The XXI Century American Revolution- Part 3

Booker T. Washington's proposals were rejected by an entire sector of the African-American community at the beginning of the 20th century when social organizations began to emerge that led the fight against the Jim Crow regime, based on the fusion of small groups, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) founded on February 12, 1909 after the race riots of 1908 in Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln's hometown. As Richard Fraser and Tom Boot explain: "Those (Booker T Washington's) concepts were quickly denied by William Monroe Trotter and WEB Du Bois, who eloquently rejected the doctrine of separatism and argued that it came from that of the oppressors. Du Bois organized black intellectuals to lead the movement, and they shocked white liberals with their revelations of the horror of the New South, and built a legal and propaganda apparatus for the movement, the NAACP in 1909" (29 )

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, author and editor, had promoted the Niagara Movement alongside Ida B. Wells, Archibald Grimké, Henry Moskowitz, Maria Ovington Blanco, Oswald Garrison Villard, William Walling, and Charles Edward Russell, and insisted on the demand for civil rights, in a movement that also included Jews and other representatives of racial minorities. In the early years, the NAACP focused on using the courts to overturn Jim Crow laws, such as the 1915 Guinn v. United States cases against discrimination in Oklahoma voter registrations, or the Buchanan case. vs. Warley of 1917, to prevent segregation in residential districts.

At that time, of the 10 million African Americans who lived in the country, 9 million were in the South, an issue that began to change after World War I, as Richard Fraser and Tom Boot explain: "In World War I The shortage of jobs caused in the South caused the migration of blacks to the North where industrial jobs greatly increased their incomes. Harlem became the center of the black world. The black movement, beyond an agrarian body of former slaves terrorized by the KKK, began to regain its social energy" (30) In the first 5 years of the " Great Migration " 750,000 African Americans from the South moved north to cities such as New York, Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland.

In 1913, Woodrow Wilson, a Southern Democrat and self-confessed admirer of the KKK, became president, bringing segregation to the federal government, appointing Southern segregationists as members of his cabinet, introducing segregation in federal offices, and also showing the first outlines of an imperialist government. In 1914 he ordered the invasion of Mexico to force the coup general Victoriano Huerta to resign and put Venustiano Carranza in his place. In 1915 he ordered the invasion of Haiti once President Sam was assassinated to land American troops and companies. In 1916, he ordered the invasion of the Dominican Republic, leaving a government sympathetic to the investments of the country's capitalist oligarchy. Wilson praised the 1915 release of the film " The Birth of a Nation," which was a tribute to the KKK by director David Griffith, which promoted white supremacy and heroism of KKK members.

The NAACP organized protests at the premiere with rallies and marches in various cities, while also organizing opposition to President Woodrow Wilson and his policy of introducing segregation in the federal government. In 1914, the NAACP had 6,000 members and 50 branches, and began conducting a study and survey of racial riots and executions, investigating 30 years of lynchings, and seeking federal legislation against them. This entire stage of legal battles was preparatory to the period of great struggles and important organizations that opened between 1915 and 1920, when thousands of African-American workers who migrated to the North joined the ranks of the North American working class.

The leadership of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) refused to organize black and white workers together in the same unions, and several AFL unions placed exclusion clauses and color bans built into their charters, "Jim Crow unions. " , a policy that was as racist as that of the political and business leaders. As Howard Zinn explained : " For the American Labor Federation, racism was practical. The exclusion of women and foreigners was also practical, because these were mostly unskilled workers, and the AFL, by monopolizing the supply of skilled workers, could obtain better conditions for themselves, leaving the majority of workers in the lurch. AFL employees earned good salaries, rubbed shoulders with bosses, and even hung out in high society. They were safe from criticism through tightly controlled assemblies, and by squads of gorillas - hired thugs - who were initially used against scabs, but over time served to intimidate and beat opponents within the union. (31)

The task of uniting black and white workers was carried out by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union, which organized workers without regard to race, sex, ethnicity or other divisions. But around 1918, with the end of the First World War, the economy slowed down, and in the recessionary situation, employers first laid off African Americans and women, the most defenseless sectors of the working class. At the same time, black soldiers returning from World War I found racism stronger than ever: They were denied admission to army parades, they were denied promised jobs and rights.

This situation sparked a wave of racial riots in Charleston, South Carolina, Longview, Texas, Washington DC, Omaha, Nebraska, Knoxville, Tennessee, and Chicago. Faced with the mobilization of African Americans to protest, big businessmen and politicians incited the racist reaction, and mobs began such as those of July 1917 in East St. Louis and throughout the country in 1919, which forced African American communities to organize self-defense. In the Chicago riot of 1919, militias were organized to defend communities from racist and police attacks, and in July 1919 black farmers in Phillips County, Arkansas, organized a union, armed themselves, and carried out an insurrection against the white landowners.

