"Freedom and Democracy" In the Capital of World Terrorism

As the day of American independence from the British Empire approaches, it should be pointed out that the United States is not the "beacon of freedom and democracy" as it claims to be throughout its history. The Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 was a historic first, and the first crack to form in the British Empire and the old form of Empire, but the "American Revolution" was not a radically progressive movement. The American colonies, all things considered, were well-off compared to English colonies that were comprised of a majority of non-white subjects. There were obviously injustices imposed upon Americans, such as high taxes, the quartering of Redcoats in civilian homes, and lack of representation / self-determination. Every group of people in large enough numbers strives for self-determination, but the principle contradiction of American society is the fact that we are a settler colony. Settler colonies require the expansion into indigenous territories, achieving this by either relocating or exterminating these peoples. Since the founding of colonies in what came to be known as the United States, the desire for more and more land grew with the rising bourgeoise and the frontiersman peasant. Among the bourgeoise and frontiersmen of the American colonies, discontent surrounding Britain found a steady rise after the Proclamation of 1763 when Britain declared that the northern colonies were not to expand past the peaks of Appalachia.

When the calamity of the Boston Massacre unfolded, all the contradictions of a colonial society coalesced into popular support for a movement to achieve self-determination, the average person was not the concern or focus of the founders of the Continental Congress. In fact, many "founding fathers" found the idea of mass democracy a detriment to the interests of the new Bourgeois class, the Landlords, and other large landholders. There was even consideration of establishing an American monarchy rather than a republic. The interests of those at the Congress was to establish a governance that would benefit themselves. This meant the continuation of the practice of slavery and indentured servitude, serving the interests of the well-to-do merchants in international trade, and the restriction of governmental power and voting to those who were white, male, and owned large amounts of land. The new American State was founded off of the backs of Indigenous genocide, 500,000 enslaved African-Americans, and an atmosphere of discontent for mass democracy from our "founding fathers" (many of whom owning slaves themselves), a far cry from the rhetoric we are frequently told about our country, and especially it's founding. Frequently throughout early US history was the struggle for the expansion of mass voting rights, but the principles have remained the same; the rich, white and powerful have absolute say in all matters of government. We have hardly updated our constitution 250 years after it was written, and so those interests will remain. The system was built for the rich white man, and will remain in the service of the rich white man.

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

- V.I. Lenin

While the Bourgeois revolutionaries had popular support among the peasantry and self-determination ultimately had benefits for white settlers after the tension between the US and Britain settled, it was a revolution created for the rich landowner, and has remained so. And when those landowners wanted more land, they went west. Waging war with Britain in 1812 to expand into the Northwest Territories previously unavailable to them due to the Proclamation of 1763. And then we never truly stopped. Tarnishing the Earth wherever we stepped our foot, massacring the caretakers of our land and pushing them onto tiny reservations while professing our spiritual mission to colonize the land; our "manifest destiny." And when the Mexican government kept American settlers in the Tejas region from owning slaves, we went to war with them and stole half of their territory to commit the same atrocities in the next phase of westward expansion. And when the large slaveowning landholders broke away from the Union over a reactionary attempt of preserving their feudal slave economy, slavery was only fully abolished (except as punishment for a crime) as a war tactic to achieve a Union victory.

And when the ravages of slavery were "over," a new market for labor and resources was needed, and thus imperialism spread eastward as well as inward on the non-white populations of America. While we were going to war with the Spanish for colonial holdings in the Caribbean and Pacific, Jim Crow was imposed on the non-whites of America. While hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were slaughtered and consequently colonized by Americans, thousands of lynchings were being conducted across the nation. When markets couldn't be gained by direct warfare, the US found other markets by forcing open the markets of Japan (a direct catalyst to the 30 million slaughtered in Imperial Japan's own imperial ventures), conducting the "open door" policy towards China's "spheres of influence," and colonizing Panama to build a canal. At the turn of the 20th century, with the rise of industry and massive profits came the organized labor movement and the "threat" of communism. While actively enriching the "Titans of Industry," the exploitation of American workers reached an all-time high, culminating in massive spikes of union activity, fighting for basic rights such as the 8-hour work day while the capitalist and middle classes sat in their mansions, raking in the "prosperity" of monopoly capitalism. Even through WWI, the United States did not drop a single bomb on the Central Forces, but rather the first bomb dropped by an American was on striking coal workers in the Battle of Blair Mountain. Though the US claimed to remain neutral in the inter-war years, immediately after WWI, the US sent forces to assist the White Army reactionary forces against the Bolshevik Revolution, but the US' real imperialist ventures would take place after it carved the world up for its own benefit after the Second World War.

