If you'd rather place an order by talking to one of our cheerful order desk clerks, please call 1-888-232-4444 (USA and Canada only) or 250-383-6864. From Europe, ring our UK order desk clerk at local rate number 0845 230 9601 (UK only) or 44 (0)1865 722 113.

The Rise of the Faceless and the Internet Warrior?

by Larry Burchall

167 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #02-0235; ISBN 1-55369-422-8; US$18.00, C$24.95, EUR16.30, £11.30

What effect does 9/11 have on you and your loved ones? Will the world be safer after the war on terrorism winds down? In this book you'll find the answers.

Read more!

about the book      about the author      excerpts      catalogue info

About the Book After September 11th are you wondering if the world is a safer or more dangerous place for you? Are you wondering just who could be "against us?" This book will help show you and help you work out for yourself, what peoples and what nations may present future problems to you and your loved ones. This book will also help you understand -- why? Larry Burchall is an ex-professional soldier. He shows that it was activists who have caused many of the changes whose benefits we now enjoy, but he also shows that it was activists who did the damage on 11 September. Burchall shows the link between what's called activism and what's referred to as terrorism. Some of the ideas set out in this book may cause you unease. You may end up feeling concerned as the author describes the workings of important modern media and the effects that these workings can have on you. You'll find a description of just who and what constitutes the "west" and "westerners." Will the "west" be able to put an end to terrorism? You'll find an interesting answer in these pages.

---

About the Author Larry Burchall was born in Bermuda in 1942. After graduating from the Berkely Institute, and over the next four decades, he worked as a laundry-man, postman, bartender, boatyard worker, professional soldier, building contractor, and as a senior civil servant. He began writing seriously in 1991 and soon had a weekly newspaper column. In 1993 he became closely involved in politics and played a part as co-chairman of a political campaign (1996-1998) which saw the political party that he supported come to power after it had lost seven consecutive elections. As a soldier serving with the Bermuda Regiment and with the British Army, he has worked and trained in Norway, Germany, the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland), Canada, the United States, Jamaica, St. Lucia, and Barbados. Married for 31 years, Burchall has one son and one daughter. He still lives in Bermuda.

---

Excerpts

from the Introduction

    On 11 September 2001, up to twenty persons blew this world a giant step forward into a new world of new powers and new possibilities. Looking back over my six decades, I realized that though the actions of those twenty individuals - helped immeasurably by the power and reality of modern communications - might seem fresh, new, and especially terrible; they were but a part of a continuum of violence that has always occurred.
    My six decades have been spent in a country peopled by a significant white minority and a black majority. I started my life in a segregated society. I lived through the years when segregation ended and the black majority acquired majority political power. I have seen and understand the power of the individual and his [or her] ability to have a major influence on both the speed and quality of change. But I also understand how, sometimes, an individual can be powerless to shape or influence events.
    In my six decades I have learned of the great importance that remembered history plays in changing an existing present and shaping a desired future.
    The images of 11 September 2001 formed a backdrop against which many of my deeper thoughts came into bright relief and this drove me to write. Thus this book.
    I don't ask that you agree with me. I do ask that you read the words and consider the thoughts.
    Ultimately, in this six billion person world, there could be six billion variations of opinion. There certainly are many differing points of view and those of us who view TV and read newspapers may not always be aware of the existence of these other points of view.
    There is a reality that there are massively differing views and values that are concealed by the parallel reality that our individual human brains cannot absorb all the views and values that now impact on us.
    We are all busy going about the business of earning a living, raising a family, and trying to garner some degree of security for ourselves and our immediate family. As we do this, we are bombarded with images and feelings that do affect the world in which we and our immediate family are trying to live.
    Despite this individual and universal family reality, the global shrinkage that has occurred - one effect of which we saw on Tuesday 11 September 2001 - can, and now obviously does, have an even greater impact on each one of us who lives on this globe - the Planet Earth, orbiting the Planet Sun, in the Galaxy we call the Milky Way.

from Chapter One: The Focus - What Happened?

    But back to that question: "Why do they hate us?" The answer lies in the realities that separate the ordinary and educated peoples of the 'third world' from the ordinary and educated peoples of the 'first world' - the West. Or, sometimes, the images presented by this first world to their counterparts in the third world.
    Now, no matter where in the world we are, given a suitable dish antenna coupled to a correctly coded electronic box, it's possible to receive the television images, in full color, that are transmitted by the world's television stations. At least those TV stations that beam their signals up to the satellites.
    It's possible for a tribesman, hunkered down with his starving family in a drought stricken dustbowl in Asia or Africa to see the riches of the West. See food and water and waste - in real time - even while he hunkers - in this same real time - dry-mouthed and hungry with his malnourished children and his community slowly dying around him.
    It's possible for an educated countryman of this tribesman, to see the same sights - the food, water, and waste of the foreign West, and the famine, drought, and shortages of his own countrymen. What's more, these twinly presented sights may be presented in a short foreign news item during a TV news or documentary program being presented for Western - first world - viewers.
    The tribesman may see the short news item and despair. His educated countryman may see the same item and also feel despair. Or, this educated countryman might get angry.
    Angry that an educated, intelligent, immensely wealthy and technologically capable West may see the sufferings of his country and his countrymen only as a thirty-second eighty-word sound and sight-bite stuffed into a two minute 'piece' on Asia. Or the Middle East. Or South America. Or Eastern Europe. Or Africa. Meanwhile 'more important' news of a city bus accident or small town bank hold-up or local school shooting takes five minutes.
    A print journalist, Cole Campbell of the American newspaper Virginian-Pilot: "*News is a choice, an extraction process, saying that one event is more meaningful than another event*."
    Western news extractors and news disseminators choose and then reduce a nation's tragedies into a part of a thirty-minute TV news program designed to entertain as well as inform. Their viewing audience is a mostly well-fed, well-housed, well-off band of Westerners who can afford the products delivered by the organization who use the news program as a vehicle for advertising their products or services. The manner in which this extracting and reducing is done, coupled with the fact that the tragedy has been accorded a certain relative importance, may provide the catalyst for the anger that drives and sustains some of the men and women who often become the leaders or directors of some of the world's anti-establishment movements.
    These constantly delivered visions of the separation of this world into important comfortable haves and unimportant struggling have-nots may help create the fuel and provide the source of energy for many anti-establishment movements. These anti-establishment movements, if they use lethal violence to express their anger or to draw attention to their causes, then get re-described as 'terrorist' movements.

from Chapter Four: The Blanket. Why the Faceless Stay Faceless. Effects and Results.

    In January 2002, an international magazine, the 'Economist', referred to an intelligence survey of educated Saudi Arabians aged between 25 and 41. The magazine reported that this survey showed that in October 2001, in the month following the destruction of the World Trade Center, some 95% of these educated Saudis supported Osama bin Laden and his cause.
    Osama bin Laden is a Saudi from a wealthy family and is a university graduate. So are many of those identified as his main subordinates and deputies.
    There is a one hundred year psychological linkage between the Arab Osama bin Laden of 2001 and the Vietnamese Vo Nguyen Giap of 1973 and the Africans Nelson Mandela of 1964 and Kwame Nkrumah of 1935 and the Yugoslavian Gavrilo Princip of 1914 and the Chinese Sun Yat Sen of 1896.

---

Catalogue Information

---