Trump’s Wall Is a Fascist Monstrosity and Must NOT Go Up...
But the “Border Security” of the Democrats Is ALSO a Machinery of Heartless Persecution, Demonization, and Deportation

Updated January 20, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Since the publication of the below article, the crisis around the wall and the government shutdown has heightened. The situation remains in flux, and we will cover major developments as they might occur.

Trump doubled down with his January 8 Oval Office address and his threats to use executive power to build the wall without Congressional approval.This signifies another big step in the fascist remolding this regime is undertaking.

At the same time, the Democrats have continued their tack of essentially accepting the basic terms of Trump. For all their stern faces and charges of Trumpian irresponsibility, they, like Trump, cover over the fundamental guilt of the U.S. imperialist system for driving people from their home countries and the essentially illegitimate character of U.S. borders in the first place. They, like Trump, frame the argument as one of how to repress and control these desperate immigrants rather than what must be done to the system that has created this.

They too “change the subject” to the suffering that is being brought down on people within the U.S. through this shutdown. They pit that against what is being done to our immigrant brothers and sisters on the border (and within the U.S.). To be clear: that suffering is real, and the fact that people who are going hungry and sick, or who are a paycheck away from being homeless, now face even worse privation, is indeed criminal and extremely ugly. But the Democrats are opportunistically using this to shift focus away from the larger crime being committed around immigration.

The conflicts between Trump and the Democrats are in fact real conflicts over how to handle immigration, as the article below points out. But at this point, they also touch very directly on “norms of rule.” That is, Trump is changing the “rules of the game” that the imperialists generally adhere to—rules that both govern relations among themselves and afford a level of civil and democratic rights to masses of people. And this has serious implications.

But as the article also points out, this system has no answer, and both sides are united, above all, on saving this system. The challenge before those who are infuriated and anguished over what they see at the border is not to choose between oppressors, but to grapple seriously with what is said below on the roots of the crisis; what is laid out in the accompanying article on the Democrats’ history and current stance on this question; and what it will take to end this—revolution.

* * * * *

Donald Trump has shut down the government to get his wall on the border. This fascist wall must not be built, period. If this wall gets funded, in whatever form and with whatever concessions, it will represent a major escalation in the attack on immigrants. Even if it is seen as “symbolic”—and that will be what the Democrats tell you when and if they cut a deal with Trump—what it will symbolize will be that the tens and hundreds of millions of people seeking refuge from conditions created by this imperialist system are subhumans who must and will be kept out of the “gated community” of the very countries at fault for the disasters. Symbols are symbols because they mean something. After all, forcing Jews in Nazi Germany to wear “yellow stars” could be seen as “symbolic”—but what did they symbolize? A program of genocide.

The imperialist system oppresses the vast majority of the world’s peoples and nations. That system grinds up the labor and lives of billions of people daily into their machinery of capital. That system wages wars that create havoc and tears apart the social fabric in those countries. That system destroys the environment in those countries, turning whole areas of the world into deserts through global warming. That system has no answers for the crisis it has created.

Trump, and the whole fascist tide around the world, is one reaction to this. But how do the Democrats—who, yes, are like the Republicans, a political institution serving this imperialist system—oppose this? By proposing their own program for “border security”—that is, for keeping out and holding down immigrants—with high tech sensors and drones in what they say is the “21st-century way” of doing this.

In other words, the Democrats are united with Trump on using tools of repression and intimidation to prevent people fleeing U.S.-created oppression in their home countries from seeking asylum here. The accompanying article—on what these Democrats have actually done when they have been in power and what they actually propose to do now—shows that they have, if anything, been even more bloody than Trump (while being more discreet about it). Where they differ now is on two main points:

One, the demonization of immigrants is at the very core of the fascist program of Trump, part of a whole thrust to “make America white again.” Trump wants the wall as a high-profile, easy-to-understand way to dramatize his highly repressive assault on immigrants more generally. We should not forget that even as now the Democrats and even many anti-immigrant groups downplay the importance of the wall, it is a fact that border walls are one part of brutally enforcing apartheid and separation and that the existing U.S.-Mexican border wall, much of which was constructed by Democratic president Bill Clinton, has been a site of brutality and terror against immigrants. Trump is using the controversy over the wall to mobilize and stoke the fascist base.

The Democrats go at this differently. They aim to maintain the support of those who are either victimized by or revolted by this program of ethnic cleansing, and keep them thinking and acting within the bounds or horizons of the current system. So while they too carry out highly repressive and even murderous policies on the border, they want to as much as possible keep their repressive policies out of the public eye. At the same time, they also want to promote a multilateralist multiculturalism, opening up immigration to those they regard as necessary to their economy and the projection of the U.S. role internationally. Thus, when they say that the wall is immoral—which is how those whom they see as their base feel about it—what they really mean is that it is “bad optics.” As the accompanying chart makes clear, it was the plan proposed by Bill Clinton that has ended up trapping and killing some 8,000 immigrant human beings in the desert over the past 20-plus years.

Two, the Democrats actually argue that their form of keeping immigrants out (sensors, drones, informant networks) is more effective than the wall.

So, yes, the wall—and behind that the whole program and mentality being promoted by the Trump/Pence regime—must be thoroughly rejected and stopped. But it won’t be stopped by the Democratic representatives of a system that created 65 million refugees in the world—or a party that agrees with Trump on the need for “border security” while regularly trampling on the sovereignty of the very countries that the U.S. dominates and oppresses through wars and proxy wars for the dominance of the U.S. over the planet.

Why should we let ourselves be bound, and bounced around, between the choices that they and their system give you—between the contending forces of a capitalist-imperialist dictatorship, competing over who can better carry out that dictatorship? Where has this gotten us? And where has this gotten the desperate people now suffering in unbearably crowded shelters in Tijuana or “icebox” detention centers in Texas or trapped in the U.S.-created and maintained killing fields of Honduras or El Salvador—after all these years?

No human being is illegal. What we need—and what we need to openly proclaim and fight for—is a world without borders, which means a world beyond all forms of exploitation, oppression and the violent antagonistic conflicts between people. What we need is REVOLUTION!

 

Watch these excerpts from the speech by Bob Avakian Why We Need an Actual Revolution and How We Can Really Make Revolution and from the Q&A following the speech

No, CODEPINK, Donald Trump Is NOT Making a “Positive Contribution to the Peace Process”—He Is, Like the Neocons and Democrats Who Oppose Him, a Bloody-Jawed Imperialist!

January 14, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

In late December, when Trump announced he was withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria and slashing troop levels in Afghanistan, some progressives hailed it as a move toward peace. The activist antiwar group CODEPINK applauded Trump’s decision as “a positive contribution to the peace process” which “decreases the tensions between the United States and Iran.”

Others on “the left” suffered similar bouts of amnesia, seeming to suddenly forget they were talking about the same Donald Trump who has escalated U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s slaughter in Yemen, backed Israel’s mass killing of unarmed Palestinian protesters, stepped up drone strikes in one country after another, announced the very threatening U.S. withdrawal from a key U.S.-Russian nuclear arms treaty, and wondered aloud why he couldn’t use America’s nukes.

Trump is not a “peacenik” or isolationist, and he’s not doing the “right thing for the wrong reasons.” He’s a fascist representative of the capitalist-imperialist system. That system cannot function without exploiting the masses of humanity and battling its rivals to violently dominate and oppress vast stretches of the globe. And U.S. imperialism in particular is running up against real limits in its ability to defend and extend its domination.

The Trump/Pence regime has a different approach than the Democratic (and even most “mainstream” Republican) imperialists to keeping “America First” among global predators given the contradictions it faces around the world. The regime has no intention of “abandoning” the Middle East, but they can’t stand pat, with U.S. forces tied down where they’re stalemated or losing, either. So Trump aims to franchise out some regional battles to its butcher allies like Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, while turning America’s machinery of death and destruction toward bigger fish—with potentially even more catastrophic consequences: gearing up now to confront Iran, while preparing strategically to take on China.

Latest case in point: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s bellicose speech in Cairo, Egypt, on Thursday. He assured the U.S.’s despotic clients in that part of the world that it will back them even more uncritically, and will defend America’s regional dominance even more aggressively: “We were timid about asserting ourselves” under Obama, Pompeo declared. He ratcheted up threats against Iran, promising that the U.S. “will not ease our campaign” against it, and provocatively threatened to “expel every last Iranian boot” from Syria.

So no, Trump’s latest moves aren’t steps toward peace. They’re moves that may well heighten the danger of war, even cataclysmic war.

The reason for the seeming amnesia and real self-delusion pointed to at the top of this article is not ignorance, but resistance to the truth that imperialism is a system, not a set of policies. Bob Avakian has trenchantly put it this way:

Imperialism means huge monopolies and financial institutions controlling the economies and the political systems—and the lives of people—not just in one country but all over the world. Imperialism means parasitic exploiters who oppress hundreds of millions of people and condemn them to untold misery; parasitic financiers who can cause millions to starve just by pressing a computer key and thereby shifting vast amounts of wealth from one place to another. Imperialism means war—war to put down the resistance and rebellion of the oppressed, and war between rival imperialist states—it means the leaders of these states can condemn humanity to unbelievable devastation, perhaps even total annihilation, with the push of a button.

And right now, when different factions within the U.S. ruling class battle it out for supremacy, including which policy will best achieve imperialist objectives, we should also keep the second part of that quote in mind as well:

Imperialism is capitalism at the stage where its basic contradictions have been raised to tremendously explosive levels. But imperialism also means that there will be revolution—the oppressed rising up to overthrow their exploiters and tormentors—and that this revolution will be a worldwide struggle to sweep away the global monster, imperialism. (BAsics 1:6)

Trump is not a “peacenik” or isolationist, and he’s not doing the “right thing for the wrong reasons.” Donald Trump has escalated U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s slaughter in Yemen, as shown here, 2017. (Photo: AP)

You Can’t Change the World If You Don’t Know the BAsics

January 14, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

 

Every week, Revolution features one quote from BAsics, by Bob Avakian, the handbook for revolution. We encourage Revolution Clubs and other readers, everywhere, to take the time to discuss the quote—the whole quote—and to write us at revolution.reports@yahoo.com with accounts of these discussions, or thoughts provoked in yourself by reading the quote.

 

A Year-End Fundraising Party with The Bob Avakian Institute

Coming Together to Discuss, Debate, and Raise Funds to Spread Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution, a speech by Bob Avakian

January 14, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

A few days before the new year, a couple dozen people gathered for a fundraising party hosted by The Bob Avakian Institute at a small progressive café in Los Angeles. This was to celebrate and raise funds for the new speech by Bob Avakian (BA), Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution.

It was a diverse crowd, including some who’ve known of BA’s work for years and others who just learned about him and came to the event to find out more. All were drawn by the topic of the film itself and because they were looking forward to meeting others who cared deeply about humanity.