After WWII's end, the United States had the power to determine policy and alliances around the world, inserting itself as the world's hegemon. The US and it's allies had to cooperate on the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany, but in the Pacific, the US had the entirety of Japan and the southern half of Korea to itself. The US subsequently created regimes friendly to its own interests. To avoid having to cooperate with the Soviet Union on the Japanese Islands, the US used nuclear weapons on civilian populations, killing 200,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Korea, the south's government was propped up by an American-friendly Fascist that suppressed the widely popular sentiment of socialism in Korea after Japanese occupation. With the perceived "threat" of the Soviet Union, the US took the policy of ensuring a worldwide network of friendly regimes, no matter the cost or system, as long as it touted the line of capitalism and US interests. In Europe, the US threw massive amounts of money at nations for rebuilding if they pledged allegiance to US-aligned capital while actively tampering with Italian elections and sending troops to suppress Greek Communists. In nations that were not supported by the USSR or powerful in their own right, any shift away from western-aligned capital found direct intervention or threats from the US, especially with the formation of NATO and the increasing activity of the CIA in international affairs. The region hit hardest by CIA intervention, however, was Latin America and South America. In Nicaragua, Guatemala, Panama, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Argentina, El Salvador, Venezuela, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, the CIA has actively destabilized these nations: through economic embargo and sanctions; through direct regime change; and through the funding of death squads (yet we wonder why there is so much immigration to the US from these countries). These nations were not converted to democracies either, in fact, many were outright fascists; Augusto Pinochet in Chile was installed after a Marxist was democratically elected into office, Hugo Banzer found massive support by the Bolivian Fascist party after the US-backed coup, and the US certainly didn't have anything to say about the fascist dictators in Spain, South Korea, and South Vietnam. The US will actively overthrow democracies, support US-friendly dictatorships, and suppress popular movements domestically and abroad to spread its own agenda, all while proclaiming that it is the harbinger of peace and democracy in the "free world." This isn't mentioning the proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam, which killed millions of civilians over a peoples who were struggling for unification in a way that didn't follow the US' model of capitalism; the military regimes supported in the Pacific that killed millions of their own; the 1980s funding of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, which included the leader of Al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden whom we would go to war with later; and the COINTELPRO doctrine in the US civil rights movement that prevented further positive change in the US because it challenged the status quo.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the military buildup, warmongering, and foreign intervention surely didn't stop. Our military budget has only increased since 1998, with the 800 military bases around the world, particularly surrounding China, have remained. So was world communism really the reason we spent so much on "defense?" When the narrative shifted away from the threat of communism, the "War on Terror" was constructed as an excuse to maintain this world hegemony, even though the problems of terrorism were caused directly by the meddling of the US, as well as western corporations, in places like the Middle East. Through the 80s we supported Islamic Fundamentalists to combat the Soviet Union, but when those regimes won out with the US Dollar, they started campaigns of Islamic Nationalism and rejected the presence of the US and other western corporations in their countries and started kicking out the imperialists. When the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers took place on September 11th, 2001, it posed as the perfect opportunity to go to war with Afghanistan to obtain their oil reserves and poppy flower exports back for US interests, sparking a forever war that only ended in 2021. And when Saddam Hussein, the CIA's former poster boy nationalized his nations economy, that's when his war crimes came to the attention of the US and thus the claim of Weapons of Mass Destruction formed a reason to claim Iraq's resources back for western corporations. While claiming to be the bulwark against terrorism, the US committed the largest terror spree in the world through the Cold War interventions and the modern "War on Terror," of which sanctions in Iraq have killed 1,500,000 through starvation alone, and the direct deaths of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, excluding factors like starvation, near 500,000. How is this a land of "Freedom and Democracy" when all we do is build a military large enough to kill god to subject onto non-whites across the world while ignoring the needs of our people? While we spend nearly a trillion dollars on "defense," there are homeless people sleeping on the steps of the capital? What kind of freedom is that?

