Attendees hold up signs during a campaign rally with Democratic presidential nominee and US Vice President Kamala Harris at Craig Ranch Amphitheater, Las Vegas, Nevada, on 31 October 2024 (Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images/AFP)
Why even progressive U.S. voters are America Firsters
Originally published: Middle East Eye on November 4, 2024 by Joseph Massad (more by Middle East Eye) | (Posted Nov 06, 2024)
One of the key responsibilities that critical American intellectuals have always shirked is considering the far-reaching effects of voting in the United States.
There is presently no other country whose elected officials’ policies and stances have as great an impact on the rest of the globe. It is an advantage that the U.S. has held since at least 1990 as a formidable force controlling most of the world.
Yet its hegemonic position and militarism seem immaterial to those Americans who feign a sense of cosmopolitanism or, more importantly, worldliness.
Talk of the “global village” does not usually recognise that this village is dominated by the U.S. and its superpower stature.
The global apartheid system in which we live is one wherein only Americans are eligible to vote for the power that controls the rest of the world.
Although few of these “worldly” intellectuals and academics who participate in the electoral process would deny this fact, they invariably limit their concerns to the impact of their votes on the U.S. alone.
Parochialism
For decades, I asked such intellectuals and academics with pretensions of worldliness how they could only consider the Democratic or Republican Party’s policies on domestic matters, which affect some 345 million Americans, versus global matters that affect eight billion people.
The answer consistently boils down to the fact that both parties pursue imperialist policies around the world. Since the only variation in their programmes relates to domestic issues, it becomes necessary to vote for the “lesser evil” and defend it as an absolute good to defeat the more evil.
Such logic renders the billions of people around the world whom the U.S. dominates and oppresses, directly or indirectly, as insignificant or at least utterly irrelevant to these American intellectuals’ political calculus.
The fate of these billions is effectively exchanged for a few possible reforms in domestic policies that would affect parts of middle-class and wealthy America—the main beneficiaries of American imperialism and oppression of the rest of the globe.
This means that the alleged worldliness and cosmopolitanism of many of these intellectuals and academics—and their dissimulation that they are “citizens of the world” about whose climate crisis they began to express much concern in the last two decades—evaporate every time they vote in national elections. It is then that their parochialism and “America first” attitude are shamelessly on full display.
Anti-colonial resistance
Dissident American anti-imperialist intellectual Noam Chomsky once dismissed the notion that people in the U.S.-dominated part of the world could ever defeat the U.S. empire and its European colonial lieutenants.
He argued instead that successful opposition to imperial policies can only come from Americans and Western Europeans:
There are few realistic options, in the world as it exists, unless the population of the major powers reaches a level of civilisation transcending anything we now see and restrains the violence of the states that dominate the international system.
He added with much alacrity:
As for the Third World liberation movements of the sixties, I never thought that they were likely to provide any useful lessons for Western socialists.
Although Chomsky declared this position in the late 1980s, he was intervening in an important debate that dates back at least to the first decade of the 20th century.
The importance of the self-determination of colonised peoples and whether their resistance against colonialism and imperialism was the primary struggle that would help defeat the colonial empires was the central issue at stake.
This part of the debate on the colonial question took place in the early 1920s within the Communist International.
The main issues centred on the question of “labour aristocracy” in the imperialist and colonialist countries, which, as the Indian communist Manabendra N Roy argued, would never be allies of workers and peasants in the colonised countries. Imperial powers had bribed their own working classes with the profits made in the colonies.
During this same period, the newly established Soviet state banked on socialist revolutions overtaking European colonising countries, after which they would presumably help liberate the colonised world. (The Soviets would go on to revise their position in 1921 after the defeat of the European revolutions and the eruption of anti-colonial uprisings across the colonised world.)
Roy, however, argued that the liberation of the colonised world was, in fact, the necessary pre-condition for the liberation of the colonising world—a view he shared with Soviet leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, though the latter did not articulate it as a pre-condition.
Liberal pretension
Frantz Fanon, the prominent anti-colonial thinker, also held this position on the struggle for liberation.
