Progressives on this campus, commit this quote to memory:
“We need to add 40,000 troops – the equivalent of two divisions – to the American military in order to meet our responsibilities elsewhere, especially in the urgent global war on terror. In my first 100 days as President, I will move to increase the size of our Armed Forces.”
These are not the words of the unelected White House appointee; they’re not the words of Donald Rumsfeld or the ‘neo-cons’.
No, they are the words of John Forbes Kerry, and they are words that should drive progressives away from the Democratic party en masse this November. Kerry’s words demonstrate, in the clearest way possible, that the only way to truly combat American Empire is to reject both imperialist parties.
We can imagine that only the fear-laden, anti-democratic slogan of the corporate left – ‘Anybody but Bush’ – will salvage the Kerry Camp as November nears.
The ‘Anybody but Bush’ clich‚ embodies the haplessness of the Democrats. It shows that they can unify around only the vilification of a hapless dunce, and it reveals that they have no alternative vision of America’s role in the world, forcing us to once again ‘choose’ between two flavors of corporate imperialism.
Ignore the hype about a Bush referendum; the elections this fall are really a referendum on the Democratic party’s ability to conceal from the public that they agree with Bush on every major issue while at the same time behaving as though he’s the devil incarnate.
Kerry’s own voting record demonstrates his complicity with the Bush Administration: pro-war, pro-PATRIOT Act, pro-tax cuts, pro-neoliberalism, pro-media consolidation, pro-corporate healthcare.
Kerry is a Bush lackey posing as an antagonist.
While the American Empire needs technicians like the neo-cons, it also needs people like Bill Clinton and John Kerry. Endless war is political and militaristic.
During the nomination process, we watched each Democratic candidate – with the exception of Dennis Kucinich – attack the Bush regime while refusing to reject any of the their crazed policies. We then saw the corporate-run media and the corporate-run party establishment chose the Democratic nominee on the basis of a senseless, imagined ‘electability’.
The machinations of this political system camouflage two truths: first, we have a one-party corporate state – “one party with two right wings,” according to historian Gore Vidal; and second, that the enemy of the world is not an individual – it’s corporate globalization.
The lesson we take from this should be that neither electing a Democrat nor getting rid of George Bush will solve a solitary problem we face, because our major problems result from our corrupt, corporate political system and the bi-partisan consensus of American imperialism.
We will never have a real alternative so long as we lack the courage to challenge the chimera of a phony one before us.
Despite the hostile response to the Ann Coulter talk, her remarks shouldn’t have surprised anyone. We must instead try to understand the political and intellectual climate that grants propagandists like her and yesterday’s speaker, Bill Kristol, such an esteemed role in our political discourse.
Coulter and Kristol enable us to imagine a distinctly American form of Nazism. Like the Nazis, their fascist white supremacy have overwhelmed reasonable political debate and made it the dominating force in American political discourse.
John Kerry offers us a different flavor of the same product.
The Kerry flavor calls for the ongoing colonial occupation of Iraq, for the continuation of Plan Colombia, for empowering the ‘National Endowment for Democracy’ to overthrow more governments, and for the use of force to facilitate corporate globalization’s insatiable quest to commodify the planet.
Reread the Kerry quote: 40,000 new troops in 3 months.
What dark-skinned American colony will they occupy – Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan?
And where will those troops come from amidst a recruiting crisis?
Read between the lines: John Kerry will start the draft. He will dissimulate on this, but he cannot deny that he needs the draft to fulfill his promise. This is hardly news to him, but he won’t be talking much about it. He is, after all, a Democrat.
What we know about each man tells us that only rhetoric separates Kerry and Bush. And while Kerry’s rhetoric of fear will probably scare most liberals into voting Democratic, the truth is that supporting him promises a different brand of fascist imperialism with a voting record to match.
Our real slogan, as citizens of the world, should be, “Anything but Empire.”