“Women’s Waves” of the Past
Know Your History—DON’T Repeat It!!

Hillary Clinton, First Lady (1993-2000), U.S. Senator (2001-2009), Secretary of State (2009-2013)

As First Lady (1993-2000), she supported President Bill Clinton’s massive assaults on poor people (“ending welfare as we know it”); on Black, Brown and Native peoples (through the largest expansion of mass incarceration in U.S. history and by supporting the death penalty); on Black male youth (whom she labeled “super predators”); and on immigrants (building border barriers and stepping up deportations). She also backed his assault on Iraq, including sanctions which killed over a million people, including 500,000 children.¹

As a senator (2001-2009), Clinton voted for the invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), the fascistic USA Patriot Act (in 2001, 2005, and 2006), and border barriers (the Secure Fencing Act of 2006). She declared, “I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants.” She supported Israel’s 2006 war with Lebanon and in 2008 threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran if it attacked Israel.²

As secretary of state (2009-2013), Clinton backed the 2009 military coup in Honduras, which greatly escalated terror against the people. She pushed for crippling U.S. sanctions on Iran in 2010, helped spearhead the 2011 war that left Libya in ruins, and advocated U.S. intervention in Syria, which helped fuel a reactionary war in which some 500,000 were killed. In 2014, Clinton supported deporting immigrant families and children fleeing U.S. created violence: “[W]e have to send a clear message. Just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay.”³

For decades, Clinton did enormous harm to women by preaching that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,” by arguing for “respect” for the anti-abortion movement, and by staying silent as anti-abortion restrictions were passed, abortion clinics were closed, and abortion-providers like Dr. George Tiller were gunned down. All this put women on the defensive and conceded the moral and political initiative to woman-hating, patriarchal Christian fascists. Clinton’s support for ending welfare was also a major assault on women.⁴

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Golda Meir, Israel’s Foreign Minister (1956-66) and Prime Minister (1969-74)

Meir has been hailed as a woman pioneer for helping create the state of Israel and becoming its prime minister. In reality, she carried out heinous crimes against humanity on behalf of Israel and U.S. imperialism. In 1921, when Meir emigrated to Palestine, it was under control of British imperialism, which sought to create a loyal European colony “in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism,” and the Zionist movement Meir was part of was their instrument for doing so. She lived on land purchased by the Jewish National Fund, “whose aim was the acquisition of land in Palestine for purposes of colonization.”

Meir fully supported the 1947-48 Nakba—the violent, terrorist ethnic cleansing of some 750,000 Palestinians men, women and children from their homes and lands. She later declared, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.”

Meir became a member of the Knesset in 1948 and then Israeli foreign minister from 1956-1966. During this period Israel launched military attacks against Syria and Egypt, supported apartheid South Africa, and in 1962 secretly acquired 10 tons of uranium from the apartheid regime for Israel’s covert nuclear weapons program. As prime minister, Meir refused to recognize the right of 350,000 Palestinians to return to the homes they had been driven from during the 1967 war when Israel seized Gaza and the West Bank in Palestine and Syria’s Golan Heights. Meir was in charge during the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Egypt and Syria, which were fighting to regain lands seized by Israel in 1967. Between 8,000 and 18,000 Egyptians and Syrians were killed.

During these decades, Israel’s brutal ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people continued unabated through the building of settlements, checkpoints, home demolitions, land seizures, and systematic repression and terror in Gaza and the West Bank, and through apartheid segregation inside Israel itself.⁵

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Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, 1966-1977, 1980-1984

Gandhi was the first and only female prime minister of India. In 1971 she seized on a legitimate revolutionary struggle for independence in East Pakistan (which became Bangladesh) to defeat and weaken Pakistan, make India South Asia’s dominant power, and advance the interests of its main imperialist patron at the time—the Soviet Union. Gandhi was a brutal ruler who viciously repressed mass protest and resistance, in particular the Maoist Naxalite revolutionary movement that was raging in the Indian state of West Bengal and elsewhere in the late 1960s. Between 1975 and 1977, Gandhi instituted a state of emergency during which basic rights were suspended, the press was censored, and widespread atrocities were carried out against the people.

Gandhi came from a ruling class family and fought to maintain India’s extremely oppressive patriarchal social order and caste system, which subjects literally hundreds of millions of women to suffocating oppression, sexual violence, and domestic abuse as well as impoverishment, while creating a few openings for “capable Indian women” to rise to the “top.” Meanwhile she argued that "to a woman, motherhood is the highest fulfilment....”⁶

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Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s First Female Prime Minister, 1979-1990

Thatcher, like Ronald Reagan, was a right-wing imperialist. During the 1980s, she joined with America’s all-around assault on their chief imperialist rival, the Soviet Union—an assault which threatened to spark nuclear war. She praised U.S.-installed dictators like Pinochet of Chile and U.S.-backed oppressive regimes like apartheid South Africa, and denounced anti-apartheid resistance movements as “terrorist.”⁷ In 1982, she launched a war of aggression to prevent Argentina from taking back a British colony—the Falklands (Malvinas)—and to assert British imperial power.

