By Steven Halpern
Today the world is witnessing a genocide organized by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people. What is happening is unimaginable. The so-called Israeli Defense Force has murdered over 20,000 human beings. The large majority are women and children. The Israeli government has instituted a policy of denying the residents of the Gaza Strip adequate supplies of food, clean water, health care, and shelter. The United Nations reported that about half of the population of 2.3 million in Gaza are now starving.
One of the weapons the IDF uses is white phosphorous bombs supplied by the United States government. These bombs burn their victims to death or cause lung damage due to of smoke inhalation.
In his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Elan Pappe reported that one of the first commodities manufactured by the state of Israel were flame throwers. The former Zionist forces called themselves the Hagenah. In 1948 the Hagenah used those flame throwers along with bull dowsers, and explosives to destroy Palestinian homes. Oftentimes there were people living in those homes while the Hagenah was destroying them. In all, the Hagenah forced about 700,000 Palestinians to leave their homes in 1948. That was how Israel became a nation.
As horrendous as these criminal acts are, there is a long history of firebombing used by the armed forces of the United States. Why has the United States government been so determined to use deliberate force to subjugate people all over the world?
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin argued in his pamphlet State and Revolution that the state was invented for capitalism as a “special instrument of repression.” In another pamphlet by Lenin, he argued that “Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.”
Positive aspects of capitalism mask the horror story
Lenin also understood that while capitalism was a highly repressive system, it was also a significant advance over feudalism. Royal families ruled the feudal societies. Religious clerics anointed those rulers based on what they argued was the will of God.
In those years, most people were peasants who lived their entire lives on manors controlled by the lords. Then there were the craft guilds that were about small-scale production. The overwhelming majority of the population was illiterate. For the most part there were no educational or health care systems.
With capitalism, there were new priorities that centered on the continual drive for profits. Economic growth became an absolute necessity to insure relative stability. This begins to explain the profound change humanity experienced from the feudal epoch.
Today the commodities of food, clothing, cell phones, and automobiles are transported all over the world. With all their profound limitations, there are health care and educational systems. Perhaps billions of people work to provide these and other goods and services every day. All of this was unimaginable in the feudal epoch.
With all this growth, we need to ask a question. Where does the money come from to finance this growth? This is where we see the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist system.
Capitalists are continually driven to cut their costs. At one time, the northeast of the United States was an industrial center of the world. From the 1940s to the early 1970s there was significant industrial growth in this country. Unions organized and forced employers to give up a part of their enormous profits. The civil rights and Black power movements also organized and Black people began to make significant gains.
Then, for various reasons, employers and banks decided to move factories to nations where wages might be $10 per day or less. Most replacement jobs in the United States had effectively lower wages and fewer benefits than the manufacturing jobs that left the country.
We also see how employers routinely keep their expenses down by using discrimination. The average wages of Black people, Latinos, immigrants, Native Americans, and women are less than the average wages of white men. Protests against this discrimination have erupted throughout the history of this country.
The long history of these protests is clear evidence of how the working class has a sense that we are the ones who create all wealth. This class consciousness did not exist in the feudal epoch. With this consciousness comes the will to demand a greater share of the profits. Ultimately workers begin to understand that since the working class produces all wealth, we need to have a government that makes a priority of human needs over profits.
So, when we hear arguments that the United States is the greatest democracy the world has known, or that here there is liberty and justice for all, the reality tells another story. We might start this story with an order given by General George Washington in the year 1779.
The Sullivan Campaign
During the revolution of the thirteen colonies against British colonialism, most Native American nations supported the British. While the British didn’t have a very good record in support of Native American rights, most of the indigenous nations felt that they weren’t as horrendous as the revolutionaries. In other words, one of the reasons behind the revolution was to determine which people of European decent would control the land Native Americans lived on for thousands of years.
So, General George Washington gave the following orders to General John Sullivan in the war against the Iroquois.
“The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements, and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.”
So here Washington made his objectives clear. He wasn’t just about a military defeat of the Iroquois. Washington wanted a total destruction of their homeland. One method used to achieve this goal was to destroy Iroquois’ homes with fire.
The hot wars against Native Americans would continue for over 100 years and culminate in the massacre at Wounded Knee in South Dakota.
Bretton Woods, New Hampshire
The First and Second World Wars cost the lives of about 80 million human beings. Today we can ask a question few people are interested in. Why didn’t the world use the enormous resources for those wars to eliminate poverty in the world?
This wasn’t because politicians are stupid or insensitive. No, the answer has to do with Lenin’s statement that “Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.” The two world wars were about deciding what nation would replace Britain as the world’s superpower.
So, even before the Second World War was over, the United States invited representatives of 44 nations to a meeting in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. There the United States made it clear that the power brokers in this country would head up the new superpower of the world.
