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<font size="1"><a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/2-united-states-democracy/">https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/2-united-states-democracy/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">The Country Where Liberty Is a Statue: The Second Newsletter (2021)</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Vijay Prashad - January 14, 2021</div>
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<blockquote><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/7_Part-3-Political-War-8.png" alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="319" height="426"></p></blockquote>
<p>Dear friends,</p>
<p>Greetings from the desk of the <a href="https://thetricontinental.org/">Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research</a>.</p>
<p>On 6 January, the world witnessed an interesting spectacle, an
assortment of what appeared to be characters from fantasy television
shows taking possession of the US Capitol, where the legislature sits.
Despite spending more than $1 trillion on its military, intelligence
services, and police, the United States government found itself overrun
by a horde of Donald Trump’s supporters. They came without any precise
programme and were not able to elicit a serious revolt around the
country. What they showed <a href="https://uspeacecouncil.org/u-s-peace-council-statement-on-the-january-6-2020-events-in-washington-dc/">clearly</a>
is that there is a serious divide in the United States, which weakens
the ability of the US elites to exercise their domination over the
world.</p>
<p>Around the world, people gaped at the bizarre pageant of Trump’s army
running riot in the chambers of the body that calls itself the ‘world’s
oldest democracy’. With precision, Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson
Mnangagwa sent out a <a href="https://twitter.com/edmnangagwa/status/1347176848694931457">tweet</a>
that tied the US economic sanctions against his country to the chaos in
Washington, DC. The events at the Capitol, he wrote on 7 January,
‘showed that the US has no moral right to punish another nation under
the guise of upholding democracy. These sanctions must end’. The
government of Venezuela <a href="http://www.mppre.gob.ve/en/comunicado/venezuela-condemns-political-polarization-violence-us/">offered</a>
its concern about the ‘political polarisation and the spiral of
violence’ and explained that the United States now experiences ‘what it
has generated in other countries with its policies of aggression’.</p>
<p>President Mnangagwa’s use of the term ‘moral right’ has echoed across
the world: how can a society that faces such a severe challenge to its
own political institutions feel that it has the right to ‘promote’
democracy in other countries, using the various instruments of hybrid
war?</p>
<p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/5_Part-3-Diplomatic-Warfare-4.png" alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="426" height="426"></p>
<p>The United States – like other capitalist democracies – has struggled
with insurmountable challenges to its economy and society, with high
rates of wealth inequality crushed by large-scale precarity and income
deflation. Between 1990 and 2020, US billionaires saw their <a href="https://ips-dc.org/billionaire-bonanza-2020/">wealth</a>
increase by 1,130%, while median wealth in the US increased by only
5.37% (this increase was even more marked during the pandemic). Exits
from this social and economic crisis are simply not available to the US
ruling class, which seems not to care about the great dilemmas of its
own population and of the world. An example of this is the meagre income
support provided during the pandemic, while the government hastens to
protect the value of the wealth of the small minority that holds an
obscene share of national wealth and income.</p>
<p>Rather than seek a solution to the economic and social crisis – which
it cannot solve – the US ruling class projects its problem as one of
political legitimacy. There is now a false sense that the main problem
in the United States is posed by Donald Trump and his rag-tag army; but
Trump is merely the symptom of the problem, not its cause. The
constituency that he has assembled will remain intact and will continue
to flourish as long as the social and economic crisis spirals further
out of control. Large swathes of the US elite have rallied around Joe
Biden, hoping that he – as a representative of stability – will be able
to maintain order and restore the legitimacy of the United States. Their
view is that the US is currently facing a crisis of political
legitimacy and not a socio-economic crisis for which they have no
answers.</p>
<p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/03_Cover_EN.jpg" alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="426" height="224"></p>
<p>The January <a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-36-twilight/">dossier</a> from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, <i>Twilight: The Erosion of US Control and the Multipolar Future, </i>broaches
the question of the decline of US authority. Since the US war on Iraq
(2003) and the credit crisis (2010), there has been the anticipation of
the decline of the power of the United States and its project. At the
same time, the United States continues to exert immense power through
its military superiority, its control over large sections of the
financial and trade system (the Dollar-Wall Street Complex), and its
command over information networks. Since the late 1940s, the United
States has declared that anything ‘less than preponderant power would be
to opt for defeat’. This political aim has been repeated in each
National Security Strategy of the United States government. The
socio-economic crisis over the past two decades has weakened US
authority, but it has not eroded US power. This is why our dossier is
titled <i>Twilight</i>: we are in the midst of a process of the whittling down of US authority, but not of the loss of US power.</p>
<p>During the last two decades, China has developed its scientific and
technological prowess, which has resulted in rapid advances for China’s
development. Over the past few years, Chinese scientists have published
more peer-reviewed papers than scientists from elsewhere and Chinese
scientists and firms have registered more patents than scientists and
firms from elsewhere. As a consequence of these intellectual
developments, China’s firms have made key technological breakthroughs,
such as in solar power, robotics, and telecommunications. A high savings
rate by the population has enabled the Chinese state and private
Chinese capital to make considerable investments in manufacturing; this
has propelled China’s high-tech industries, which have seriously
threatened Silicon Valley firms. It is this challenge, we argue in this
dossier, that has provoked the US ruling class to instigate a dangerous
confrontation against China; Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’ and Trump’s ‘<a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/the-imperialism-of-finance-capital-and-trade-wars/">trade war</a>’ have both had a military component, which includes the deployment of tactical nuclear warheads into the waters around Asia.</p>
<p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/3_Part-2_BRI-5.png" alt="The War in Eurasia" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="426" height="426"></p>
<p><span>Rather than tackle the great social and economic challenges
within the US, its ruling class has taken refuge in anti-Chinese
rhetoric. Why is the employment situation so bad in the United States,
the people ask? Because of China, say the elites – whether those who
support Trump or those who look back nostalgically to Obama. Why did
COVID-19 create such havoc in the United States, which continues to have
the highest death toll in the world? Because of China, says Trump.