He understood by the early 1960s that only the colonised would be able to defeat the ongoing imperial depredations visited on the globe, especially given the complicity of the white liberals and socialists of the colonising countries.
Fanon recognised that these groups, like the white labour aristocracy, were also direct beneficiaries of the imperialist system:
Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe.
Fanon added that “some Europeans were found to urge the European workers to shatter this narcissism and to break with this un-reality. But in general, the workers of Europe have not replied to these calls, for the workers believe, too, that they are part of the prodigious adventure of the European spirit”.
I cite this history to show that many communists in the 1920s, like most white liberals and socialists then and now, harboured such Eurocentrism.
They were always ready to sacrifice the welfare of the rest of the world for the sake of European revolution in the case of the communists, or domestic reform in the case of U.S. liberals, or even anarchists like Chomsky.
How else can one explain the persistent collaboration of western liberal and leftist intellectuals with the imperial system and their neglect of—if not outright contempt for—the rest of the globe?
Why is it that what supposedly moves them today are questions on the climate and not genocide, starvation, poverty, or imperial wars of aggression?
The answer is simple: the impact of the climate crisis, which we have inherited as a direct result of U.S. and European actions and policies, is now also felt in the U.S. and Western Europe, the two regions that are the central and principal concern of liberal and leftist American and European academics and intellectuals.
Their subterfuge that caring for the climate makes them “citizens of the world” is no more than the most recent pretension that these intellectuals and academics have to worldliness when it is yet another proof of their parochialism.
One would think that the racial and national privileges that American voters enjoy while deciding the fate of the entire global population would weigh heavily on those who consider themselves anti-nationalist, anti-imperialist, or simply “global citizens”.
Far from it!
What unites leftist and liberal voters with right-wing voters in the U.S. in this year’s elections is the same thing that has always united them: America first, and après nous le déluge
https://mronline.org/2024/11/06/why-eve ... -firsters/
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Bill Clinton and the “Dictators Club”
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 06 Nov 2024
Bill Clinton couldn’t be cozier, or more richly rewarded, in what he calls “the dictator’s club.”
In Bill Clinton’s infamously unhinged speech last week in Michigan, he said that Jews had been living in Judea and Samaria before Islam existed, that anyone upset by the Gaza genocide should understand how Israelis feel, and that Kamala Harris’s promise to work for a ceasefire should be enough to make them vote for her. Those statements were so tone deaf that they dominated the outraged response.
The rest of the speech was also rife with brutal lies and hypocrisy. One was a particularly glaring instance of the Democratic argument that Trump is a would-be dictator who consorts with dictators and would do away with all our democratic institutions. Clinton said that Trump wants to join “the dictator’s club,” and accused him of cozying up to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
These allegations are based on the fact that as president, Trump actually sat down and talked to these heads of state of two of the world’s nuclear powers. In 2018 he met President Putin, in a two-hour, one-on-one conference in Helsinki. The same year he met with North Korea’s head of state Kim Jong Un in Singapore. God forbid that an American president should talk to either about how to avoid Armageddon instead of threatening to bring it on.
Bill’s Own Dictators’ Club
In 2009 Bill Clinton presented a Clinton Global Citizen Award to Paul Kagame, one of the worst dictators and war criminals in the world and a longtime favorite of his poverty pimping Clinton Foundation.
Clinton was in office during the final two years of the Rwandan Civil War, which he received daily briefings about. The US had selected Kagame and his Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) Army to represent US corporate interests in the African Great Lakes Region, making Kagame’s victory in the war a foregone conclusion.
Kagame and other RPF leaders had met with US officials years before the war began, and Kagame had trained at Fort Leavenworth. The RPF had a steady supply of advanced weaponry and intelligence that the existing government lacked.
When the last horrific 90 days of the war began, the UN Security Council proposed an emergency expansion of the UN peacekeeping operation in Rwanda, but Clinton sent his UN Ambassador, Madeleine Albright, to veto it.
