How the Democratic Party—the Supposed Vehicle for the Oppressed—Has Carried Out Vicious Slaughter Around the World AND Within the U.S.
January 22, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The Democrat Party paints itself as a party that fights for the interests of oppressed and disenfranchised peoples, a party that’s a vehicle for their struggles. But what have the Democrats actually done to oppressed people around the world, and right here “at home”?
Here’s just a few of those actions:
Barack Obama Launched 10 Times More Killer Drone Strikes Than Bush Did. From 2009 through 2015, Barack Obama launched 563 drone strikes, 10 times more than Bush’s 57 strikes. In Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, these strikes killed between 384 and 807 civilians and several thousand other alleged enemy combatants. Obama’s first strike on Yemen massacred 55 people, including 21 children and 12 women. Obama’s team acted as judge, jury, and executioner—targeting anyone they deemed an enemy without any legal or due process. Some were targeted simply because they fit the U.S. profile of a militant, like living in a particular village, or associating with certain people. Obama personally went over the “kill lists.” 1
In 2011, Obama and Clinton Attacked Libya, and Libya’s People Are Still Paying a Horrendous Price. In March 2011, Obama, acting at the urging of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the British and French imperialists launched a massive air war against the Qaddafi regime in Libya. They claimed it was a “humanitarian” mission, but they were really trying to take control of this oil-rich country. Qaddafi was overthrown and Libya was turned into a hellish battleground between warlord militias and reactionary Islamic jihadists. Thousands were killed and 2.44 million people—a third of Libya’s population—was displaced or terrorized by the fighting. Food, water, and electricity became very scarce and suffering increased dramatically. Today, desperate migrants fleeing across Libya are being starved, tortured, and held hostage by traffickers. Some are even being sold as slaves at public auctions. 2
The Democrats Backed, Carried On, and Escalated Bush’s Criminal Wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. Shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, every single Democrat in Congress except one voted to give Bush what amounted to a blank check to launch the U.S. “war on terror,” a murderous war of empire that began with the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. In 2002, the Democrats controlled the Senate and could have voted down a resolution authorizing war against Iraq. Instead, most Senate Democrats joined the Republicans to pass it, supporting Bush’s illegal and unjust invasion of Iraq in 2003 based on the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. When Obama took over in 2009, he escalated the Afghanistan war, initially tripling the number of troops there, and later greatly escalating airstrikes. In Iraq, Obama carried out Bush’s agreement to end the U.S. occupation in 2011, but then brought U.S. ground and air forces back in 2014 after the rise of ISIS Over these years, some 1.3 million people have died because of America’s wars on Iraq and Afghanistan and its attacks in Pakistan. They’ve turned millions more into refugees, installed reactionary religious fundamentalists and gangster warlords in power, and poured jet fuel on barbaric Islamic jihadism.
Vietnam, 1961-1968: “Hey, Hey, LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?” The U.S. launched the Vietnam War in 1961 when Democratic president John F. Kennedy sent hundreds of advisers to help crush the Vietnamese struggle for national liberation, contain communism, and dominate Asia. His Democratic successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson (“LBJ”), massively escalated the war, attacking North Vietnam in 1965 and deploying 500,000 troops by 1967. By the time the war ended in 1975, the U.S. had dropped seven million tons of bombs, 20 million gallons of the toxic chemical defoliant “Agent Orange,” and 373,000 tons of flesh-burning napalm on Vietnam. All told, some two million civilians and a million Vietnamese fighters were killed. In 2013, Obama praised the soldiers who carried out this criminal mass murder for writing “one of the most extraordinary stories of bravery and integrity in the annals of military history.” 3
Massacring 500,000 in Indonesia in 1965. Lyndon Johnson and his CIA and State Department set in motion, backed, and orchestrated the slaughter of at least 500,000, perhaps more than a million, Indonesians by the Suharto regime. Members of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), trade unionists, intellectuals, teachers, land reform advocates, ordinary peasants, ethnic Chinese, women, and children were all targeted for death with bloodthirsty abandon. Johnson’s administration had given Suharto equipment, weapons, tens of billions of dollars, and hit lists of thousands to carry out this enormous massacre.4
Nuclear Incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1945, Murdering Over 200,000 People. Democratic president Harry Truman ordered the dropping of nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, at the end of World War 2. Over 200,000 people, overwhelmingly civilians, were killed, and hundreds of thousands more were injured. Before the atomic bombs were dropped, Truman and others in the U.S. leadership knew Japan was already close to defeat and attempting to negotiate its surrender. The nuclear horror was meant as a warning, written in hundreds of thousands of incinerated human lives and mounds of charred flesh, against any challenge to American imperialist domination of Japan and the world.5
