6-17-05, 10:27 am
There is a lot of talk about the American Empire. Indeed the name empire is correct, but it’s necessary to clarify one point well: the empire is not the American people, but the empire of the American capitalism.
The present war in Iraq and the atrocities committed by the American army revolt the great majority of the conscious people of the world. Some, by anger and powerlessness, are led to compare the present war policy of the American empire to that of the Third Reich, which is correct to a certain point. But again voices rise to blame collectively the American people for this policy of war as was done once with the German nation. Someone even stated that the crimes of American stink of burnt bodies. No doubt about it. But which America?
These voices do not intend to be provocative, but the fact is that they are. The fact is that statements of this kind contribute to the division of the resistance and serve more the engineers of the policy of war rather than those who fight against it.
We should always remember that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union predicted World War II long before it started and was engaged in clarifying to the peoples of the Soviet Union that it was not the German people who were the enemy. It claimed that our enemy is nazism, the most inhumane and barbarous policy of the German capitalism. That is our enemy as it is the enemy of the German people, whom, in spite of the course it is taking, always will be our ally.
The same way nowadays the common enemy of all the people of the world is not the American people. On the contrary, they are our allies in this fight. They are allies of the Iraqi people in the fight for the end of the occupation.
Of course there are real resemblances between the extermination war policy of the Third Reich and the present policy of the American empire. And also the consequences of that policy on the ground are similar, nowadays in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Palestine: death and the demolition. It is frightening. But we must keep our heads cool. And that is a revolutionary duty.
After November 2004 many of us pointed the finger at the American people and said, 'You are the ones to blame; you had your chance and look what you did with it.'
It is necessary to say that the American people are profoundly dominated. They live in terror, in the uncertainty of tomorrow, in extreme ignorance and in social and economic precariousness. American society is different from those we know in Europe in many aspects. It is a very unfair society. In American society, the bourgeois ideal has taken roots perhaps far deeper than in any other. The culture of individualism is stronger; the relations between men are in practice reduced to monetary relations. In American society it is perhaps more difficult than in any other to explain to people the mechanisms of society and to build class consciousness.
And some stand that the American people do nothing to combat this Bushian policy. Some stand that they show contempt or apathy towards those peoples that the American army exterminates. That isn’t true.
Despite everything many voices rise in the United States against this war. Mass organizations rise throughout the country despite the policy of repression and persecution. Slowly, it is true, but such resistance exists. It is not enough to say that people should rise as whole against a policy of those who rule them, one must also remember to ask: and how can they do it? How long it will take in such adversity until that resistance gives fruit? And who will organize that fight?
In the United Stated of America there is a Communist Party that for already a century has been engaged with coherence and bravery in the fight for the unity of all the North-American workers and all the North-American people against capitalism. Many thousands already fell in that fight: communists and non-communists, democrats and freedom fighters who paid with suffering or with their own lives for those ideals and goals.
Today, after day, despite the darkness in which they live, the American people are gaining more and more conscience of the catastrophic situation of their country and of the course of suicidal exterminationist colonial war that this government of Bush is taking. And they are rising against it, and more they will rise in the future, more and more. Not only in the battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine the colonial armies are put in check. Already during the war in Vietnam the fight of the American people against the war gave a valuable contribution.
What to say about the people of Europe? Today the countries of Europe, especially of the European Union, form an economic and political block strong enough to oppose the American Empire efficiently. If it doesn’t do it’s because it’s truly a vassal of the Empire. But thus being so, it is also in the hands of the people of Europe to halt the war policy of Bush, they also can do something. And it is duty of the revolutionaries of those countries to rise in their homelands in order to force the vassal governments to oppose the Empire and to withdraw their troops from Iraq, in those countries where troops continue to occupy Iraq. We must take advantage of those things in the structure of the European Union, which was built to benefit capitalism, which may be used against capitalism.
Of course in certain cases and to some degree there may exist a collective guilt, as in the case of Germany or Japan 60 years ago. But to what degree? That is very hard to determine. And what to do about that?
In this fight we must understand who our enemy is, because sometimes he tries to hide in the shadows. Our enemy, and in a more concrete and urgent case, the enemy of the Iraqi people is the North-American capitalism: the oil companies, the corporations, the banks, the industry of weapons, of construction, of agriculture products, etc.
And these are the owners of the United States of America. They are the government. It is for the profit of these people that the United States government exists. The American people have little or no say on the subject. No one wishes more than the capitalists that terrorists would direct their violence against the American people in order to force the fusion of the American people with the American capitalists in an enormous Fourth Reich. No one else wishes more than capitalists that mysterious organizations of madmen repeat the events of September 2001 in New York.
It is American capitalism and the occupying army that defends US capitalism’s interests that all the forces of the patriotic Iraqi resistance must be directed against. It is against this common enemy too that the solidarity of all the peoples of the world must be directed against: the Iraq war not against the American people. And moreover it is a duty of all the revolutionaries of the world to bring this explanation forth to daylight and not to make mistakes in such an important task.
What must never be done is to divide the resistance and diminish or underestimate any dawn of opposition in the imperial metropolis itself on the basis of this aspect of collective guilt. For all the reasons and one more, because this fight is a great help to ours, as ours is to theirs. But also because, even if it were not so, the fate of the American people interests us just by itself. It is not by chance that the proletarian moral is many steps above the must liberal of the bourgeois morals.
The North-American capitalism stinks of burnt bodies. The White House, the Pentagon, the penthouses of the bankers, of the industrialists and the lawyers, their servants. They stink of burnt bodies, of loathing and rottenness.
But that America, the America of the mountains, of the plains, of the rivers, of the small and big cities, of the deep mines, of the majestic factories, of the fields of bread, of the great scientific, technical and artistic deeds… That smells of sweat and tears, but also smells of fresh and hope. And that is the America of tomorrow. That America that so well Chaplin knew to depict. That is the America we must respect and support because it’s our brother and comrade in this fight.
--Duarte Fusco is a reader in Italy
