Red Star: Empire of the Rich

America is an evil power whose aggression, dishonesty and barbarity are almost without equal. But the cruelty of killing approximately half a million Iraqis, orstrangling the Nicaraguan revolution in its crib, doesn’t tell us why these things happen.

Evil isn’t an explanation.

From Honduras and Haiti to Indonesia and Iran, America’s enemies were popular revolutionaries and reformers with mass-backing who sought to wrest control of their resources, their capital and their labor from foreign investors. They were blockaded, shot, and slandered in death. History will absolve them.

Americans butchered in the name of democracy, while denying the franchise to millions of people at home, and creating vast underclasses with no chance at a decent life.

America is an oligarchy, a democracy of money. The American ruling class seized the ruins of European empires and funded reactionary religious movements, bourgeois barons, conservative landlords and fascist gangsters to consolidate the remnants of old colonialism into a new colonialism.

“US Foreign Policy is not stupid or confused, but it’s very rational and it's very consistent,” political scientist Michael Parenti noted in one lecture. "The goal is to secure the profits of the Fortune 500, by guaranteeing cheap labor, raw materials, and a class bargain for white workers at home."

Sometimes, as The Guardian columnist Owen Jones notes, “no good can come of adding even more western missiles to Syria’s carnage.”

But, liberals say, sweatshops are woke, they employ girls. Capitalism is barbarism.

The Americans and their European forebears destroyed functional societies, provoked famine by switching food for cash crops, consolidated land in the hands of magnates and slaughtered any opposition. Africa subsidizes the rest of the world to the tune of $40 billion a year, while poverty is growing in America.

Any opposition, progressive, socialist, communist, nationalist or religious was branded as undemocratic, reactionary, dictatorial and then smashed.

Fake news dates back at least to 2003 when American officials of both parties invented an excuse to murder a million people, or to the 1990s, when American-backed anti-communist regimes oversaw one of worst peacetime falls in standards of living anytime in world history. The fall of the Soviet Union, which saw free market economics kill as many as the the famine of 1932-33, was part of a broader movement. Neoliberalism drove down wages globally and left half of the world poorer, more polluted and deeper in debt.

Now the generals and pundits want to do the same things in Syria, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, Russia and China. Wars of aggression are crimes, regardless of what CNN says Kim Jong-un or Assad are doing. Fear and war are good business. Look at how ready the United States is to stop bloodshed in Syria through indiscriminate bombardment.

To stop war we have to stop the Empire, which means strikes, demonstrations, sabotage and political pressure. It means organizing people targeted for recruitment, veterans, and soldiers, to corrode the sword of the ruling class. Treason is heroic in the service of humanity.