Image by Phạm Nhật.
I mourn the six dead Israeli hostages recently murdered by Hamas before Israeli Defense Forces could claim them as military victories because I strive to be a human being. But it has been revolting to hear and see so much detail in the dominant media about the beauty and humanity of one group of people — the Israeli hostages — while hearing and seeing little detail in that media about the beauty and humanity of a monumentally larger group of people — the 40,000-plus Palestinian Gazans, mostly children, massacred by the genocidal and fascist state of Israel and its arch-criminal United States backers/arms-suppliers/funders/protectors/sponsors.
I am reminded of how the US leveled an Iraqi city, Fallujah, using horrific white phosphorous and killing untold thousands of civilians and causing a child leukemia epidemic as payback for the murder of just four imperial military contractors two decades ago (more on Fallujah below).
US military personnel who oversaw that little bit of “urban warfare” consulted with the Israeli Defense Forces as they planned the Crucifixion of Gaza last year.
Forty thousand-plus dead is a low estimate. The leading British medical journal The Lancet has projected a death toll of 186,000 when the collapse of public health, disease, and starvation are factored into the equation.
Worthy and Unworthy Victims, Direct and Proxy Murder, Double and Single Standards
The brilliant left anti-imperialist Noam Chomsky’s distinction between the American Empire’s officially “worthy” and “unworthy” victims is being demonstrated yet again on a grotesque scale. White Israelis and Ukrainians on the “right” side of the American Empire are “worthy” of our concern and empathy. Brown Palestinians and enemy Russians on the wrong side of US policy are not.
It is morally irrelevant that Palestinians and Russians are not being directly killed by American military forces. Uncle Sam murders, maims, sickens and starves masses both through clients and proxies, as in Gaza, Ukraine, and Russia today, and directly, as in Iraq after the 2003 US invasion, and in Southeast Asia between 1962 and 1975.
Some folks see a racialized moral “double standard” in the contrast between Washington’s outrage over Russia’s invasion of white Ukraine and its backing of Isarael’s genocide in brown-skinned Gaza. US foreign policy is informed by white supremacism, to be sure, but Russians are mainly Caucasian, US policy is sacrificing thousands of white Ukrainians, and US policy in both cases is driven above all by what Chomsky has called the “single standard” of imperialism. In both “conflict zones,” US policy is dictated by the cold calculus of strategic imperial calculation.
Let’s dig deeper into the history of this American Empire, which spans the world with more than 800 military bases spread across more than 80 “sovereign” nations, and whose unmatched “lethal fighting power” Kamala Harris promises to preserve as US president.
“Our Real Task is to Maintain This Disparity”
This is an Empire that has consistently and brazenly defied its claims to be a great and benevolent agent of liberty, peace, and democracy around the world. As numerous key U.S. planning documents reveal over and over, the goal of US “foreign policy” (a nice euphemism for imperialism) since 1945 has been to maintain and, if necessary, install governments that “favor private investment of domestic and foreign capital, production for export, and the right to bring profits out of the country” (Chomsky). Internally, the basic selfish national and imperial objectives were openly and candidly discussed. As the “liberal” and “dovish” imperialist, top State Department planner, and key Cold War architect George F. Kennan explained in “Policy Planning Study 23,” a critical 1948 document:
“We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. … In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. … To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. … We should cease to talk about vague and … unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”
The harsh necessity of abandoning “human rights” and other “sentimental” and “unreal objectives” was especially pressing in the global South, what used to be known as the Third World. Washington assigned the vast “undeveloped” periphery of the world capitalist system—Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and the energy-rich and thus strategically hyper-significant Middle East—a less than flattering role. It was to “fulfill its major function as a source of raw materials and a market” (actual State Department language) for the great industrial (capitalist) nations (excluding socialist Russia and its satellites, and notwithstanding the recent epic racist-fascist rampages of industrial Germany and Japan). It was to be exploited both for the benefit of U.S. corporations/investors and for the reconstruction of Europe and Japan as prosperous U.S. trading and investment partners organized on capitalist principles and hostile to the Soviet bloc.