At that time, a shock shook the world, the Russian Revolution in 1917, which was a great inspiration for millions of workers around the world. Under his influence, important detachments of the world working class and the United States began to look with sympathy on the Bolsheviks and the Communist Party. This revolution was viewed with fear by the industrialists and the government who saw a new revolutionary awakening of the working class and its departure to fight. In 1919, the Seattle general strike and the steel strike followed one another in which more than 4 million workers went on strike. This entire era of riots, great struggles and mobilizations of African Americans is remembered as the " Red Summer ", which the government and big businessmen called "Red Terror" or " Red Menace". launching a new wave of repression, and accusing those leading the protests of being Bolsheviks and communists.

Malcolm X, 1964

If the popularity of the Bush Administration was declining, after the events of Hurricane Katrina, the popularity of the Bush Administration began a process of plummeting. At the beginning of 2005, the Bush Administration still enjoyed the high popularity that had given it the electoral support of 2004 when it obtained an absolute majority in the parliamentary elections and the largest vote in history up to that point. But in the middle of the same year, all the polls gave him declining popularity margins, with high rates of disapproval of his management compared to what happened in New Orleans. This phenomenon of rejection and disapproval of the openly racist policy of the Bush Administration in Katrina also began a slow and sustained rejection of the Iraq War, with multiple expressions.

The first crises in the Bush Administration affected Donald Rumsfeld and the high command of the Pentagon, but if we talk about the Pentagon crisis, we talk about a fundamental institution of the American state that did not always exist in the history of the country as we know it today. In fact, the current structure of the Armed Forces began to develop around the Second World War, and in a special juncture, the end of the Second World War in which the capitalist world was in ruins and presented a panorama of devastation: All The old imperialisms that had dominated the capitalist world for centuries were in a state of destruction. By the time World War II ended England, France, Germany, Spain, Holland, Portugal, Belgium, among other nations that had been important imperialist capitalist nations, were completely in ruins.

Forty years earlier, the phenomenon of the emergence of great tycoons in the United States was linked to the development of monopolies on an international scale. That is to say, the emergence of monopolies in the United States was part of a process that occurred simultaneously in France, England, Germany and all the major capitalist economies. This new Form of Accumulation was integrated through a conglomerate of companies that came together to dominate a branch of production in the country, for which they agreed on prices, production goals, distribution, benefits, etc., to eliminate competition.

This is how Lenin defines it : "...they agree among themselves regarding the conditions of sale, payment terms, etc. They divide the sales markets. They set the quantity of products to be manufactured. They establish the prices. They distribute the profits between the different companies, etc." (17) With the emergence of monopolies the stage of "free competition" in capitalism ended, because through these agreements, companies formed a kind of league or union that allowed them to advance in the dominance of a branch of production in their country, while they also tried to extend that domain internationally.

These leagues or unions developed from 1860 under the name of trusts in the United States and in Germany under the name of cartels. The emergence of monopolies went through three moments according to Lenin: " 1) 1860-1880, culminating point of development of free competition. Monopolies constitute nothing more than barely perceptible germs.2) After the crisis of 1873, long period of development of posters, but these are still an exception, they are not yet solid, they still represent a temporary phenomenon. 3) Boom at the end of the 19th century and crisis of 1900-1903; posters become one of the bases of all life economic. Capitalism has been transformed into imperialism." (18) That is to say, although they emerged since 1860, monopolies became the predominant Form of Accumulation of capitalism from 1903 to the beginning of the 20th century. The structure they presented turned out to be complex, as a result of the fact that although they dominated one branch of production, they were combined companies that concentrated several branches within themselves based on the dominance they acquired over one of them, as Lenin explains: "an extremely An important aspect of capitalism, which has reached its highest level of development, is the so-called combination, that is, the meeting, in a single company, of different branches of industry that represent in themselves or successive phases of the production of a raw material. ...or different branches that play an auxiliary role in relation to each other..." (19)

That is why we define monopolies as a group of companies that establish agreements to dominate a branch of production in a country. When these companies became the predominant Form of Accumulation after 1903, the capitalist system entered, in historical terms, its highest and final stage of decline. When we talk about stages we are referring to a period that in historical terms can last several centuries, since its birth and as part of its evolution process, capitalism went through different stages from the 10th century in which it began its rise and battle to displace the feudalism.

