While the Media Tries to Pull Your Heartstrings Over Dead American Soldiers...
WHEN IT COMES TO MURDERING BABIES AND CREATING WIDOWS AND ORPHANS...
America “Reigns Supreme” Without a Challenger!
| revcom.us
When ISIS set off its barbarous suicide bomb near the Afghan airport, the U.S. media didn’t make the main story about the scores of Afghans killed, but about the U.S. soldiers—and especially the one who left behind a pregnant widow.
They are trying to play you, to program you to think only or at least first and foremost about American lives. You wouldn’t know from the headlines and pictures of the U.S. soldiers who died that are splashed across the front pages that while 2,400 U.S. troops have died in the American invasion of and war against Afghanistan, at least 240,000 Afghans, and perhaps more, have been killed.1 In other words, in the past 20 years of war, at least 100 times as many Afghans have died as Americans. And underneath that, even more, is the larger message they are pushing: their fiction that “America is a force for good in the world,” with its “noble troops” willing to lay down their lives to “help others.”
What poisonous bullshit! U.S. troops are stationed in over 70 countries around the world2 to protect U.S. imperialist interests. And when they do fight, they do so in a way that treats the thousands and millions who die as a result as “collateral damage”—just so much road kill in maintaining world domination.
Go here, here, and here to learn how much America really cares about the small children and the families of the countries it invades. As A Declaration, A Call puts it:
The military of this country is not carrying out an “honorable service”—and it is not some “bad ass” force that people should respect. It is doing the same thing around the world, on a massive scale, that the police are doing here: carrying out the cowardly killing and terrorizing of people in the service of the biggest oppressors in the world, the rulers of this country. And it is a major cause of the destruction of the environment.
It is a hard but basic truth: For the masses of people, and ultimately for humanity as a whole, there is no future, or no future worth living, under this system.
1. The 240,000 figure cited in “All in or All Out? Biden Saw No Middle Ground in Afghanistan,” Peter Baker, New York Times, August 28, 2021. A 2015 report from the Cost of War project at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University estimated that indirect deaths from the U.S. war in Afghanistan—caused by destruction of health system infrastructure, effects of displacement, etc.—to be 360,000. [back]
2. “Where in the World Is the U.S. Military?” David Vine, Politico, July/August 2015. [back]
Bob Avakian has written that one of three things that has "to happen in order for there to be real and lasting change for the better: People have to fully confront the actual history of this country and its role in the world up to today, and the terrible consequences of this." (See "3 Things that have to happen in order for there to be real and lasting change for the better.")
In that light, and in that spirit, "American Crime" is a regular feature of revcom.us. Each installment focuses on one of the 100 worst crimes committed by the U.S. rulers—out of countless bloody crimes they have carried out against people around the world, from the founding of the U.S. to the present day.
Read the American Crime series
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