DEMOCRAT OR REPUBLICAN. WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE?
By John Wight

In the United States, as election season draws ever nearer, a fresh wave of excitement, fanned by the corporate media, centres on which Democratic Party candidate will face off against the Republican election machine, which in the next election will be headed by someone other than the execrable George W Bush.

Within the US progressive community, keen attention is currently focused on which of the Democratic hopefuls will at last lead them out of the darkness of a Republican administration, an administration, they observe, which over the last eight years has destroyed America’s standing in the world. Whether it is the disaster that is the war in Iraq, whether the disrespect with which it has treated the UN and international law, or whether it is the astounding ignorance it has shown in refuting the irrefutable scientific evidence that climate change is the result of human activity, the common consensus among those who would happily label themselves ‘progressive’ is that the only hope for America in 2008 is a Democrat incumbent. Judging by the polls, this will most likely be Hillary Clinton.

But there is a fly in the ointment of so much hope being placed in the prospect of a Democratic Party administration. And it doesn’t come in the form of subjective opinion either. No, this word of caution is arrived at on the back of a cursory examination of recent history, a history which immediately serves to question the expectation of salvation from a Democrat incumbent. It is a history of war, military interventions, the subversion of human rights and democracy, and economic imperialism under Democratic Party administrations which has been every bit as brutal and ignoble as that undertaken by their Republican counterparts.

Towards the end of the Second World War, with Japan to all intents and purposes a defeated and decimated nation, the then president, Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, ordered the twin nuclear strikes against Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whilst still in office, from 1950 to 1953, Truman also sanctioned the decimation of Korea and the deaths of 3 million people. It was a Democrat, JFK, who ordered the first US troops into Vietnam in 1963, who sanctioned an attempted armed intervention to topple the Cuban government, who thereafter initiated the embargo against the Cuban people which continues to this day. It was a Democrat, Jimmy Carter, who initiated the doctrine of military intervention in the Middle East, who covertly provided sanctuary and funding to Pol Pot and his followers in Thailand, who poured millions into research on and development of the Neutron bomb, and who sanctioned Indonesia's annexation of East Timor in 1976, which led to the massacre of a quarter of a million East Timorese.

Then there is Bill Clinton, that star of the Democrats, the man who, in the eyes of millions who recall his tenure in office with misty eyes and warm hearts, walks on water. Well, tell that to the millions of single mothers forced to leave their kids at home while they went to work long hours to make ends meet as a result of the Clinton ‘welfare to work program,’ setting in motion a transfer of wealth from poor to rich of which Ronald Reagan would have been proud. Tell that to the Cuban people, who found their country further isolated as a consequence of the Helms-Burton Act penalising any US trading partner which also trades with Cuba, signed into legislation by Clinton in 1996. And tell that, finally, to the Iraqi people who saw their nation decimated for 13 years under US orchestrated, UN sanctions, sanctions in which half a million children perished, an infanticide which, Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s Secretary of State, described as a ‘price worth paying.’

As for John Kerry, the so-called liberal from Massachusetts, he fought an election campaign in 2004 around his combat record in Vietnam, one of the most immoral and criminal wars ever waged, along with pledges to prosecute the war in Iraq even more vigorously than Bush, to maintain support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine and their repression of the Palestinian people, to ‘hunt and kill more terrorists.’

Given the role of the US ruling class, both Democrat and Republican, in the misery and oppression felt by billions in the developing world, a special responsibility has always rested on the shoulders of the American people. With the war in Iraq having already claimed the lives of countless hundreds of thousands (quite literally, as the US refuses to compile statistics of Iraqi dead), the world demands that they get out of the mall and into the streets in their tens of thousands to begin the process of dismantling the most exploitative, extreme and barbaric economic and political system the world has ever known.