Kagame seized power at the end of the slaughter and has held an iron grip on it since. The West’s constant complaint against the defeated government had been that it was not a multi-party democracy, but it has since heaped praise on Kagame even as he brutally repressed opposition, refused to allow any real challengers to run against him, and even imprisoned those who, like Victoire Ingabire, tried. Ingabire served eight years in prison after attempting to run in the 2010 presidential election and has since been confined to Rwanda, unable to travel to The Netherlands to visit her family, including her gravely ill husband.
Rwandan gospel singer Kizito Mihigo, who dared to dissent from the legally codified and enforced history of the genocide, died in jail several days after being apprehended trying to cross the Rwandan/Burundian border. He is just one of many murdered, missing, or exiled dissidents and journalists.
In February, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that
the Kagame regime is guilty of transnational repression that ranges from spying, intimidation, killings, kidnappings, beatings, and enforced disappearances to manipulated extradition requests, arbitrary detention, and attempted or successful renditions.
In October, HRW reported that torture has been widespread in Rwandan prisons for decades.
Kagame’s former advisor, development economist David
Himbara, describes Rwanda as a totalitarian state like that Hannah Arendt described in her classic study The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Ever since seizing power, Kagame has “won” staged elections by laughably implausible percentages in the high 90s, most recently, in 2024, by 99.18%.
In 1996 his army joined Uganda’s in invading the Democratic Republic of the Congo, initiating a brutal war and occupation that has cost millions of lives and continues to this day. University of Antwerp Emeritus Professor Filip Reyntjens, speaking in the BBC documentary “Rwanda’s Untold Story ,” called Kagame “the greatest war criminal in office today.”
Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev and the Uranium One deal
Bill Clinton also befriended and burnished the reputation of infamous dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev, the former president of Kazakhstan. Nazarbayev, a former prime minister of Kazakhstan under Soviet rule, became president after the collapse of the Soviet Union and ruled from 1991 to 2019. His regime was characterized by unlawful killings, torture, arbitrary detention, political imprisonment, restrictions on speech and press, restrictions on internet freedom, religious persecution, interference with the rights of peaceful assembly and freedom of association, political repression, government corruption, and restrictions on workers' freedom to associate and organize.
In 2015, Nazarbayev won re-election with 98% of the vote.
His extensive human rights violations were documented by Human Rights Watch , Amnesty International , and the US State Department . In 2021, however, State reported that “the law grants former president Nursultan Nazarbayev broad, lifetime authority over a range of government functions.”
In September 2005 Bill Clinton traveled to Kazakhstan, where he praised its economic progress under Nazarbayev. During the same trip, Nazarbayev pledged an undisclosed sum to a charitable fund created by Clinton and former President George W. Bush to respond to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina on the US Gulf Coast.
One month later, Clinton traveled to Kazakhstan again, this time with Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra on his luxurious private jet. While there he held a press conference praising Nazarbayev for “opening up the social and political life of your country.” According to The Nation , Clinton even recommended that Nazarbayev be named head of the very international election-monitoring organization that had ruled his own most recent election fraudulent.
On the same trip, Giustra somehow managed to secure a lease to mine Kazakhstan’s considerable uranium reserves for his shell company, Uranium One, which then immediately ballooned in value. Giustra then donated $31.3 million to the Clinton Foundation, following it up with at least $100 million more in 2007.
The deal raised eyebrows at the time, but even more so after Giustra’s company sold Uranium One’s assets to the Russian nuclear corporation Rosatom, in three transactions that Hillary Clinton’s State Department had to sign off on, from 2009 to 2013, because uranium is a strategic mineral. This episode was detailed by the New York Times , which also noted that Uranium One chairman Ian Telfer used his family foundation to make four donations totalling $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation during the years in question. “And,” the Times wrote, “shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.
Trump is of course also guilty of profiting on cozy relationships with dictators. During his presidency, his son-in-law Jared Kushner worked on Middle East affairs, despite having no demonstrated expertise, and developed a personal relationship with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). Upon his return to private life, Kushner established a private equity firm which received a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund.
Kagame, Nazarbayev, MBS, the Clintons, and the Trumps are all part of an international network of autocrats and kleptocrats. Bill Clinton and the rest of the Democratic Party’s phony pieties about standing against tyranny are just more galling.
https://blackagendareport.com/bill-clin ... ators-club
