Hark, The Great Champion of “Liberal Values and Women’s Empowerment” Speaketh…:

Hillary Clinton to 65 Million Desperate Refugees: STAY PUT, SHUT UP, AND DROP DEAD

November 26, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

There are 65 million refugees in the world today, forced out of their homes because of wars, poverty, and ecological destruction and desperately seeking a place where they can survive. These conditions have resulted from this system, rooted in the expand-or-die competition of capitalism and the imperialist rivalry over control of the world to serve that end. Those fleeing are so desperate that they risk a nameless death of thirst in the deserts or drowning on the high seas.

And what does Hillary Clinton, that supposed champion of liberal values and women’s empowerment, say should be done about this? Let’s let her speak for herself.

In an interview with the Guardian, Clinton advised Angela Merkel, the current head of Germany, “I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message—‘we are not going to be able to continue [to] provide refuge and support’—because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic.”

Let’s break this down and get to the reality behind those words.

“Europe has done its part”?! That’s a huge part of the problem!

Yeah, “Europe has done its part.” Let’s look at that “part.”

Start with the Atlantic slave trade. European capitalists kidnapped tens of millions of Africans and shipped them to the Americas, to sell as slaves. The ships came back with slave-produced goods and stolen treasure to invest in the newly rising capitalist mode of production. This went on for centuries—hand-in-hand with the literal genocide of Native Americans. This ushered in what Karl Marx ironically called the “rosy dawn” of capitalism, beginning a process through which a handful of countries became super-wealthy and powerful at the expense of the world’s peoples. And it spawned Europe’s monster child, the USA, which went on to outdo the European powers in genocide, predatory wars, exploitation, and oppression across the globe.

Then there’s the specific “part” that Europe and the U.S. have played in the history of horrors in Africa, where so many of those seeking refuge in Europe come from. In the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, the European powers carved up Africa, literally drawing up borders and allotting different parts to different colonizers. This division set the terms for the barbaric exploitation of Africa’s land, mineral wealth, and people, as well as the tearing up of the social fabric of communities of the oppressed—and all this goes on to this day. In the Congo alone—seized by Belgium—an estimated 10 million Congolese people were sacrificed on the altar of capital in the late 1800s. Similar truths could be told about the Middle East, South Asia, and other parts of the world.

Then there’s the “part” that Europe and the U.S. play in global climate change, caused in large part by the use of oil and other fossil fuels that their system of capitalism-imperialism is addicted to. Tens of millions of people from sub-Saharan Africa and other oppressed areas of the world are being forced to look for refuge because intensifying droughts, floods, and other effects of climate change have made their homelands unlivable. In the face of warnings from scientists about the looming catastrophe that climate crisis poses for the planet’s environment and humanity, all these powers are continuing on this disastrous course.

And look at all the wars of conquest, bombings, invasions, backing of reactionary coups, and other military actions that all these imperialist powers have carried out and continue to carry out in pursuit of their interests—against each other, any threats to their interests (including from reactionary forces like the fundamentalist jihadists), and against the masses of oppressed people. Whether in the Middle East, Central America, or other places, these reactionary wars have devastated whole countries and regions and forced countless millions into a desperate search for safety and means of survival.

Yes, Europe (and the U.S.) has “done its part.” It has created a world where there’s an enormous concentration of wealth and power in a handful of countries—and a hellish nightmare of massive poverty, dislocation, reactionary violence, and suffering in large parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. This is what has caused the human flow of tens of millions seeking refuge and a way to survive.

Hillary Clinton’s Special Bloody Role in Today’s Refugee Crisis Horror

And let’s not forget the “part” that Hillary Clinton played as Secretary of State under Obama. Clinton was a big proponent of taking advantage of an internal uprising in Libya to launch a war aimed at Libya’s regime, headed by Muammar Qadaffi. Qadaffi himself was a reactionary who at one time posed an obstacle to American imperial designs, but had long since capitulated. But Clinton and Obama decreed that he would still have to pay, and now was their chance to violently reassert their power and tighten the imperialist noose around Libya's neck. After Qadaffi was seized by a crowd and abused and lynched in a truly horrific manner, Hillary Clinton laughed and gloated: “We came, we saw, he died.”

Meanwhile, U.S.-led NATO bombing left Libya in shambles. Rival warlords fought each other, and Islamic jihadists seized ground within the chaos. Meanwhile, the United Nations estimates that some 400,000 Libyans have had to flee their homes, a quarter of them becoming refugees driven from the country altogether.

Libya itself, rent by chaos, has become a major route for refugees from sub-Saharan Africa trying to get to Europe. European powers have responded by backing the puppet Libyan regime in setting up a Coast Guard, which routinely opens fire on and rams boats filled with refugees in the international waters of the Mediterranean, endangering and killing many. In June of this year, more than 100 people, including babies, drowned when Libyan ships “intercepted” a boat full of refugees. In a report on the incident, the British paper Telegraph noted, “Libya is the main departure point for most migrants trying to reach Europe. More than 1,000 people have drowned or gone missing in the Mediterranean already this year.” Refugees who are captured on land and at sea—as many as a million people, often children unaccompanied by parents—are being held in concentration camps in Libya. They are beaten and starved, and some are even literally auctioned off as slaves.

Yes, Europe—and “Madame Secretary”—have certainly “done their parts.”

Hillary Clinton’s Offer to Refugees: Nothing.

And Hillary Clinton’s “solution”? “We’re not going to be able to provide refuge and support.” In other words—stay home, shut up, drop dead!

On this, the main point is not Hillary Clinton and whatever she might or might not think needs to be done (or might or might not now wish she had said in answering this question). The main point is that the system she has dedicated herself to serving has no answers to this problem of tens of millions of refugees driven from their homes by the very workings of that system itself and the crimes that system has perpetrated.

“Roiling the Body Politic”

Clinton warns that letting in more refugees will “continue to roil the body politic”? Well, the “body politic” in Europe, and in the U.S., badly needs a lot more “roiling.” In fact, it needs much more than roiling; it needs revolution, communist revolution, to turn this whole world right-side up. There actually IS a solution to this madness—there is a system in which the world’s people could share the planet and its resources and deal with the catastrophes and horrors that it would inherit from capitalism. The blueprint for that solution can be found here in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian. The road to that solution can be found here in the speech given this summer by BA. The whole body of work of this architect of the new communism can be gone into here. And some of BA’s thinking on this madness can be accessed here, in answer to a question posed during his speaking tour this summer.

We need a revolution and, yes, we need “roiling” as part of that. We need—humanity needs—people right now protesting against both the vicious fascist attacks on immigrants launched by Trump and the kinds of solutions proffered by top Democrats like Hillary Clinton.