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If you pay elementary attention to what they say, you can easily determine who our ruling class capitalist, imperialist and fascist masters really are and what they are really about beneath all their blather about freedom and democracy.
With Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors Cuz the Guys with the AR-15s Are On Our Side” Trump it ought to be a piece of cake to call him out as a fascist. As president he called white supremacist neo-Nazis “very fine people,” told the fascist Proud Boys to “stand by” for him, called Black nations “shithole countries” (while complaining that the US didn’t get more pure white Scandinavian immigrants), told US border patrol agents he’d pardon them for shooting Latin American asylum-seekers, tried to deploy the US military crush the George Floyd Rebellion, called a giant fascist mob to Washington DC on January 6 to attempt to physically cancel an election he clearly lost, and told a white audience they’d survived Covid-19 because of superior genetics.
As the Republicans’ 2024 presidential candidate, Trump promises retribution against his political enemies and says that brown-skinned immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He declares his intention of setting up mass deportation camps and “clearing the Marxist vermin out of the country.” That rhetoric is straight out of Hitler, of whom we know Trump is a fan.
Trump just applauded a supporter who physically attacked media personnel at one of his hate/campaign rallies. “He’s on our side!,” Trump said in defense of the thug.
That and much more of what oozes out of Donald “Be Wild” Trump’s neo-Nazi asshole of a mouth – including his Goebbels-worthy Stolen Election Lie, his description of the capitalist-imperialist Democrats as “radical Left,” and his absurd charge that Democrats are bringing in “illegals” to vote in US elections – shows without any doubt that the Republican cult leader is a FASCIST.
Significantly enough, the Democratic Party refuses to publicly identify Trump and his patry as fascist. This is for unpleasant reasons noted by Bob Avakian and discussed in a recent Paul Street Report[1].
It's a chilling and telling fact that this malignant Republi-Nazi maniac Trump has a real shot at a second presidency starting next year. A decent society doesn’t hold presidential debates and elections featuring fascist arch-criminals; it locks those vile transgressors up!
Democratic presidential candidates also tell you who they really are before they become mass-murderous heads of the world’s most criminal and dangerous Empire. Nobody should have been surprised by the intimately related national chauvinism and imperialism (and financial-neoliberal corporatism and objective white supremacism) of Barack Obama’s presidency. (Please see my 2010 book The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama and the Real World of Power).
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My spring 2008 book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics was loaded with quotes from then candidate Obama showing his fierce nationalism and commitment to US imperialism (along with his financial-neoliberal corporatism and his objective white supremacism). Among the many things Obama said along those lines, one especially stood out to me. In a 2006 speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the US senator and soon-to-be announced presidential candidate Obama had the cold-blooded imperial audacity to say the following in support of his false claim that most US citizens backed their country’s monumentally criminal and mass- murderous invasion of Iraq: “The American people have been extraordinarily resolved. They have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah.”
This was a spine-chilling statement. Fallujah was the site of colossal US war atrocities -- crimes including the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the targeting of ambulances and hospitals, the use of chemical weapons that created a child leukemia epidemic, and the leveling of practically an entire city in April and November of 2004
But this and many other things Obama said and did as he launched his presidential candidacy was consistent with the nationally chauvinist and imperial rhetoric of the famous keynote speech that catapulted him into political rock star status at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. There the future great faux-progressive hope Obama referred to Americans as "one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America." He praised "a young man" named Shamus who "told me he'd joined the Marines and was heading to Iraq the following week." One of Shamus' endearing qualities, Obama said, was "absolute faith in our country and its leaders, his devotion to duty and service. I thought," Obama said, "this young man was all that any of us might hope for in a child."
Obama discussed the terrible blood costs of the United States’ Iraq invasion and occupation purely in terms of the U.S. troops "who will not be returning to their hometowns," their loved ones, and other American soldiers dealing with terrible war injuries. He expressed no concern for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who were killed and maimed as a result of Uncle Sam’s criminal and unjustified invasion and occupation.
Obama’s nauseating imperial nationalism peaked when he likened “the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs” to “the hope of a young naval lieutenant [2004 Democratic presidential candidate John F Kerry] bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta” during the US War on Vietnam in the late 1960s. This horrific lumping of antebellum African-American slaves' struggles with the U.S. imperialist and racist crucifixion of Southeast Asia as part of a shared expression of the “hope” of America foretold in its one sick way what a cold-blooded killer Obama would show himself to be in the White House.[2]
Droves of US progressives became disillusioned when Barack “the Empire’s New Clothes” Obama’s presidency was precisely what I predicted it would be from 2004 on – a monument to each of what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had called ”the triple evils that are interrelated”: white supremacist racism, imperialism, and capitalism.
It was all predictable in light of Obama’s conduct and language in the years prior to his election, as I showed along with Bruce Dixon and Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report (and others)[3] before Obama’s ascendancy. All you had to do was pay serious attention.