There were people working in the arts, education, health care, activists with Refuse Fascism, and people from different backgrounds and nationalities, including some coming from countries devastated by U.S. imperialism. Two different people in attendance said it felt so good to be among others who are paying attention to what’s happening in the world and want to do something about it. Another young woman there has known about BA for a long time and has engaged some of his work, but hadn’t ever come to anything before. She said that the situation in the world finally brought her to come to support and find out what she could do to contribute.

The evening began with showing a clip from the Q&A that followed the speech, speaking to why immigrants cross borders in the first place. This was followed by comments from Annie Day, the director of The Bob Avakian Institute. She talked briefly about the intolerable outrages that are plaguing our world, and the understanding that BA provides about their source in the system of capitalism and imperialism, how none of this could be ended through reform, and the need for an actual revolution. This speech and BA’s work overall provides the plan and strategy for how such a revolution can be made and what that revolution would be aiming for, concentrated in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (a concrete blueprint for a socialist transition to communism).

Day also talked about what it means that Avakian's work is not known, at a time people do not know there is a real alternative, and she then challenged everyone there to be part of changing this, to break through the decades-long assault on revolution and communism and the toll it has taken in terms of the ability for people to even conceive of a radically different world. She referenced a point BA made several years ago that listening to most people, including too many progressive intellectuals, talk about the history of communist revolution is like learning about the Civil War from Confederate generals. Because of all this, people today are more capable of imagining the end of humanity than the end of capitalism.

Interestingly, these last points, and the discussion of how to change this with BA’s work, were reference points throughout the night.

After watching the trailer for BA’s speech, the room broke into informal conversations and debate. At the same time as people were getting to know each other, and learning what drew them there, there was good struggle and debate about all these questions, especially struggle over the basis for revolution: that, to quote BAsics 4:11, “What people think is part of objective reality but objective reality is not determined by what people think.”

One question that came up was the need to be reaching out to social service and community-based organizations and people around the world—even if they don’t all agree with revolution now—because after a revolution, we’ll need a lot of assistance and infrastructure to rebuild the economy and meet people’s needs.

This was a perfect segue to the final video clip we played: “What Would Society Look Like Right After the Revolution?,” which provoked more discussion about the contradictions under socialism, including how the work we do now is connected to what will be required to go for power and maintain power after the revolution.

To illuminate the need for the new communism and BA to be known throughout society, one person shared a story about talking to a 20-year-old relative at a holiday party. He told her that so many of his friends have discussed suicide because they have no hope for the future. She said it brought home the impact of people not knowing there is another way the world can be and so much work that’s been done by BA on the basis for this and how to bring that into being.

It was a very good time. $400 was raised from this party, including donations made by people who could not attend. The Bob Avakian Institute and volunteers reached out broadly, sending out hundreds of invitations to everyone in the area that they had met over the years. The invitation itself posed a real challenge to people about the importance of BA’s work. A number of people who had not been heard from in some time sent comments back saying they regretted not being able to attend and how they would like to talk more in the coming year.

A young woman who attended, who has just recently been introduced to BA, talked about how important this event was—the feeling of unity and togetherness in the struggle to understand and change the world, knowing we might not all agree but feeling love and hope in that common desire for a deep change in the world. She took home a copy of BAsics and wants to be part of these kinds of things in an ongoing way, including figuring out how to bring this into her circles.

The LA fundraising event was simple to pull together, and much more of this is needed—in every corner of society.

The Republican Party Is Fascist
The Democratic Party Is Also a Machine of Massive War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity
This System CANNOT Be Reformed—It MUST Be Overthrown!

Republicans, Democrats and U.S. Crimes Against Humanity: A Chart

 