It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed hungry person. True freedom can only be where there is no exploitation and oppression of one person by another; where there is not unemployment, and where a person is not living in fear of losing his job, his home and his bread.

- J.V. Stalin

Below are the actions of the supposed "Freest Country In the World."

(Some) Domestic Abuses of the US Federal Government:
1776-1865 - Enslavement of African-Americans by constitutional grounds
1776-1921 - Suppression of Women of Democratic Rights
1865-1964 - Jim Crow Laws Restricting the Movement and Freedom of African-Americans
1865-Present - Legalization of Slave Labor as punishment for a crime.
1872-77 - The Betrayal of Radical Reconstruction
1882-1943 - The Chinese Exclusion Act
1895-1935 - The Widespread Suppression of Unions through Governmental Force
1896-1954 - Strengthening of Jim Crow through Plessy v. Ferguson
1917-Present - Espionage and Sedition Acts, Arresting Eugene V. Debs and other Communists
1917-1991 - The First Red Scare
1945-1991 - Intensifying the First Red Scare
1934-Present - The redlining of primarily non-white communities
1938-75 - The House Un-American Activities Committee
1921-85 - Suppression of a Woman's Right to Economic Freedom
1921 - Bombing of the Blair Mountain Unionists
1942-46 - Japanese Internment Camps
1954-73 - The Communist Control Act
1956-71 - The COINTELPRO infiltrations
1964-73 - The Vietnam War Draft
1964-Present - The deliberate avoidance of improving the conditions of the African-American
1965-69 - The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton
1971-Present - The War on Drugs; Mass Incarceration of Minorites
1978-Present - Mass Telecom surveillance by the NSA
1980-Present -  Neoliberal policies designed to destroy public programs that actually benefitted the working class.
1980-Present - The ever-increasing military spending during peace-time
1980-88 - Deliberate avoidance in dealing with the AIDS Crisis
1985 - The MOVE Neighborhood Bombings
1994-2011 - Don't Ask, Don't Tell
2001-Present - The Patriot Act
2010-Present - The active persecution of Whistleblowers such as Julian Assange
2010-Present - Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
2013-Present - The Second Red Scare
2017-Present - Muslim Travel Ban Executive Order
2019-Present - Intensification of the Second Red Scare
2020-2023 - Abhorrent handling of the COVID-19 Pandemic
2021-Present - Hundreds of nationwide Anti-LGBT and Anti-Trans bills
2022 - The Overthrow of Roe v. Wade
2023 - Approval of Alaskan Willow Oil Project
2024 -  Overthrow of the Chevron Deference, Legalizing Outright Bribery, Making Homelessness Illegal and the Granting of Absolute Presidential Immunity

