DNC 2020: Don’t let Democrats revive ‘humanitarian’ imperialism
The Minnesota Anti-War Committee would not skip the chance to protest a national party convention lightly. We helped organize marches on the RNCs in 2008, 2012 and 2016, and protested against the Democratic Party’s proposal to hold their convention in the Twin Cities in 2012 (which was ultimately held in Charlotte, NC). Alongside thousands we showed the world that real resistance to war and racism doesn’t take place in convention halls or through carefully orchestrated electoral spectacles. Real resistance happens in the streets.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the Anti-War Committee to cancel our plan to bus to Milwaukee to protest the DNC this year. We support our friends in the Milwaukee-based Coalition to March on the DNC who will protest, as well as individuals who travel to join them, whom we encourage to do so safely. The organizational challenges posed by the worsening COVID-19 outbreak in the US highlight the failure of both political parties to prioritize human needs over war and imperialism.
Aren’t Democrats at least better than the alternative?
A false division occupies our cultural imagination: The Republicans are warhawks, the Democrats peaceniks. Both parties turn these popular imaginings to their advantage come election season but in reality no such division exists.
A brief tour through recent history: Jimmy Carter ran as an anti-war candidate, claiming to have been opposed to the Vietnam War (a lie) and promising to slash the military budget should he gain office. Instead he proposed raising military spending by $10 billion. Bill Clinton promised to cut military spending and did so, only to replace overt force with covert force, funding and training right-wing death squads in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, among other countries.
Barack Obama promised to end US military intervention in the Middle East. Instead he massively increased the scale of the US drone program. Somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 Afghanis are dead as a result. Obama’s military budget outspent that of George W. Bush by $816.7 billion over the course of his presidency. He and VP Biden also aided the destruction of Libya and Syria through covertly-financed proxy armies whitewashed through the use of “humanitarian intervention” propaganda.
Obama called this “leading from behind,” but Biden makes it straightforward in “The Biden Plan for Restoring American Leadership.” It states: “The world does not organize itself. American leadership, backed by clear goals and sound strategies, is necessary”. The “Plan” continues to explain that to ensure the USA can “organize” the world, “Biden will never hesitate to protect the American people, including when necessary, by using force. We have the strongest military in the world—and as president, Biden will ensure it stays that way.”
Note the rhetorical transition: Is Biden intent on “protecting the American people?” Or is he more concerned with ensuring that, through maintaining our capacity for force, we remain capable of organizing the world as we see fit? Biden’s campaign staff assure us that “the Biden administration will make the investments necessary to equip our troops for the challenges of the next century.” As such we can expect no reduction in military spending under Biden’s watch.
Rhetorical slides continue to do a lot of work throughout Biden’s “Plan for Restoring American Leadership.” Biden promises to “end forever wars” in Afghanistan — by making an effort to “narrowly focus our mission on Al-Qaeda and ISIS.” In what way does this proclaim an “end” to anything? Biden also promises to maintain an “ironclad commitment to Israel’s security,” continuing the US tradition of supporting a settler-colonial ethnocracy that practices apartheid which, by no cooincidence, has sold the USA many of the weapons, and taught the State many of the suppressive military police practices, which are used in the USA today. Biden promises to increase the already crushing economic sanctions on Venezuela, which have to date directly resulted in the deaths of more than 100,000 Venezuelans. Some Democrats may say that all that needs doing for the death to end is for President Nicolás Maduro to capitulate and consign himself to the coup (on August 4th Democratic Senator Chris Murphy unabashedly used the word “coup” himself, while complaining online that Trump’s government was not sufficiently competent to bring the coup success) but in what way does this at all differ from the logic of war? “Surrender,” says the US, “and we will relent.” Here we encounter another obfuscation of violence: Does calling an enforced siege something other than a siege transform it? Does the DNC believe in magic?
Repression at home
Meanwhile, many Americans (white liberals in particular) have been stunned by the summary violence directed at protesters against police oppression of Black people, and in particular by the deployment of the National Guard and other federal forces. What could possibly be surprising about this? The US has invested heavily in practices, techniques, technology, personnel and materiel for the suppression of dissent and opposition worldwide. Through the continual deployment of these techniques and technologies, the State has built a base of knowledge, used that knowledge to refine these techniques, and with further refinement, wound itself into a death spiral — a death spiral for anyone who is not an American, moreover not of a particular type, race, class of American. Why should we be surprised when, faced with dissent and opposition at home, the State responds the same ways it responds abroad? How else could we expect the State to respond to dissent? When Palestinians, Iranians, Venezuelans, Cubans, Vietnamese, Bolivians, et cetera ad nauseam dare to fight for self-determination, they are immediately met with the heel of the USA’s boot. How could we expect anything else when Americans themselves make a stand?
Many would like to lay the blame for this deployment of State violence at Donald Trump’s feet, or perhaps at the feet of the Republican Party in general. But Democrats like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, etc etc etc have happily underwritten this overwhelming accumulation of technologies of State suppression, as well as their continual use around the globe. In a very material sense, the very existence of these technologies of violence means a threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Biden’s recent infamous statement that US police officers should “shoot [US Americans] in the leg instead of the heart” is an exceptional summary — and recalls the language of “precision” and “surgical” “strikes” used by Obama’s drone program. Yes, says the DNC, populations must be suppressed; yes, it must be done with violence; but let us have humane violence, precise violence, clean and surgical violence that doesn’t leave us feeling dirty.
Protest the DNC from Minnesota!
Despite the pandemic cancelling our DNC protest plans in Milwaukee, it’s still urgent that we raise these grievances against the Democratic Party’s compromised platform. In lieu of traveling to Milwaukee, on the Thursday of the week of the DNC (August 20) we will be calling attention to one area where more Democrats must be forced to improve their positions: Palestine. Ilhan Omar’s primary election victory–against a sleek DNC insider airdropped into Minneapolis with millions in pro-occupation PAC funding–reflects a change in the popular understanding of Palestine. Decades of organizing, calls for divestment, and worldwide protest have contributed to the radical new awareness growing in the youth generation. Join us with American Muslims for Palestine (AMP-MN) and the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR-MN) as we raise banners bearing messages of solidarity from bridges over I-35W in Minneapolis. We demand an end to US aid to Israel and the right of return for Palestinians to their occupied national homeland.
Also during the week of the DNC, on Tuesday, August 18, we will be supporting the Climate Justice Committee and UMN Climate Strike outside Governor Walz’s mansion in St. Paul, demanding a better environmental platform from the DNC (Walz is a superdelegate). Join us at 7pm at 1006 Summit Ave, St Paul.
As always, we don’t endorse candidates. But we think the DNC is an important time to make our voices heard and fight against the narrow political limits that the gatekeeping Democratic Party tries to impose on our movements.
Money for human needs, not war and occupation!