Updated January 7, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

U.S. Wars and Interventions	President	The Human Cost
The nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 1945	Harry Truman (D)	As Japan was suing for peace and World War 2 was coming to an end, on August 6, the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb ever used on the city of Hiroshima. By the end of 1945, between 140,000 and 150,000 people, overwhelmingly civilians, died from the attack and hundreds of thousands more were wounded. On August 9, the U.S. dropped an even more powerful nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, destroying the city and murdering another 70,000 people.1
Military intervention in the Chinese Revolution, 1945-1949	Truman (D)	By 1945, Japan had been defeated, in large part by decades of revolutionary struggle under the leadership of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party. A civil war soon broke out between China’s revolutionaries and the reactionary Nationalist Party (Kuomintang/KMT) under Chiang Kai-shek. The U.S. funneled billions in aid and military equipment to the KMT. The roughly 100,000 American troops stationed in China advised, trained, organized, and supported Chiang’s forces, even airlifting 500,000 to different battlefronts. Without U.S. backing the KMT would have been defeated more—perhaps much more—quickly. So U.S. intervention prolonged the conflict and contributed significantly to the terrible toll on the Chinese. Between 1945 and 1949, an estimated 2.5 million were killed, millions more were displaced, the economy collapsed, and tens of millions were left destitute.2
Turning Micronesia into a nuclear testing ground, 1946-1962	Truman (D) Dwight Eisenhower (R) John Kennedy (D)	From 1946 to 1962, the U.S. turned Micronesia—a region in the Western Pacific Ocean comprising thousands of small islands, including the Marshall Islands—into a nuclear test site which it named the “Pacific Proving Ground.” It carried out its first test by exploding a nuclear bomb over Bikini Atoll in 1946, and between 1947 and 1962 carried out 102 tests over, on, or under the waters of these precious islands. Of these tests, 67 were atomic bombs. Some islands were evacuated prior to testing and were obliterated. But other tests were carried out on inhabited islands and people were exposed to huge amounts of nuclear fallout and suffered acute radiation illness including nausea, vomiting, burns, hair loss, hypothyroidism, and miscarriages. Some were guinea pigs in a secret medical experiment to study the effects of radiation on human beings. Today, 60 years after nuclear testing, entire islands remain uninhabitable and many islanders still suffer their aftereffects, in some instances with thyroid cancer rates 200 percent above the national baseline.3
Military intervention in Greek civil war, 1947-49	Truman (D)	In 1947, the U.S. took over from Britain, whose troops had spent three years trying to crush the pro-Soviet leftist fighters that had driven the Nazi invaders from many parts of Greece during World War 2. The U.S. armed, trained, and led the reactionary Greek military in a bloody counterinsurgency against these anti-fascist Greek guerrilla fighters who held out for nearly three years, suffering losses of many tens of thousands before their surrender in October 1949. In this “Third Phase” of the Greek civil war, the total deaths were estimated at 158,000 and a million people were forced from their homes (including through U.S.-orchestrated “pacification”). After surrendering, “Almost 100,000 ELAS fighters and communist sympathizers serving in DSE ranks were imprisoned, exiled or executed.” The U.S. then “exercised almost dictatorial control” of Greece in the economic sphere, according to a prominent Greek politician.4
The Korean War, 1950-53	Truman (D) Eisenhower (R)	In June 1950, the U.S. orchestrated a United Nations invasion of Korea, and sent over 340,000 American troops. Over the next three years of combat and massive bombings, U.S. and U.S.-led forces killed more than three million people: two million North Korean civilians, 500,000 North Korean soldiers, between 900,000 and a million Chinese soldiers. There were also 1.3 million South Korean casualties, including 400,000 dead.5
Korean War 1950-53: U.S. Army photo depicts the summary execution of 1,800 South Korean political prisoners July 1950 carried out by the U.S.-installed puppet Syngman Rhee.
U.S. nuclear threats against China and North Korea, 1950-1951	Truman (D)	On November 30, 1950, Truman stated publicly that the U.S. was considering using nuclear weapons against Chinese and North Korean forces. That day, the Strategic Air Command was ordered to “be prepared to dispatch without delay medium bomb groups to the Far East ... this augmentation should include atomic capability.” Some in government advocated a “limited war” against China, including air attacks and a naval blockade. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, then in overall command of U.S. forces in Korea, argued for dropping 30 to 50 atomic bombs on Manchuria and Chinese cities. (Truman feared this could end up harming U.S. interests and fired MacArthur in the spring of 1951.)6
CIA coup in Iran, 1953	Truman (D) Eisenhower (R)	On August 19, 1953, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), along with British intelligence, launched a military coup overthrowing Iran’s popular, elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. In 1951, during an upsurge of protest against British colonialism, Mossadegh had nationalized Britain’s Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. That day, CIA-organized mobs, joined by the military, took over streets chanting “Long live the Shah! Death to Mossadegh!” Street battles raged. By late afternoon, military units seized control of Mossadegh’s house, breaking the resistance. By evening, 300 lay dead, and Iran’s Mohammad Reza Shah [King] Pahlavi’s throne was secure. Iran’s nationalist upsurge was crushed. The U.S. replaced Britain as the dominant imperialist power in Iran. Mossadegh’s nationalization was reversed, and U.S. oil giants were cut in on the spoils, reaping enormous profits. The coup embedded Iran as a key military outpost for the U.S. against regional liberation struggles and in its Cold War clash with the Soviet Union. The Shah ruled as an iron-fisted U.S. puppet for 25 years. Speaking out risked arrest by SAVAK, his U.S.-trained secret police. Thousands were murdered, jailed, or barbarically tortured—they even threatened to torture children in front of their parents. When millions rose against the Shah in 1978-79, he shot down thousands with U.S. backing before being ousted. The 1953 coup and what followed ended up helping pave the way for a new Iranian nightmare: the 1979 founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran.7
U.S. threatens nuclear attack against Iraq’s 1958 revolution	Eisenhower (R)	After the pro-Western Iraqi monarchy was overthrown in a nationalist military coup, the U.S. threatened war against the new republic. U.S. forces, including the Strategic Air Command, were put on worldwide alert, and 70 naval vessels, hundreds of aircraft, and 14,000 Marines were dispatched to neighboring Lebanon, including an atomic unit with artillery capable of firing nuclear shells. Eisenhower had secretly ordered the military to prepare to use nuclear weapons to prevent an Iraqi takeover of Kuwait’s oil fields. In response to U.S. threats and deployments, the Soviet Union began large-scale maneuvers on its borders with Turkey and Iran. “Until the makeup and intentions of the new Republic of Iraq became clear, ‘general war’ was a real possibility,” one journalist summed up.8
Vietnam War, 1961-1975	Eisenhower (R) John Kennedy (D) Lyndon Johnson (D) Richard Nixon (R) Gerald Ford (R)	The U.S.first sent military advisers, then more than 500,000 troops, and dropped millions of tons of bombs in an effort to defeat the national liberation struggle of the Vietnamese people and prevent either revolutionary China or the imperialist Soviet Union from strengthening their influence in Southeast Asia. By the time the war ended in America’s defeat in April 1975, its military had slaughtered some two million Vietnamese civilians and one million Vietnamese soldiers.9
My Lai massacre. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Planning for nuclear war with the Soviet Union and China, 1950s and ’60s.	Truman (D) Eisenhower (R) Kennedy (D)	Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg saw a copy of these war plans in 1961.He later wrote: “The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed at the Soviet Union, its Warsaw Pact satellites, and China, would be roughly six hundred million dead. A hundred Holocausts.”10
Murdering the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, installing the butcher Mobutu, 1961-1997	Eisenhower (R) Kennedy (D) Lyndon B. Johnson (D) Richard Nixon (R) Gerald Ford (R) Jimmy Carter (D) Ronald Reagan (R) George H.W. Bush (R) Bill Clinton (D)	On January 17, 1961, a firing squad shot to death the Congolese anti-colonialist leader Patrice Lumumba, just months after he’d been elected prime minister of the newly founded Republic of the Congo. This brutal murder was carried out by Lumumba’s Congolese enemies, but it had been called for by President Eisenhower in August 1960 and organized by CIA Director Allen Dulles, who wrote the CIA station chief in the Congo that Lumumba’s “removal must be an urgent and prime objective.” Murdering Lumumba, who sought to use the Congo’s vast mineral resources to improve its people’s lives, and then in 1965 installing the brutal regime of Mobutu Sese Seko, turned the Congo into a bulwark for U.S. political and military intervention in Africa for nearly three decades. While global imperialism and Mobutu plundered the country, Congolese suffered hellish enslavement and medieval destitution. “How do I describe ... the feeling of holding in my arms a child half-dead from lack of protein,” one eyewitness wrote, “his hair a sickly orange, his face bloated and puffy, his abdomen an overstretched balloon?” Meanwhile, Carter intervened to save Mobutu in 1977 and 1978, Reagan hailed him as “a voice of good sense and good will,” and George H.W. Bush called him “our best friend in Africa.”11
The Bay of Pigs invasion, 1961	Kennedy (D)	The U.S. attempted to spark the overthrow of Cuba’s government, headed by Fidel Castro, by organizing this invasion by reactionary Cuban exiles. It was defeated, but during the fighting some 2,000 to 6,000 Cuban soldiers, militia personnel, and others were killed, wounded, or went missing.12
Cuban missile crisis, 1962	Kennedy (D)	The U.S. was carrying out secret operations to overthrow the Cuban government (and on another front, had also stationed nuclear missiles threatening the Soviet Union in Turkey). At Cuba’s request, the Soviets placed 36 nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. The U.S. demanded the missiles be removed, sent U-2 spy planes over Cuba (one was shot down), placed a naval blockade on Cuba, dropped depth charges near a disabled Soviet submarine, considered invading, and put its nuclear forces on DEFCON 2 alert, the highest level short of nuclear war. For 13 days, the world hovered on the brink of nuclear holocaust before the crisis was defused.13
Invasion of Dominican Republic, 1965	Johnson (D)	On April 28, 1965, 22,000 U.S. Marines and other troops invaded the Dominican Republic to crush a just, mass uprising against the country’s pro-U.S. tyranny. Some 3,000 to 4,000 Dominicans were killed, although others estimated that the death toll was as high as 6,000 to 10,000.14
CIA orchestrates bloodbath in Indonesia, 1965-1966	Johnson (D)	For many months, starting at the end of 1965, the reactionary Indonesian military, led by the pro-U.S. General Suharto, as well as other reactionary forces that it unleashed, slaughtered people with wild abandon. This massive bloodbath was set in motion, backed, and orchestrated by the U.S., which provided the military with equipment, weapons, and ultimately tens of billions of dollars. CIA advisers counseled Indonesian generals and provided them with a “hit list” of 5,000, then checked off their names as they were murdered. When the bloodletting ended, at least 500,000, perhaps more than a million, had been killed, including members of the Communist Party of Indonesia, trade unionists, intellectuals, teachers, land reform advocates, ordinary peasants, ethnic Chinese, women, and children. Hundreds of thousands more were arrested and tortured.15
Bombing of Laos, 1965-1973	Johnson (D) Nixon (R)	During the war in Vietnam, U.S. warplanes dropped two million tons of bombs on the small neighboring country of Laos, more than had been dropped on Germany or Japan during World War 2. These included anti-personnel cluster bombs. There’s been no accounting of those killed or wounded during the bombing, but over 20,000 people have been killed or maimed by unexploded ordinance—including cluster bombs—in the decades since the war ended.16
Bombing of Cambodia, 1969-1973	Nixon (R)	The U.S. also carpet bombed Cambodia during the war in Vietnam, directly or indirectly killing 100,000 to 600,000 Cambodians—mostly civilians. Hundreds of thousands more likely died due to displacement, disease, and starvation in this period. Over two million people, more than 25 percent of its population, were driven from their homes in the countryside.17
Christmas bombing of North Vietnam, December 18-29, 1972	Nixon (R)	The U.S. massively bombed the densely populated cities of Hanoi and Haiphong to force concessions by North Vietnam in negotiations to end the war. It claimed 1,600 Vietnamese civilians were killed, but Vietnamese sources estimate there were 2,300 civilian deaths—about 1,500 in Hanoi alone.18
CIA-organized military coup in Chile, 1973	Nixon (R)	Beginning in the early morning hours of September 11, 1973, the Chilean military, with political guidance and secret backing from the U.S., carried out a coup against the leftist government of Chilean president Salvador Allende. More than 3,000 Chilean people were executed, thousands more were “disappeared,” and tens of thousands tortured; over 140,000 people were rounded up during the coup, and in the few years that followed, as many as one million people out of Chile’s population of 11 million were forced into exile.19
U.S. foments civil war in Angola, 1975-1994	Ford (R) Carter (D) Reagan (R) George H.W. Bush (R) Clinton (D)	In the 1960s, when the Angolan people were fighting to lift the yoke of Portuguese colonialism, the U.S. backed the Portuguese government’s attempts to crush their struggle—including supplying the colonial regime with napalm. In 1975, when Portugal ended its rule and the Angolan MPLA was set to take power, the U.S. began arming, funding, and militarily assisting the reactionary anti-MPLA butchers of UNITA headed by Jonas Savimbi. The U.S. also backed South Africa’s military intervention in Angola to weaken or overthrow the MPLA government, prevent the Soviet Union or its ally Cuba from gaining a foothold in Southern Africa, and help preserve the apartheid government of South Africa. A savage civil war was unleashed which lasted until 2002. Some 500,000 were killed, over four million were driven from their homes, and the society was devastated. The U.S. rulers only dialed back their support for the civil war in 1993 when the Soviet Union had collapsed. After the war, “80 percent of people have no access to basic medical care. More than two-thirds have no running water. A whole generation of children has never opened a schoolbook. Life expectancy is less than 40 years. Three in ten children will die before reaching their fifth birthday,” the New York Times reported.20
Covertly fueling terror in Mozambique, 1977-1992	Carter (D) Reagan (R) George H.W. Bush (R)	Between 1977 and 1992, the U.S. covertly fueled a reactionary war and a barbaric campaign of mass terror in the southern Africa country of Mozambique. This newly independent nation was ruled by the nationalist Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), which was aided by the Soviet Union. The white settler states of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa, secretly backed by the U.S., formed, supported, and armed the “Mozambican National Resistance” (RENAMO). Their goal: to force Mozambique to halt support for the just struggle against apartheid South Africa, drive it into the arms of Western imperialism, and prevent the imperialist Soviet Union from gaining a foothold in southern Africa. RENAMO systematically carried out crimes against humanity as part of a strategy to cripple and destabilize Mozambique’s government. It abducted children to be soldiers. It forced villagers to produce food, transport munitions, and turned village women into sex slaves—devastating agriculture (as well as the country’s infrastructure) and spawning mass starvation and famines which killed hundreds of thousands. It carried out brutal massacres, including the 1987 slaughter of 424 civilians, including hospital patients in the town of Homoine, and directly murdered some 100,000 people in all. U.S. ally South Africa gave RENAMO logistical, military, and financial support, and also carried out direct attacks in Mozambique, including cross-border raids, aerial bombings, sabotage, assassinations, kidnappings, even a 1986 invasion aimed at cutting Mozambique in half in 1986. Between 600,000 and one million died of war-related causes. The U.S. secretly supported this slaughter—through private parties (the right-wing Heritage Foundation gave RENAMO office space in Washington, DC, for instance) and covert backing for South Africa. Author Mahmood Mamdani summed up, “Simply put, after the defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, the United States decided to harness, and even to cultivate, terrorism in the struggle against regimes it considered pro-Soviet.”21
Supporting Indonesian genocide in East Timor, 1975-1999	Ford (R) Carter (D) Reagan (R) George H.W. Bush (R) Clinton (D)	On December 6, 1975, President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met with America’s close ally, Indonesian dictator Suharto (who spearheaded the mass slaughter of leftists in 1965 and then staged a military coup in 1967—all with U.S. backing), and green-lighted Indonesia’s invasion of its neighbor, East Timor. “What followed was one of the greatest genocides of the 20th century. It is estimated that up to one-third of the Timorese population was killed through a policy of army massacre and enforced starvation. Many of those who were left were imprisoned and tortured by a military armed and trained by the United States.” The slaughter continued for almost 25 years. In 1999, after the Timorese voted for independence from Indonesia, pro-Indonesia forces murdered about 14,000 people. A few months later, the U.S. president—this time Clinton—was again meeting with Suharto to strengthen ties with his murderous regime.22
