Following is a talk given at the
evening rally at the Nov. 13-14, 2010, National Conference on Socialism
sponsored by the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
Many
of us have come into this room for different reasons. Some have lost their jobs;
some have watched their parents die in hospitals because the care was too
expensive; others have gone into debt trying to get an education or had their
home countries devastated by U.S. economic policies. This list could surely go
on.
For
me it was a war. It was believing in this system so much that I joined the
Army, with all the illusions of fighting for freedom and democracy, willing to
give my life for those things.
But
I am here to tell you that I went from being a patriot and a soldier to being a
socialist and a revolutionary.
I
had always believed what I was taught growing up in the United States, which is
what they teach each one of us. From a lifetime of indoctrination, we are
taught to believe that the United States is a beacon of equality and democratic
principles, a force for progress and human rights.
But
I was taught something very different by the Iraqi people. When I went to war
they became my teachers. Instead of being taught about the “American dream” I
was taught the truth about U.S. foreign policy. My teacher was a young boy,
with scars from U.S. bombs that mangled his face beyond recognition, that melted
his eyes shut, that severed his arm; and his mother, who begged for
compensation because they were too poor to eat. My teacher was an eight-year-old
girl who looked exactly like my sister, who was dragged from her home in tears,
never to be allowed back, who screamed hysterically as she watched her brothers
taken away with sandbags over their heads. A man, my father’s age, shot though
the neck, sent to a detention cell instead of a hospital, bleeding through
bandages, shaking, choking on blood, and sobbing saying that he just wanted to go
home and see his family.
They
taught me that there was no way in hell that this was a war of liberation. It
was something else.
I
learned from their suffering. I learned from their strength. I started thinking
that the Iraqi people were not much different than my family, friends,
neighbors and co-workers. Then I realized they were no different than my
family, than my friends. I realized that I should be on their side, not the
side of the aggressor, the occupier, the invader.
I
came home with feelings of guilt and betrayal. And I had to know why. Why I was
told I was fighting for liberation, and instead robbed them of their
independence. Why I was told we were defending our country from imminent attack
from WMDs, when every shred of
evidence was exposed as a blatant, and willful, lie.
The
reality is that these wars are for profit. There is no question. A mountain of
human suffering for the enrichment of a tiny few corporate owners and bankers.
Why
did the war happen? Was it just Bush? Well, we have seen that regardless of
which party is in power, a warfare state is a constant feature. And why is
that?
The
United States is an imperialist country. It is an Empire. It must wage war to
survive, to constantly accumulate wealth. It must kill, destroy, invade,
embargo and cause untold suffering to feed the defense contractors over $1
trillion a year, to give the oil giants new seas of profits, and to give banks
new financial sectors to gobble up.
The
Roman Empire could plunder and pillage openly.
But the U.S. Empire cannot be so open, because in this era, nobody would accept
it. So they change the language, and say we are fighting for “democracy” and “human
rights.” Well, we don’t believe that, do we?
And
we don’t believe the lies about it being about our safety, because they don’t
care about us at all—this government has lost all credibility telling us who
our enemies are. They expect us to believe it is just a coincidence that the
one thing every country has in common that we are told to fight is that they
have not opened their borders to be plundered by U.S. corporations.
No
Iraqi, no Afghan ever hurt my family or my community, never destroyed a school
or shut down a factory; no one from Iran, Cuba or Venezuela was ever
responsible for millions of people in the United States losing their homes, for
1 million schoolchildren a year living on the streets, for millions dying of
preventable diseases. Our enemies are not people in the poorest countries on earth,
but right here in the richest one, sitting in plush offices on Wall Street and
Capitol Hill.
Right
now in Detroit, in Florida, in California, where record numbers of families are
being kicked out of their homes, their are houses are being bulldozed because
they cannot be sold at a profit; entire apartment buildings empty and rotting. If
bombs went off all over the country and destroyed those homes, leaving families
with nowhere to go, this government would be vowing revenge on those
responsible–but when Bank of America does it, we are supposed to accept it as “the
way things have to be.”
What
have workers in the United States gained from these wars? We have just been
told to take more cuts, to lose childcare, lose more funding for our schools
and social services, to take more job loses while the military budget just increases,
while hundreds of billions of dollars flow into defense contractors’ pockets,
and the oil giants they defend, while the wealth we produce is used to buy more
million-dollar armored vehicles to be filled with our loved ones just to get
blown up in some distant land.
Why
is it that the rich live while we die? Why is it that the families of the poor,
the struggling, have to mourn, have to watch their loved ones come home in
coffins, in wheelchairs?
It
is never the children of the politicians, the CEOs, the billionaires; it is our
children, our friends, our siblings. That is why we say “this is not our war”–because
it isn’t. It is their war, for their interests, for their profits.
And
if it is not our war, we are not going to support their war, we are not going
to fight their war. Instead, we are going to fight against their war. And we are
going to fight against the system that makes their criminal wars inevitable.
Because that is what we must do.
I
came home angry, and I wanted to fight, so I joined the most dedicated fighting
organization in the United States–I joined the Party for Socialism and
Liberation.
The
first step for all of us is understanding the truth: that we live in a class
society, with one class of fat cats who live in luxury off the blood and sweat
of our class, who create all their wealth. But the most important thing isn’t
understanding the truth, it is understanding what to do about it, because there
are more of us than there are of them.
My
experience is not unique. I am nobody special. We all suffer under this system,
and we can all undergo this same transformation. You see and experience the
injustice and suffering, you get angry and want to do something, then you meet
other people who feel the same way, then you organize together, fight together,
and struggle together, and then you win victories together, and then you are
not just people who agree with each other anymore, you are comrades. And then
all that anger and passion becomes something greater, it becomes a real concrete
political force—and that is how we end the wars, the suffering, injustice and
inequality. That is how we smash this rotten system. That is how we throw those
criminals at the top into the dustbin of history. That is how we build a better
world.
