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The New York Times Invites You for a Swim in an Ocean of Blood

January 7, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Last week the New York Times ran an editorial entitled “The Changing of the Guard” that bemoaned the ways in which a number of infamous U.S. war criminals—or, in the words of the New York Times, “national security titans”—are growing older and losing influence. Collectively, these people were responsible for the deaths of literally millions of people, as can be seen from the accompanying chart.¹

Now remember, the Times is balanced and these days even tries to be “woke.” So they emit a slight cough halfway down the page and note that Henry Kissinger (one of the war criminals—or “moderates,” to use Times-speak—that they’re celebrating here) will be “stained by the needless bloodshed in Vietnam and clandestine support for the vicious coup in Chile.” And that is it by way of criticism; just enough to calm the reader’s objections (and dull her senses).

The rest is a celebration of these people who, we are told, “brought reason, experience and a sense of history to bear on national security debates.” What they actually did, however “reasonable,” was to use the machinery of death and the threat of that machinery to enforce a bitter and grinding exploitation for the billions of people around the planet for the profit of U.S. capital and the parasitical way of life that America celebrates. In addition to the horrific wars they carried out or sponsored, they starved whole peoples and robbed the natural resources of countries—including extorting unbearable concessions that impoverished countries through their control of international finance through institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and further tightened the choke chains of imperialist domination.

The Times poses these “titans” against what they consider to be Donald Trump’s “wreckage” of that imperialist order. Trump for his part—and he represents a whole fascist section of the ruling class, now in power—believes that old order has outlived its usefulness and he is fighting for a different way to pursue those same bloody interests.

And that’s the point. The Times and their coverage, including their often cutting denunciations and exposures of Trump, differs with the fascist regime not over whether but HOW to enforce U.S. interests, here and around the world. For them—and for you, if they succeed in their shaping of public opinion—the problem is not that Trump threatens to do even more horrific damage to the masses, but that he may destabilize or upset the system by what they consider to be his wrong-headed policies.

In this light, we’ll again repeat the following:

The Democrats, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, etc., are seeking to resolve the crisis with the Trump presidency on the terms of this system, and in the interests of the ruling class of this system, which they represent. We, the masses of people, must go all out, and mobilize ourselves in the millions, to resolve this in our interests, in the interests of humanity, which are fundamentally different from and opposed to those of the ruling class.

This, of course, does not mean that the struggle among the powers that be is irrelevant or unimportant; rather, the way to understand and approach this (and this is a point that must also be repeatedly driven home to people, including through necessary struggle, waged well) is in terms of how it relates to, and what openings it can provide for, “the struggle from below”—for the mobilization of masses of people around the demand that the whole regime must go, because of its fascist nature and actions and what the stakes are for humanity.

1. The butchers mourned by the Times include Republicans Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James Baker, Colin Powell, and Richard Lugar; and Democrats Madeleine Albright, Sam Nunn, William Perry, and Lee Hamilton.  [back]

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