You like to “think outside the box” do you? So do we: in fact, we have lived “outside the box” for so long we have forgotten what it’s like to think “inside the box”. So here’s some “outside the box” thinking for you. You’re welcome in advance!
As a public service to our working-class sisters and brothers around the world, we would like to take a moment to explain what, to the 95.5% of the world’s population living outside the United States apparently appears to be an unsolvable riddle: “Why is it that the seemingly nice, friendly people of the United States have such a vicious, murderous, warmongering government?”
The answer, brothers and sisters, is simple: the vast majority of the citizens of the United States are vicious, selfish, ignorant cretins who don’t give a shit how many of you are murdered by the US military so long as the standard of living in the US enables them to barely survive. We like to tell people that so long as the price of gasoline remains below $5.00/gallon, the vast majority of the citizens of the United States will continue to not give a shit how many innocent women and children are butchered annually by a raping, murdering, torturing US military that the majority of US citizens consider to be “heroes” to the last man. So long as the price of gasoline keeps falling, you can expect these scum to continue to give the US military a blank check to go ahead and kill as many people as the US capitalist class feels is necessary to maintain the economic status quo here in the United States. And the rest of you – the 95.5% of the world’s non-US citizens – can all go fuck yourselves.
No one else is going to be honest enough to tell you that that is really what the vast majority of the shitty “American people” of 2014 think. They’re so stupid that not 1 in a thousand of them even KNOW that the US only makes up 4.4% (and falling) of the world’s population. “Fuck the rest of the world!” is a common statement we hear from US workers all the time. Living here in the United States is like living in an insane asylum full of chronological adults barely functioning at a grade-school level.
No one here in the United States – or in the rest of the world except ourselves – wants to address the fact that the overwhelming majority of the people of the United States have become so corrupted morally by the utter degeneracy of the US capitalist class that they simply do not give a rat’s ass how many men, women and children are murdered every year by “their” government in its endless and phony war on “terrorists” – terrorists who have largely been recruited, organized, trained and armed by “their” US Government. So long as the stupid and selfish citizenry of the USA can barely afford to feed, clothe, shelter and amuse themselves they will continue to not give a shit about anything being done to their fellow human beings all over the world. by the execrable US capitalist class and its bought-and-paid-for government and its military war machine.
The US working class has been so completely brainwashed into believing the disgusting US corporate philosophy that “greed is good” and that every human being is responsible for their own welfare and owes absolutely nothing to any of their fellow human beings. This philosophy is extremely popular in the US among its workers – a philosophy, by the way fully embraced by what large numbers of the stupid US working class sees as an “alternative” to the Republican and Democratic parties – the inane and inhumane “free-markets-for-free people” “philosophy” of Libertarianism. It is for this reason that we warn our working class sisters and brothers around the world that US workers in 2014 have come to resemble their closest historical precursors – the “good German citizens of Hitler’s Germany.
In fact, the citizens of the United States are almost exactly like the citizens of Nazi Germany in their self-imposed faux-ignorance of the realities of what their government is doing to the rest of the world – with one major exception, which only serves to make the viciousness of today’s US citizen all the more repulsive: in Nazi Germany, there was pervasive censorship of the news media far more comprehensive than what we see in the US today. Though the German people in Hitler’s era were able to listen to shortwave radio broadcasts from around the world, they were subject to severe penalties for doing so. In the United States today, though there is vast but usually subtle self-censorship of the news media and television, there is the Internet – and no criminal penalties for utilizing it to inform oneself about how the rest of the world perceives the USA. But Americans are so apathetic and, frankly, stupid that they don’t want to be bothered using the Internet to read the vast amount of first-hand reports of US military atrocities being daily committed all over the world. Instead, US citizens use their computers to entertain themselves and to keep themselves distracted from what is going on in the world… because when it comes right down to it, they simply don’t give a shit.