“The Irresponsibility of its Own People”
“Democracy” was fine as a slogan and benevolent, idealistic-sounding mission statement when it came to marketing this imperialist U.S. policy at home and abroad. Since most people in the “third” or “developing” world had no interest in neocolonial subordination to the rich nations and subscribed to what U.S. intelligence officials considered the heretical “idea that government has direct responsibility for the welfare of its people” (what U.S. planners called “communism”), Washington’s real-life commitment to popular governance abroad was strictly qualified, to say the least. “Democracy” was suitable to the U.S. as long as its outcomes comported with the interests of U.S. investors/corporations and related U.S. geopolitical objectives. It had to be abandoned, undermined and/or crushed when it threatened those investors/corporations and the broader imperatives of business rule to any significant degree. As President Richard Nixon’s coldblooded national security adviser Henry Kissinger explained in June 1970, three years before the U.S. sponsored a bloody fascist coup that overthrew Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.”
The U.S.-sponsored coup government that murdered Allende would kill tens of thousands of real and alleged leftists with Washington’s approval. The Yankee superpower sent some of its leading neoliberal economists and policy advisers to help the blood-soaked Pinochet regime turn Chile into a “free market” model and to help Chile write capitalist oligarchy into its national constitution.
“Bombing is Apple Pie”
“Since 1945, by deed and by example,” the great Australian author, commentator and filmmaker John Pilger wrote fifteen years ago: “The U.S. has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, crushed some 30 liberation movements and supported tyrannies from Egypt to Guatemala (see William Blum’s histories). Bombing is apple pie.” Along the way, Washington has crassly interfered in elections in dozens of “sovereign” nations, something curious to note in light of current liberal U.S. outrage over real or alleged Russian interference in “our” supposedly democratic electoral process in 2016. Uncle Sam also has bombed civilians in 30 countries, attempted to assassinate foreign leaders and deployed chemical and biological weapons.
If we “consider only Latin America since the 1950s,” wrote the sociologist Howard Waitzkin seven years ago:
“The United States has used direct military invasion or has supported military coups to overthrow elected governments in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Haiti, Grenada, and Panama. In addition, the United States has intervened with military action to suppress revolutionary movements in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. More recently … the United States has spent tax dollars to finance and help organize opposition groups and media in Honduras, Paraguay, and Brazil, leading to congressional impeachments of democratically elected presidents. Hillary Clinton presided over these efforts as Secretary of State in the Obama administration, which pursued the same pattern of destabilization in Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia.”
The death count resulting from “American Era” U.S. foreign policy runs well into the many millions, including possibly as many as 5 million Indochinese killed by Uncle Sam and his agents and allies between 1962 and 1975. The flat-out barbarism of the American war on Vietnam is widely documented on record. The infamous My Lai massacre of March 16, 1968, when U.S. Army soldiers slaughtered more than 350 unarmed civilians—including terrified women holding babies in their arms—in South Vietnam was no isolated incident in the U.S. “crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (Noam Chomsky’s phrase at the time). U.S. Army Col. Oran Henderson, who was charged with covering up the massacre, candidly told reporters that “every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden somewhere.”
It is difficult, sometimes, to wrap one’s mind around the extent of the savagery Uncle Sam has unleashed on the world to advance and maintain its global supremacy. In the early 1950s, the Harry Truman administration responded to an early challenge to U.S. power in Northern Korea with a practically genocidal three-year bombing campaign that was described in soul-numbing terms by The Washington Post years ago:
“The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America’s own leaders. ‘Over a period of three years or so, we killed off—what—20 percent of the population,’ Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later Secretary of State, said the United States bombed ‘everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.’ After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops … [T]he U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of explosives on North Korea, including 32,557 tons of napalm, an incendiary liquid that can clear forested areas and cause devastating burns to human skin.
Gee, why does North Korea fear and hate Uncle Sam?
