"The Actual Dictatorship Beneath the Shell of US Democracy"

As Seen in the Repression and Smearing of Campus Protests and More

Eric Adams, the dismal fascistic Democratic Party "law and order” and ex-cop Mayor of New York City, absurdly denouncing anti-genocide student protesters as “antisemitic”

Dear readers - this is a rushed piece given the pace of current events and so I have not fully hyperlinked it. If time permits later today, I’ll add some sources in the comments section.

The election-denying and white Christian nationalist Republican Party has crossed into domestic political fascism in ways that the Democrats have not, but we should make no mistake: at the end of the day we US-Americans live under a capitalist-imperialist class rule dictatorship and this dictatorship is bipartisan, consistent with Upton Sinclair’s 1904 description of the Republicans and Democrats as “two wings of the same bird of prey.”

It’s nothing new.

It was with a Jim Crow Democrat in the White House, Woodrow Wilson, that the United States undertook a top-down dry run of violent, anti-radical and racist fascism during and after World War One.

The Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt, who boasted of having “saved capitalism,” had an interesting comment after a Democratic Chicago mayor sent out police who ended up massacring steelworkers on Memorial Day of 1937: “a plague on both your houses [of labor and capital].”

The Democratic president Harry Truman responded with an iron first to the great postwar strike wave of 1946, sending in the military to take over the nation’s coal mines and authorizing the military to take over the nation’s railroads.

Democratic elected officials including the blood-soaked warmonger president Lyndon Johnson called out and sent in federal troops to suppress urban protests after the assassination/execution of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1968, one year to the day after King made a historic speech against the Johnson-led American Empire’s crucifixion of Southeast Asia.

Democratic mayors and city councils worked with the Democratic president Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security to surveil, infiltrate, and dismantle — often quite violently, as in Oakland, California and New York City — the populist Occupy Wall Street movement in the fall and early winter of 2011.

This is just a short list.

Here we are in 2024 with the ancient Democratic president Jor Biden, a longtime imperialist (he helped lead the charge for the criminal and mass murderous invasion of Iraq from the Democratic side of the US Senate), facing a wave of righteous student protest against his continuing support (his claims of concern for Palestinian lives is pathetic attempted cover) for the Judeo-fascist apartheid state of Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza — an epic crime against an already besieged open-air concentration camp (a modern day Warsaw Ghetto) that has so far killed at least 40,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and put millions of Gazans at risk of famine. Israel is right now murdering children and whole families with US-made bombs in the Gazan city of Rafah, to which the Israel Defense Forces have herded hundreds of thousands of desperate, hungry, and frightened Palestinians.

By my count this morning there are more than thirty US campuses currently home to student encampments opposed to Israel’s genocide and Washington’s (bipartisan) funding, equipping, and political, diplomatic, and military protection of that genocide.

Behold the bullshit of aptly nicknamed “Genocide Joe,” who took a page from Truman by invoking the Railway Labor Act to pre-empt an overdue national railroad strike in December of 2022, and who after October 7th ran to embrace Israel’s genocidal-fascist prime minister Bibi Netanyahu, offering an increase in deadly arms shipments and repeating a telling statement of his from his days in the Senate: “if there not an Israel, we ‘d have to an Israel one.” The “we” in that statement is the American Empire and the reason the Empire would “have to invent an Israel” is to serve US strategic imperial interests within and beyond the oil-rich Middle East.

The bloody-jawed imperialist Biden recently played along with evidence-free, reality-inverting Republi-fascist and Zionist propaganda that smears student opponents of racist genocide as “antisemites” who are threatening Jewish students. Never mind that a large number of Jewish students are helping lead the protest wave.

Biden has called on Americans to oppose a mythical "alarming surge of antisemitism" on US campuses. "Silence is complicity," Biden actually proclaimed in a written statement last Sunday evening, referring not to silence over the genocidal mass murder of innocent Palestinians but to silence over the non-existent “surge of antisemitism.” "Even in recent days,” Biden proclaimed without proof, “we’ve seen harassment and calls for violence against Jews. This blatant antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous – and it has absolutely no place on college campuses, or anywhere in our country."

After speaking at an Earth Day event — an ironic venue for a president under whom the US has set new records the burning of fossil fuels! — Genocide Joe repeated this Orwellian nonsense: "I condemn the antisemitic protests. That’s why I have set up a program to deal with that," he told reporters.