U.S. proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, 1979-1989	Carter (D) Reagan (R)	After the Soviet Union, the U.S.’s main imperialist rival, invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the U.S., along with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, armed, organized, and funded the reactionary Islamic fundamentalist Mujahideen (who later became Afghanistan’s Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda) to wage war against the Soviet forces and the Afghan regime it backed. When the Soviets finally pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, between 800,000 and 1.5 million Afghans (along with 15,000 Soviet soldiers) had been killed in this reactionary bloodbath and five million Afghans, one-third of its population at the time, had been driven out of the country as refugees.23
U.S. threatens tactical nuclear war over Iran, 1980	Carter (D)	During and immediately after the 1979 Iranian revolution, the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a series of high-stakes warnings and threats, backed by military maneuvers and nuclear alerts, to maintain or increase their leverage in Iran. In August 1980, the U.S. warned the Soviets that any move into Iran would lead to a direct military confrontation. Those options included the use of tactical nuclear weapons. For the first time, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski later wrote, “the United States deliberately sought for itself the capability to manage a protracted nuclear conflict.”24
U.S. backs El Salvador death squads, 1980-92	Carter (D) Reagan (R) George H.W. Bush (R)	To crush a guerrilla struggle against its brutal client regime, the U.S. supported, funded, and armed death squads that carried out extra-judicial executions and massacres which killed as many as 75,000 Salvadorans25
Fueling the Iran-Iraq war, 1980-1988	Carter (D) Reagan (R)	In September 1980, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Iran with a green light from the U.S. Their common goal—to weaken or topple the new Islamic Republic. The U.S. sold (or had allies sell) arms to Iraq, including the capability to make biological and chemical weapons (which were used against Iran), and provided military intelligence. For a time, the U.S. also supplied Iran with weapons. U.S. machinations prolonged the war and worsened the slaughter: Conservative estimates place the death toll at 262,000 to 367,000 Iranians and 105,000 Iraqis, plus an estimated 700,000 injured or wounded on both sides.26
The U.S.-sponsored Contra war in Nicaragua, 1981-1988	Reagan (R) George H.W. Bush (R)	After the Sandinistas overthrew the pro-U.S. Somoza dictatorship in 1978, and established friendly ties with the Soviet Union, the U.S. was determined to overthrow them. “For eight terrible long years, the people of Nicaragua were under attack by Washington’s proxy army, the Contras, formed from Somoza’s vicious National Guardsmen and other supporters of the dictator. It was all-out war ... burning down schools and medical clinics, raping, torturing, mining harbors, bombing and strafing.” As many as 50,000 people were killed. In 1990 the U.S. forced a “free election” with the threat of escalated terror if people supported the Sandinista government. It fell. Today, Nicaragua is one of the poorest and most violence plagued nations in the hemisphere.27
U.S.-backed genocide in Guatemala, 1982-1983	Reagan (R)	In 1982, the U.S. backed a military coup by the Christian fanatic General José Efraín Ríos Montt, who then launched a genocidal assault on Guatemala’s indigenous Mayan population. With U.S. aid and support, Guatemala’s military systematically destroyed more than 600 indigenous Mayan villages and slaughtered some 75,000 people. The Guatemalan military regime’s savage, U.S.-supported war against leftist opponents and peasants (which had begun in the 1960s) continued until 1996. During those decades it’s estimated that some 200,000 people were disappeared or killed.28
1982-1983: Armed and backed by the U.S., the Guatemalan military systematically destroyed more than 600 indigenous Mayan villages, and slaughtered some 75,000 people.
Invasion of Grenada, 1983	Reagan (R)	The U.S. invaded this small island nation to overthrow its leftist government, an action the UN denounced as a “flagrant” violation of international law. U.S. forces killed 45 Grenadians and 25 Cubans working there in support of Grenada’s government, and wounded a total of 396 Grenadians and Cubans.29
America’s complicity in the massacre of Iraqi Kurds, 1987-1988	Reagan (R)	After facilitating Iraq’s development of chemical weapons, the U.S. turned a blind eye and continued to support it when it used them against Iraq’s Kurds. As many as 60,000 were massacred, including an estimated 5,000 in one gas attack at Halabja, according to an Iraq scholar. A Defense Intelligence Agency officer told the New York Times that the Pentagon “wasn’t so horrified by Iraq’s use of gas. It was just another way of killing people—whether with a bullet or phosgene, it didn’t make any difference.”30
The shoot-down of Iran Air Flight 655, 1988	Reagan (R)	On July 2, 1988, at a time the U.S. was seeking to end the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq war, the naval warship USS Vincennes shot down an unarmed Iranian civilian passenger jet—Iran Air Flight 655—as it flew over the Persian Gulf. All 290 passengers on board were killed.31
The invasion of Panama, 1989-1990	George H.W. Bush (R)	On December 20, 1989, the U.S. military invaded Panama with 27,684 troops and 300 aircraft, removing Manuel Noriega and his Panamanian Defense Force from power. Whole neighborhoods were destroyed and an estimated 3,000-6,000 Panamanians—mainly civilians—were killed.32
On December 20, 1989, the U.S. military invaded Panama with 27,500 troops and 300 aircraft, killing thousands of civilians and removing Manuel Noriega. (Photo: AP)
The Persian Gulf War—the U.S. assault on Iraq, 1990-1991	George H.W. Bush (R)	From January 16 to February 27, 1991, the U.S. waged war against Iraq to strengthen its grip on the Persian Gulf and set the tone for the post-Soviet “new world order” it sought to establish. Some 100,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed and another 300,000 wounded. The war also caused the deaths of 70,000 civilians by January 1992.33
U.S.-UN killer sanctions on Iraq, 1990-2003	George H.W. Bush (R) Clinton (D) George W. Bush (R)	In the months leading up to the January-March 1991 Persian Gulf War, the U.S. and UN imposed a crippling economic blockade on Iraq. Then, during the attack, U.S. bombers destroyed much of Iraq’s infrastructure, including its electrical, water, and sewage treatment systems. By 1997, the UN reported that more than 1.2 million Iraqis had died as a result of medical shortages caused by the war and sanctions, including 750,000 children under the age of five. A 1999 survey found that twice as many Iraqi children under five were dying than before the Gulf War. That’s roughly 5,000 Iraqi children under five dying each month thanks to U.S. actions.34
Iraq, 2004 Iraqi woman seeks treatment for her three-month-old son suffering from dehydration due to U.S. sanctions. (Photo: AP)
Military intervention in the former Yugoslavia: Bosnia, 1994-95; Serbia, 1999	Clinton (D)	In the 1990s, the multi-national Republic of Yugoslavia was torn apart by the forces of reactionary nationalism, egged on, backed, and manipulated by Germany, Russia, the U.S., and other imperialist powers. A complex series of brutal wars erupted in which over 100,000 died. At various points, NATO—under U.S. command—intervened in order to shape the outcome in U.S. interests, carrying out its own war crimes. In April 1999 alone, NATO planes conducted hundreds of runs, destroying homes, apartment complexes, and bridges, and killing over 100 civilians in Kosovo and Serbia.35
Invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, 2001-present	George W. Bush (R) Obama (D) Donald Trump (R)	In October 2001, U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan, drove the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime from power, and installed a widely hated, pro-U.S. “Islamic Republic.” But the U.S. has never succeeded in defeating the Taliban or stabilizing the country, and the U.S. air and ground war has continued ever since. By August 2016, some 111,000 people had been killed and over 116,000 injured. More than 31,000 of the dead were Afghan civilians.36
Afghanistan, 2008 Children killed by U.S. airstrike in Kabul, Afghanistan, 2008. (Photo: AP)
Invasion, occupation, and ongoing intervention in Iraq, 2003-present	George W. Bush (R) Obama (D) Trump (R)	In 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein’s regime based on the lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. war and occupation sparked armed resistance and led to the rise of reactionary Islamic jihadism and the ethnic-sectarian conflict that continues to this day. From 2003 to 2016, 251,000 Iraqis were killed in the war, including between 168,239 and 187,378 civilians. Other studies estimate that between 1.2 and 1.4 million (and perhaps as many as 2.4 million) have died from the war’s direct and indirect impacts. More than 4.2 million Iraqis had been injured and at least 4.5 million driven from their homes by 2016.37
U.S., British, French war on Libya, 2011	Obama (D)	In March 2011, the U.S., Britain, and France seized on a mass uprising against Muammar Qaddafi’s oppressive, 42-year-long rule, to launch a war. Their goal: overthrow him and tighten their grip on Libya. For the next seven months, the U.S.-led coalition carried out extensive bombing raids and military operations. By October, between 10,000 and 30,000 had been killed and Qaddafi’s regime had been shattered. Libya was turned into a battleground between reactionaries, and life became a nightmare for the people, with shortages of food, water, and electricity. A third of the population had no medical care, and a half-million people were forced to flee from their homes.38
Arming, backing, and enabling the Saudi-led war in Yemen, 2015-present	Obama (D) Trump (R)	In March 2015, Saudi Arabia, with U.S. arms, technical support, and political backing, launched a war against Yemen’s Houthi movement, which had taken power. Since then, between 57,000 and 60,000 have been killed, mainly by Saudi air strikes. The Saudis have bombed Yemen’s food, water, and medical systems, causing massive hunger and disease. At least 85,000 children have starved to death as a result, and in 2016 and 2017 alone, 113,000 children died of starvation or preventable disease. Now, 14 million Yemenis are on the brink of famine.39
U.S. support for Israel’s wars, 1948-present	Truman (D)	The Nakba (1948). Israel was created by defeating armies from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq in war, and by violently forcing Palestinians from their lands and homes. Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians—of a population of 1.9 million—were expelled and made refugees. Zionist forces took more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres. The U.S. supported the foundation of Israel, seeing an opportunity to undercut British influence in the region and strengthen its own. One of Truman’s aides argued that Israel “could become a strategic asset—a kind of stationary aircraft carrier to protect American interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.”40
	Johnson (D)	1967 War [“Six-Day War”] (June 5, 1967-June 10, 1967). In 1967, Israel launched a preemptive war against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, crippling their air forces. Israel then carried out a successful ground offensive, seizing the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt; the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan; and the Golan Heights from Syria. Egypt’s casualties numbered more than 11,000, with 6,000 for Jordan, and 1,000 for Syria, compared with only 700 for Israel. This overwhelming military victory impressed on U.S. strategic thinkers that Israel was the key ally to ensure American domination in the Middle East. The U.S. began providing Israel cutting-edge weapons and jet fighters, and a massive flood of U.S. military aid that continues to this day. (Since its founding, the U.S. has given Israel a staggering $134 billion in aid—including over $94 billion in military aid—far more than the U.S. has given to any other country.) This established Israel’s military superiority over Arab regimes, and Israel increasingly functioned as an American proxy and attack dog, not only in the Middle East, but around the world.41
	Nixon (R)	1973 Arab-Israeli War (October 6, 1973-October 26, 1973) started after a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria fought to regain lands that had been seized by Israel in the 1967 war. The lowest casualty estimate is 8,000 (5,000 Egyptians and 3,000 Syrians) killed and 18,000 wounded. The highest estimate is 18,500 (15,000 Egyptians and 3,500 Syrians) killed. The U.S. fully backed Israel, even putting its nuclear forces on alert as a warning to the Soviets against intervening unilaterally in the war. It saw this (and the June 1967 war) as a way to bludgeon the surrounding Arab countries, and to demonstrate, as then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger put it, “the limits of Soviet influence.” They were also aimed at crushing the Palestinian liberation struggle, then the region’s most revolutionary and broadly influential movement.42
	Reagan (R)	1982 Lebanon War (June 1982-September 1982) Israel Defense Forces invaded southern Lebanon with the goals of expelling the Palestine Liberation Organization, removing Syrian influence over Lebanon, and installing a pro-Israeli Christian government. By the end of the second week, International Red Cross and Lebanese police figures claimed up to 14,000 people died and 20,000 were injured, mostly civilians. During the Siege of Beirut, by late August 1982, Lebanese sources put the death toll in Beirut at 6,776. Lebanese police and international doctors serving in Beirut put the share of civilian casualties at about 80 percent. While some in the Reagan administration may have been concerned about the fallout from Israel’s attack, the U.S. continued to staunchly support Israel overall, including the need to crush the Palestinian resistance and other anti-U.S. forces in the region.43
	George W. Bush (R)	Massacre in Gaza, 2008-09 Between December 27, 2008 and January 19, 2009, Israel waged a war of wanton death and destruction as collective punishment of Gazans after Hamas (an Islamist Party) was voted into power. Between 1,166 and 1,417 people were killed, including 844 unarmed civilians, 281 of them children. On January 9, Democrats and Republicans in both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly in support of Israel’s actions, declaring—in direct opposition to the findings of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Red Cross, and other humanitarian organizations—that Israel’s armed forces bore no responsibility for the large numbers of civilian casualties from their assault on Gaza.44
	Obama (D)	2014 Gaza War (July 8, 2014-August 26, 2014) 2,251 Palestinians were killed, including 1,462 Palestinian civilians, of whom 299 were women and 551 children; and 11,231 Palestinians, including 3,540 women and 3,436 children, were injured, of whom 10 percent suffered permanent disability as a result. Again, both Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate passed resolutions unanimously supporting Israel’s slaughter.45
	Trump (R)	2018—the Great March of Return Weekly protests began March 30, 2018 at Gaza’s border with Israel. They demanded that Israel’s crippling blockade be lifted and Palestinian refugees be given the right to return to their homes stolen by Israel in the 1948 war. The protests were also fueled by the Trump/Pence regime’s decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem—a big “fuck you” to the Palestinian people and a green light for Israeli ethnic cleansing. Unarmed protests have continued since then, and as of October 2018 over 150 Palestinians have been killed in the demonstrations. At least 10,000 others have been injured, including 1,849 children, 424 women, 115 paramedics, and 115 journalists. Of those injured, 5,814 were hit by live ammunition. The Trump/Pence regime responded by blaming the unarmed Palestinians for the violence.46
U.S. drone strikes in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia, 2002-present	George W. Bush (R) Obama (D) Trump (R)	Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the George W. Bush administration launched the so-called “war on terror”—a global war to retaliate for the attacks and expand and strengthen the U.S. empire. This war went after all manner of states and forces the U.S. rulers considered obstacles or opponents, and America’s drone war became a key component. Drones deployed from dozens of secret facilities in the Middle East, Africa, and Southwest Asia, directed from operational hubs in the U.S.—where the buttons are pushed and the missiles launched, thousands of miles away from the bloodshed. Over the next years, tens of millions in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia came to live in daily danger of terrorist attack—from U.S. drones. People gathered in groups at wedding parties, tribal meetings, or car convoys have been slaughtered by America’s remote-controlled high-tech death machines. In the dehumanizing jargon of the U.S. military, people killed by drones on purpose are referred to as “jackpots” while unintended deaths are referred to as “EKIAs”—“Enemies Killed in Action”—a category that includes women, children, and people bombed in homes or at social gatherings. The Obama administration greatly stepped up the number of unmanned drone attacks, launching more than 300 against Pakistan alone—six times the number ordered by Bush—as well as dozens more against Yemen, Somalia, and perhaps other countries in the region. Totals to date: Minimum Confirmed Strikes: 5,861 Total Killed: 8,289-11,792 Civilians Killed: 758-1,619 Children Killed: 252-36947