“The Greatest Thing in History”
This ferocious bombardment, which killed 2 million or more civilians, began five years after US president Truman arch-criminally and unnecessarily ordered the atom bombing of hundreds of thousands pf civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to warn the Soviet Union to stay out of Japan and Western Europe.
Upon hearing of the Hiroshima atrocity from US Navy captain Frank Graham, Truman leapt to his feet and shook hands with the officer. “Captain,” Truman said, “this is the greatest thing in history! Show it to the Secretary of State.” Graham gave the message of Hiroshima’s devastation to Secretary James Byrnes, who read it aloud and exclaimed “Fine! Fine!”
Hiroshima and Nagasaki had both been withheld from conventional mass U.S. bombing near the end of WWII so that the maximum killing capacity of America’s new “winning weapon” could be best demonstrated to the world – and above all to the Soviet Union.
Truman took offense when J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific overseer of the American nuclear bomb project, expressed some moral remorse over his role in the atom bombing of Japanese civilians. Truman’s pique wasn’t about the remorse. It was about Oppenheimer’s claim of responsibility for “the greatest thing in history.” Truman wanted all the responsibility for the savage act.
Nuclear Chicken
The warning by scientists that the birth of nuclear weapons could mean a final disastrous war that exterminates humanity has come closer to fulfillment by US recklessness than most people know. When he was informed that Russia was setting up nuclear missile sites in Cuba in the fall of 1962, the United States’ pathologically heedless, privileged, arrogant, and selfish US president John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) could have handled the matter privately and averted potential catastrophe by privately negotiating a missile swap – Soviet missiles out of Cuba and US missiles out of Turkey – with then Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. Instead, as Seymour Hersh shoed in his remarkable study The Dark Side of Camelot, JFK decided to keep his knowledge of the Soviet installations secret from Khrushchev and then go public with the intelligence in a game of global nuclear chicken that brought the world to the literal brink of Armageddon. The resolution included a private deal to remove US missiles from Turkey. JFK gambled with human survival to raise his political profile by looking courageous and manly in the wake of his humiliation after the failed US Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. But for a Soviet sub-commander’s refusal to okay the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in the Saragossa Sea the world might still be recovering from nuclear winter 62 years later (see Michael Dobbs’ exceptional study One Minute to Midnight, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War). US nuclear provocations would nearly set off nuclear war in at least two future incidents, one under Nixon and one under Reagan.
Mass Murder by Proxy
The ferocity of U.S. foreign policy in the “America Era” did not always require direct U.S. military intervention. Take Indonesia and Chile, for two examples from the “Golden Age” height of the “American Century.” In Indonesia, the U.S.-backed dictator Suharto killed millions of his subjects, targeting communist sympathizers, ethnic Chinese and alleged leftists. A senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s later described Suharto’s 1965-66 U.S.-assisted coup as s “the model operation” for the U.S.-backed coup that eliminated the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, seven years later. “The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders,” the officer wrote, “[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965.”
As John Pilger noted 10 years ago, “the U.S. embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a ‘zap list’ of Indonesian Communist party members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured. … The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had called ‘the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in south-east Asia.’ ”
“No single American action in the period after 1945,” wrote the historian Gabriel Kolko, “was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate [Suharto’s] massacre.”
Two years and three months after the Chilean coup, Suharto received a green light from Kissinger and the Gerald Ford White House to invade the small island nation of East Timor. With Washington’s approval and backing, Indonesia carried out genocidal massacres and mass rapes and killed at least 100,000 of the island’s residents.