Nobody should have been surprised by “Genocide Joe” Biden’s criminal and many-sided support – equipping, funding, militarily and politically and diplomatically protecting – of Israel’s Ziofascist ethnic cleansing operation in Gaza over the last eleven months. As a US Senator nearly four decades ago, Biden said the quiet part out loud. As Al Jazeera reported last January:
“It may have been one of Joe Biden’s most career-defining moments. Stern-faced and with outstretched arms, the then-Democratic senator paced from left to right as he delivered an impassioned plea to his colleagues in the United States Congress. His message? Stop apologizing for your support of Israel. ‘There’s no apology to be made. None,’ he said, pausing for dramatic effect. ‘Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region. The United States would have to go out and invent an Israel.’ It was June 1986: …in the years since, his words have taken on near-mythic significance – repeatedly touted by Biden himself as a symbol of his pro-Israel bona fides” (emphasis and boldface added).
Biden repeated his 1986 line last October in defense of his decision to put the full weight of the American Empire behind Israel’s neo-Nazi, Fallujah-like destruction of Gaza – the livestreamed genocide that has put hundreds of thousands of protesters in the streets. The meaning of Biden’s comment was this: Israel is a core and valued ally, client, and asset of the global US Empire and the US will always back it to the hilt.
Biden said the quiet part out loud. It’s not just or mainly about the Israel Lobby, it’s about the strategic interests of the American Empire, the same core thing behind the US-sparked and US-fueled meatgrinder of mass death in Ukraine.
2020 presidential candidate Biden foretold his coming dutiful service to the wealthy capitalist Few when he told a Los Angeles Times interviewer that he “had no empathy, give me a break” for the economic struggles and debt burdens of the Millennial generation and promised to veto Single Payer health insurance if it ever came to his desk as president.
Then there’s Kamala Harris. If she gets into power (as seems at least somewhat possible) and continues (as is certain if she wins the election and staves off the fascist overthrow campaign that will follow her victory) the sickening US-Israel crucifixion of Gaza and the United States’ reckless provocation of the nuclear superpower Russia on its long Ukraine border and of the nuclear superpower China, let it be known that we were warned. Harris has never once called for the elementarily human policy a US arms embargo on fascist-genocidal Israel. Three weeks ago in Arizona, she said this to protesters decrying her support of massive human right and war crimes in Gaza: “keeping saying that if you want Trump to win. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” In other words, “You are an agent of Trump unless you STFU about my backing of genocide.”
(I’m hardly the first writer to wonder if the Democrats haven’t kept the malignant orange fascist around because they see him as the indispensable Republi-Nazi Bad Cop required to keep folks cringing under the false protection of the supposed Nice Cop Democrats – as the villain who will wipe out what’s left of bourgeois democracy and rule of law if we don’t bow under the Democratic Party wing of the US capitalist-imperialis class dictatorship.)
In her nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago eleven days ago, Harris said that she “will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself,” as if Israel's right to self-defense has anything to do with killing more than 40,000 Palestinians, disproportionately children, so far. (And that’s the low count. The leading British medical journal The Lancet calculates that the real body count when premature deaths from famine and disease and the collapse of public health are factored in is going to push 200,000).
To ensure that the nation’s leading imperialists understand her deep, Obamanistic commitment to the US global killing machine, with its 800-plus bases in more than 80 “sovereign nations,” Harris added this for good measure: “As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” Nice.
That’s Harris telling you she looks forward to being a multi-theater war president, helping continue humanity on the path to terminal nuclear war that could be sparked by conflicts in one or more US-fueled conflict zones: the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and/or East Asia.
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As for the imperial homeland itself and her readiness to bring the hammer of a repressive police and prison state on the masses, pleases listen to my latest PSR audio for her record as a friend and agent of racist mass incarceration, capital punishment, prosecutorial misconduct and other Iron Heel practices.
“When someone shows you who they are,” Maya Angelou once wrote, “believe them the first time.”
You’ve been warned.
Maybe it’s time to question the whole damn system that plays these sick game on us. All indications are that hopes for a decent future can’t survive many years of this madness.
Endnotes
1. “I merely want to highlight [Bob] Avakian’s important reflection on why the Obamas and other top Dems consistently ‘avoid calling out the actual fascist nature of Trump and the Republicans,’ reflecting their ‘determin[ation]…to downplay and distort the very real differences [between the two major capitalist US parties] — deliberately leading people away from the understanding that the Republican Party, with Donald Trump at its head, is a fully fascist party: overtly and aggressively racist, woman and LGBT-hating, immigrant persecuting, environment plundering, science-denying theocrats, determined to rule society based on a fanatical fundamentalist rendering of Christianity, and to crush, as violently as necessary, any opposition to their rule, including rivals in the ruling class.’…What’s this fascism-denying bullshit all about? Why do they do it? Avakian’s answer is I think dead-on: “Because, to acknowledge the fact that one of the two ‘legitimate’ ruling class parties of this system is fascist can call into question the legitimacy of the system as a whole. And, as I pointed out in [a previous essay], the Democratic Party is deathly afraid of mobilizing masses of people in the way that would be necessary to decisively defeat the fascists, because the Democrats fear that this could lead to things ‘getting all out of control,’ threatening their whole system.” Paul Street, “Two Essays and One Interview,” The Paul Street Report, August 29, 2024, https://paulstreet.substack.
2. See Paul Street, “Keynote Reflections,” ZNet, https://znetwork.org/
3. This was sharp and predictive: Ken Silverstein, “Obama, Inc.: The Birth of a Washington Machine,” Harper’s (November 2006), https://harpers.org/archive/
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