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War of the worlds: popular culture has long prepared Americans for an `alien'' aggressor. (on the eve of war).

Article Excerpt
The aliens are among us. Muslim students in California, Muslim captives in Guantanamo Bay or Diego Garcia, Osama bin Laden somewhere in the mountains straddling the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan and Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. The world seems to be filling up with people who seem scarcely human to those bearing the heavy responsibility of the global manager. Indeed, the dangers are so great that the sooner every person on the planet can be brought under surveillance the better. Who knows what strange creature might be lurking within a human skin?

In The War of the Worlds the aliens were so unrecognisable that the only word for them was the Thing. The first Thing arrived in a metal capsule and then other Things started crashing to earth all over the place. Their weapons were a Heat Ray and a lethal Black Smoke emanating from their mysterious machine-like bodies. The aliens of our time look like extras from a Star Trek cast. Almost human but not quite. They come from places in deep space--Planet Yemen and the mysterious asteroid Tora Bora where they live, dress and eat in accordance with their weird space customs, write in space squiggles and communicate in a language that few terrestrial beings can understand.

Orson Welles' broadcast adaptation of the novel by H.G. Wells from the Mercury Theatre on Hallowe'en Night 1938 caused panic among millions of American listeners. If a radio play based on a chemical or nuclear weapons attack in Chicago or New York were broadcast today and listeners came in half way through and thought it was really happening, the effect would be much worse. In the aftermath of September 11 Americans are living with the threat of further large-scale terrorist attacks. No-one can say where, when or how or which freeway, bridge, airport, subway, dam or landmark building will be targeted, but sufficient warnings have been issued for the public to believe that such attacks are all but inevitable.

Even now Americans are baffled by motive. The young men who flew aircraft into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon left behind no notes of explanation or justification. The media offered only envy and a very malign form of hatred as motives but clearly these young men had been trained, paid and manipulated by a force far greater than themselves. Circumstantial evidence soon led to the evil presence whose commands they had apparently followed. He was tracked down to the caves of Planet Afghanistan but vanished before the most powerful state in the world could get its collective hands on him. Vanished into what--into another country or into history as a mythical figure to frighten children for centuries to come--no-one could say. He seemed to have been human once, but grainy video clips were the only evidence that he had once lived in the shape of a man. An alien; a demon in human form, uttering chilling words that rattled around the Qur'an and around the world like the paradiddle of a kettle drum. `You shall be killed...

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