“No Cruelty is Too Great for Washington Sadists”
Among the countless episodes of mass-murderous U.S. savagery in the oil-rich Middle East over the last generation, few can match for the barbarous ferocity of the “Highway of Death,” where the “global policeman’s” forces massacred tens of thousands of surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait on Feb. 26 and 27, 1991. Journalist Joyce Chediac testified that:
“U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. ‘It was like shooting fish in a barrel,’ said one U.S. pilot. On the sixty miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun … for 60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No survivors are known or likely. … ‘Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,’ said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer. … U.S. pilots took whatever bombs happened to be close to the flight deck, from cluster bombs to 500-pound bombs. … U.S. forces continued to drop bombs on the convoys until all humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created an aerial traffic jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions. … The victims were not offering resistance. … [I]t was simply a one-sided massacre of tens of thousands of people who had no ability to fight back or defend.”
The victims’ crime was having been conscripted into an army controlled by a dictator perceived as a threat to U.S. control of Middle Eastern oil. President George H.W. Bush welcomed the so-called Persian Gulf War as an opportunity to demonstrate America’s unrivaled power and new freedom of action in the post-Cold War world, where the Soviet Union could no longer deter Washington. Bush also heralded the “war” (really a one-sided imperial assault) as marking the end of the “Vietnam Syndrome,” the reigning political culture’s curious term for U.S. citizens’ reluctance to commit U.S. troops to murderous imperial mayhem.
As Chomsky observed in 1992, reflecting on U.S. efforts to maximize suffering in Vietnam by blocking economic and humanitarian assistance to the nation it had devastated: “No degree of cruelty is too great for Washington sadists.”
“A Price Worth Paying”: Half a Million Iraqi Children Sickened and Starved to Death
But Uncle Sam was only getting warmed up building his Iraqi body count in early 1991. Five years later, Bill Clinton’s U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright told CBS News’ Leslie Stahl that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S.-led economic sanctions imposed after the first “Persian Gulf War” (a curious term for a one-sided U.S. assault) was a “price … worth paying” for the advancement of inherently noble U.S. goals.
“The United States,” Secretary Albright explained three years later, “is good. We try to do our best everywhere.”
“McDonalds Cannot Flourish Without …the F-15”
In the years following the collapse of the counter-hegemonic Soviet empire, however, American neoliberal intellectuals like Thomas Friedman—an advocate of the criminal U.S. bombing of Serbia—felt free to openly state that the real purpose of U.S. foreign policy was to underwrite the profits of U.S.-centered global capitalism. “The hidden hand of the market,” Friedman famously wrote in The New York Times Magazine in March 1999, as U.S. bombs and missiles exploded in Serbia, “will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”
Obama: “They Have Seen Their Sons and Daughters Killed in the Streets of Fallujah”
In a foreign policy speech then US Senator Barack Obama gave to the Chicago Council of Global Affairs on the eve of announcing his candidacy for the U.S. presidency in the fall of 2006, Obama had the audacity to say the following in support of his claim that U.S. citizens supported “victory” in Iraq: “The American people have been extraordinarily resolved. They have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah.”
It was a spine-chilling selection of locales. In 2004, the ill-fated city was the site of colossal U.S. war atrocities, crimes including the indiscriminate murder of thousands of civilians, the targeting even of ambulances and hospitals, and the practical leveling of an entire city by the U.S. military in April and November. By one account, Incoherent Empire, Michael Mann wrote:
“The U.S. launched two bursts of ferocious assault on the city, in April and November of 2004 … [using] devastating firepower from a distance which minimizes U.S. casualties. In April … military commanders claimed to have precisely targeted … insurgent forces, yet the local hospitals reported that many or most of the casualties were civilians, often women, children, and the elderly… [reflecting an] intention to kill civilians generally. … In November … [U.S.] aerial assault destroyed the only hospital in insurgent territory to ensure that this time no one would be able to document civilian casualties. U.S. forces then went through the city, virtually destroying it. Afterwards, Fallujah looked like the city of Grozny in Chechnya after Putin’s Russian troops had razed it to the ground.”
The “global policeman’s” deployment of radioactive ordnance (depleted uranium) in Fallujah created an epidemic of infant mortality, birth defects, leukemia and cancer there.