Like the vast majority of German workers under the Hitler regime, the vast majority of the US workers under the bloodthirsty Obama regime delude themselves into believing that things aren’t really all that bad; or if they are, that “there is nothing that we (meaning the US working class of 175,000,000 or so people) can do about it”. That facile excuse for not giving a shit is utilized by almost every “nice” US citizen you ask about it. Think we’re lying? Give it a try! If you know a native-born American citizen – black, white, Hispanic, Asian – it don’t matter – ask them about any important issue regarding the US government’s vicious policies being carried out in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria or Israel. We’ll wager that you will quickly elicit either a blank stare accompanied by the sound of crickets chirping… and then a savage reaction when you challenge them on their offhand attitude to the monstrous brutalities being carried out all over the world in the THEIR NAME, utilizing weapons systems paid for with THEIR TAX DOLLARS to murder innocent women, men and children all over the Middle East, western Asia.
A typical reaction from a US citizen might be: “the US military is being used to fight terrorism – and that’s a good thing”. They will get very defensive and start to get agitated – so press them a bit harder and you will finally get: “I don’t care about what’s going on in the rest of the world! I care about what’s going on here!”
The one thing that American citizens hate more than anything is people who remind them and inform them of the crimes being committed by “their” government all over the world. They resent being told by us about these things and they hate us for bringing this information to their attention because it strips away their ability to continue to pretend that they don’t know what’s going on. They don’t want to read about US military atrocities in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq or anywhere else because once they do then they are forced to openly admit that they aren’t going to do anything about it – because they just don’t care. And they hate that! US citizens want to be seen as being nice people who love everyone and who want to like others and be liked in return. So they try to hide their inner viciousness with a veneer of benign ignorance. They are so selfish that they wouldn’t try to change things even if they believed that they could, because that might make their lives a bit less comfortable than they are – and dull, conformist middle-class comfortability is, after all, the birthright of every US citizen, right? (Well, every “white” US citizen anyway…).
You still believe that we exaggerate? Try this: ask your American friends about “Fallujah”. See if they even know what that word means.
Ask them if they heard about the four boys who were blown to pieces by an Israeli naval vessel in Gaza this year. Ask them if they know how many women and children were murdered by their “hero” sons and daughters in the US military this year. Ask them what they know about “Abu Ghraib” and see if they even have a vague recollection of what that name means. And then challenge them on their callous indifference to the suffering of their fellow human beings at the hands of their own sons and daughters in the US military and see what kind of reaction you get! Americans hate to be forced to reveal their inner hideousness!
Their historical memories of world-infamous atrocities committed by the US government are no better. Ask ANY American how many people were killed in the Vietnam War: their answer (if they can answer the question at all) will most likely be: “53,000”. Of course, that’s only the number of Americans who were killed in the war. They don’t know, because they prefer not to know and/or don’t care, how many Vietnamese were butchered by the US during the Vietnam War. They have been brainwashed into believing that US veterans of the Vietnam War were “heroes” rather than “war criminals”. “Don’t forget” they will remind you: “the people the US killed in Vietnam were all communists, so killing them was a good thing”!
Ask any US citizen about the US-imposed war against Korea in the 1950s and you will get a blank stare. That war is unknown to most Americans because they don’t give a shit – except when they fatuously heap praises on veterans of that utterly senseless and savage war because, in their tiny minds, ALL veterans of US wars are “heroes”. They have no idea that in the Korean War an estimated 3,000,000 Koreans were savagely butchered by the US military. They don’t know or care that these “heroes” were ordered to, and did shoot down thousands of unarmed Korean civilians in war crime after war crime. They don’t care enough to look into it – but they “know for sure” that the North Koreans are crazy, that their communist government is a threat to something that they call “world peace” which is under constant attack from crazy people all over the world and which is why they support the mission of the US military – which they idiotically believe to be “the defense of world peace”.
“But we Americans always give generously to charity; and the United States gives more money in foreign aid to poor countries than any other country in the world!” they will exclaim. They believe these lies but they’ve never bothered to check the facts because they really don’t care. They are satisfied with the APPEARANCE of their generosity, not with the reality or unreality of it. They don’t give money to charity because they are good decent human beings: they give it because they are rotten, corrupt and vicious human beings – but they don’t want anyone to KNOW that! So they pinch a few pennies and attempt to purchase absolution for their callous indifference to human suffering by making a token donation of a ten-thousandth of their income to charity every year – then they order their town or city council to drive the homeless out of their midst and demand that organizations like “Food Not Bombs” be prevented from feeding starving street people. They don’t care that two of their favorite and largest so-called “charitable organizations” – the United Way and the American Red Cross – have been busted for wasting tens of millions of dollars of donations on lavish salaries, offices and banquets for their wealthiest donors, or that they simply don’t even try to provide any kind of accounting at all for what they do with the hundreds of millions of dollars they rake in every year. The indifference of the US citizenry is necessary in order for these vast charitable frauds to be perpetrated decade after decade.
