The Gross Hypocrisy of Melania Trump’s “Be Best” Campaign—and the Reality of America’s Long Criminal History of Torture, Rape and Murder of Children

May 14, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

In a White House ceremony this week with Donald Trump, Mike Pence and several cabinet officials present, Melania Trump announced a campaign called “Be Best” supposedly aimed at promoting the well-being of children. She said, “Children deserve every opportunity to enjoy their innocence.” The fact that this display of brazen hypocrisy wasn’t immediately met with loud jeers and outrage from the media and every corner of society is a sign of just how dangerously normalized this American fascist regime has become. On the very same day that this regime was claiming to care about children, Trump’s attorney general Jeff Sessions declared that all undocumented adults who are caught going across the border into the U.S. with children will be considered to be criminals “smuggling” minors, prosecuted, and separated from their kids. This means even more ugly inhumanity against children of immigrants—on top of a situation in which over 700 kids have been ripped away from parents or other adults by the Border Patrol since October 2017, more than 100 of them under the age of 4. Think of what this is doing to children who are already traumatized by having to uproot their whole lives in their home countries because of upheavals and crushing poverty, and then by the harrowing and often deadly trek across the border. This is the regime that now claims to be for the well-being of children!?!

Anyone with an ounce of humanity in their hearts must join in the movement of millions to drive out this fascist regime, before they consolidate their power and do even more incalculable harm, perhaps threaten civilization as a whole. But if you think that what’s needed is a return to when America was “better” and stood for something “good” in the world, then you need a dose of reality.

When have America and its rulers ever cared about the well-being of children? During the horrific 400 years slavery, when children were auctioned off as their enslaved parents watched and “sold down the river” to slave owners hundreds of miles away, never to be seen again? Did the slave-owning class, and the capitalists in the North who greatly profited from the plantation economy, give a fuck about the unknown number of lives of children and parents they destroyed? The obvious answer is no—unless you’re one of those, like Kanye or his pal Trump, who blame the slaves themselves for being in chains.

Was the well-being of children in the minds of America’s rulers when they carried out massacre after massacre of Native American peoples, including many, many children and babies? Or when they conducted cultural genocide by taking away thousands of Native American children from their parents and sending them to boarding schools, where their Native American culture was forcibly driven out of them through Christian indoctrination and physical, mental, and sexual abuse? Again—the rulers didn’t give a fuck about these children.

Look at the children, along with the adults, who were ruthlessly exploited by the rising capitalists in the factories of America, under dirty, unhealthy, and often life-endangering conditions. And as these capitalists became capitalist-imperialists whose empire now stretches across the globe, look at the children working in near-slavery conditions in the factories, mines and fields—and many forced into sexual slavery at an early age—in vast regions of the world, part of the international web of exploitation and oppression that goes into building up the vast wealth and power of the U.S. rulers.

When Harry Truman, the Democratic president, ordered the dropping of the atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was he thinking about the well-being of the many, many children who were among the 200,000 humans, overwhelmingly civilians, who were incinerated? No, all that he and the other rulers had in mind was that these weapons of mass murder would be a signal to the world—to their rival powers as well as the masses of people—that America was now the number one imperialist godfather everyone had to bow down to. And these same rulers would go on just a few years later to lead an invasion and war in Korea that killed over 3 million people—again, including massive numbers of children, and again, in order to benefit the cause of their empire.

During the Vietnam War, among the Vietnamese people that the GIs tortured, raped, and massacred were many children. Probably pretty soon, the Republican Senator John McCain will die and then there’ll be a huge memorializing of him as an “American hero,” including how he survived after being shot down as a bomber pilot during the Vietnam War. No, he wasn’t a fucking hero—he was a war criminal, along with all the other American soldiers participating in that war! Go to www.revcom.us and read the piece by a Vietnam War vet, titled “We Were Baby Killers for U.S. Imperialism,” that runs down some truth about the atrocities and horrors the U.S. troops committed.

Let’s not forget one of the towering crimes of the Bill Clinton presidency in the 1990s, when the years-long U.S. economic sanctions on Iraq cut off medicine, food, and other vital supplies and killed 500,000 children in that country—more than were killed in the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Do we need to ask whether this unspeakable horror led those running the U.S. to reconsider their actions? Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state under Clinton, was later asked by a TV interviewer about the death of half a million children—“Is the price worth it?” Albright’s answer: “We think the price is worth it.”

We could go on and on…but what we’ve laid out here is more than enough to point to the truth: America, from its beginnings to today, has always meant horrors and mass suffering for children—and for people overall—here and around the world. Trump, Pence and the rest of the cabal represent an extreme form of the system of capitalism-imperialism that poses an immediate threat to humanity, and that’s why their fascist regime must go. But how can going back to “imperialism as usual”—under monsters who think killing half a million children in the interest of their system is “worth it”—actually move the world beyond the horrors we already faced before Trump? Nothing less than an actual revolution to overthrow the rulers and their system—when a revolutionary situation has been brought into being and millions are ready to be led to fight all out, with a real chance to win—can bring about a completely new, and much better, political and economic system based on the interests of humanity.

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