Mass Murdering Over Three Million in the 1950-53 Korean War, Threatening China with Nukes. Under Democrat Harry Truman, the U.S. took control of half of Korea following World War 2 and installed a fascistic puppet government. This was part of a strategy of containing the Soviet Union and revolutionary China and dominating the Asia-Pacific region. When North Korean forces were poised to defeat the U.S.-backed government, Truman launched a massive invasion and genocidal war. U.S. bombers flattened every building over one story high in the north and dropped 37,000 tons of napalm. The U.S. killed over three million Korean people and Chinese volunteer fighters before being pushed back to the current cease-fire line between North and South Korea. At a November 1950 news conference, Truman said the U.S. was considering attacking Chinese and North Korean forces with nuclear weapons. On the same day, an order was given to the U.S. Strategic Air Command to “be prepared to dispatch without delay medium bomb groups to the Far East … this augmentation should include atomic capability.” 6
Democrats Blocked Anti-Lynching Laws for Decades. Between 1877 and 1950, over 4,000 Black people were lynched in America, overwhelmingly in the South. Every African-American lived under the terror of lynching. Over those years some 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress. All were blocked by filibusters and other maneuvers by one party: the Democrats, in particular the “Solid South” block of southern Democrats. They were a powerful core in the party, supported by Democratic presidents including Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. “Whenever a Negro crosses this dead line between the white and the Negro races and lays his black hand on a white woman, he deserves to die,” one senator—a Democrat—declared in 1930. (To this day Congress refuses to pass anti-lynching laws or even apologize for slavery!)7
Kennedy and Johnson Back the FBI’s War on Civil Rights and Antiwar Protesters. During the 1960s, the FBI devoted more effort to attacking the civil rights and Black liberation struggles, as well as the antiwar movement, than anything else. And it did so with the leadership and full backing of Democratic presidents Kennedy and Johnson. This included the FBI’s covert COINTELPRO program to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” targeted organizations. The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, told Johnson, “we wouldn’t have any problem if we could get those two guys [Malcolm X and Martin Luther King] fighting, if we could get them to kill one another off…” COINTELPRO used informants, agent provocateurs, infiltrators, illegal surveillance, false correspondence, and psychological warfare against these movements. There is evidence that under Johnson, the FBI may have been directly or indirectly involved in the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X.8
LBJ Calls Out Troops to Suppress Uprisings Against Police Terror and Segregation. Between 1964 and 1968, Lyndon Johnson repeatedly deployed federal troops and the National Guard to put down the just uprisings of Black people against decades of police abuse, segregation, poverty, and oppression. Johnson sent troops to crush the Watts rebellion in 1965. In 1967, he deployed over 4,700 federal troops to put down a massive five-day uprising in Detroit. Over 7,000 were arrested, 400 injured, and 43 killed. In 1968, over 100 cities exploded with rage after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Johnson deployed troops across the country, including 13,500 to Washington, DC, where Marines mounted machine guns on the steps of the Capitol. All told, some 45 people were killed, 2,500 injured, and more than 15,000 arrested to put down this nationwide mass outpouring.9
Lyndon Johnson Launches Mass Incarceration Targeting Black Youth. In 1964, Johnson launched his federal “War on Poverty,” which included food stamps, Head Start, Medicare, and Medicaid. This was part of his “Great Society” that was supposedly going to end poverty and other social ills. But meanwhile in 1965, he launched a “War on Crime” targeting Black people. The federal government was given a direct role in local policing for the first time. Johnson and the U.S. rulers saw African-American youth as social dynamite, and enacted measures to target, criminalize, and control them. These actions laid the basis for a system of mass incarceration that over the following decades locked up millions of people, disproportionately Black and Brown youths, criminalizing them and unjustly destroying countless lives.10
THIS is the real record of the Democrats. THIS Is What You’re Relying On to Stop Trump-Pence Fascism?!?
1. Obama’s Covert Drone War In Numbers: Ten Times More Strikes Than Bush; Drones may predate Obama, but his resolute use of them is unmatched [back]
2. U.S. & European Allies Attack Libya: Imperialist Aggression Under Cover of “Humanitarian Intervention”; “Revolution Interviews Raymond Lotta: The Events in Libya in Historical Perspective... Muammar Qaddafi in Class Perspective... The Question of Leadership in Communist Perspective; The 2011 U.S.-NATO War Helped Turn Libya Into Hell on Earth: Now the Imperialists Are Preparing to Wage War Again [back]
3. American Crime Case #96: Vietnam, March 16, 1968—The My Lai Massacre; The My Lai Massacre – “Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam” [back]
4. American Crime Case #100: 1965 Massacre in Indonesia [back]
5. American Crime Case #97: August 6 and 9, 1945—The Nuclear Incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [back]
6. American Crime Case #49: 1950-53—Encircling, Threatening and Attacking the Chinese Revolution; American Crime Case #93: U.S. Invasion of Korea—1950 [back]
7. Wikipedia: Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill; A Senate Apology for History on Lynching [back]
8. The FBI’s War on Civil Rights Leaders [back]
9. 50th Anniversary of the Detroit Rebellion; Wikipedia: 1967 Detroit riot [back]
10. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime review – disturbing history; Think We Should Go Back to the “War on Poverty”? This Book Shows How It Was A War All Right—On the Poor [back]
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