January 2005   

Nuremburg Rally on the Potomac? More like Louis Napoleon at Versailles.
Remember the Paris Commune! (Photo: Jason Reed/Reuters)

At noon on January 20, George W. Bush had himself sworn in for a second term as commander of U.S. imperialism, a/k/a president of the United States. The elaborate ceremony resembled a coronation more than a ritual of “democracy,” European observers complained. The embedded bourgeois media gushed over the pomp and circumstance. But rather than some anemic Old World “constitutional” monarch, this was a “robust” display of imperial might by rulers who fancy themselves a new Roman Empire. Of course, we all recall what happened to the last one, and the current American empire is bogged down in its bloody occupation of Iraq. Bush carefully avoided mentioning that in his inaugural address.

The White House gang imagine themselves to be the unchallenged rulers of the world, and together with Wall Street, masters of the universe. What they put on in Washington, a capital city laid out on imperial lines, was an ostentatious celebration of militarism. From the huge motorcycle cavalcade and the many thousands of cops in the streets, some brought in from Pennsylvania and Chicago, to the warplanes roaring across the skies overhead, the intent was to “shock and awe” – i.e., intimidate – the population. Streets were closed, manhole covers welded shut and access restricted to more than 100 blocks. Police checkpoints were everywhere. The ten thousand or so demonstrators who came to protest the obscene spectacle were tightly penned in; police pepper-sprayed some on general principles. Protesters chanted, “This is what a police state looks like.” Not quite yet, but it’s getting there.

It was an obscene celebration of money, of the unshackled domination of capital. With a total cost of over $40 million, well-heeled donors and corporate moguls could “pay to play,” at $25,000 to $250,000 a pop, and buy their seat at the table of power. At the Capitol, a spectacle with oversized flags and hundreds of party bigwigs, military brass and top officials lining the ramparts had a hint of Hitler’s Nuremburg rallies. But it was more like an assemblage of notables from the Versailles court of Louis Napoleon – Bonaparte’s not-so-bright nephew, the one who seized power in 1852 after tiring of parliament, invaded Mexico in the late 1850s, got bogged down there and had to exit in disgrace, then lost a war with Germany in 1870, whereupon Parisian workers took power and established the Commune.

Bush gave a bombastic speech to the crowd at the Capitol, long on the rhetoric about “freedom” (mentioned 27 times in 21 minutes), by which he means “free markets” and “free trade.” Written by the president’s born-again Christian flack, the harangue was filled with evangelical imagery: vintage anti-Communism, a slap at Clintonesque indulgence, and images of apocalypse: “After the shipwreck of communism came years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical. And then there came a day of fire,” namely 11 September 2001. The fiery imagery is key for a Christian fundamentalist president who thanks the evangelical vote for his reelection, who has repeatedly said that god chose him to lead the U.S. at this time, and who believes in Armageddon (the final battle to be fought as Israel retakes its “biblical lands,” stretching up to the Euphrates River in Iraq) and Rapture (in which the elect will rise to heaven).

Meanwhile, there is something approaching apocalypse now on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. While champagne flowed in Washington, rivers of blood are flowing in Iraq. Anti-Bush demonstrators in Washington chanted about American soldiers dying in Iraq. Yet the 1,300-plus deaths among the U.S. expeditionary force (and several hundred more among its privatized auxiliaries) pale in comparison to the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have been slaughtered in Washington’s wars of imperialist aggression, and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children who died of preventable disease due to the U.S.’ deliberate destruction of the country’s infrastructure in the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War and the murderous United Nations “sanctions” enforced and praised by Bill Clinton’s Democrats.

U.S. officials act as if they are in cloud cuckoo land, talking of “democratic elections” in Iraq when half the country is up in arms in revolt. Reporters in Iraq are too worried for their safety to leave their hotel rooms, while international election monitors will “observe” the Iraqi elections from Amman, Jordan. For the exploited and oppressed around the world, the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan were nothing short of a heinous crime. Yet even as a majority of the U.S. population concluded that the Iraq invasion was a costly “mistake,” John Kerry and the Democrats were too timorous to even oppose it after the fact, only claiming that they could “do better.” The fact is, the capitalist rivals were both war mongers, and the most resolute butcher won. Big surprise.

