A FINAL NOTE: On the Real Nature and Monstrous Crimes of This Country

The American Crime series, at revcom.us, analyzes 100 of the worst crimes of this country, since its founding and down to today—a list that speaks not just to “isolated incidents” of wrongdoing but a whole pattern of atrocities, repeated over and over again, reflecting the essential nature of this country—a list that will continue to grow until a revolution overthrows and uproots the system of capitalism-imperialism that rules in this country and replaces it with a radically different and far better system, based on the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, which I have written.

Concentrating much of the monstrous crimes of this country and its ruling class, there is the fact that this Republic of the so-called “United States” of America is:

A Republic whose “National Anthem” was written by a slave owner (Oh, oh say can you see... all the sla-a-ver-y...)!....

A Republic founded on slavery and genocidal robbery: keeping millions of Black people in chains for generations... killing off huge numbers of Native Americans and stealing their land... waging a war that ripped off half of Mexico, greatly expanding slavery.... 

A system that, from the start and down to today, has been grounded in heartless exploitation, using and abusing masses of people to create wealth for the few, with violent white supremacy, male supremacy and gender oppression built into and enforced by this system... plundering people in all parts of the world... destroying the environment, and waging unjust war after war, even to the point of threatening the very existence of humanity... killing off hope for a decent future, or any future at all.

(This is part of an important statement from the revcoms, Allegiance, which is available at revcom.us.)

The USA is a country in which a woman is assaulted/beaten every 9 seconds. It is a country where huge numbers of women are raped and otherwise sexually assaulted every year; a country where the right to abortion has been ripped away from women, with the assertion of male supremacist control over their bodies, and their very being, constituting, in a very real sense, a form of female enslavement. This is a country in which LGBT people are discriminated against, persecuted, bullied, vilified and abused, brutalized and outright murdered.

This is a system in which more than 40 million women are ensnared and enslaved in international sex trafficking and the so called “sex industry”; a system where hundreds of millions of women are cruelly exploited as a key part of the “supply chains” of the world economy and the overall capitalist-imperialist system, in which the U.S. has for decades been the dominant power.

And there is the massive unjust violence perpetrated by U.S. imperialism in the “international arena”:

In addition to the continuing crimes against humanity carried out by the U.S., just since World War 2, including the U.S. slaughter of millions of civilians in Vietnam, and before that in Korea, and the bloody coups it has engineered in Indonesia, Iran and elsewhere, in the period from 1846 to the present the U.S. has intervened in South and Central American countries—militarily, through CIA coups, or in other ways—at least 100 times, at the cost of literally hundreds of thousands of deaths and endless misery for the people of those countries. 

(This is from my article “Shameless American Chauvinism: ‘Anti-Authoritarianism’ as a ‘Cover’ for Supporting U.S. Imperialism,” which is also available at revcom.us.) 

And there is the fact that the U.S. is (up till now, at least) the only country to actually use nuclear weapons, with its atomic bombing of two Japanese cities at the end of World War 2, instantly incinerating hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians and subjecting many others to slow agonizing deaths from the effects of radiation. And then, in more recent times, there has been the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq, built on blatant lies—and now the proxy war in Ukraine, along with active preparation for war with China, with the growing danger of nuclear annihilation.

All this under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

As for the claim by Biden (and the section of the ruling class that he represents) that the U.S. is engaged in an historic struggle, within this country itself and throughout the world, of “democracy” vs. “anti-democratic authoritarianism,” in “Anti-Scientific ‘Anti-Authoritarianism’ Serving American Imperialism and Promoting American Chauvinism,” I provided the following list of some of the countries where, just since World War 2, the U.S. has been allied with—and in many cases has installed, through invasions, bloody coups, etc.—oppressive governments that are “authoritarian” (that would have to be considered “authoritarian,” according to the “logic” of the “theorists” of “authoritarianism”):  

Chile... Brazil... Haiti... Cuba (before the 1959 revolution)... El Salvador... Nicaragua... Guatemala... Honduras... Panama... the Dominican Republic... Greece… Poland... Indonesia... the Philippines... South Korea... South Vietnam... China (before the victory of the revolution in 1949)... Iran... Iraq... Turkey... Israel.

Again, this is only a partial list of the “authoritarian” governments backed—and often installed through invasions, bloody coups, etc.—by the U.S. imperialists, just since World War 2.

