REVOLUTION 74

Liberals’ Love Affair With Mass Murderers

BOB AVAKIAN—REVOLUTION

Number Seventy-Four: Liberals’ Love Affair With Mass Murderers.

No one is easier to fool than those who want to be fooled.

Back when I was a teenager, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers had a hit song: “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”...

Well, I don’t know about other fools, but it is a fact that liberals really do fall in love with mass murderers. And, yes, when I say mass murderers, I’m talking about people like Kamala Harris and her “running mate” Tim Walz. The Democratic convention, starting this week (August 19), will no doubt be a “love fest” with these mass murderers.

For anyone who would try to dismiss what I’m saying here as just extreme rhetoric, you need to look seriously at this actual reality:

In her role as Vice President, along with Joe Biden and the whole U.S. government and ruling class, Kamala Harris is responsible for fully backing Israel in its genocidal slaughter of Palestinian people in Gaza. Stop and get this image fully in your mind: the millions of Palestinians in Gaza, subjected to daily terror by Israel, forced to live amidst disease-ridden rivers of human waste and other filth, with little food, and health care facilities destroyed—and every day loved ones’ limbs are blown off and brains blown out by massive Israeli bombs and other weapons supplied by the U.S. government. More than 15 thousand Palestinian children blown apart in this way.

Don’t be fooled by any “honeyed words” from Harris that she cares about “the humanitarian crisis” in Gaza: If you listen to her she will tell you that she will keep on backing Israel, no matter what monstrous crimes it commits, with its mass murder of Palestinians and its role as an attack dog for U.S. imperialism, especially in the strategic Middle East.

And that is not all. Look what happened when Trump’s “running mate” J.D. Vance and the Republican fascists accused Tim Walz of getting out of the National Guard in order to avoid being sent to Iraq in the midst of the war there that was brought about by the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Did Walz, Harris and the Democrats answer this by pointing out that the U.S. invasion was carried out on the basis of flagrant lies about Iraq supposedly possessing “weapons of mass destruction?” Did the Democrats bring out the crucial truth that this U.S. invasion was a blatant international war crime, which set in motion events which cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, created millions of refugees, and unleashed a maelstrom of death and destruction in that part of the world? Did they argue that the right, and courageous, thing to do was to oppose that war crime by the U.S., not to “serve” as part of it?

Of course not! Instead, while admitting that Walz had exaggerated one part of his involvement in the U.S. military, they emphasized the positive importance of his “service” during many years in the U.S. military. And, what is this military? As I pointed to in message number Sixty-Nine, this U.S. military is “a machinery of massive death and destruction,” which (together with the bloody “intelligence agencies” of this country) has slaughtered millions of civilians in countries all over the world.

Again, if anyone thinks this is exaggeration, or distortion, here’s another “reality check”:

In addition to the illegal invasion of Iraq, along with many other continuing crimes against humanity carried out by the U.S., just since World War 2, including the U.S. slaughter of millions of civilians in Vietnam, and before that in Korea, and the bloody coups it has engineered in Indonesia, Iran and elsewhere, in the period from 1846 to the present the U.S. has intervened in South and Central American countries—militarily, through CIA coups, or in other ways—at least 100 times, at the cost of literally hundreds of thousands of deaths and endless misery for the people of those countries. (This is from my article, Shameless American Chauvinism: “Anti-Authoritarianism” as a “Cover” For Supporting U.S. Imperialism, which is available at revcom.us.)

Caroline Elkins, in her important book Legacy Of Violence: A History of the British Empire, brings out the full measure of the massive and truly depraved violence that the British imperialists repeatedly used to enforce their empire, from India, to Jamaica, to Palestine, Africa and elsewhere (and, yes, this massive atrocity was carried out for many years under the direction of the fanatical anti-communist “hero” of western imperialism, Winston Churchill). Very importantly, Elkins documents how this continual atrocity went together with the proclamation of the so-called “liberal, civilizing” mission of the British empire, and it was accompanied by and made possible more or less “liberal democratic” rule in England itself. Today, with the U.S. having replaced the British as the world’s dominant imperialist power, the same basic pattern holds true for this country: the proclamation of its holy “democratizing” mission throughout the world, and the continuance of its “democratic rule” at home, rests on the most ruthless exploitation, and massive destructive violence throughout the world (accompanied by murderous violence against Black people and others within the U.S. itself, and vicious repression generally against anyone and anything posing a significant challenge, and especially a serious threat, to the interests of this system of capitalism-imperialism and its ruling class).

This is the reality of this system that so many liberals, and “progressives” are so anxious to be fooled by.

This system forces the people who rise to the top of it, and rule it, to be literally—without any exaggeration—cut-throat exploiters, murderous oppressors on a massive scale, and relentless plunderers of people and the environment, regardless of the suffering this causes for masses of human beings. For individual capitalists, and for the ruling classes of capitalist countries, if they do not beat out and beat down others, by whatever means, no matter how monstrous, they will go under. This cannot be “reformed away,” and it cannot be changed by changing the people who rule in this system—they will all be bound by the very nature, the “logic” and dynamics, and the demands of this system.

This can only be changed with a revolution—to overthrow and abolish this system, and replace it with a fundamentally different and much better system, which does not rest on, does not require, and aims to fully do away with ruthless exploitation and monstrous mass murder and destruction.

The basic principles and the practical guidelines for this system are laid out concretely in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, which I have written. It is this fundamentally different system that we must be insisting on, and fighting for—accepting nothing less—if we really want to put an end to all the madness and unnecessary suffering that the masses of humanity are subjected to, in this country and throughout the world, and set out instead on the only possible and realistic road of emancipating all of humanity.

In my next message, I will get into all this further.