In Northern Ireland, Thatcher led Britain’s brutal reign of torture, mass detention, and shredding of civil liberties. She oversaw rampant police brutality against black people, South Asians and impoverished whites in Britain’s crumbling inner cities. Thousands of youth were locked in “sadistic, brutal concentration camps” and subjected to beatings, humiliation and sexual assault. Thatcher’s actions provoked powerful urban uprisings such as the Brixton rebellion in 1981.⁸

Thatcher pushed ruthless fuck-the-poor policies, slashing social services and government aid for education and housing. Banks were deregulated, major government-owned industries were privatized, and unemployment doubled. She was proud of crushing a major strike by coal miners in 1981.

Thatcher was a staunch Methodist who upheld oppressive traditional religion and the patriarchal family as the basis of morality and the social order: “There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families,”⁹ she said. She fought for abortion to be rare.

Thatcher was so widely hated that celebrations broke out in the United Kingdom and elsewhere when she died in 2013.

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Madeleine Albright, UN Ambassador (1993-1996), First Female U.S. Secretary of State (1997-2000)

In 1996, Leslie Stahl of CBS’s 60 Minutes asked Madeline Albright, then Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the UN, about the horrible impact of the U.S. sanctions on Iraq: “We have heard that half a million Iraqi children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And—and you know, is the price worth it?” Albright answered that “…we think the price is worth it.”¹⁰

As Clinton’s secretary of state, Albright was a strong supporter of the U.S.-NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, a one-sided imperialist aggression that killed thousands of people. She played a key role in Clinton’s “Plan Colombia,” which sent billions of dollars to the reactionary Colombian regime, much of it to the military that was closely linked with right-wing paramilitary forces.¹¹

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Condoleezza Rice, First Female National Security Advisor (2000-2005), Secretary of State (2005-2009)

During the presidency of George W. Bush, Rice became the first woman to hold the post of national security advisor and the first Black woman to be secretary of state. She was also a war criminal. Rice was one of the principal architects of the U.S.’s “war on terror”—really a war for greater imperialist empire—and played a critical role in advocating and planning the U.S. wars of aggression against Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). She played a central role in concocting and spreading the lies used to justify these wars—including that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” she said in 2002, after having stated in early 2001 that Hussein posed no threat.

The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that she championed led to over a million Iraqis deaths and displaced some five million more. In October 2003, Rice was put in charge of the Iraqi Stabilization Group, which ultimately failed in its mission to turn Iraq into a reliable pro-U.S. client regime. She also chaired meetings of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, which authorized the waterboarding of prisoners held illegally by the U.S. Rice reportedly told the CIA, “This is your baby. Go do it.”¹²

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Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Late 1980s, Early 1990s

Touted as the first woman to head the government of a Muslim-majority country, Benazir Bhutto was prime minister of Pakistan in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When she was in power, the Pakistani intelligence services worked closely with Al Qaeda and installed the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime in Afghanistan—which brought even more horrors to the people in that country, in particular for women. She facilitated the growth of Islamic jihadist influence within Pakistan itself and played a key role in wiping out radical, secular influence in the struggle against Indian rule in Kashmir. Her rule was characterized by death squads, murders in police custody, “disappearances” of dissidents, and torture.

After fleeing Pakistan due to corruption charges, Bhutto returned in 2007 under an agreement brokered by the U.S. between her and Pakistan’s military regime headed by Pervez Musharraf. The U.S. under George W. Bush hoped that Bhutto’s participation in elections would lead to her sharing power with Musharraf and lend legitimacy to the widely hated Pakistani government, which played an important role for U.S. imperialist interests in the region. However, Bhutto was assassinated before the elections took place.¹³

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Samantha Power, National Security Council (2008–13), U.S. Ambassador to the UN (2013–17)

Samantha Power began her career as a journalist crusading against the history of complicity in genocide by the great powers—including the U.S.—in A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. In another book, she exposed the role of U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in green-lighting the mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of leftists in Indonesia. However, she believed that imperialist powers—particular western powers—could and should be the solution to genocide. She became a major advocate of “humanitarian interventionism,” whereby the U.S. and other big powers bomb, invade and occupy countries in crisis, using the pretext of “protecting civilians” while in fact working to consolidate their own power.

She became a member of Obama’s administration as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights at the National Security Council. She played a crucial role in launching the 2011 U.S./NATO war in Libya, justified in the name of defending pro-democracy activists from being massacred by the Qaddafi government. NATO ships and planes conducted almost 15,000 bombing runs, and U.S.-backed militias unleashed civil war and massive atrocities. Eight months later, between 10,000 and 30,000 people were dead, and Libya had descended into a nightmare of violent conflict and chaos, virtually ceasing to exist as a nation. As UN ambassador, she pointedly condemned Russia and the Assad regime for committing war crimes in Syria while backing U.S. intervention. In 2017, she denounced Russia for undermining the U.S.-dominated “international order.” In June of 2016, she received the Henry A. Kissinger prize from the hands of the notorious war criminal himself.¹⁴

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