(17. September 2011) Near where I live in Sydney, there is a war memorial commemorating all those people from the area who have died serving the Australian armed forces in wars overseas. There are columns for each war Australians have participated in, followed by the names of those who never returned. For instance, there are columns for World War I (1914-1918), World War II (1939-1945), the Korean War (1950-53), and also the „International Campaign against Terrorism (2001– )“. Notice that last one? Unlike the others, the war on terror has no end date.

The horrific terrorist attacks of September 11 prompted justified outrage at the perpetrators and sympathy for their victims. Since then, there has been a continuous barrage of war crimes, an escalation of US wars in the Middle East, new offensives against Iraq and Afghanistan by US imperial power, and a steady erosion of democratic civil liberties in the name of a „war on terror“. In fact, the first decade of the 2000s can rightly be called the savage decade.