As fireworks increase and politicians solemnize Independence Day, america betrays the liberty of individuals all over the world. The 4th of July is a wierd spectacle: In Washington, D.C., patriots wave American flags at a parade even because the U.S. approves Morocco’s occupation of the Western Sahara, serving to to crush the Sahrawi folks’s hope for independence.
Take your choose: Rwanda to Bahrain, Israel to Morocco; the U.S. is the boss of a global ring of client states that crush dissent. It has flooded dictatorships and settler-colonial regimes with navy weapons and drone bombed the hell out of harmless folks in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria and Somalia. The world’s top arms seller, it ignores human rights abuses of consumers who buy weapons to kill civilians.
Add it up. The fact of the U.S. starkly contrasts with the picture it sells on the 4th of July. The U.S. shouldn’t be a beacon of freedom. It’s a terrorist state. It is among the main forces of violent repression that stamps out folks’s hopes for freedom and justice.
Lord of Conflict
Proper now, planes crammed with U.S.-manufactured weapons and ammo land in airports of countries the place activists are jailed or shot. Proper now, an immense river of cash from the U.S. fills the financial institution accounts of dictators and corrupt presidents who rig elections so that they by no means have to go away workplace. In the meantime, occupations from Morocco to Israel are greenlit.
In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame seized energy after Hutu state militias dedicated genocide towards Tutsis in 1994. Greater than half 1,000,000 have been killed or raped. Kagame, a Tutsi commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Entrance grew to become president in 2000 and has remained since. Using on Western guilt over the genocide, he has develop into extra authoritarian. Human Rights Watch launched a report on opposition leaders and journalists who’ve been jailed or killed. One exiled opposition politician was not too long ago shot in South Africa as Kagame rigs elections in Rwanda.
But the U.S. gives navy coaching and assist to Kagame’s regime. It has a Status of Forces settlement that lets American troopers out and in of the nation with no oversight. In 2020, the U.S. signed a five-year improvement bundle for $643 million.
Or take Equatorial Guinea, dominated by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who ripped energy from his uncle in 1979 and has sat in office ever since. Mbasogo is wealthy. Filthy wealthy. A number of hundred million {dollars} wealthy. But three-fourths of his nation’s folks reside in poverty. In response to a Human Rights Watch report, most youngsters in Equatorial Guinea should not immunized to polio or measles and don’t attend faculty. Half the inhabitants doesn’t have secure ingesting water. Why? Properly, the president and his regime are incredibly corrupt. The oil-rich nation is sucked dry by high-level officers happening procuring sprees.
But President Joe Biden invited Mbasogo to attend the U.S. African Leaders Summit with the intention to use it as a bulwark towards China’s rising affect. In fact, the U.S. desires that oil badly. A 2020 U.S. State Division report notes, “The Republic of Equatorial Guinea is endowed with oil and fuel assets that attracted billions of {dollars} in direct U.S. funding instrumental to extracting these assets.” There you could have it, of us! Who cares {that a} dictator is sitting on the oil drum!
You possibly can pull the lens again and spin the globe to search out Israel, a U.S. shopper state that will get $38 billion from 2017 to 2028 in a military aid bundle signed by President Barack Obama – even because the United Nations calls out Israel for its apartheid insurance policies and illegal occupation of Palestinian territory.
Add to that list: Egypt, Jordan, the Philippines and Bahrain. In a 2017 Truthout essay, Wealthy Whitney crunched the numbers and located the U.S. helps over 73 % of the world’s dictators.
Bombs Bursting All over the place
If america was at a strip membership, it could bathe mass murderers with greenback payments. The U.S. likes to bankroll corrupt client states and arm dictatorships. It doesn’t matter if a Democrat or a Republican is within the Oval Workplace. It doesn’t matter if the secretary of state, Homeland Safety secretary, the president or vice chairman is Black or Latino, white or Asian. The agenda for all on the helm of the U.S. state is world hegemony.
U.S. “international coverage” (imperialism) all the time drives towards the identical objectives: safe entry to low-cost assets and labor for its ruling class. To take action, the U.S. arms to the tooth so it could possibly bully weaker nations. At first, this colonial system was overtly racist, famously known as “the white man’s burden.” Later, after anti-racist actions made this overt racism untenable, the U.S. started to cover its empire underneath the loud, garish promoting of democracy. Noam Chomsky has called U.S. international coverage directed by a “godfather precept, straight out of the Mafia” for its use of violence.
In the event you dial time backward, right here’s a short and incomplete checklist of U.S. imperialism. The so-called founding fathers hungrily eyed Native folks’s lands. A genocidal fantasy named Manifest Future led wave after wave of European migrants to terrorize and steal. The U.S. stole from Mexico what’s now New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado. It stole Puerto Rico. It stole Guam. It stole Samoa. It stole the Virgin Islands. Its troops occupied Haiti and the Dominican Republic. It propped up the dictators of each islands, who killed and exploited their folks. After World Conflict II, it demolished Communist events in Europe, who led resistance towards the Nazis, to revive capitalist management. It backed the Shah of Iran towards a democratically elected authorities. It took over from France a colonial war towards the Vietnamese and bombed, burned and brutalized the tiny nation. It backed the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in Chile and supported a brutal right-wing dictatorship. It organized Operation Condor, a marketing campaign to decimate the left in South America that killed 60,000 activists. It interfered in the struggle of African nations in the 20th century for independence by ensuring no regime would defy the pursuits of multinationals. It has repeatedly vetoed UN resolutions by the Palestinians to ascertain their very own state.
I can go on. And on and on. We are able to take a look at the Iraq Conflict — or how the U.S. presently arms Saudi Arabia because it fires so many missiles into Yemen that the cities appear to be the cratered floor of the moon.
What number of households have run from our bombs? What number of fled a dictator we supported as their police dragged folks by the hair into jail and tortured them? What number of misplaced lives?
Freedom From U.S. Empire
Proper now, smiling Individuals rejoice. We acquired a day without work. We are able to delight in patriotic hype of the U.S. because it pushes for chilly conflict with China and fights a proxy conflict towards Russia. We are able to say these are struggles for democracy. But most residents appear to blissfully ignore the mountain of dying made by the U.S.
One can say, Individuals don’t know this historical past. Wherever we flip — be it films or a web-series or music — our celebration of militarism is a wall that retains us from seeing the reality of our nation.
Perhaps the reality is extra disturbing. Perhaps we don’t wish to know. Our authorities betrays our values to take care of energy. It could as a result of so many voters need American exceptionalism that deep down, they imagine something is price it to maintain it, even killing innocents.
Or possibly, the rationale the U.S. has engaged in infinite conflict is as a result of the American Revolution was by no means completed. What if we did? What does life appear to be if, “We maintain these truths to be self-evident, that each one [humans] are created equal”?
What if we be a part of arms with folks all over the world looking for freedom, even when it meant their freedom from us?
They’re right here. They’re doing the work. Be part of Dissenters, the multiracial and class-political youth attempting to finish militarism. Help the Palestinian Youth Movement or CODEPINK. Or throw down at Rev. Billy’s The Church of Stop Shopping, a longtime activist choir that raises the roof in New York’s Decrease East Aspect with socialist gospel and dancing and protest.
Individuals are rising. They’re declaring a brand new independence. They’re saying: One other world is feasible.
