US-American Imperialism Deleted

From US-Americans' Understanding of the "Immigration Crisis" and the Plight of Gaza

Under the consent-manufacturing guidance of US capitalist-imperialist commercial war and entertainment media, millions everyday Americans confront current events without remotely adequate historical and political frameworks to make any sense of them.  

The American people are supposed to be scared and angry about the never ending and recently escalating “immigration crisis” at the southern United States (US)  border, where millions of desperately poor and brown-skinned people are seeking both legal and illegal entry to the United States.  But what’s missing in the dominant media coverage and political commentary on this crisis is any serious discussion of the historical forces and events behind the desperation of millions of Central and South Americans to get out of their countries and north of the US border.

An Imperialism Problem, Not an Immigration Problem

There’s a reason for that omission. The migrants are fleeing poverty, violence, and political repression caused by past and ongoing US military, economic and climate policies.  Life is miserable for millions upon millions of people south of the US border thanks to the central role that US capitalism and imperialism have played in subjecting Latin Americans to poverty, coups, military rule, right-wing death squads, underdevelopment, narco-terrorism, export-flooding, displacement, debt, and now runaway climate catastrophe. The American political and ideological systems are conditioned by and a beholden to a capitalist-imperialist system whose owners and managers don’t want this basic historical fact made public to any significant degree – and who want the citizenry’s anger and fear directed not at the underlying class rule system and its masters but rather at brown-skinned Others portrayed as menacing and unworthy invaders.   

The Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) of the United States  is correct when it says that “we [US Americans] don’t have an immigration problem, we have an imperialism problem” – the problem posed by the imperialism of our own capitalist government. The RCP’s leader Bob Avakian provided essential historical context in terms that ordinary people could understand years ago when he responded to nationalist and imperialist arguments against radical criticism of  US American society:   

“Now I can hear these reactionary fools saying, ‘Well, answer me this: If this country is so terrible, why do people come here from all over the world? Why are so many people trying to get in, not get out?’ I’ll tell you why: because you have fucked up the rest of the world even worse than what you have done in this country. You have made it impossible for many people to live in their countries as part of gaining your riches and power.”

The point applies with special accurate force to Latin America, which the United States claimed as its own imperial dominion long ago.

(I am writing in Chicago, where people are angry about the recent influx of 18,00 migrants, many of them from Venezuela, which the Biden administration is, like its predecessors, devastating with crippling economic sanctions that have produced a humanitarian crisis. Few at the community meetings held here to express outrage over the newcomers seem to know much about what the US has been doing to Latin America for many decades – or that the city’s high real estate vacancy rate means that it possesses abundant space to shelter the newcomers as temperatures drop.)

Deleting US Imperialism From the Latest Gaza Crisis

Speaking of making it impossible for people to live in their countries and of the need for basic historical knowledge beyond what the reigning US media-politics provides everyday Americans, consider the plight of the people stuck in the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip, a squalid 141-square mile territory on and along the southern border of Israel.

Gaza is in the news right now because the Muslim force (Hamas) in nominal charge of its colonial government has launched a bloody attack on the leading US Middle Eastern client state and ally, Israel.

According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency:

“The Gaza Strip has a population of approximately 2.1 million people, including some 1.7 million Palestine Refugees. For at least the last decade and a half, the socioeconomic situation in Gaza has been in steady decline. ..A[n] Israel-imposed and US-backed] blockade on land, air and sea was imposed by Israel following the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007. There are now very few options left for the people of Gaza, who have been living under collective punishment as a result of the blockade that continues to have a devastating effect as people’s movement to and from the Gaza Strip, as well as access to markets, remains severely restricted….The blockade and related restrictions contravene international humanitarian law as they target and impose hardship on the civilian population, effectively penalizing them for acts they have not committed…Food security in Gaza has deteriorated with 63 per cent of people in the Gaza Strip being food insecure and dependent on international assistance. The continuing intra-Palestinian divisions exacerbate the humanitarian and service delivery crisis on the ground. With 81.5 per cent of the population living in poverty, an overall unemployment rate of 46.6 per cent (48.1 per cent for Palestine Refugees living in the camps) at the end of the third quarter of 2022 and an unemployment rate of 62.3 per cent among youth (15-29 years, refugees and non-refugees), the already fragile humanitarian situation in Gaza threatens to deteriorate further. The economy and its capacity to create jobs have been devastated, resulting in the impoverishment and de-development of a highly skilled and well-educated society. Access to clean water and electricity remains at crisis level and impacts nearly every aspect of life. Clean water is unavailable for 95 per cent of the population. Electricity is available up to an average of 11 hours per day as of July 2023. However, ongoing power shortage has severely impacted the availability of essential services, particularly health, water, and sanitation services, and continues to undermine Gaza’s fragile economy, particularly the manufacturing and agriculture sectors.”

The Judeo-fascist state of Israel has not been content to rely on blockades and ghettoization alone to impose collective punishment on the Palestinian people of Gaza. Those people have for years suffered under Israeli air strikes that take huge tolls in human life and infrastructure.

An award-winning Israeli documentary released in 2013 exposed how Israel turned millions of Gazans and other Palestinians “into literal human laboratories for the testing of new weapons” (Ramzy Baroud).

