Imperialism and Clinton Apologists
BY GARY ZABEL @AUTONOMIA75
In 1945, World War Two ended. The two powers that had been contending for global dominance — England and Germany — were in ruins. The US, which was already the dominant industrial power, and which was intact at the end of the war, made a successful bid to replace England and its empire. It fought an uneven war against “communism” that it won in 1989–1991, the years between the collapse of the Soviet client regimes and that of the Soviet Union itself. The period from 1945–1991 was misnamed the Cold War. It consisted in dozens of hot wars, covert operations, and political assassinations: Korean War, Vietnam War, proxy wars in Nicaragua and Afghanistan, overthrow of governments in Guatemala, Grenada, Chile, Greece, etc., the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, organization of US-trained death squads throughout Latin America, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in Congo, Salvador Allende in Chile, Che Guevara in Bolivia, and many more, including eight attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro.
People who expected peace with the end of the Cold War were sorely disappointed. US support for “radical Islamist terrorists” in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan as tools of anti-communism resulted in the creation of Al Qaida and its spin-off, the Islamic State. The US started wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and arguably Syria, attempted to overthrow democratically elected governments in Venezuela and Bolivia, assassinated well over one thousand people in the Middle East (under Obama), kidnapped and tortured suspected enemies from around the world, held them in secret prisons, and on and on.
Hillary Clinton was a part of this sordid story as Secretary of State. She lobbied Obama to commit what he has now called the biggest foreign policy mistake of his administration, the invasion of Libya, which has contributed to the greatest exodus of refugees in recorded history. She pushed for the US to support the coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras, turning that nation into a free-fire zone for multinational corporations protected by government death squads. She, her husband, and the Clinton Foundation managed the flow of private and US government earthquake reconstruction funds to Haiti, enriching members of the Clintons’ inner circle, while building luxury hotels in a nation of homeless people. She was part of an administration that practices daily extrajudicial executions, and yet is considered by the mainstream US press to be a hawk when compared with Obama.
US geopolitical power is now waning as Russia, China, and other regional powers emerge, and Hillary doesn’t like it. As a born-again American Exceptionalist, she believes that the US has not only the right but the duty to make the planet safe for multinationals, banks, and wealthy investors. She has made it clear that confrontations with Russia in Syria and China in the South China Sea are on her agenda, even to the point of risking nuclear war.
It astonishes me that none of this seems significant to the supposed “liberals” or “progressives” who support Clinton. Anyone who criticizes her for the atrocities she’s initiated or backed is denounced in near hysterical terms by many of her supporters, male and female. Critics are accused of supporting Trump, swallowing right-wing propaganda, or being insensitive to the worries of oppressed people in the US whose race or gender they lack. The fate of women and people of color in Latin America and the Middle East doesn’t seem to matter in their moral calculus.
This is an embrace of militarism, nationalism, and overt imperialism that I used to associate with the Right, but that is now found on the so-called Left. It also involves a new form of McCarthyite denunciation of dissenters filtered through the pseudo-radicalism of identity politics.
It’s perfectly honorable to support Clinton on the grounds that Trump would be even worse. But to defend her record as a dyed-in-the-wool imperialist is beyond the pale of the morally acceptable. It disarms many otherwise well-intentioned people for the struggle against war in Syria and probably elsewhere that will be necessary after her election. It threatens to give her a blank check on domestic as well as foreign policy issues since it makes supporting the first woman president of the United States its chief priority. It reinforces anti-liberal, Orwellian tendencies on the PC “Left.” In short, it does not belong in any progressive movement worthy of the name.
Gary Zabel is a senior lecturer in philosophy at UMass Boston, and longtime labor activist.