US-Backed Conflicts Involving Excessive Unnecessary Death:
1492-1959 - Settler Colonialism, 13,000,000 Indigenous Peoples Killed
1846-48 - War w/ Mexico, 38,000 dead
1898 - War w/ Spain, 200,000 Filipino Citizens Killed
1912-33 - Nicaraguan Occupation, > 1,000 Killed
1917-32 - Russian White Terror, supported by US, 300,000 Killed
1918-19 - American Invasion of Revolutionary Russia, 3,500 Deaths
1936-75 - Spanish White Terror, supported by US, 400,000 Killed
1945 - Dropping of two Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 226,000 Killed
1947-87 - Taiwanese White Terror, supported by US, 32,000 Killed
1950-53 - Korean War, 3,000,000 Civilians Killed
1950-80 - Korean Fascist Massacres, supported by US, 100,000 Killed
1960-96 - Guatemalan Civil War, following occupation and coups, 200,000 Dead
1961-Present - Cuban Invasion Attempt, Genocidal Embargo, Unknown Related Deaths
1964-65 - The "30 September" Indonesian Politicide, supported by US, 3,000,000 Civilians Killed
1965-75 - Vietnam War, 1,800,000 Dead
1969-73 - Laos and Cambodia "Secret Wars", 300,000 in Cambodia, 220,000 in Laos
1974-83 - The Latin American "Dirty War," Supported by US, 30,000 Killed
1975-78 - Authorization of the Invasion of East Timor, 200,000 Killed
1975-79 - Massive Financial Support to the Cambodian Genocide, 2,900,000 Killed
1979-92 - Salvadoran Civil War, 100,000 Dead
1979-92 - Funding the Mujahideen, 71,000+ Afghanis and Soviets killed by insurgent forces
1980-88 - Funding the Contra Death Squads, 22,000 Deaths
1990-2003 - Sanctions on Iraq, 1,500,000 Civilians Killed 
1999 - NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia, 500 Civilians Killed
2001-21 - War w/ Afghanistan, 212,000 Killed
2003-11 - War w/ Iraq, 315,100 Killed
2011 - NATO Invasion of Libya, 400 Civilians Killed
2023-Present - Support to the Israeli Genocide of the Palestinian People, 42,500 Killed

Total Deaths (so far): 28,214,000 (outright, not indirect)
This list is not even comprehensive, just a rundown of some of the most blatant and brutal interventions and policies the US has supported or directly participated in internationally. Keep in mind that this is SOLELY the United State's actions, and does not include unnecessary deaths perpetuated in imperialist World Wars, other Western imperial ventures (see: the 165 million Indians killed through British colonialism), or other symptoms of Capitalism such as the millions per year who die of starvation or preventable illness.

Fascists and Dictators Installed/Supported by the US Under the Guise of "Spreading Democracy:"
1933-79 - Nicaraguan Somoza Family
1936-77 - Support for the Fascist Francoist Spain
1948-79 - Syngman Rhee and Park Chung Hee of South Korea
1949-98 - Support to the unelected Kuomintang in Taiwan, not recognizing the PRC until 1979
1952-59 - Backing of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba
1953-78 - Strengthening of the British Shah of Iran
1954-85 - Installment of Carlos Castillo Armas of Guatemala
1955-63 - Support for South Vietnamese Dictator Ngô Đình Diệm
1964-85 - Military Support to the Brazilian Coup
1964-98 - CIA Backing of Suharto's Indonesian Coup
1971-78 - Installment of Hugo Banzer Suárez in Bolivia
1973-90 - Installment of Augusto Pinochet in Chile
1976-83 - Jorge Rafael Videl's "National Reorganization" Coup in Argentina
1979-92 - Installment of Adolfo Arnoldo Majano in El Salvador

From Manifest Destiny to Lebensraum, Jim Crow to the Nuremberg Laws, and Reservations to Concentration Camps, there's a reason the American Nazi Bund proudly proclaimed Washington was the first Fascist. While the old ways of Empire and direct colonialism are mostly over, the United States has inserted itself as the world hegemon in a much more insidious way. Since the end of WWII, the United States has been the largest threat to world peace, and as its power wanes in the global stage, it will only act more and more irrational in a desperate attempt to go back to what it once was. The US Government has only served the interests of the wealthy white man, and it is time to claim it for the working class, for the 70,000,000 POC in our country, for the women who have been bound to the patriarchal workings of the capitalist system. The capital of world terror and the largest blockade to freedom in the world is seeing the end of it's glory, but it won't turn into anything positive unless you organize for that change.

Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot.

- V.I. Lenin