 

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1. American Crime Case #97: August 6 and 9, 1945—The Nuclear Incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, revcom.us, May 23, 2016  [back]

2. American Crime #49: 1950-53— Encircling, Threatening and Attacking the Chinese Revolution, revcom.us, January 1, 2018; William Blum, Killing Hope – U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II(Common Courage 1995), pp. 21-23; Alpha History, “The Chinese Civil War,” 2018.  [back]

3. American Crime Case #88: “Nuclear Testing in the Pacific,” revcom.us, July 18, 2016  [back]

4. Blum, Killing Hope, pp. 34-39; “Greek Civil WAR (1946-1949),” The Apricity.  [back]

5. American Crime #93: U.S. Invasion of Korea—1950, revcom.us, June 13, 2016.  [back]

6. American Crime #49: 1950-53— Encircling, Threatening and Attacking the Chinese Revolution, revcom.us, January 1, 2018.  [back]

7. Case #98: 1953 CIA Coup in Iran: Torture and Repression – Made in the U.S.A.,” revcom.us, May 16, 2016  [back]

8. Larry Everest, Oil, Power & Empire – Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda (Common Courage, 2004), pp. 65-67  [back]

9. American Crime #96: Vietnam, March 16, 1968 – The My Lai Massacre, revcom.us, May 23, 2016.  [back]

10. Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine – Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, p. 3  [back]

11. “Case #73: The CIA-Directed Murder of Patrice Lumumba,” revcom.us, November 7, 2016; Rogue State, pp. 137-138; see also, Stephen R. Weissman, “What Really Happened in Congo - The CIA, the Murder of Lumumba, and the Rise of Mobutu,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2014; “Zaire: An African Horror Story,” Atlantic, August 1993; “LOOKING BACK IN ANGER: LIFE IN MOBUTU'S ZAIRE,” Washington Post, June 1, 1997  [back]

12. American Crime #45: The Bay of Pigs Invasion, 1961, revcom.us, February 12, 2018  [back]

13. The Nuclear Close Calls: The Cuban Missile Crisis, Atomic Heritage Foundation, June 15, 2018.  [back]

14. American Crime #68: The 1965 U.S. Invasion of Dominican Republic, revcom.us #476, January 28, 2017.  [back]

15. American Crime Case 100: "1965 Massacre in Indonesia,"  revcom.us,  May 2, 2016.  [back]

16. Killing Hope, p. 88; “The Bombing of Laos: By the Numbers,” ABC NEWS, September 6, 2016 6  [back]

17. American Crime Case #47: The Bombing of Cambodia, 1969-1973, revcom.us #526, January 15, 2018  [back]

18. American Crime Case #34: America's 1972 Christmas Bombings North Vietnam, revcom.us, December 17, 2018.  [back]

19. American Crime Case #57: The 1973 CIA Coup in Chile, revcom.us, October 22, 2017;William Blum, Rogue State – A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Common Courage, 2000), p. 143  [back]

20. Rogue State, p. 147; Killing Hope, pp. 249-257; “Apartheid in South Africa: Decades of Serving the U.S. Empire,” revcom.us, December 9, 2013; Polgreen, Lydia, "Angolans Come Home to 'Negative Peace,'" New York Times, July 30, 2003  [back]

21. Mahmood Mamdami, “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism,” American Anthropologist, Sept 2002; Mozambique: Civil war, World Peace Foundation, August 7, 2015; “Evolution of political events in the Southern African region,” Extracts from APARTHEID TERRORISM - Destabilisation report by the Commonwealth Secretariat, 1989 (from “A Crime Against Humanity—Analysing the Repression of the Apartheid State,” posted at South African History Online (SAHO).  [back]

22. “Massacre: The Story of East Timor,” Democracy Now!, November 12,1997  [back]

23. Oil, Power & Empire, p. 90; The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, 1979-1989, ThoughtCo.com  [back]

24. Oil, Power & Empire, pp. 91-93, Ellsberg, p. 321  [back]

25. American Crime Case #38: The U.S. Backs El Salvador’s Death Squad Government, 1980 to 1992,” revcom.us, July 9, 2018.  [back]

26. Oil, Power & Empire, p. 99  [back]

27. Rogue State, P. 146-147; “Legacy of Civil Wars - In Central America, Reagan Remains A Polarizing Figure,” Washington Post, June 10, 2004  [back]

28. American Crime Case #95: Reagan's Butcher Carries Out Genocide in Guatemala, revcom.us, #441, May 30, 2016  [back]

29. Cole, Ronald (1997). “Operation Urgent Fury: The Planning and Execution of Joint Operations in Grenada”  [back]

30. Oil, Power & Empire, pp. 113-114  [back]

31. Oil, Power & Empire, p. 111  [back]

32. American Crime Case #43: The U.S. Invasion of Panama, 1989-1990, revcom.us, April 23, 2018  [back]

33. American Crime Case #32: The 1991 Persian Gulf War, "Operation Desert Storm", revcom.us, December 17, 2018.   [back]

34. American Crime Case #76: U.S.-UN Sanctions On Iraq,"A Legitimized Act of Mass Slaughter, revcom.us, #461, October 17, 2016.  [back]

35. "Yugoslavia: The American Way of War - "Destroying the Village to Save It," Revolutionary Worker #1003, April 25, 1999.  [back]

36. Costs of War -- Update on the Human Costs of War for Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001 to mid-2016, Watson Institute, Brown University.  [back]

37. American Crime Case #70: Operation Iraqi Freedom, 2003, revcom.us, December 5, 2016; and "Iraq conflict has killed a million Iraqis: survey," Reuters, January 30, 2008; "1.3 million children displaced by Iraq's war with Islamic State: UNICEF," Reuters, January 19, 2018; "The Staggering Death Toll in Iraq," Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J. S. Davies, AlterNet, March 15, 2018.  [back]

38. American Crime Case #35: The U.S.-NATO War on Libya, revcom.us, September 3, 2018  [back]

39. “85,000 Children in Yemen May Have Died of Starvation,” New York Times, November 21, 2018; “Yemeni children die as warring sides block aid deliveries: UNICEF,” Reuters, NOVEMBER 2, 2018; “Saudi Arabia Escalates Genocidal, American-Backed War in Yemen-U.S. Rulers Maneuver as 14 Million Yemenis on Brink of Starvation,” revcom.us, November 26, 201.  [back]

40. Oil, Power & Empire, p. 61; McDowall, David; Claire Palley (1987). The Palestinians. Minority Rights Group Report no 24. p. 10; The Nakba did not start or end in 1948-Key facts and figures on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. 23 May 2017, www.aljazeera.com.  [back]

41. "Six Day War,' Encyclopaedia Britannica, November 26, 2018.  [back]

42. Gawrych, George (2000). The Albatross of Decisive Victory: War and Policy Between Egypt and Israel in the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli Wars; Herzog, Encyclopaedia Judaica, Keter Publishing House, 1974, p. 87; Oil, Power & Empire, p. 56, Ellsberg, p. 321.  [back]

43. Fisk, Robert (2001). Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War. Oxford University Press; Molly Dunigan (28 February 2011). Victory for Hire: Private Security Companies’ Impact on Military Effectiveness. Stanford University Press. pp. 103.  [back]

44. Al-Mughrabi, Nidal, “Israel tightens grip on urban parts of Gaza,” Archived 9 January 2009 at the Wayback Machine; Noam Chomsky, “Exterminate all the Brutes”: Gaza 2009.  [back]

45. "Key figures on the 2014 hostilities - Data featured in the Report of the Independent Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza Conflict," United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Occupied Palestinian Territory, June 23, 2015; "U.S. Senate Unanimously Approves Resolution Giving Full Support of Israel on Gaza," HAARETZ, July 20, 2014  [back]

46. “U.S.-Israeli Massacre Kills 60 Palestinians and Wounds Over 2,700 
Everyone Must Stand Up and Protest Against These Crimes Against Humanity!,” Revcom.us, May 14, 2018;, Seven Protesters Killed, Two of Them Children, and 257 Injured at Friday Demonstrations in Gaza, Al Mezan Center For Human Rights, September 29, 2018; “Total US Foreign Aid to Israel 1949-Present, JewishVirtualLibrary.org.  [back]

47. Drone Warfare, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.  [back]

 

A "Wave"—of Hype and Delusion?
Or What Humanity Needs: an ACTUAL Revolution!

