally murdered by angry men looking for the lethal phials of atomic smallpox he swiped from the last bombed out U.N. food dump. Lisa, sent personally by Mrs Bush to introduce Afghani women to U.S. fashion trends - latest war priority number one - meets misunderstood guru bin Laden in a romantic cave and becomes his press agent...
The yanks are much better at press manipulation than the nation they're currently re-decorating (nothing against peaceful Islam of course - though that crusade giveaway will take some inking out). Has anyone in the West seen footage of a dead person? No, not that one lying face down in a gutter. The thousands with their stomachs hanging out. Tongues, noses and cocks cut off. They're fed that stuff daily everywhere else. One more gulf between civilizations in need of a good patching over. Another one, according to the few people really in the know is Saudi-Arabia. I always believed the tourist propaganda that it was the most West integrated and therefore properly civilized nation in the scary Arab world. My stupid brother worked there. He didn't notice people practicing flying jumbos into skyscrapers. Apparently, their Royal playboy family is despised as much as the one in Britain. The Arabs themselves are hated in Afghanistan - not that they ever minded (until now). That's why they were such prized guests of the Taliban - bedmates in oppression and murder, all in a good cause. The friendship was a bit too boney to last though. The Arabs, the real fear alchemists (immune to everything in the eyes of Allah) enjoyed watching the Big Day on de-demonized colour TV at the comfort-terror camps where local poppy farmers were privileged to send their kids to learn the Koran and popular death lists by heart. After that the ceiling caved in. Mostly on newly weds and large families, all of whom would no doubt have died of thirst, starvation or civil war in any case.

When Bush stood on that pile at Ground Zero and answered that spontaneous heckler with a spontaneous war speech, didn't the hairs on your neck go into a frenzy of anticipation? The weeks of waiting were so boring before he put his bombs where his mouth was. During that time the most unlikely coalition in the history of the world was stitched together for a 'new type of war'; something called a War on Terror. How many distinguished pop stars have voiced their love generation concerns that you can't carpet-bomb terrorists into not hating America and getting jobs as rug weavers instead - to be completely ignored of course. Jumping on a bandwagon that has seen Japan and Germany dusting off their old war trumpets, even China is joining up so it can legitimize its persecution of anybody it likes, naming them all as personal friends of bin Laden. Perhaps rightly. He's got a lot of friends. (His closest ones will be rich again soon, to the tune of 25 million U.S. dollars). And so has Mr Bush now, though he's having a tiff with the relatives in up-town Jerusalem (there's a Holy landmark one would love to visit for a weekend, after a day trip to Konduz). Surely enough time has passed since the last world war for Israel to be recognised as the child murdering Nazi regime it has become. Is anyone ever going to expel those bloody hardnecked housewives and their bloody families from those grubby bits of land so innocently referred to as 'settlements'? Bush perhaps, after Baghdad, Somalia, Syria, Chechnya, Ireland...with Blair's help, naturally (before the latter has to be restrained).

Another chum these days linking hands with the likes of Mandela, Musharraf and mad Mujahidin bandits' is Putin, looking less slimy by the day. He's pretending he has no wish to join the NATO club, at the moment at any rate. The ridiculous things these people are advised to say in the name of Domestic Consumption. There's a time not far off when everyone will be a member and it'll be called WATO. There will be no-one left to fight then. It has to be admitted, though, that a lot of good things are coming out of this new kind of barbarism. As well as so many nations joining in the fun of being seen in a kind light, condemning "terrorists" left, right and center; as well as the British emerging again as an empire, on the rise now to challenge their financially scuppered younger cousins across the water; as well as more interest than ever before being shown by the infidels in the contents of the Koran (with perhaps the odd conversion - punishable by death?); as well as being able to read in black and white exactly what manner of plague weaponry various maniacs have been getting access to (does anyone have a copy of that C.D. - copyright protected - "Do-it-yourself World Destruction Recipes", written in some Arabic tongue indecipherable by U.S. intelligence?); as well as all the horrors in Africa and elsewhere getting blotted out of prime-time slots and well out of mind (good riddance); as well as the Israelis being frogmarched at last towards the odd compromise (HA HA HA): it will be noticed above all these things that Mr Tarantino and his Hollywood party chums will spend about two years making "a more thoughtful film...with a leaning towards cultural themes from overseas". Well worth the fifty year wait!

America has been injured more deeply than it was at Pearl Harbour. Its happy-go-lucky citizens are in ponderous grieving, with an appetite like never before for getting clued up on the peoples and events of nations they can now just pinpoint on a map. However, two weeks after Sept. 11 one newspaper published pictures of Britney Spears playing with a snake under the heading "America longs to care about stupid things again". As soon as it does so, if it hasn't by then forced the Jews to do the decent thing, and if it hasn't high-tailed it out of the region on receiving bin Laden's head through the post, seasoned with anthrax, leaving Blair and Schröders' prettiest troops sitting targets in a 'new kind of fanatical warfare'; then to be sure, the slaying of the Twin Towers will prove to have been only a prelude to Really Bad Things to Come...