Making the world safe for capitalism

by Barbara Jean Hope

Americans are told that the deployment of the military offshore, especially 
in Central and South America, is done to "restore democracy" to those 
nations. Nothing has ever been further from the truth. The word "democracy" 
as used in the mainstream media is simply another word for capitalism.

US troops are used worldwide to make the world unsafe for workers who are 
fighting against exploitation. American military trainers in collusion with 
the military of other nations stomp on the rights of workers as US 
corporations look at the world as a cash cow.

For decades, US citizens have passively accepted the fact that the standard 
policy of the US Government has been to co-opt the governments of nations 
in the so-called Third World.

When workers are shot down and beaten by goons in some nations in Central 
America, they are murdered because of the aim of US ruling elite interests 
to make the world safe for capitalism and the struggle for workers' rights 
unsafe at any speed, whether done as a spontaneous reaction to injustice or 
done in a considered, measured fashion.

Late last month, the UN Truth Commission released a report on the 34-year 
Guatemalan civil war. More than 200,000 Guatemalan workers (most of them 
Mayan and other indigenous groups) were murdered by the military and the 
paramilitary forces.

Responsibility for the deaths rests at the doorstep of the officers trained 
in counter-revolutionary torture and murder tactics by the US (mainly in 
the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia).

In a March 8 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Russ Christensen 
spelled out some things that are rarely seen in the bourgeois press. "The 
terrible truth here is that the killing of these people is something our 
government, not those of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Haiti, Colombia, 
and Mexico, desired.

"It has been our policy to crush any incipient challenge to dominant US 
economic interests. Our government has been in the business of protecting 
US multinational corporations for decades."

In 1948, George Kennan, a US Foreign Service strategist for nearly 20 
years, outlined the capitalist US foreign policy agenda and spoke of the 
"unreality" of a human rights agenda when dealing from a 
capitalist/imperialist perspective: "We have about 50 percent of the 
world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population.

"In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. 
Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships 
which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without 
positive detriment to our national security. [Talk about double-speak!]

"To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-
dreaming and our attention will have to concentrate everywhere on our 
immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can 
afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction ... 

"We should cease talk about vague and ... unreal objectives such as human 
rights, the raising of the living standards [for the world's workers], and 
democratisation", warned the US Foreign Service strategist.

Since 1948, that thinking has ruled US military/corporate raiding of the 
world and the use of the military.

As Christensen observed, "A series of spin doctors has perpetuated the tale 
that our government is the leading defender of democracy in the world ... 
We have chosen massive repression in these Third World countries because we 
feared democracy.

"From our pinnacle of vast wealth, we have looked into tiny agricultural 
countries where the majority of the population is slowly dying of 
malnutrition — and we have been afraid of political parties whose economic 
plan might differ from our own."

Of course, Christensen is using the term "our own" when we who fight for 
socialism understand he must surely be speaking of the capitalist economic 
plan that most certainly differs from our own.

Their plan is not the plan of the world's workers and is not our own. The 
cowardly ruling elite that rains down massive oppression and murder on the 
heads of those in South and Central America and worldwide who speak out for 
workers' rights must be shown for what it is.

It is a coward's denial of true democracy. True democracy in the world 
means that the workers will control the world's governments.

The cowardice, which evidences itself in the training of torturers and 
murderers in Fort Benning, will be no match for the determination of the 
workers in the world to be free of the abuse and cruelty and murder that, 
for some, would masquerade as fighting for "democracy".

* * *

People's Weekly World, paper of Communist Party, USA.