As Shirley Bassey song a long time ago, and Propellerheads mixed into some really nice new version, it's all just a case of history repeating. We've seen it all before. Look at the very odd behaviour of the Israeli's against the Palestinians: they are building a security wall, making a "security zone" between Egypt and Gaza and kind of terrorizing villages by bulldozing dozens of houses. Of course, this is all because of the Palestinians bombing poor Israelian people. But why are they doing that? Because they don't see another way of making themselves heard. They want their country, or even their freedom back. Now it's a non-trivial matter about whose country it originally is, but fact is that modern Israel exists since the Second World War. The Jews where shown a new home, at the cost of the Palestinians who where living there for ages. Backed by the Americans, the Israelians builded some fine army and forced themselves into their new ground.

But what strikes me as painfully odd is the fact that they are now building a security wall to prevent terrorism from "the other side". Something similar, but with some other reasons, we saw in the early sixties, when the USSR builded a wall "to protect our citizens against Capitalism", or to prevent their smart people from leaving the country. That wall was build mainly in ex-Nazi-Germany, in which Jews wheren't quite welcome. To me this seems a case of "don't people learn from the past indeed?". Every year on the day we remember the deads of WW2, we say we shouldn't forget the past so we can learn from it. But people simply don't. They keep taking revenge, after which the other side takes revenge, after which some other village is destroyed, after which some new homeless people blow up some busy market places, after which... ah well, it's just too sad.

Another matter is some semi-herotic guy named George W. B. trying to be cool and free some poor country from a dictator. All is well, but it went all too well. And war ain't easy. So, if things go well, there's something fundamentally wrong. That expresses in many more dead Americans in the long months after the "war" than in that war itself, and many Iraqi not being all that happy with the current situation, even decapitating some guy. Some really sad thing is that the media even went as low as showing the tape of the decapitation on tv. But the Americans and maybe the British soldiers too are doing some really nasty things too. Just look at those torture photographs. Of course, the high people want to punish those "bad bad boys", but I'm glad that strong words are touted about being said to do so by officers. And some high ones too. Now that's a soap opera I would like to follow a bit.

So while a guerrilla war in Iraq slowly develops, I'm thinking about those other wars America fought. Think about Vietnam. But also think about Korea, which was the predecessor of Vietnam. If America had learned from it, Vietnam wouldn't have been that enormous disaster. Then that quite victorious first war against Iraq, in which they won back Kuwait. But they where fighting against an Iraq that had received weapons from "us" because of it's earlier war against Iran. Talking about war and insane.

So now they are fighting a war against terrorism as they where fighting their war against drugs some time ago. Except that the drugs abusers where American citizens and the producers where South American people, all close together on the island America. However, some thing like "terrorism" isn't a physical thing. It's an underground thing [maybe like the drugs world], but it's a thing in which everyone that has a mayor grief against some other group is participating. The goal of terrorism is terrorizing people. And that's just what the American government is doing to their own people, and most other people in the world along with it; they are severily restricting freedom in general, privacy is violated like it's nothing and paranoia is everywhere. Isn't that exactly what a terrorist wants? I guess they even laugh their asses off, because America is investing such a huge amount of money terrorizing itself: they don't even have to do anything about it anymore.

I know you can't do like there's nothing happening in the world [remember the bombings in Madrid], but if you start violiting rights of your own citizens, demanding that other countries agree [The Netherlands being Americans Best Friend(tm) as ever totally agrees on giving whatever information about travellers they want - and I guess about lots of other people too], who is the winner in this War on Terrorism?

Terrorists win?