Rape, Murder… “The Justness of our Cause, The Force of Our Example, the Tempering Qualities of Humility and Restraint” (Obama)
Fallujah was just one especially graphic episode in a broader arch-criminal invasion that led to the premature deaths of at least 1 million Iraqi civilians and left Iraq as what Tom Engelhardt called “a disaster zone on a catastrophic scale hard to match in recent memory.” It reflected the same callous mindset behind the Pentagon’s early computer program name for ordinary Iraqis certain to be killed in the 2003 invasion: “bug-splat.” Uncle Sam’s petro-imperial occupation led to the death of at least 1 million Iraqi “bugs” (human beings). According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen in December 2007, “Iraq has been killed. … [T]he American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century.”
Along with death came the ruthless and racist torture. The award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh told the ACLU about the existence of classified Pentagon evidence files containing films of U.S-“global policeman” soldiers sodomizing Iraqi boys in front of their mothers behind the walls of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. “You haven’t begun to see [all the] … evil, horrible things done [by U.S. soldiers] to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run,” Hersh told an audience in Chicago in the summer of 2014.
Of course, it isn’t just Iraq where Washington has wreaked sheer mass murderous havoc in the Middle East, always a region of prime strategic significance to the U.S. thanks to its massive petroleum resources. In a Truthdig reflection on Syria, historian Dan Lazare reminded us that:
“[Syrian President Assad’s] Baathist crimes pale in comparison to those of the U.S., which since the 1970s has invested trillions in militarizing the Persian Gulf and arming the ultra-reactionary petro-monarchies that are now tearing the region apart. The U.S. has provided Saudi Arabia with crucial assistance in its war on Yemen, it has cheered on the Saudi blockade of Qatar, and it has stood by while the Saudis and United Arab Emirates send in troops to crush democratic protests in neighboring Bahrain. In Syria, Washington has worked hand in glove with Riyadh to organize and finance a Wahhabist holy war that has reduced a once thriving country to ruin.”
Chomsky described Obama’s targeted drone assassination program as “the most extensive global terrorism campaign the world has yet seen.” The program “officially is aimed at killing people who the administration believes might someday intend to harm the U.S. and killing anyone else who happens to be nearby.”
“We lead the world,” presidential candidate Obama explained, “in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good. … America is the last, best hope of earth.”
Barack The Empire’s New Clothes Obama elaborated in his first inaugural address. “Our security,” the president said, “emanates from the justness of our cause; the force of our example; the tempering qualities of humility and restraint”—a fascinating commentary on Fallujah, Hiroshima, the U.S. crucifixion of Southeast Asia, the “Highway of Death” and more.
“Peace Prize? He’s a Killer”
Within less than half a year of his inauguration, Obama’s rapidly accumulating record of atrocities in the Muslim world would include the bombing of the Afghan village of Bola Boluk. Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives in Bola Boluk were children. “In a phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to outraged members of the Afghan Parliament,” the New York Times reported, “the governor of Farah Province … said that as many as 130 civilians had been killed.” According to one Afghan legislator and eyewitness, “the villagers bought two tractor trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the casualties that had occurred. Everyone at the governor’s cried, watching that shocking scene.” Obama and his imperialist Secretary of State Hillary Clinton initially blamed the deaths on… “Taliban grenades.”
The Obama administration refused to issue an apology or to acknowledge the “global policeman’s” responsibility. By telling and sickening contrast, Obama had just offered a full apology and fired a White House official because that official had scared New Yorkers with an ill-advised Air Force One photo-shoot flyover of Manhattan that reminded people of 9/11. The disparity was extraordinary: Frightening New Yorkers led to a full presidential apology and the discharge of a White House staffer. Killing more than 100 Afghan civilians did not require any apology.
Reflecting on such atrocities the following December, an Afghan villager was moved to comment as follows: “Peace prize? He’s a killer. … Obama has only brought war to our country.” The man spoke from the village of Armal, where a crowd of 100 gathered around the bodies of 12 people, one family from a single home. The 12 were killed, witnesses reported, by U.S. Special Forces during a late-night raid.