Biden, in a softer way, makes similar noises. The general orientation of
the US ruling class is to blame China for every problem within the
United States, to make China’s rise the excuse for any failure in the
United States.</span></p>
<p><span>Trump used the Obama-era Quad (Australia, India, Japan, and the
United States) against China, while Biden promises to build a wider
‘coalition of democracies’ (the Quad plus Europe) against China.
Regardless of which fragment of the US ruling class governs the country,
these leaders will seek to shift all responsibility for their failures
onto China. This is a cynical and dangerous strategy because – as we
point out in the dossier – the US elites well know that China’s economic
development poses a serious challenge to the US, but that China does
not have any military or any significant political ambitions to dominate
the world. The US ruling class, however, is willing to risk a
cataclysmic war to protect its preponderant power.</span></p>
<p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_9815-1.jpg" alt="TBT: Ricardo Silva Soto" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="426" height="426"></p>
<p>In 1972, when the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile
came under murderous pressure from the United States, the poet Nicanor
Parra wrote:</p>
<blockquote><p>United States: the country where<br>
liberty is a statue.</p></blockquote>
<p>A year later, the US government told General Augusto Pinochet to
leave the barracks, overthrow Allende’s government, and inaugurate a
dictatorship that would last for 17 years. Three years before the coup
took place, the CIA’s director of plans <a href="https://monthlyreview.org/product/washington-bullets/">wrote</a>,
‘It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup.
It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and
securely so that the [United States government] and [the] American hand
be well hidden’. This policy of making sure that the ‘American hand be
well hidden’ is part of the hybrid war techniques, which we outline in
the dossier.</p>
<p>Brave women and men fought and died to overthrow the Pinochet
dictatorship. Amongst them were people like Ricardo Silva Soto, a young
man who liked to play football and enjoyed his studies at the Faculty of
Chemical Sciences and Pharmacy at the University of Chile. He joined
the Communist Party of Chile’s Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR),
which operated against the tentacles of the dictatorship. In June 1987,
Silva Soto and others were killed in cold blood in Operation Albania.
The Chilean Human Rights Commission and Vicaría de la Solidaridad found
that no bullets had been fired from inside their safe house at 582 Pedro
Donoso Street in Santiago; the bullets were fired at close range at the
militants. In Recoleta, there is a people’s pharmacy named for Silva
Soto. It was opened in 2015 by the mayor Daniel Jadue, who is now a
candidate for the Chilean presidency. The creation of this pharmacy led
to the establishment of the Chilean Association of Popular Pharmacies
(ACHIFARP) and to the opening in 94 municipalities across Chile of such
establishments, which have played a key role in the fight against
COVID-19. Ricardo Silva Soto was killed to stop the world from
breathing; his name now sits atop a process that helps the world
survive.</p>
<p>The global reaction to the events of 6 January shows that the
authority of the United States is greatly dented. Biden will use any
method – including hybrid war – to revive this authority. But it is
unlikely to succeed. Parra’s poem was written in 1972 with bitter irony;
today, due to the worldwide interest in Black Lives Matter and the
public appearance of the white supremacist Trump-supporting hordes,
Parra’s statement is seen to be a description of reality.</p>
<p>The US has considerable resources to reassert its authority. The
struggles ahead – in the name of people like Ricardo Silva Soto – will
be difficult and perilous. But – for the sake of humanity – these
struggles are essential.</p>
<p>Warmly,</p>
<p>Vijay</p>
<p><br></p></div></div></div>
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