January 16, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

On Saturday, January 19, tens of thousands of women and men marched around the country. The following statement was part of a REVOLUTION broadsheet passed out to thousands and thousands at these marches.

To all those who have come out to the Women’s March angry and anguished about what is happening to women and to all the billions of people all over the planet…

You are being played. This march will take you nowhere—at least nowhere good. We do not need a “wave” that will end up washing our anger and desire to fight back into the confines of the very system that causes the problems in the first place. We need an actual revolution.

All over the world, women aspire to break free from the shackles of male domination. They increasingly demand to be treated as full human beings in every sphere. Yet they are being slammed back on every front, and misled and misdirected by those claiming to stand for them.

It is no wonder that women dress as “handmaids” to protest when:

• the most fundamental right of a woman to decide if and when she will bear a child is being actively repressed by governments worldwide, with the U.S. Supreme Court increasingly infested with justices who intend to overturn this basic right;
• one in three women will be victims of sexual or physical assault at some point in their lives;
• tens of millions of women and children are bought and sold in the multi-billion dollar global enterprise of sex trafficking;
• hundreds of millions of women are trapped in virtual slave labor, working in sweatshops or in fields, or as maids, where sexual harassment and assault is the price of survival; other hundreds of millions in better jobs, or more professional situations and the arts, or in schools likewise face discrimination, harassment, abuse and assault, as has been graphically brought out in the past year;
• social relations between men and women in every sphere, from the home to the culture as a whole, are saturated with putrid male supremacy and “guy culture”;
• Dark Age religious fundamentalists with their even more openly repressive attacks on women have increasingly metastasized into the ruling cliques in a number of major countries—with the Trump/Pence fascist regime as a prime example.

But everywhere—including at the “Women’s March”—we are deluged with triumphalist bullshit in the face of this intensifying horror. Women’s March 2019 proclaims with great pride that “The 2017 Women’s March inspired hundreds of women to run, millions more to vote, and dozens to win elected office”; and that “The 2019 Women’s March marks two years of resistance to the Trump Presidency, two years of training new activists, and two years of building power, and this time we are coming back with an agenda.”

This idea that if you just get involved in working inside the system you can make a difference is a very old worn-out scam, but it gets refashioned every time people rise up, every time they hunger for change. It is the number one way to deceive and confuse people into thinking that this system can be made to work for the good of the masses of people.

It cannot. The oppression of women is stitched into the fabric of capitalism-imperialism, and you cannot fundamentally eliminate the one without getting rid of the other. Go here to find out why this is so. These horrors, among many more, are completely unnecessary at this stage in history. They are kept going not by a few men or some wrong-headed policies that can be easily switched out, but by the system of capitalism-imperialism. All this cries out NOT for the replacement of some men at the top of that system with some women, but for the overthrow of that system!

Think about it: women have headed up governments all over the world, from India to Germany, from Brazil to Britain (see “‘Women’s Waves’ of the Past: Know Your History—DON’T Repeat It!!”).  But has this fundamentally changed the conditions of the masses of women, or the people more generally, in any of these countries? NO! Why? Because no matter who gets put in that position, they have to play and govern by the rules of the system—or the system won't function and likely they would be forced out before that.

The point is NOT to stop fighting. The point is to see and wage that fight as part of something larger: making revolution, overthrowing (not reforming) this system, with the aim of emancipating all humanity.

And the possibility of revolution is real. There is a Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, which would be established as foundational law after the victorious revolution in this country and which clearly states the following in its preamble, as part of the fundamental principles of the new society:

The oppression of women arose together with the emergence of exploitative class divisions among human beings thousands of years ago, has been carried forward and become deeply entrenched in all societies ruled by exploiting classes, and was a marked feature of the imperialist United States of America and its domination and influence in the world. Abolishing and uprooting all this is one of the most important objectives of the New Socialist Republic in North America. This is expressed not only in full legal equality between women and men, but beyond that in the declared orientation and policy of this Republic to overcome all “tradition’s chains” embodied in traditional gender roles and divisions, and all the oppressive relations bound up with this, in every sphere of society, and to enable women, as fully as men, to take part in and contribute to every aspect of the struggle to transform society, and the world, in order to uproot and abolish all relations of oppression and exploitation and emancipate humanity as a whole.

That Constitution is the work of Bob Avakian, BA, who has brought forward a new communism and who leads the revolution in the U.S. As a critical part of this work, BA has done extensive and trailblazing work on the roots of the oppression of women, and the specific ways it is bound by a thousand threads to this capitalist system we live in today. He has critically drawn on past revolutionary experience, and developed a deeper understanding of what a socialist society must do to carry the fight further, after revolution has been made, in order to fully break every chain and emancipate all humanity. If you are really serious about ending the oppression of women, and of all humanity, then you need to get into the revolution and you need to get into BA.

Revolution will not be easy. It will involve tremendous effort and real sacrifices, facing twists and turns and solving a lot of complex problems; but it IS possible. (See HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution, put out by the Revolutionary Communist Party.) We can bring into being a new world, in which all of humanity could flourish. Join with those who have already set out on the road to do that!

Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger by Rebecca Traister

Or: How to Domesticate Your Rage and Get In on a System That Exploits and Torments Women All Over the World

By Toni Redtree

January 16, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Rebecca Traister is a commentator on politics from a feminist perspective.  In her book Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger, she exposes how anger works for men in ways that it does not work for women within the system—and how women’s anger has been the fuel often igniting movements for social change in the history of the U.S. Traister goes after the rampant misogyny that marked the 2016 election, and the more general and pervasive oppression that female political candidates and women in the professions and business must face. To be clear: there is valid exposure of this in her book including in the treatment of Hillary Clinton. But the election of the first female president would not have changed this, nor will Traister’s prescriptions do anything but keep the same machine that generates that oppression going.

Traister in Good and Mad posits the problem as government not being truly representative, prescriptively implying that if that representation can be wrested from these white patriarchal men the majority of women could be free from subjugation. She states in her chapter Let’s Get Elected: “In the wake of Trump’s defeat of Clinton, a gang of women were eyeing the aging cast of men who’d been hogging America’s political power ... forever, and imagining they might replace them. Replacement. It was a particularly charged concept...” [Emphasis ours]

Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that fear of being “replaced”—backlash against the relatively minor concessions made to women and people of color—has fueled the rise of the Trump/Pence regime and the fascist movement more generally. But—much more fundamentally—NO! Replacement—that is, changing the faces in a system that remains fundamentally the same—does not make it represent those groups this system continues to oppress. "Replacement" just means you want to get to the top of it and grab “your” share of the spoils too.

Traister’s Fantasies vs. Historical Evidence

While a constant refrain, it is one that is thoroughly refuted by a mountain of historical evidence that women (and oppressed people) can come to the head of oppressive governments while the majority of the people they supposedly represent remain locked in subjugated existences and change anything significant for those people over any length of time. Did Obama’s election and presidency fundamentally change the situation of the vast section of people in the U.S. who are Black? Nearly every single country in South Asia has had women in power, sometimes for decades, with no real change in the horrifying oppression of women. There is more than enough evidence that women are equally capable of being pigs—presiding over a monstrous system—from Hillary Clinton to Theresa May to Angela Merkel.

There is NO historical evidence that women being equally “represented” in government have been able to fundamentally change or “reform away” the basic functioning of the capitalist-imperialist system, the very functioning of which engenders and reinforces—every second of the day—the systemic oppression and worldwide subordination of women. To the degree legal rights have been extended to women and other oppressed groups, they have largely required tremendous struggle and sacrifice from “below,” from the people—they have not been merely granted from on high!

Along with slavery, patriarchal rule was encoded into the nation’s founding—something Traister recognizes—but the fact is that the oppression of women continues to be integral to this system’s ability to function and exist. Even while a vast majority of the world’s female population has been drawn into the labor force, forces of reaction that aim to reassert and reinforce patriarchy have gained ascendance. Mike Pence, a Christian fascist, now sits within a heartbeat of the presidency; someone who believes in the literal biblical relegation of women to a man’s authority, and won’t sit alone in a room with a woman. 

Revolution Does NOT Mean Old Wine in New Bottles

Anyone who gets into the halls of Congress must play by the rules required by the system’s functioning and learn to “compromise,” as we hear incessantly from the Democrats… and as their actions prove. The subordination of women in this system cannot be “reformed,” “elected” or “represented” away—it’s in the nature of the beast.

None of this—especially changing faces atop this monstrous system—is remotely “revolutionary,” despite what Traister may claim. An actual revolution means a DIFFERENT system, not just different people administering oppression. An actual revolution requires the OVERTHROW of the system. It speaks to the ignorance of this society that one can get away with using the word revolutionary in the service of women motivated by something as hideous as getting atop—or their fair share in—a system as predatory, monstrous and outmoded as U.S. capitalism-imperialism!

Hillary Clinton—Exhibit A for Traister… and an Exposure of the American Chauvinism Saturating Her Approach

If there is a single example of the logical outcome of the political solutions in this book, it lies in Rebecca Traister’s shameless apology and support for Hillary Clinton.

Let’s state what should be an obvious and indisputable truth: Hillary Clinton is NOT a standard bearer for the liberation of women—she is a woman who is a war criminal. Just to take two examples:

• She is a woman who proved her hawk credentials as head of the Obama State Department—leading the charge to depose the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, as part of U.S. efforts to dominate the region. Traister, who laments Clinton’s inability to show emotion, has conveniently forgotten her Hannibal-Lecter-worthy performance gleefully announcing the slaying of Muammar Gaddafi. As Libya plunged into chaos, Clinton’s “competent” fingerprints are all over the crime scene of the thousands dead and the refugees fleeing the collapse of Libyan society, drowning as they try to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.
• Clinton’s fingerprints can also be found on the women and children stranded in squalid encampments at the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2009, the U.S. ambassador to Honduras told Secretary Clinton that the removal of the elected president, Manuel Zelaya, a left leaning liberal populist, would be an “an illegal and unconstitutional coup.” Despite this, and while issuing mild criticisms, Clinton lent legitimacy to elections that forbade Zelaya’s participation. The regime brought to power with the coup was openly fascistic and pro-U.S., plunging the Honduran people even more deeply into the grip of U.S. domination, state-sponsored political assassinations, and the intensified violence, poverty, and oppression that people are now fleeing by the thousands.