Then, the United States gave the world an example of what might happen to nations that went against the demands of the new superpower.
Flames Over Tokyo
In 1991 E. Bartlett Kerr wrote his book Flames Over Tokyo—The U.S. Army Air Forces’ Incendiary Campaign Against Japan 1944-1945. This book goes into the details of how the United States Air Force organized to burn large parts of 67 Japanese cities to the ground. Kerr showed how those 67 Japanese cities had similar populations as the 67 largest cities in the United States. The U.S. Air Force used phosphorous firebombs in this destruction. That six-month campaign took place before the Air Force dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Air Force murdered hundreds of thousands of Japanese by fire, smoke inhalation, or incineration by atomic bombs. Most of those deaths were of civilians. The commander of the Air Force bombing of Japan was Curtis LeMay.
The war against Korea
General LeMay was also the commander of the Air Force in the war against Korea. This is what he had to say about firebombing Korea. “We burned down every town in North and South Korea.”
The U.S. domination of the world declared at Bretton Woods didn’t last very long. In 1949 the Chinese people organized a revolution. This revolution protested over 100 years of humiliation by imperialist powers since the Opium Wars in the 1840s.
The United States government wanted to keep soldiers in Asia to battle against the Chinese revolutionary government. However, the soldiers in the military organized a Bring the troops home movement. They saw no reason to go to war against the Chinese. So, the U.S. government needed to bow to that demand.
Then, the U.S. government’s puppet Syngman Rhee became so unpopular in Korea that workers and farmers in the north and south organized to remove him from power.
Rhee had little support. The armed forces of the North had considerable experience in the war of independence against the Japanese. They clearly didn’t want Korea to be ruled by the U.S. puppet regime of Syngman Rhee. So, they invaded the south and met little resistance.
The forces supporting Rhee only managed to hold on to a small part of the South of the nation known as Pusan. Then the United States organized a massive invasion of the country at Inchon.
The revolutionary forces of China fought with the Koreans in their independence struggle against Japan. China joined in the war against the U.S. invasion and together with the armed forces in the Korea fought the United States to a stalemate.
Vietnam
Curtis LeMay continued to be an Air Force General during the war against Vietnam. His remarks on that war followed his actions in the wars against Japan and Korea. This is what he had to say.
“My solution to the problem would be to tell the North Vietnamese Communists frankly that they got to drawn in their horns and stop their aggression or we’re going to bomb them back into the stone age.”
Le May was well aware of the fact that Vietnam is located on the other side of the Pacific Ocean from the United States. While they posed no threat to this country, the U.S. government demanded their absolute obedience. He also was aware of President Eisenhower’s statement that Ho Chi Minh would have won an election in Vietnam by a margin of 90%. Yet LeMay also felt comfortable arguing that the Vietnamese communists were engaged in “aggression.”
Le May wasn’t just talking about a massive bombing campaign. The U.S. Air Force used five million tons of bombs in Vietnam. This was twice the tonnage of bombs as they used in the Second World War. Of that amount, there were 400,000 tons of napalm and 19 million gallons of herbicide. The Air force dropped hundreds of thousands more bombs on Laos and Cambodia.
President Johnson named his bombing campaign against Vietnam Rolling Thunder. President Nixon didn’t feel Johnson’s bombing campaign was sufficient, so he ordered the Air Force to carry out new bombings called Linebacker I and Linebacker II.
However, the Vietnamese people resisted this unimaginable aggression. Aided with an international anti-war movement, the Vietnamese forced the U.S. armed forces to leave their country.
The current genocide
On September 11, 2001, individual terrorists took control over passenger jet planes and crashed those planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As a result, over 3,000 people lost their lives.
On that same day, the news media neglected to mention other events that had just as dire consequences. The United Nations estimates that every day, on average, 30,000 children die of preventable diseases. We might speculate that every day there might be 60,000 parents who mourn the deaths of all those children. These thousands of preventable deaths of children continue every day.
The United States government dealt with these events by going to war against Iraq and Afghanistan. They also continued their massive funding of the Israeli government that now is carrying out a genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Looking at this long history, I believe that Lenin understood what he was talking about when he argued that “Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.” The history of mass murder ordered or supported by the United States government wasn’t about stupidity, insensitivity, or denial of reality. No, those acts of genocide reflect the essence of who the power brokers in this country are.
The other side to this history has been the tenacious struggles aimed at resisting the horrors organized by the government and the capitalist forces they serve. When we look at the massive demonstrations now erupting in the streets demanding “Ceasefire Now,” we see how these struggles are continuing.
The current horror we see today in Gaza is also a reflection of how the international capitalist system is falling apart. As this crisis continues to unfold, workers living in the world will become more and more open to the idea of advancing a government that has completely different priorities. A government that makes human needs the priority over profits will ultimately be the only answer to the enormous problems we face today.