So, what is to be done about this, sisters and brothers? Especially by you, our working-class sisters and brothers who make up the 95.5% of the world’s population?
First of all: stop thinking that the United States is composed of really nice, compassionate human beings who are simply not aware of the monstrous crimes being perpetrated by the US capitalist class and its military all over the globe: the citizens of the United States don’t know about what’s going on because they don’t want to know and they don’t give a damn. They are willfully ignorant, hoping that by remaining aloof to the suffering imposed on millions of their fellow human beings by the US Government they can continue to be perceived as being merely unaware of the suffering they are solely responsible for as citizens of the United States who have the unique responsibility for imposing their will on “their” national government. The citizens of the US believe in their corrupted, amoral hearts that they are benefiting economically from the brutalities inflicted by the US military around the world and so they refuse to do anything to stop the atrocities.
Secondly: do not expect the situation to change any time soon in the United States. There is not an inkling of any motion among US workers to start fighting even for their own rights, let alone for yours (the uprising in Ferguson, MO is very tiny and has set for itself political goals so feeble as to be utterly useless even in the narrow realm of fighting police brutality in Ferguson itself). It is possible that things could change, and that’s why we continue to agitate for a socialist workers revolution here in the US: it would be the best thing for the whole planet if the US capitalist class and their state was overthrown by the workers of the US and replaced by a revolutionary socialist government – but it does not look very likely to happen any time soon, if ever. The citizens of the USA, like their predecessors in Nazi Germany, are literally fat, dumb and grudgingly satisfied enough with the racist capitalist status quo to allow the US Government a free hand to brutalize and colonize the whole planet for the foreseeable future. Do not expect the stupid assholes of the 2014 US working class to help you drive the US military and US corporations out of your countries in any way, shape or form.
The bottom line: unless a major sea change takes place in the minds of the workers of the United States – and soon – it is going to be up to YOU – our working-class sisters and brothers OUTSIDE THE US – to band together worldwide and organize yourselves to do the same thing to the United States that the international working class was compelled to do when the Red Army of the no longer extant USSR smashed Nazi Germany in 1945. There is no other way forward. If the people of the United States continue to act like “good Germans” they are doomed to suffer the fate of the “good Germans” in 1945. The world simply can not afford to wait for the relatively pampered, spoiled, over-entertained, over-amused, selfish, pro-capitalist, socialism-hating proto-Nazi US working class to start acting like civilized human beings. Time is not on our side: the US government is preparing to unleash a series of massive pre-emptive military assaults on any nation that dares to stand up to the lust of the US capitalist class for global domination of the world’s political and economic future – and the workers of the US are giving them a free pass to do whatever it takes to maintain the current economic status quo inside the US. Declining gas prices are just going to increase the indifference of the US workers as they find a bit more change in their pockets every time they fill up their gas-guzzling cars at the service stations of America.
The future of the entire planet is at stake. If 4.5% of the world’s population, due to its callous heartlessness, selfishness and untrammelled greed, must be wiped out so that the planet can survive, then so be it. It’s a small price to pay! No one will miss the United States when it’s gone – except brutal dictators and criminal bankers and capitalists who depend on the US military to drown every manifestation of revolutionary socialist working-class leadership in blood wherever and whenever it raises its heroic and noble presence among us.
It is high time that the working class of the United States stood up on its hind legs and started fighting against the encroaching fascism here in the USA and organized itself into revolutionary socialist workers parties dedicated to overthrowing the US capitalist class and its capitalist state and its hideous war machine and building a socialist workers republic! The slogan “Either socialism or barbarism” has never been more sharply posed as it is today right here in the United States of America!
Workers of the World, Unite!
Independent Workers Party of Chicago
Independent Workers Party of Los Angeles 