As the sun rises in Paris we remember the people that have died and the families that have lost loved ones.

It's a sad moment in which only the silence and remembrance for the victims should resonate in the air after a night from hell, an atrocity for all mankind. The horror besieged France with a terrorist attack in Paris unparalleled in Europe. The new dramatic toll is 127 dead and 192 wounded. Among the latter there are about 80 in serious condition. It's a massacre, with slaughters throughout the French capital, including suicide bombers in action: the targets were a theater, stadium and other parts of the city.

However instead of respecting this moment of infinite sadness, many people are using it to promote their populism that often leads to xenophobia and racism. To our dismay other lives were wasted last night to stir up hatred, the same hatred that has brought us to this point in our dramatic history, punctuated by fierce wars and mass killings.

"History always repeats itself twice: first time as tragedy, second time as farce." - Karl Marx

Unfortunately we are in the farce, what happened in Paris is just a night of the routine Syrians have dealt with for the past five years in Syria. The executioners become victims and victims executioners, but innocents keep dying. In the last few hours, following the terrorist attacks the hashtag #PrayForParis is spreading online, and many people try to get on the bandwagon of the grieving to make very nice posts and comments, which will be forgotten tomorrow as it has happened after the Charlie Hebdo's attack. The most boorish part is the exploitation of a catastrophe to attack Islam and Muslims, puking nonsense and blaming innocents for a mistake of few, just as terrorists do. Did anyone hear about the terrorist attack in Beirut a couple of days ago claimed by the Islamic State? Or the hundreds of deaths caused by Boko Haram in Africa? Innocent deaths should be treated equally and condemned by the international community against fanatics.

The War of Terror, that campaign without end launched 14 years ago by George Bush and Tony Blair, is tying itself up in ever more grotesque contortions. The Guardian reported this summer that the trial of a Swedish man, Bherlin Gildo, accused of terrorism in Syria, collapsed after it became clear British intelligence had been arming the same rebel groups the defendant was charged with supporting.

The prosecution abandoned the case, apparently to avoid embarrassing the intelligence services. The defence argued that going ahead with the trial would have been an “affront to justice” when there was plenty of evidence the British state was itself providing “extensive support” to the armed Syrian opposition.

That didn’t only include the “non-lethal assistance” boasted of by the government (including body armour and military vehicles), but training, logistical support and the secret supply of “arms on a massive scale”. Reports were cited that MI6 had cooperated with the CIA on a “rat line” of arms transfers from Libyan stockpiles to the Syrian rebels in 2012 after the fall of the Gaddafi regime.

Armed opposition to illegal invasion and occupation clearly doesn’t constitute terrorism or murder on most definitions, including the Geneva convention. But terrorism is now squarely in the eye of the beholder. And nowhere is that more so than in the Middle East, where today’s terrorists are tomorrow’s fighters against tyranny – and allies are enemies – often at the bewildering whim of a western policymaker’s conference call.

For the past year, US, British and other western forces have been back in Iraq, supposedly in the cause of destroying the hyper-sectarian terror group Islamic State (formerly known as al-Qaida in Iraq). This was after Isis overran huge chunks of Iraqi and Syrian territory and proclaimed a self-styled Islamic caliphate.

What’s clear is that Isis and its monstrosities won’t be defeated by the same powers that brought it to Iraq and Syria in the first place, or whose open and covert war-making has fostered it in the years since. Endless western military interventions in the Middle East have brought only destruction and division. It’s the people of the region who can cure this disease – not those who incubated the virus.

Not being able to learn from our mistakes, I fear that yesterday's events are only the first of a long series of terrorist attacks that will result in a war with no territory in which religion will be the excuse to express the hatred we feel for ourselves. My hope is that during today's gathering in Vienna the World leaders can discuss the emergency in Syria, ISIS and how to solve the chain of events that was triggered with their War of Terror.

"The war which is coming is not the first one. There were other wars before it. When the last one came to an end there were conquerors and conquered. Among the conquered the common people starved. Among the conquerors the common people starved too." - Bertolt Brecht

The only way to end the violence is to stop using it.