Hillary Clinton’s active support for the main policies of her husband, Bill Clinton, while he was President (and she was a major, if unofficial, member of his team)—policies of mass incarceration, of NAFTA and its devastation of Mexico, of the profoundly anti-woman and racist ending of welfare—were themselves criminal. Her role in the promotion of the slogan that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare” (thereby ceding the moral high ground to the Christian fascists) was particularly damaging.

Anyone who can put “Hillary Clinton” and “using your anger as a catalyst for change” in the same sentence—much less the same book—is automatically disqualified from using the word “revolutionary” in their book title.

Ultimately, the problem is Good and Mad not only reinforces “let’s get elected” as the horizons of what is needed, but it’s fundamentally not really all that mad—commensurate with the depth, the scale, the intensity of women’s oppression all around the world. The fury of women can indeed be a catalyst for fundamental and radical social change—one that gets to the roots of the problem through an actual revolution. But Traister’s outlook and program can only channel that fury into futility or, worse yet, becoming a cog in the machine.

(Next week: Traister on #MeToo—And what happens when “me” eclipses “too”)

How the Democrats Have Colluded to Restrict Reproductive Rights: 4 Examples

January 16, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

1. The Hyde Amendment

The Hyde Amendment, passed for the first time in 1976, prohibits federal funds from being used to provide abortions. This has hit poor, Black, Latina, Native American, and rural women hardest. In 1977, Rosie Jimenez became the first woman known to die after the Hyde Amendment deprived her and other women of safe abortion care.

Since 1976, The Hyde Amendment has been re-approved and signed into law every single year—including by three Democratic presidents: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. Obama went so far as to further enshrine it through Executive Order 13535, which explicitly prohibited federal funds for abortion in the context of the Affordable Care Act.

2. “Safe, Legal, and Rare”

During Bill Clinton’s presidency, anti-abortion violence surged, and legislative attempts to end abortion mounted. Bill and Hillary Clinton responded that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” “Rare” implies that abortion is wrong, but abortion is not wrong. What is wrong is forcing a woman to have a child against her will. The Clintons repeated this mantra for decades, including during Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid. This craven ceding of the moral high ground to rabid anti-abortion fascists disoriented and demobilized millions as abortion rights were systematically stripped away.

3. Democrats Boycott the Funeral of Dr. George Tiller

In 2009, Dr. George Tiller was assassinated in his church by an anti-abortion fanatic. Dr. Tiller was one of the most respected abortion providers in the U.S. and one of just three to provide late-term abortions. More than 1,000 mourners attended Dr. Tiller’s funeral, including abortion providers from around the country and many former patients. Not a single Democratic politician showed up.

4. The Democrats REFUSED to Make Abortion Central to the Fight Against Gorsuch or Kavanaugh

Donald Trump promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. In response to both of Trump’s fascist Supreme Court appointments, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, the Democrats refused to make abortion central to their opposition. No leading Democrat stated that it is completely illegitimate and immoral for the state to force women to bear children against their will. The Democrats refused to throw down and mobilize people to stop these nominations. In the case of Kavanaugh, the Democrats focused instead on Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual assaults as a youth in a way that was not at the heart of the danger he posed and harmed important principles related to due process. All this rendered the millions who support abortion passive while legitimizing a court that is now poised to drop the hammer on the right to access abortion and birth control nationwide.

"Women's Waves" of the Past
Know Your History—DON'T Repeat It!!

January 16, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

(and if you don't know who these criminals are on sight, click the faces in the image below to find out...)

(and if you don't know who these criminals are on sight, tap the faces in the image below to find out...)

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A "Wave"—Of Hype And Delusion?

Or What Humanity Needs— An ACTUAL Revolution!

FILES FOR PRINTING

January 17, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

See the articles online:

• A “Wave”—Of Hype And Delusion?
  Or What Humanity Needs: An ACTUAL Revolution!
• Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger by Rebecca Traister
  Or: How to Domesticate Your Rage and Get In on a System That Exploits and Torments Women All Over the World
  By Toni Redtree
• How the Democrats Have Colluded to Restrict Reproductive Rights: 4 Examples
• "Women's Waves" of the Past
  Know Your History—DON'T Repeat It!!

Video Clips:

 

 

 

 

DOWNLOAD 2-sided 8.5"x14" PDF for flier

(note space on back of flier for local information to be added)

DOWNLOAD ZIP file of PDFs of 4-page 11x17 broadsheet

(note space on bottom of page 4 for local information to be added)

 

From the Revolution Club Chicago:

January 18 Protest: Sentence Van Dyke to Jail—The Whole Damn System is Guilty as Hell!

January 17, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Revcom.us received the following press release and statement from the Revolution Club Chicago, issued after a judge declared the three Chicago cops on trial for coverup in the police murder of Laquan MacDonald were declared “not guilty.”

Rally: Revolution Club Chicago & Stolen Lives Families:
LaToya Howell - mother of Justus Howell murdered by Zion Police
Chantell Brooks - mother of Michael Wesley
Gloria Pinex - mother of Darius Pinex
Shante Needham - sister of Sandra Bland - a statement
And other Stolen Lives Families

Where: Cook County Criminal Court House, 2650 S. California Ave.

When: Friday, January 18, 1-4 pm

Contact Information: 773-329-5014

CHICAGO GODDAMN!
STATEMENT BY THE REVOLUTION CLUB CHICAGO

A Crook County Judge has just issued a not guilty on all counts verdict in the case of 3 CPD officers charged in the conspiracy to cover up the murder of Laquan McDonald by the murderer Jason Van Dyke.

As we have noted before, that very fact the only 3 officers were charged in this crime, despite direct involvement of numerous other officers, commanders, and the mayor himself, was already outrageous and the precursor to potentially sweeping all this under the rug.

To explain why the officers could not be held accountable for false statements and reports the judge included in her decision that essentially no evidence can disprove what a police officer says they "believe" happened. Ominously, this involves repeating and perhaps expanding the modern day Dred Scott standard that allows police to simply say they "believed" their life was in danger to avoid prosecution when they are caught murdering Black and Brown people. Additionally, the judge took the fact that numerous supervising officers (who were not charged in this case) reviewed and approved the lies and cover-up as proof that there was no cover-up.

We will see what this will mean for the sentencing of Jason Van Dyke for the murder of Laquan McDonald tomorrow, because criminalizing Laquan was yet again a feature of this trial and verdict. Much more can and should be said about this verdict, but it boils down to this:

The systematic and systemic nature of police murder along with systematic lies and misinformation campaigns carried out by all levels of the government to defend these murderers has just been given judicial blessing and approval EVEN in the face of damning and illuminating exposure and truth-telling. The Revolution Club Chicago calls on everyone to join us tomorrow, 1:00 pm, at 26th and California in front of the Cook County Courthouse to denounce this verdict, and respond to the sentencing of Jason Van Dyke which is to be given tomorrow.

This reveals, once again, that this system cannot be reformed, it must be overthrown. And as Bob Avakian puts it in BAsics 1:24, “The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people….”

 

Dashcam Video of Officer Jason Van Dyke Shooting Laquan McDonald

Police murder Laquan McDonald at 5 minute mark

 

Reprinted from RefuseFascism.org

The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!
Fascism Cannot Be Voted Out,
The People Must Drive It from Power

A challenge to everyone at the Women's Marches from RefuseFascism.org

January 18, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

The Women’s March is wrong when it says that this is a time to celebrate “two years of resistance to the Trump Presidency, two years of training new activists, and two years of building power...” Nor, is it time to funnel our energies into 2020 and backing more women in office.

In the face of rapidly advancing fascism, this is deadly delusion.

We are two years into the Trump/Pence fascist regime. We have seen: Muslims banned. White supremacists march openly and murder, with open backing from the president. Women are poised to lose the right to abortion and LGBTQ rights recently won are under assault. The courts packed with fascist judges at the highest level and all the way down. Pipe bombs sent to powerful people in public life who were demonized by Trump. Children torn from parents and locked in cages. Teargas fired – and the border shut down – to stop desperate asylum-seekers. Treaties and international agreements torn up. Nuclear holocaust threatened. An unending torrent of LIES. Massive environmental deregulation, endangering the planet and humanity’s future. This country’s largest anti-Semitic massacre. And now Trump has shut down the government to demand his Fascist Border Wall – a concentrated symbol and major leap in his fascist program to Make America White Again.

The chaos in the White House is not a sign of incompetence or unraveling. Rather, this chaos is the very vehicle by which this regime frees itself from the constraints imposed by the established domestic and international order.

However, people are being told – and far, far, far too many are believing – that the new Democratic majority in Congress marks a huge victory and a “new day.” MSNBC, Democracy Now, Women’s March leaders, and many others are nonstop heralding the “good news” of the diverse identities of the freshmen congressional reps, various new legislation or inquiries, and on and on.

This is not only wrong, it is a deadly delusion.

None of what the Democrats are doing is striking at or in any way moving to stop the FASCISM that is at the core of the Trump/Pence regime and which is already destroying millions of lives and imperiling the future of human civilization across the globe. But what the Democrats are doing is pacifying and domesticating people’s outrage into meaningless channels precisely at a time when it needs to be breaking loose into the streets with the demand that: “This Nightmare Must End: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America!” In the crisis over Trump’s Fascist Wall, the Democratic Party leadership is not taking on the white supremacy, anti-immigrant terror, and all-around fascism concentrated in this Border Wall. Rather, they repeatedly agree with Trump that “border security” needs to be strengthened, simply insisting that this clamp down on immigrants be done in ways that are “more effective” and less obviously cruel.

All this underscores the crucial truth concentrated in Refuse Fascism’s Call to Action that, “[T]he world as we have known it is being torn asunder. This requires getting out of our comfort zones and not allowing our differences to stand in the way of rising together in an unprecedented, unrelenting mass struggle to confront the danger of a Trump/Pence fascist America.”

And, “[T]here IS another way. A different kind of protest. We need to organize now for the time when we can launch massive, sustained nonviolent protests in the streets of cities and towns across the country – protests that continue day after day and don’t stop, creating the kind of political situation in which the demand that the Trump/Pence regime be removed from power is met.”

RefuseFascism.org is a movement of people coming from diverse perspectives, united in our recognition that the Trump/Pence Regime poses a catastrophic danger to humanity and the planet, and that it is our responsibility to drive them from power through non-violent protests that grow every day until our demand is met. Refuse Fascism is the only organization with that understanding and mission.

Join with us! Join us here and now at the march spreading this message. Sign up, donate and get organized at RefuseFascism.org, email info@refusefascism.org, or call Refuse Fascism National Office at 917-407-1286.