Obama was only warming up his “killer” powers. He would join with France and other NATO powers in the imperial decimation of Libya, which killed more than 25,000 civilians and unleashed mass carnage in North Africa. The U.S.-led assault on Libya was a disaster for black Africans and sparked the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.
Two years before the war on Libya, the Obama administration helped install a murderous right-wing coup regime in Honduras. Thousands of civilians and activists have been murdered by that regime.
The Imperial Baton to Trump and Biden
The clumsy homeland fascist Donald “America Needs to Win More Wars” Trump took the imperial baton from the elegant and silver-tongued “imperial grandmaster” Obama, keeping the superpower’s vast global military machine set on kill. As few new noticed behind the domestic Trump freakshow, the orange-hued maniac’s military outdid Obama in quantity of murderous airstrikes across the Middle East and Southwest Asia. Herr Trump nearly sparked a major Middle East War by murdering a top Iranian military official on Iraqi soil and repeatedly threatened to nuke Iran and North Korea while consistently menacing and provoking the nuclear superpower China. Trumpenletfies who trumpet Trump’s supposed “isolationism” are sadly mistaken. If he becomes president again, he will likely invade Mexico and may well start a disastrous war with China.
Joe Biden is a bloody-jawed imperialist who boasts about how the US is currently engaged in no wars overseas even as he pours billions of dollars and massive US military hardware into an insanely reckless imperialist proxy war on nuclear Russia’s long and repeatedly Western-invaded Ukrainian border (a war that has spilled into Russian itself) and into sick support for Israel’s genocidal war of ethnic cleansing on the people of Gaza. Yes, the US does not currently deploy hundreds of thousands of “boots on the ground” in a ground war anywhere on the planet. So what? You are no less of a killer when you arm someone else for the explicit purpose of mass murder and even genocide. And the US has boots on the ground the world (including many engaged in military actions in the Middle East right now) in those 800 bases across more than 80 countries.
After October 7 (itself no surprise given the savage oppression of Gaza), Biden repeated something despicable and telling he said as a US Senator in 1986: “the US would have had to invent Israel if didn’t already exist.” Translation: the racist occupation and apartheid state Israel remains an indispensable outpost and client of the American Empire.
As thousands of Democrats chanted “USA, USA!” during the recent Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago, Biden said this: “Name me a country in the world that doesn’t think we’re the leading nation in the world. Without America—not a joke, think about it, I’m being literal—who can lead the world other than the United States of America?”
Fascinating. Countries don’t think, human beings do, and most politically cognizant humans think of the US as a menace, a selfish empire, and an exploiter/oppressor, not a world “leader.”
“America, Let’s Show the World Who Are with the Most Lethal Fighting Force in the World” (Harris)
Biden has passed the baton to “Killer Kamala,” who gives the dying masses of Gaza the middle finger by loudly backing “Israel’s right to defend itself” and failing to call for a US arms embargo on the Judeo-Nazi war criminals in Tel Aviv. Harris tells anti-genocide protesters to keep their mouths shut unless “you want Trump to win.” How perfect: “silence yourselves about my support for genocide or we’ll put back in power a malignant maniac to consolidate fascist power in the homeland.”
Harris intoned the following cold imperialist and national-chauvinist claims in her acceptance speech at the DNC:
“As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.… America, let us show each other and the world who we are and what we stand for: Freedom, opportunity, compassion, dignity, fairness and endless possibilities…We are the heirs to the greatest democracy in the history of the world. ..God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America. Thank you.”
We have yet to hear Harris call for an end to the US-sparked and US-fueled war in Ukraine, which has combined with the capitalist climate catastrophe to push the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock closer to Midnight than it has ever been.
But just remember: “The United States is good.” Say it again, say it proud, say it like you believe it.
Postscript
Like so many others, I am deeply indebted to Noam Chomsky for his many years of systematically digging into and eloquently exposing the horrific crimes of the American Empire.