On the domestic front, the Bush gang is pushing the myth of an “ownership society,” by which they mean gutting Social Security to divert several trillion dollars into “private accounts,” which will actually be run by Wall Street money managers. This won’t do a thing to “rescue” Social Security (which is hardly adequate as retirement income, but is also hardly in a “crisis” – it can pay full benefits up to 2042, even without raising taxes). But it will provide a huge injection of liquidity into stock markets that have been in the doldrums since the bursting of the dot.com bubble in 2000. Meanwhile, with a record annual trade deficit heading toward $700 billion and another $500 billion federal government deficit, the United States is courting a full-fledged capitalist crash if the Japanese and Chinese governments who have been buying up U.S. Treasury bonds ever decide to cash in or go over to the euro. Washington’s only defense is to brandish the old U.S.-Soviet nuclear deterrence formula, “mutually assured destruction” (MAD): the threat is that if Wall Street tanks, so will your markets. Yet investors are fleeing the dollar in droves.

On Inauguration Day, several Congressmen were sighted in Canada (pure happenstance, the media reported). Antiwar demonstrators braved frigid cold to show their disgust, and even in the rest of the not very numerous crowds quite a few anti-Bush signs could be seen. But bigger or smaller “peace” protests won’t stop a regime hell-bent on dominating the world any more than the mealy mouthed Democrats can stop the Republican electoral machine. Minor bourgeois parties and politicians like the Greens and the maverick Ralph Nader (who ran most places on the ballot line of the right-wing populist Reform Party, whose last presidential candidate was the fascistic Pat Buchanan) only served to soak up popular discontent like a Bounty paper towel, to be thrown away in the black hole of electronic voting machines which leave no paper trail (and thus can’t be subject to a Florida-style recount).

Lesson: You can’t fight Bush with Democrats – or any bourgeois “alternative,” for at bottom they all support U.S. imperialism. (That’s why not even Nader and the Greens called for immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.) But that does not mean that Bush is home free. Far from it. It only means that to bring down these bloodsuckers, it will take a real battle led by the only forces with the power to take on and defeat the predatory capitalist-imperialist system of which Bush & Co. are currently the spearhead. That force is the proletariat, the many millions-strong international working class, from Iraq to the United States. But to accomplish this mission, working people need a leadership that is up to the task, a revolutionary leadership that won’t buckle when the class enemy plays hardball. They need a leadership like the Bolsheviks, who under V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky made the October Revolution in Russia that for over 70 years haunted the imperialists, and whose spectre (judging from Bush’s speech) still obsesses the bourgeoisie. They may declare communism dead and gone, but their draconian repression against even mild antiwar or anti-Bush protests at home shows they don’t act on that delusion.

The liberal media are full of hopeful comments that perhaps Bush will be brought to task by his hubris. After all, look at Nixon, brought down by the Watergate scandal. Signs at the Washington protests called to “Impeach Bush.” But the Democrats wouldn’t impeach a wet noodle. More fundamentally, Nixon’s forced departure wasn’t because he burgled Democratic Party offices in D.C., but because he was losing the imperialist war in Vietnam. The helicopter whisking Nixon away from the White House lawn in August 1974 foreshadowed the helicopter taking off from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon eight months later. On the home front, not even two years after Republican Nixon won in a landslide in 1972 (61 percent to 37 percent for Democrat McGovern, compared to 51 percent for Bush to 48 percent for Kerry in 2004), he faced mushrooming labor unrest.

After Bush’s address, the talking heads on TV were busily trying to scope out what country he intends to invade next. The consensus was: Iran. But the Pentagon doesn’t even have enough forces to police Iraq, much less invade Iran (with a population of 68 million, three times that of Iraq). In testimony at her Senate confirmation hearings, secretary of state designate Condoleezza Rice made barely veiled threats against Venezuela. North Korea is in Washington’s gun sights, and as always Cuba is also high on the Bush regime’s hit list.

The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International defend the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states (North Korea, Cuba, China, Vietnam), as we stood for defense of the Soviet Union and East Europe, while calling for political revolution to oust the Stalinist leaders whose pipe dreams of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism went up in smoke. The IG/LFI defend semi-colonial countries such as Iraq and Iran under attack by imperialism, and uphold their right to obtain any weapons they need to fight off U.S. imperialism, whose vast destructive power and kill-crazed rulers constitute the greatest threat to the future of mankind. The Trotskyists call to defeat the bosses war, abroad and “at home,” with powerful working-class struggle.

From the war-ravaged Near East to Europe and the United States – as well as in Asia, hard-hit by a tsunami whose devastation was man-made, and Latin America, where the working masses have endured more than two decades of strangulation by rulers doing the bidding of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Wall Street banks – the raw material for explosive class struggles against imperialism and its puppets is abundant. The crisis of proletarian leadership is the decisive factor. A few thousand of Bush’s black-clad riot cops can goose-step up Pennsylvania Avenue and pepper spray unarmed youths, but they can’t hold back a tidal wave of struggle by a class-conscious working class, at the head of all the oppressed, led by a Bolshevik vanguard party. n