It is not enough that they wait complacently for another presidential election to choose which member of the same ruling class gets the honour of repressing the world for the next four or five years. No, because until those twin pillars of US global hegemony have been removed - namely the marriage of military might to corporate greed - it makes only the slightest bit of difference if the US is governed by a Democrat or a Republican administration.

No longer can anyone, either outside or inside the US, be under any illusions as to the true nature of this country which proclaims itself the land of the free. The American Revolution was not fought in the interests of liberty as the official history would have us believe; instead it was fought in the interests of a white, property-owning class who decided that their continued prosperity would be better served by taking political power from the British.

After the successful colonisation of the continent's indigenous population, which ended towards the end of the eighteenth century, and after solving the problem of slavery after the Civil War by moving three million Africans from chattel slavery to wage slavery on the bottom rung of the economic ladder, where they remain to this day, the same ruling class turned its attention outward to the rest of the world.

The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 had already taken care of its neighbours to the south, but for them, the beneficiaries of an economic system that is predicated on constant expansion, this wasn't enough.

This is why the First World War proved such a godsend.

In the wake of its aftermath, as a gesture of appreciation for their belated help, the British allowed the US access to the Middle East for the first time. The Sykes-Picot Agreement between Great Britain and France of 1916, carving up this imperial prize between them, gave Britain control of present day Iraq's oilfields. Britain brought the US in to share in the spoils of this prize as a junior partner, until after the Second World War when, with Britain's economy in tatters, the US assumed the mantle of imperial master over all.

The skilful and cynical use of repressive, client regimes throughout the region - in Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Israel - achieved two things: maintenance of US economic and strategic control and the illusion of non-intervention and influence.

At various times the mask slipped - the CIA-engineered coup in Iran in 1953 that brought the Shah to power, for example - but overall it was a policy that worked to keep the flow of petroleum and petrodollars going without interruption.

And let's not forget the rest of the world either, because US overt and covert military interventions, since the end of the Second World War, have taken place in every corner of the globe. From Africa to Southeast Asia, from the jungles of Colombia and Vietnam to the streets of Chile, American power has been utilised with the aim of forming a world in the service of the US ruling class and its economic interests.

This is power has also, in the United States itself, created a society in which over 44 million men, women and children are without healthcare, in which 35 million are mired in poverty, in which over 2 million people, more than any other nation on earth, are in prison, and in which juveniles are executed in a number of States.

The aforementioned is necessary to illustrate and emphasise the scope and destructiveness of US global hegemony, and also to emphasise the simple fact that nothing apart from the intervention of the American people will stop it. In February 2003 there was a glimpse of an awakening; antiwar marches and rallies in cities across the United States were attended by close to 2 million people. However, in comparison to the 1.5 million who marched in London, the 2 million who marched in Rome, the millions who marched in other countries around the world, and taking into account the population of the US compared to those countries, that figure pales.

In the face of rigid, corporate control of the media that exists within the US, it could be argued that the American people have been kept ignorant with lies and distortions, and have been poisoned with false patriotism, fear and xenophobia.

However, despite that, the truth is still available if you bother to look for it, which up to now, with few exceptions, they have not. Apathy could be argued for this, but a more probable cause might be the fact that, in a material sense, the American people are the beneficiaries of the present global system of exploitation. In support of this claim one only has to consider the following: constituting just 5 percent of the world's population, the United States gobbles up 25 percent of its resources.

In a society in which consumption, the apotheosis of consumption, is confused with freedom and liberty, as long as a steady supply of consumer goods is made available, traditionally the American people have been content to turn a blind eye to what their government does in their name around the world.

Both Democrats and Republicans called next year’s presidential election the most important modern history. In truth, in terms of stemming the tide of US imperialism and its savage consequences around the world, it means nothing. The obligation of the American people is not, and cannot be, merely to change one administration for one which supports the same policies and is a product of the same class and economic interests. Rather it is to ensure that these policies and economic interests are dismantled.

That will require more than just a change of government. It will require, instead, a change in the system of government.

It will require nothing less than a second American Revolution.