Bob Avakian (BA), the revolutionary leader and author of the new communism, has analyzed:
The essence of what exists in the U.S. is not democracy but capitalism-imperialism and political structures to enforce that capitalism-imperialism. What the U.S. spreads around the world is not democracy, but imperialism and political structures to enforce that imperialism. (BAsics 1:3)
The truth of this scientific analysis and the horrendous consequences for humanity were on sharp, overt display at every stop of Biden’s trip to Israel and Saudi Arabia last week.
Biden may have campaigned on promoting “human rights” around the world and rejecting Trump’s praise for mass murdering tyrants and war criminals—but on his trip, he embraced a who’s who of vicious tyrants, ethnic cleansers, mass murderers, and war criminals, such as Israel, Saudi Arabia and other pro-U.S. reactionaries.
Biden Goes to the Middle East—Provides Vivid Demonstration That: The Democratic Party Is a Machine of Massive War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity
First Stop: Settler-Colonial State of Israel
Israel is an illegitimate settler colonial state formed by violently dispossessing and steadily ethnically cleansing the native Palestinian people from their land and imposing a form of apartheid rule over them today.1 It has historically been a bulwark of U.S. imperialist interests in the strategically important region of the Middle East.
Biden didn’t reverse Trump actions that escalated Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people or undercut Palestinian efforts to form an independent state, such as moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.2 He said nothing about Israel’s ongoing human rights atrocities against Palestinians, like the theft of their homes and land, the murder of Palestinian protesters, and the violation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, considered sacred by Palestinian Muslims.3
Instead, he showered Israel with praise and pressed Arab states to “normalize” relations with it—which means legitimizing and facilitating Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing and crimes against millions of Palestinians.4
Saudi Arabia: Fist-Bumping with a Cold-Blooded Murderer—U.S. Imperialist Business As Usual
When he ran for president, Biden promised to turn Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (known as MBS) and Saudi Arabia into pariahs as punishment for the ghoulish 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a leading critic of the Saudi ruling royal family who wrote for the Washington Post.5
But when he arrived in Saudi Arabia, Biden gave MBS a smiling fist bump. Nor did Biden mention the Saudi kingdom’s other atrocities—from mass beheadings to a suffocating patriarchy to intense political repression against dissidents and the U.S.-backed Saudi war of aggression in Yemen. That war in Yemen has directly killed some 15,000 civilians, contributed to the deaths of over 400,000 people, and driven millions—including children—to the edge of starvation.6
Next Up: Rogues Gallery of Autocrats, Absolute Monarchs and Military Dictators
In Saudi Arabia, Biden also met with the leaders of nine Arab states—six of them from the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates), plus Jordan, Egypt and Iraq. All, with the exception of Iraq, are overt tyrannies with no pretense of the “democracy” the U.S. claims to promote around the world.
Talking “Peace” While Ramping Up Military Moves and Threatening War
Biden had written before the trip that he was going to the Middle East to promote “peace” in the region through “diplomacy.”7He didn’t mention that the U.S. is already carrying out or supporting dangerous military attacks and murder in the region, and planning for more.
In 2018 under Trump, the U.S. and Israel launched a program of aggressive attacks inside Iran, with Israel blowing up suspected nuclear facilities and assassinating Iranian leaders and several nuclear scientists. The U.S. itself carried out assassination by drone of top Iranian general Qassim Soleimani while he was in Iraq in 2020. Assassinating officials of another country is considered a war crime under international law. Some of this has continued and even escalated with Biden.
Israel and some Arab states are also working together to shoot down Iranian drones. At every stop of Biden’s trip, one of his key goals was bolstering and expanding this military coordination, directed mainly against Iran.8
In Israel Biden was asked if he would use force against Iran to stop it from obtaining a nuclear weapon. He answered, “If that was the last resort, yes.”
The New York Times called Biden’s statement a more direct and explicit U.S. threat than previous U.S. presidents had ever delivered.9
Think about it: the U.S. has thousands of nuclear weapons and is the only country to ever have used them. Israel has 100-200. Iran has none. But the U.S. and Israel are threatening war on Iran—not to eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons, but to ensure their regional monopoly on them! Any such war would likely be a horror for the Iranian people and perhaps millions across the region, potentially dwarfing the carnage in Ukraine that Biden and the U.S. rulers are supposedly so concerned about.
“We Can’t Leave a Vacuum for China, Russia or Iran”
Biden’s trip, his dealings with various regional powers, and U.S. actions in the Middle East are all driven by the needs and dynamics of U.S. imperialism—not any concern for “human rights.” The Middle East is key to U.S. global dominance, and at this time of intensifying imperialist rivalry, the U.S. is determined to maintain its grip on the region, including backing regimes carrying out towering war crimes and crimes against humanity and waging war, if need be, to do so.10
Biden said as much. “President Biden kept returning to a single reason for renewing his relationship with American allies who fall on the wrong side of the struggle he often describes as a battle between ‘democracy and autocracy,’” the New York Times reported. “We will not walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia or Iran,” Biden assured the pro-U.S. tyrants he met with in Saudi Arabia.11
The Democrats: A Party of War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity
To all those who think the Democrats are basically good and their “hearts are in the right place,” for all those who vote for them like sheep in election after election: Think about what Biden’s trip, and the Democratic Party’s whole history of crimes they oversaw—from atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, to the “war on terror” that was nothing but a brutal war for empire.12Then have the moral courage and intellectual integrity to face what all this shows about the actual nature of the Democrats and what they’re actually all about: A party of war crimes and crimes against humanity.13
Despite their sharp differences with the Republicans over how to rule, when it comes to U.S. global dominance and empire, the Democrats, like the Republicans, represent the predatory, murderous, planet-killing interests of U.S. capitalism-imperialism—nothing less or different!
Given everything happening in the world, isn’t it way past time to face that blatantly obvious fact and get with the movement for revolution, an actual revolution to overthrow this whole system for once and for all—especially at a rare moment like this when revolution becomes more possible
As Bob Avakian sums up in his recent article “January 6 Hearings—And the Violence of This System”:
Along with the horrific violence perpetrated within this country to maintain the “law and order” of this system—such as the continual wanton murders of Black people by police—the truth is that the ruling class of this country, through the CIA (and other “intelligence services”), as well as the military, has constantly carried out coups, invasions and other violent actions all over the world—and, without this, their (up to now) “peaceful transfer of power” within this country would have been impossible....
Much of these bloodthirsty actions, and the terrible carnage and atrocity that they involved, were carried out under Democratic administrations: monstrous war crimes and crimes against humanity have been repeatedly perpetrated by the Democrats, no less than the Republicans, for the basic reason that both of these parties are instruments of the ruling class of this system of capitalism-imperialism.
The Republican Party Is Fascist
The Democratic Party Is Also a Machine of Massive War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity
This System CANNOT Be Reformed—It MUST Be Overthrown!