Beneath the outward appearance of “respectability” (and even the aura of “solemn dignity”) that surrounds many of the “leaders” of this country, there is the reality of the truly perverse, demented mentality that someone is required to have—or is compelled to acquire—in order to serve as top functionaries of this system. Besides the facts and analysis I have already provided clearly illustrating this basic point, there is the following, serving as a reminder that, for not only murderous but truly ghoulish mentality, you can look not only at Donald Trump, or other fascist Republicans, but also at someone like Hillary Clinton. As pointed out in a recent article at revcom.us (an updated version of American Crime Case #35: The 2011 U.S.-NATO War on Libya) in 2011, as Secretary of State in the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton was among the strongest and loudest advocates of the U.S./NATO bombing of the north African country of Libya, which led to the ouster of the government headed by Muammar Qaddafi, and at the same time the deaths of thousands of Libyans. The end of Qaddafi’s rule also led to widespread chaos and civil conflict within Libya, which has continued in various forms down to today—and which has greatly magnified the death and devastation that has resulted from recent massive flooding in Libya.

As that revcom.us article points out, when the forces opposed to Qadaffi—benefitting from the months of U.S./NATO bombing of Qaddafi’s forces—finally captured, tortured, and murdered Qaddafi himself, Clinton laughed on TV, saying, “We came, we saw, he died.” But those who captured and killed Qaddafi did not just torture him in some vague sense: They sodomized him, in an especially brutal way. It is with knowledge of this, that Clinton gleefully made the ghoulish declaration: “We came, we saw, he died.” 

And then there is Barack Obama himself, whose election as “the first Black president” is supposed to be regarded as a great achievement and “proof” that this country is continuing to advance toward “a more perfect union.” The following provides some, but only some, of the truth about the actual role of Obama, as the chief executive of this truly monstrous capitalist-imperialist power, and more fundamentally the truth about the nature of this country and this system as a whole.

In 2012, Barack Obama spoke these words while praising the U.S. military for its role in Vietnam:

One of the most painful chapters in our history was Vietnam—most particularly, how we treated our troops who served there.... [Y]ou wrote one of the most extraordinary stories of bravery and integrity in the annals of military history.
(Barack Obama, May 28, 2012, part of the Vietnam War Commemoration)

There was, and there is, nothing “heroic” about the U.S. military. On the contrary, it is—without the slightest exaggeration—a machinery of massive, and unspeakable, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and its actions in Vietnam constitute a systematic concentration of this, with a level of destructiveness and depravity that is almost unfathomable:

the slaughter of millions of Vietnamese civilians, with incessant bombing and shelling, including of schools, hospitals, dams and other crucial infrastructure, and widespread use of napalm, white phosphorous, Agent Orange, and millions of anti-personnel weapons, burning to death and maiming huge numbers of children and others;

ruining the livelihood of millions of Vietnamese—destroying large parts of the soil and livestock so essential for the people in rural Vietnam;

torture of people held as prisoners—including large numbers of civilians—male, female, old and young, including the very young;

mutilating the bodies and wearing as “trophies” body parts of Vietnamese killed; mass rape of Vietnamese women and girls.

All this, and more, by the U.S. military and its “heroic” soldiers.

Included in the “American Crime” series is the account of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which U.S. soldiers wantonly murdered over 500 civilians, almost all of them old people, non-combatant women and children. And it is a well-documented fact that this massacre was not some kind of exception, or aberration, but represented the essential approach and means of the American war machine in Vietnam, fueled ideologically by a perverse, poisonous combination of ignorant, irrational anti-communism, American chauvinism, and grotesque racism and misogyny which regarded and treated the Vietnamese people as subhuman “gooks” and “slopes,” and females the lowest of all.

This is the actual history of the U.S. role in Vietnam, which in the twisted minds of the heads of state of U.S. imperialism, such as Barack Obama, is considered, and praised, as “one of the most extraordinary stories of bravery and integrity in the annals of military history.”

This not only reveals the thoroughly corrupt mentality of Obama—and anyone who would preside over this truly monstrous system—but it is also the case that Obama is here willfully, and viciously, rewriting history: He turns upside down the actual role of these “troops” in Vietnam. He complains that the “troops” who carried out these atrocities in Vietnam were not “thanked” for their “service” of horrific war crimes, but instead these war crimes were, rightly and righteously, condemned by masses of people in this country.

And Obama fails (or refuses) to mention the fact that many of these troops (and former troops) came to openly rebel against what they were ordered to do in Vietnam and became an important part of the massive opposition to the U.S. role in that war. In opposition to what Obama perversely hails as heroic, that rebellion of U.S. troops against the government and the system that was encouraging and commanding them to carry out almost unbelievably horrific atrocities—that kind of rebellion is truly something to honor and encourage.