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Beware: The Killers Who Rule Your Country Will Lie You into War

Updated

In the wake of accusations of Russian troops killing civilians in Ukraine, the U.S. capitalist-imperialist ruling class and the media that channels their interests are weaponizing (literally and figuratively) those reports. They aim to mobilize public opinion behind further moves to isolate Russia and escalate the war in Ukraine, with potentially catastrophic consequences for humanity (see On the Dangerous, Reckless and Unconscionable Drumbeat for a “No-Fly Zone” in Ukraine).

First fact: in the department of war crimes, no force in history has perpetrated anywhere near as many as the rulers of the U.S. And no force in history can beat the belligerence of the rulers of the U.S. in applying one standard of war crimes to their rivals, while doing or enabling the exact same thing themselves. They’re doing that right now by arming and enabling war crimes in Yemen by their allies in the Middle East.

American Crime Ad for whole series with image of U.S. airstrike in Gaza.

 

But in addition to the obscene hypocrisy involved in the U.S. calling anyone war criminals, this country is literally built on crimes against humanity routinely justified with false pretenses.

Hyperbole?

  • In their founding document, the rulers of this country justified the genocidal mass murder of the Native Americans and theft of their land by accusing the Native peoples of being war criminals! Their Declaration of Independence called the people they were massacring “merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
  • Accusations of rape (or even just "improper" words or touching) were repeatedly invoked to incite and justify the gruesome public lynching of thousands of Black people and to instigate racist mass murder of Black people.

When the rulers of the U.S. charge other countries with “war crimes,” they do so to advance their interests as global oppressors and exploiters and often to prepare to carry out war crimes:

  • “Remember the Maine.” The U.S. battleship Maine blew up on February 15, 1898 in Havana harbor—when Cuba was still one of Spain’s colonies. There was never any evidence that Spanish forces were involved in this explosion, but this did not stop the pro-war forces in the U.S. ruling class from publishing front-page drawings “showing” how the Spanish forces had attached mines to the bottom of the ship. Shouting “Remember the Maine!” the U.S. government rushed into a war to snatch an empire from Spain, seizing Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.
  • The “Gulf of Tonkin Incident.” On August 4, 1964, the U.S. claimed—without any real evidence—that North Vietnam had launched two unprovoked attacks on the U.S. fleet in the Gulf of Tonkin. In fact, the CIA was attacking North Vietnamese coastal installations, so any confrontation that happened would have been provoked by the U.S., and the second “incident” never took place. In “response” to these invented “incidents,” the U.S. Congress passed the “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,” which authorized the massive deployment of U.S. troops into southern Vietnam. It was the start of the extreme escalation of warfare that led to the deaths of millions of people in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
  • “The Kuwait Incubators.” In 1990, as the U.S. was gearing up for the first Gulf War—President George Bush (I)’s invasion of Iraq—the news was inundated with false “testimony” of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti, claiming she witnessed Iraqi soldiers yanking babies out of incubators at a hospital in Iraqi-occupied Kuwait. Bush (I) retold the story in a speech in January 1991, shortly before he launched the bombings on Iraq. This lie served to justify a war that killed 200,000 Iraqis.
  • Non-Existent “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” In 2001, Vice President Cheney pushed the CIA to produce false reports that Iraq had chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ties to Al Qaeda. Justified by the WMD lies, the U.S. launched a blitzkrieg-like invasion of Iraq. Thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed and wounded in the invasion, and the U.S. occupation that followed has been even worse. Iraq Body Count documented between 168,239 and 187,378 civilian deaths from violence, and total violent deaths including combatants at 251,000 from 2003 through September 2016.

When the rulers of this country highly selectively, and with an unmatched record of fabricating incidents, charge “war crimes,” what they mean is: get ready for us to carry out world class war crimes and use you as complicit fools in doing that.

For everyone unwilling to be played that way, there is the challenge posed by Bob Avakian:

What is called for, and urgently now, is to oppose all imperialist marauders and mass murderers, and all systems and relations of oppression and exploitation, while giving particular emphasis to opposing “our own” imperialist oppressors who commit their monstrous crimes “in our name” and seek to rally us to support them on the basis of a grotesque American chauvinism, which we must firmly reject and fiercely struggle against.

We are at a turning point in history. The capitalist-imperialist system is a horror for billions of people here and around the world and threatening the very fabric of life on earth. Now the election of fascist Trump poses even more extreme dangers for humanity—and underscores the total illegitimacy of this system, and the urgent need for a radically different system.

The website Revcom.us follows the revolutionary leadership of Bob Avakian (BA), the author of the new communism. Bob Avakian has scientifically analyzed that we are in a rare time when an actual revolution has become more possible in the U.S. He’s charted a strategy for making that revolution, and laid out a sweeping vision and concrete blueprint for “what comes next” in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America.

Revcom.us projects BA’s voice, leadership, and vision throughout society. It posts his timely leadership for the revcoms (revolutionary communists) and the whole movement for revolution, including his social media posts, and curates his whole body of work. 

Our website applies the scientific approach BA has developed to analyze major events in society and the world—why they are happening, how they relate to each other, how all this relates to the system we live under, where people's interests lie, how revolution is in fact the solution to all this, and what the goals of that revolution are.

Revcom.us acts as a guiding and connecting hub for the revcom movement nationwide: showing what’s being done, digging into what’s right and what’s wrong, and rapidly learning—and recruiting new people into what has to be a rapidly growing force. As part of this, revcom.us feature and promotes the weekly The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show on YouTube.com. 

Put it this way: there will be no revolution unless this website not only “keeps going” but rises to a whole different level!

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