 

Setting the Record Straight on Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the Important Difference Between the Two

January 18, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

The ruling class media and mainstream political spokespeople consistently conflate the legitimate and correct opposition to the state of Israel and the ideology of Zionism with anti-Semitism and hatred of Jewish people. At the same time, there is a rising tide worldwide of anti-Semitism—also strongly backed by sections of the ruling classes—which is a danger in its own right and perniciously influences the thinking of masses of people.

To set the record straight on this:

1) The state of Israel was founded by European Jews who migrated to the Middle East and settled on land that had been historically and continuously occupied by another people, the Palestinians. This movement was from the beginning conceived of and openly advertised by its main founder as a colonial project. At least half a million Palestinians were driven out of their land in a war of ethnic cleansing that included a substantial number of significant massacres. The new Israeli state received substantial support from various great powers, both in the period leading up to its founding and subsequently, and today occupies the role of the critical regional enforcer for U.S. imperialist interests. It is on this basis that people and institutions—including REVCOM—maintain that Israel is an illegitimate settler state. This view is not only utterly legitimate, it is objectively true and irrefutable. Attempts to label such a view as anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish, etc. and to suppress those who adhere to it are cowardly and dangerous; it is the use of power to suppress truth and forbid debate over that truth. Such attempts must be opposed, and all those who come under fire for either adhering to that view or supporting the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel¹ (a movement which actually stops short of that view) should be supported.

2) Anti-Semitism—views that in one way or another demonize and dehumanize the Jewish people as a people—has absolutely no truth or validity, should not be “up for debate,” and must be exposed for the reactionary poison that it is. Such views have led to or justified genocidal acts for several thousand years, including but not limited to the Nazi murder of six million Jewish people, and until very recently were “stock in trade” of most European ruling-class institutions, including the Catholic Church. Those who today proffer such views—from Alex Jones² to Louis Farrakhan to David Icke to ISIS, etc.—generally do so as part of a profoundly reactionary and often straight-up fascist discourse and program, and those views and programs must also be firmly opposed. As for oppressed people who fall for the lie that “the Jews” were responsible for the slave trade or today “control everything” behind the scenes: you are being played for fools and suckers, while the real enemy—the capitalist-imperialist system—is let off the hook.

 

 

1. The mainstream of the boycott, divestment, sanction (BDS) movement does not uphold the position that the state of Israel as a whole is illegitimate, but holds that the Israeli “settlements” (armed outposts) in the West Bank and Jerusalem—the territories occupied by Israel after a further war of expansion in 1967—are illegitimate. Even this is too much, however, for the imperialists and the supporters of Israel. [back]

2. It must also be noted that anti-Semitic views, especially in code words and “dog whistles,” have been part of Donald Trump’s approach for a long time—including his infamous characterization that there were “good people” on the side of the neo-Nazis and KKK attack dogs in Charlottesville who were, among other things, chanting openly anti-Semitic slogans. [back]

 

Reposted from RefuseFascism.org

Isabel Cárdenas Statement in Support of Maya—Facing 7 Years in Prison for a Protest in Support of Immigrants

January 18, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Maya faces seven years in prison for a SILENT PROTEST IN SUPPORT OF IMMIGRANTS. Meanwhile the demonizing, verbal and physical attacks on immigrants have escalated since the Trump/Pence Regime was imposed on the citizenry of this country by the Electoral College Vote. First it was DACA, now immigrant families who search for a life free of poverty and so much violence by seeking asylum in this country are, instead, having their children Caged, Tortured, and Sexually Abused by ICE, following orders of the Trump/Pence Administration.

The last phrase in the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance states “ONE NATION UNDER GOD, INDIVISIBLE, WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL.” Neither what is stated in the Pledge of Allegiance nor the Constitution is now being practiced or respected! There is no Liberty or Justice when citizens of a particular group such as Maya, a member of the Revolution Club, are arrested and face incarceration for exercising their LIBERTY AND RIGHT OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH. The citizens of this country ARE NO LONGER INDIVISIBLE, UNDER GOD; they are being divided and their Human Rights are constantly violated. AND WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ASYLUM FOR REFUGEES? WHAT IS BEING DONE TO MAYA IS AN OUTRAGE AND A VIOLATION OF HER RIGHT OF LIBERTY AND FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION.

ALL CHARGES MUST BE DROPPED NOW!
RESPECTFULLY,
ISABEL CÁRDENAS
80-YEAR-YOUNG AMERICAN-SALVADORAN/USA CITIZEN
AND COMMUNITY ACTIVIST SINCE 1960

 

 

Maya (wearing “NO!” shirt) is facing seven years in prison for participating in this silent protest in solidarity with the 11 million immigrants targeted by the Trump/Pence regime. Learn more about her case here.

The Outrageous Sentence of the Murderer of Laquan McDonald

One More Reason to Overthrow a System That Murders Its Youth

From the Revolution Club Chicago

January 18, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

January 18—Last October, a jury found Chicago cop Jason Van Dyke guilty of second degree murder of Laquan McDonald and 16 counts of aggravated battery. Today, a judge handed down a sentence for Van Dyke that is a sickening, brutal beat-down of Black people and an outrage against humanity. For the racist murder of Laquan McDonald, the ripping away of the life of a 17-year-old who was loved and was just beginning his life, this police officer got a sentence of 6 years, 9 months—and he could be out in half that. This comes just one day after another judge handed down a verdict of “not guilty” on three former and current Chicago cops, including Van Dyke’s partner, on charges of lying about and conspiring to cover up the murder of Laquan.

In the courtroom today, the prosecution brought to the stand four Black men who testified about personal experiences with Van Dyke’s brutality and racism. All were routine traffic stops. One man had a gun pointed at his temple by Van Dyke, another was choked, all were called “motherfuckers” and at least one called “nigger.” Edward Nance said Van Dyke violently pulled him out of the car, handcuffed him, slammed him face-first on the car, and dragged him by the cuffs. He had been a high school basketball and football referee at the time, but because of the physical and psychological trauma from what he had suffered at the hands of Van Dyke, “I can’t referee no more. I’m in constant pain every day.”

After a day of this harrowing witness testimony revealing that Van Dyke was a terrorist-at-large hounding and brutalizing Black people long before the less than 15 seconds he took to decide to murder Laquan McDonald... after thousands and thousands of cases of police getting away with murder after murder after murder of Black, Latinos, and Native American people... in a courthouse that every day is locking away the lives of Black and Latino people in a meat grinder of mass incarceration... after America's entire history of white supremacy and lynch mob terror that these police proudly carry on into today... after all the struggle of the people and the "dragging truth into light" required to finally get ONE of these killer cops found guilty of murder... This sentence, this sickening charade of a punishment, spits in the face of everyone who has a heart for justice. This comes as the second in a 1-2 punch after the full acquittal of the three officers who were tried for the vast conspiracy to cover up and lie about the murder of Laquan McDonald. 

Ironically, the outrageously light sentence on killer cop Van Dyke—and yesterday’s acquittal of three fellow pigs—comes at the start of the MLK Day weekend, which supposedly marks how far Black and other oppressed people have come in America. In fact, this sentence and yesterday's verdict send the message loud and clear that there are virtually no circumstances in America under which a cop can be seriously punished for murdering a Black man, woman or child, or for systematically covering up and lying about these murders. This sentence and yesterday's verdict strengthen the already devastating genocide of police terror and mass incarceration targeting Black and Brown people. This sentence, and yesterday's verdict, stand as a declaration and announcement of the absolute bankruptcy and worthlessness of this system and its supposed mechanisms of justice, and the crying need for revolution to overthrow this worthless system.

It has been true since day one in this country that white supremacy is woven into the fabric of America. What’s needed to bring an end to this is actual revolution, the overthrow of the system of capitalism-imperialism. What wasn't always true, but IS true now, is that we have the science, the strategy and the leadership to lead millions to make that revolution. So now that this system has shown you, again, its complete illegitimacy, what are you gonna do?

Now is the time to go to work on preparing for revolution. Get with the Revolution Club. Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution. Go to revcom.us and watch the speech by Bob Avakian, the leader of the revolution: Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution. Spread this everywhere.

This system cannot be reformed, it must be overthrown!

Bob Avakian, "Yes there's a conspiracy, to get the cops off."

Reposted from RefuseFascism.org

Report the Truth MSNBC–The Trump/Pence Regime is Fascist

January 19, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

White House lawyers have begun prepping legal justification for declaring a national emergency over the wall.

While nobody is sure what Trump declaring a national would mean or the implications, this highlights the great urgency and importance of acting together Saturday at MSNBC Headquarters, sounding the alarm on the reality that the Trump/Pence regime is fascist and it’s up to the people to act.

MSNBC is leading people to accommodate and conciliate with fascism. Although on the surface, it might seem like they are doing a lot of exposure on the Trump/Pence regime. They are not sounding the alarm on how the Trump/Pence regime is fascist. And every night they are brainwashing people to think that the “end of the presidency is near” while Trump hammers into place a fascist agenda into place.

For example, Thursday on Morning Joe, commentators talked about Trump declaring a national emergency but they said he was doing this because the wall is a “vanity project’ and NOT part of a fascist program of ethnic cleansing of immigrants.

Cosmetic plastic surgery is vanity project. Locking out, criminalizing, killing children at the border is ethnic cleansing.

People need to know the difference.

After having a commentator on speaking about the likeliness of Trump declaring this national emergency, commentators followed with... “Yeah, but his ratings on his speech didn’t do very well, so is his base getting worn out.”

MORE ON THE PROTEST…

January 12, 1PM at MSNBC Headquarters entrance, Refuse Fascism presented the facts that show that MSNBC is feeding its audience a steady diet of Russia, Russia, Russia and Mueller, Mueller, Mueller and how they are NOT sounding the alarm that the Trump/Pence Regime is hammering into place a fascist America.

Watch and share the video. The end of the Trump/Pence Regime is NOT near. It’s up to the people to be in the streets to drive this regime from power.

In a survey done in July, in one week; Rachel Maddow spent 123 minutes on Trump and Russia; 37 minutes on voting Democrat, Trump’s incompetence, cronyism, lack of patriotism, 12 minutes on abuse of immigrants and 0 minutes on white supremacy, the global environmental crisis, patriarchy, abuses of women, and LGBTQ people, US wars and intervention, Trump and fascism. As of July 3, 2018, they had aired nearly 500 segments on Stormy Daniels and 0 on the War on Yemen.

The effect of the illusions spread by MSNBC is to pacify and paralyze people at the very time that millions should be led to understand the danger of the Trump/Pence regime and to act accordingly. RefuseFascism.org is building a movement of tens of thousands of people who will take to the streets streets in a sustained protest that doesn’t stop until our demand is met: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go. As part of this effort, we are waging a societal wide challenge for people to break with illusions and lullabies that have catastrophic consequences for humanity.

 

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Refuse Fascism Live from MSNBC HQ: Report the Truth MSNBC—Trump/Pence Are Fascist