2024: The Beginning of the End of US Military Imperialism
As the US spends more on military than the next 10 countries combined, with 700+ foreign military bases, the domestic political winds are beginning to subtly shift away from the most fascistic empire in the history of the world.
Even though just last year the US Congress approved another increased military budget, the popularity of the Bernie Sanders campaigns for President and the upstart Cornel West campaign show that the anti-imperialist peace movement is beginning to become popular in mainstream American culture.
As a member of Congress during that time period, Bernie opposed the US-Saudi War in Yemen and the War in Iraq. Just recently, he proposed an amendment to cut the military budget by 10%. When a dove flew up to podium during a speech, he commented about how they represented world peace.
Inherent within the Communist movement is the idea that poor and working people deserve a better quality of life than they currently receive, with policies like free healthcare and free education helping to do that. Currently only military soldiers, the elderly, and the poorest of the poor enjoy these standards. Both inherently ease the violent burden of the necessity to earn money to survive. During both of his campaigns, these already popular ideas gained so much attention that mainstream capitalist culture could no longer ignore them, to the benefit of the rich and powerful.
In 2016, after starting his campaign at just around 1–2% in the polls, it meteorically rose to out-fundraising, with no Super PAC money, and almost defeating Corporate Military Establishment candidate Hillary Clinton. If not for the subtle media manipulation in favor of the military-industrial complex, represented by WikiLeaks emails revealing collaboration between the Clinton campaign and corporate media, it’s likely Bernie would’ve won. General Election polling consistently showed him outperforming Clinton against Trump.
In 2019, the Capitalist Establishment flooded the race for President with candidates to co-opt the Communist movement, with Bernie the only Marxist within the Democratic Party primary. That same year, the BLM movement, explicitly Marxist, gained popularity again, with protests against the prison-industrial-complex and military-industrial-complex happening around the world. At the same time, these protestors were protesting widespread medical neglect and being called terrorists while President Donald Trump was busy calling COVID-19 the “China virus” and sending in federal police to abuse them in the streets. In a crushingly authoritarian defeat, both Biden and Trump ended up conquering the progressive movement.
At the beginning of Biden’s presidency, in authoritarian police-state fashion, his administration classified anarchists as violent domestic extremists. In a report unfairly separating these protestors from the progressive movement, they even cited these protestors as being motivated by abortion, animal, and environmental rights.
Last year, the US and Ukraine voted against condemning the glorification of Nazism at the UN and then escalated war in Eastern Europe. Abortion rights were shortly after overturned federally by the US Supreme Court. Despite being a facility known for torture, Guantanamo Bay hasn’t been closed as Biden has promised. Is it a coincidence that the Democratic Party’s continuation of US authoritarianism from Trump’s 2019 “antifa BLM protestors are terrorists” narrative then led to these policy decisions? Clearly not.
After Cornel West announced his Green Party campaign with a message of anti-imperialist peace activism, he started polling around 5%. Marianne Williamson, polling around 15–20% in the Democratic Primary, believes in a Department of Peace. In 2020, four states voted to overturn exemptions in state constitutions that allow slavery. Even historically fascistic Virginia recently voted to overturn the death penalty.
As MLK Jr. once said, a Marxist himself, the arc of history really does seem to bend toward justice and equality. Even though the rich and powerful keep funding politicians who vote for more militarism, that’s really not how most people feel.
