Actualité - Saddam Hussein and U.S. Politics of Assassination - Peoples Reject Lynching & Demand End to Occupation of Iraq

Voice of Revolution joins the peoples of the world in denouncing this U.S.-organized lynching, with its fake trial of Saddam Hussein and other co-defendants. The U.S. lynching of Saddam Hussein is a stark example of the failure of the U.S. state. In its refusal to go forward to a modern democracy, that empowers the people, the world is witnessing the U.S. state going back to the dark days of the complete impunity of “lynch law,” with its state-organized public lynching. Like then, the lynching of Saddam -Hussein — done on the dawn of Islam’s holy feast of Eid al-Adha, with video given to the media to broadcast in graphic detail worldwide — was designed to terrorize and humiliate Muslims, the Arab world, and all who reject U.S.-style democracy. Like the U.S.-organized trial, the lynching was also a show of force by the U.S. against the peoples, that U.S. impunity and brutality knows no bounds. And any who have seen the photographs of African Americans castrated, lynched and burned at the stake knows this well.

Humanity has long since rejected “lynch law” and the impunity of the state to summarily execute people as well as using kangaroo courts to hide the injustice of the lynching taking place. Its social relations and standards have advanced beyond the Dark Ages and refuses to go back to this level. The broad demonstrations and denunciation of the lynching by millions worldwide and the continued resistance in Iraq, in the U.S. and worldwide show that the peoples will not submit to this terrorism and degradation of humanity, will not permit the U.S. to drag the world down with it.

We stand on the shoulders of the broad resistance waged against the racism and lynchings of the government, present and past, and call on all to reject the failed U.S. state. The demand of the people is to go forward to a democracy that guarantees the rights of all and empowers them to govern and decide.

The lynching of Saddam Hussein in many ways makes clear that it is racism, brutality and impunity that have always been at the heart of U.S.-style democracy. The thousands of lynchings carried out against African Americans, alongside many hundreds against Mexicans, were commonly organized by the government’s paramilitary forces like the Ku Klux Klan. Sheriff’s and police agents were usually a direct part of the gang of lynchers, or turned prisoners over to the lynchers. The federal government guaranteed the lynching occurred and would continue — not only by having its agents backing and being part of the KKK and arming and protecting them, but also through its refusal to intervene, including refusing to pass a law making lynching a federal crime.

Lynchings on a broad scale were at their height in the 1880s and 1890s as part of the government’s efforts to crush the people’s fight for empowerment and rights in the Reconstruction period in the U.S. This was a period of broad democracy among the people following the end of the Civil War and slavery, when working people together were engaged in rewriting constitutions, themselves electing and being elected and united in fighting for rights and new arrangements. Lynching and lynch law was imposed to block this progress and push social relations back to the near-slave conditions of plantation sharecropping.

It is this state-organized, KKK-style terrorism and lynching that the U.S. is exporting to Iraq, directing it against the peoples and against governments. It is open terrorism and highly provocative, striving to drag the peoples down to these backward levels at a time when humanity is striving to push society forward.

In trying to impose its dictate and create an atmosphere of terror and powerlessness among the people, the U.S. is seeking to draw Americans in as spectators to the lynching — to create the notion that somehow we are to benefit from such crimes. The people say no! Today like then, the American working class and people are represented by all those standing to oppose U.S. impunity, to reject the chauvinism of the U.S. state and stand with the peoples of the world in fighting for a new world that guarantees the rights of all — not some, not a chosen few, but all.

Politics of Assassination

Lynching and the elimination of rule of law that characterize “lynch law” go side by side with the U.S. politics of assassination. The entire trial of Saddam Hussein by a kangaroo court under U.S. occupation was an exercise in the politics of assassination.

The politics of assassination is an instrument of criminalizing politics, perfected by the United States since the Second World War. Besides the CIA instigated coup d’etat in Iran, Greece and Guatemala in 1953-54, U.S. imperialism was also the driving force behind the assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, the financing of the Contras in Nicaragua, the invasion of Grenada and Panama, the financing of cut-throats in El Salvador and more than 600 assassination attempts against President Fidel Castro. All these criminal activities were means perfected by the United States to make sure the peoples of the world and their governments could not solve a single problem in a peaceful manner on the basis of rule of law.

During the 1980s and 90s, the politics of assassination engineered by the secret agencies of the reactionary Indian state became their preferred instrument to destabilize the people’s political movement in Punjab and other parts of India. Since then, the use of assassination to instigate civil wars and wreck any political movements of the peoples has become the norm of the Israeli Zionists in the Palestinian territories and it has been introduced in Lebanon and on a widescale in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries.

Bush’s so-called war on terror is state terrorism with a license to kill. The staged trial of Saddam Hussein and death sentences can only be considered in this light. There is no clearer indictment of the U.S. imperialist economic and political system in deep crisis which, to save itself, turns against the peaceful solution of problems.

No amount of justification about fighting terrorism can justify state terrorism, aggression and occupations. The trial and lynching of Saddam Hussein points to the desperation of the U.S., British and other supporters of the occupation of Iraq to find an exit strategy to the quagmire they have created for themselves. Far from sorting anything out and achieving the so-called reconciliation they talk about, the imposition of a kangaroo court and assassinations after a deeply flawed trial and bogus legal process will never cover up the death and destruction the imperialists have rained on Iraq and all the U.S. crimes against humanity.

Voice of Revolution calls on all democratic and justice-loving forces to condemn the fraudulent “lynch law” imposed in Iraq and continue to dissociate themselves from state terrorism, all individual acts of terrorism and violence and the criminalization of politics using assassination as a preferred weapon. We join the world’s people in demanding that President George W. Bush and all the top officials, civilian and military, responsible for these criminal acts must be held to account.

No to “Lynch Law” and Politics of Assassination! End War and Occupation!

(Voice of Revolution - January 5, 2007)