Adolph Hitler would admire the Hell Israel has created for the people of Gaza and Palestine.

The Israel government has carried out this torture of the people of Gaza with the support of the United States, which provides Tel Aviv with billions of dollars’ worth of military aid every year.  As the Arab Center reported six weeks ago:

“If there is one thing that characterizes American-Israeli relations more than any other it is US military aid to Israel, which currently amounts to nearly $4 billion dollars a year. Few things in Washington have seemed more guaranteed than this US aid, as well as congressional approval for it. This support has been so sacrosanct that any critical conversation around it has long been considered taboo…US Military aid to Israel, or more precisely US military financing for Israel, functions through the United States’ Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program. Israel is the single largest recipient of US military financing through this program, at $3.8 billion a year. Egypt comes in second at $1.3 billion. Together they make up the majority of the nearly $10 billion annually allotted for this purpose. Egypt’s military financing itself was a product of negotiations to bring the country under American influence as part of the Camp David Accords in the late 1970s. The peace accords, sealed with financing for the Egyptian military and economy, brought an end to hostilities and recognition of Israel by Egypt. In other words, the majority of the FMF program serves Israeli interests.”

US sponsorship and funding of Judeo-fascist Israel, a hyper-militarized ethno-religious state based on the ruthless theft of Palestinian land and the brutal oppression of the Palestinian people, goes back many decades. The US is the critical super-imperial force behind the misery of Gaza, where recent brazen Israeli provocations including the opening of a cherished Muslim mosque to Jewish worshippers have made a conflict seem inevitable in recent months.

Now that Hamas has struck, inflicting what is being called “Israel’s 9/11,” Washington’s role in the torment of Gaza is kept down the memory hole as Joe Biden announces that Washington gives “rock solid and unwavering support” to Israel.  Biden’s statement amounts to giving the far-right genocidal fascist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu a blank check as he acts on his pledge to respond with “mighty vengeance,” telling Gazans to “flee” from Israel-made  prison they can’t escape. Indeed, the US is sending advanced weaponry to help Israel kills Gazans en masse. Washington is sending warships to warn off any regional forces who might be moved to try to protect the people of Gaza from horrendous assault.    

The history of US-backed Israeli oppression was omitted as the Black misleader and imperialist US House Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) advanced his party’s racist, Arab-hating imperialism by going on “woke-imperialist” MSNBC to say yesterday that "right now Israel has to do what it's got to do." The MSNBC host asked, "so level the place?," meaning Gaza, and Meeks didn’t flinch.

The mainstream media treats it as a normalized and apparently approved fact that Israel is going to kill thousands of Palestinians in response to a Hamas attack for which little if any real historical context is permitted.

The power worshipping "presidential historian" Michael Beschloss yesterday went on warmongering MSNBC to absurdly defend Israel and call it a “great democracy” --- as if it isn't an openly Judeo-fascist ethno-state that recently made a big leap toward heightened internal authoritarianism under the criminal Netanyahu.

Other Democratic Congresspersons went on MSNBC to say that “We’ve got to give Israel room” to “act decisively here” – that is to generate mountains of rubble and Palestinian corpses in Gaza.

The Democratic House Armed Services Committee member Adam Smith made it clear on MSNBC (to anyone who can read between the lines) that he's fine with Israel killing untold thousands of Palestinian civilians in coming days.

The imperial USA media “conversation” about Israel’s role in the Hamas attack on CNN and MSNBC turns on Israeli intelligence failures; nothing much is said about Israel’s US-backed savage oppression and torture of Gaza.

Watching cable yesterday and this morning, I’ve been horrified but unsurprised to see Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman's dichotomy between worthy and unworthy victims play out with blatant and unapologetic transparency. “Yes,” a Palestinian rights activist writes me, “some lives matter and others don’t.” It’s nothing new.

A note of moral sanity from Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Cornel West:

“This is my response to the many media requests as to what my aim would be as President in regard to the catastrophe in the Middle East: ‘I would stop the killing of innocent people – be they Palestinians or Israelis – by calling for an end to the vicious U.S.-supported Israeli occupation [of Palestine]. This violent resistance to oppression is the desperate language of an occupied people…,the U.S. government, the Israeli government, and the occupied Hamas forces have blood on their hands. We must fight for the masses of Palestinians and Israelis to live with dignity and security! As I have always said, a precious Palestinian child has the same value as a precious Israeli child.’”

As West knows, the Gazans have been trapped in a living Hell that the United States is about to let its client state Israel make even more horrific than it already was. How despicable.

According to reports this morning, Israel has already launched 1000 strikes into Gaza. It has reduced countless civilian dwellings and at least ten mosques to rubble, with bodies crushed underneath. Israel has shut off Gaza’s electricity and denied it access to any food or fuel from outside.  "I have given an order — Gaza will be under complete closure," Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said in a statement. "There will be no electricity, food or fuel. We are fighting barbaric terrorists and will respond accordingly.”

"We are going to respond very, very severely to this," Hecht said earlier. "In a way, this is our 9/11."

“Barbaric” and “terrorism” are accurate words to describe how Israel treats the people of Gaza, for whom, in a way, every day is 9/11. You wouldn’t know it from CNN or MSNBC, where one named and humanized Israeli or US victim is worth thousands of nameless and imperially dehumanized  Palestinian victims.