(Wow, what an asshole. Biden is a low-life Weimar president who has made it impossible for leftists of conscience to do “the lesser evil”  thing for him next fall.  This longtime imperialist is knee deep in Palestinian blood.  And now this dirty old bastard has the unmitigated gall to call the campus protests against the US-Israel Crucifixion of Gaza “antisemitic.”  What slander: the kids are protesting genocidal ethnic cleansing that has been funded, equipped, and politically and diplomatically protected by Biden himself, in his role as the head of a global empire that has long considered Israel a critical imperial asset within and beyond the Middle East. More on this below. To put it bluntly, Biden values murdering Gazans more than he values blocking the Orange fascist Trump from winning a second and worse fascist presidency.  He’s on board with Judeo-fascism in Gaza and he’s on board with the neo-McCarthyite Republi-fascist demonization of anti-genocide protesters as “antisemitic.”)   

“Silence is complicity”….like at the “liberal” New York Times, widely read by professional and managerial class Democrats, where, as The Intercept recently reported:

‘The Times instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept…The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees…The memo — written by Times standards editor Susan Wessling, international editor Philip Pan, and their deputies — “offers guidance about some terms and other issues we have grappled with since the start of the conflict in October…While the document is presented as an outline for maintaining objective journalistic principles in reporting on the Gaza war, several Times staffers told The Intercept that its contents show evidence of the paper’s deference to Israeli narratives. “I think it’s the kind of thing that looks professional and logical if you have no knowledge of the historical context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” said a Times newsroom source, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, of the Gaza memo. “But if you do know, it will be clear how apologetic it is to Israel.”’

Physical repression and the manufacture of consent, consent not just to imperial policy but to the repression of anti-imperial protest, are two sides of the same authoritarian and imperialist coin.

The president of Columbia University, a longtime liberal and Democratic bastion, recently called in the New York City Police Department to physically clear out and arrest student protesters. New York City’s liberal-fascistic law and order mayor Eric Adams was more than happy to provide the muscle, enlisted in service to false charges of antisemitism, not just at Columbia but also at NYU.

Columbia recently hosted the openly Christian Fascist US House Speaker Mike Johnson for a speech in which he told student activists to “go back to class” and then threatened them with the deployment of the National Guard to crush their protests at the tips of bayonets!! Translation: “I’ll advocate for repeat Kent States!”

Liberal-Democratic “higher education” authorities are repressing student pro-Palestine and anti-genocide protests in the California system and across the country as I write. Fascist Texas has paraded its military state police in full horse-riding riot gear to arrest and intimidate student protesters at the University of Texas-Austin.

Republicans and Democrats might disagree on how fascistic the politics and governance of the imperial homeland should be — no small difference — but more than enough of them in the US Congress agree when it comes to the advance of US imperialism in Israel-Palestine and other locations (Ukraine/Eastern Europe and Taiwan/East Asia and elsewhere), as is seen in the recent “national security” bill passed by the House and Senate. And if the advance of US imperial interests requires the repression of dissent and protest in the homeland’s centers of higher learning, whose presidents are clear member of the US ruling class, the dismal Weimar Dems are more than willing to play ball with the Republi-fascists.

Why, you ask? As Revcom leader Bob Avakian (who you have probably, absurdly, and tellingly been told to hate and snicker at and cancel if you are like much of the American “left”) recently explained:

‘Because fundamental interests of U.S. capitalism-imperialism are at stake. Because Israel plays a “special role” as a heavily armed bastion of support for U.S. imperialism in a strategically important part of the world (the “Middle East”). And Israel has been a key force in the commission of atrocities which have helped to maintain the oppressive rule of U.S. imperialism in many other parts of the world…And this repression is happening because representatives of the ruling class in this country have a definite sense that if youth especially at “elite” universities begin to seriously question and act against what this system is doing—if the system “loses the allegiance” of large numbers of those students—that can be a big factor in creating a real crisis for the system as a whole, as happened in the 1960s: a crisis that, now more than ever, this system really cannot afford, when the whole country is already being torn apart by deep divisions, with bitter clashes right among the ruling powers. So, at the same time as they are bitterly divided, the ruling powers of this country are firmly united in their determination to punish and intimidate especially students at elite universities who have stepped forward to protest the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians. The ruling class is desperate to prevent opposition to its fundamental interests from spreading and involving masses of people, from all parts of society.’

And:

‘All this reveals, more “nakedly” than in “normal situations,” the actual dictatorship behind the outer shell of “democracy” of this country—and it shines a light on the strategic weakness of this system, when it does lose the allegiance of major sections of the people and this has the potential to spread to all parts of society, including among the dominant institutions of this system.’

Read this for a first-rate Revcom report of and commentary on the rising wave of campaus protest currently spreading across the country (https://revcom.us/en/waves-campus-protests-against-us-backed-israeli-war-genocide-continue-and-spread?)