Until 1903, capitalism had gone through 2 major stages: First, the stage of original accumulation between the 10th and 16th centuries, secondly, the peak or apogee stage, around the 17th and 19th centuries. Starting in 1903, a third historical stage opened, imperialism, the stage of decadence of capitalism, with 5 characteristics as Lenin puts it: "... 1) Monopolies emerge that are placed at the center of the economy and play a role. decisive role in economic life 2) Monopolies are the product of the fusion of banking capital with industrial capital, which gives rise to a financial oligarchy 3) The process of capital export acquires exceptional importance 4) Monopolies tend to be international and divide the world 5) The territorial distribution of the world between the greatest imperialist powers culminates and the domination of monopolies and financial capital is established..." (20)

Monopolies tended to be international due to the existence of the capitalist world market, but the scope of their international dominance of the branches of production, commerce and finance at the beginning of the 20th century was still very limited. Some of them had branches in other countries, in the oil industry for example, and attempted operations for global expansion. But its global dominance did not achieve the dimensions that were achieved, as we will see, by multinationals in the 20th century, or by the Multinational Corporations that emerged from 1980 and 1990, which are superior monopolistic forms.

The current structure of the United States Armed Forces was born in this context. The Pentagon is the product of the panorama of colossal development of the productive forces that the United States presented in contrast to the devastation and destruction that surrounded it. By the end of World War II, the United States constituted one third of all export operations in the capitalist world, had two thirds of all existing gold reserves in its possession, and was the producer of 50% of all merchandise in the world. World Market. From then on, the United States took control of the world economy, which was achieved with the implementation of the Marshall Plan, which produced a change in capitalism: modern multinationals displaced monopolies from the center of the world economy.

The Marshall Plan, the economic assistance to Europe, by the United States established after the Second World War, was not a disinterested measure, but with it the United States sought to extend its monopolies and finance military bases abroad to consolidate its world dominion. The US monopolies took advantage of the formidable business of the capitalist reconstruction of Europe to massively export their goods, using the economic reactivation of Europe as a bridgehead for their global expansion . That is, with the contribution of the North American state to Europe, the US monopolies were transformed into multinationals. A good example is the monopoly automobile producer Ford of the United States, which created an organization throughout Europe in 1967. The current structure of the United States Armed Forces was born in this context.

What differences are there between Multinationals and Monopolies? As we saw, Monopolies are companies that emerged since 1860 called cartels and trusts, unions or leagues of companies that dominate a branch of production in a country. On the other hand, Multinationals do not limit their dominance of a branch to one country, but do so on a global scale. Multinationals are not a league of companies like monopolies were, but rather they are a single company that dominates a branch on a global scale, which represents a qualitative leap in the process of monopolization of capitalism. By establishing themselves as a company that dominates branches of production, commerce and finance on a global scale, they became a superior form of accumulation, which contained and surpassed monopolies.

The mutation of monopolies into modern multinationals is the fundamental, structural change, in the productive field, of the international division of labor and commerce, that develops in capitalism. Thus the capitalist system adopted the physiognomy that we know it today. As Nahuel Moreno pointed out: "... The fact that I want to point out to you is the emergence of transnational corporations... This is a new phenomenon. Until the Second World War, no monopoly had branches... with the exception of the oil companies. ...that is, they are companies that have ten, twenty companies in different countries and all coordinated, working together" (1) After the great conflagration of the Second World War, the United States imposed its monopolies globally, with which monopolistic corporations such as General Electric, Ford, Coca Cola, etc., which had managed to dominate a branch of production in the US, became multinationals.

When the Wall Street crisis broke out in 1929, a Commission of Inquiry into the events that occurred between the banks and the financial system was formed in January 1933, headed by Ferdinand Pecora, who was assistant district attorney of New York County. In that investigation, Pecora denounced the role of City National Bank (currently Citibank). The testimony of the powerful banker JP Morgen Jr. provoked a repudiation and public protests because he admitted that he and many of his companions had not paid any income tax between 1931 and 1932. The world had emerged from the First World War and in all this period the dominance of the monopolies was concentrated in the conglomerate of companies of the Morgan group as described by Nomi Prins: "...The Morgan Bank had been the preeminent financier, at the level of 75% of private financing, in the First War World Cup, and was very closely linked to Woodrow Wilson and the Secretary of the Treasury of the time. She was very involved in the decisions that Washington made to finance the war effort through government bonds intended to raise additional funds, etc." (2)

Between World War I and World War II there was a transition from the dominance of the Morgan conglomerate to the dominance of the Rockefeller conglomerate, as stated by Nomi Prins: "... But at the time when World War II broke out, Chase - a bank of Rockefeller -, since its president Winthrop Aldrich was a friend of Roosevelt, he pressed to withdraw the financing of the war from the Morgan Bank...Thus, the operation of the war bonds, and the Liberty Bonds, was directed by Aldrich and the National City Bank..." (3) Between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th until the First War, it was the Morgan group that had the most influence on the country's governments, but after the First War with the emergence and predominance of multinationals, the weight and influence was leaning towards Rockefeller's Chase group who established deep relations with the government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower.

The balance tipped towards Chase and National City. The entire postwar political and economic order was established around this predominance, as Naomi Prins states: " After World War II, when Truman was president of the United States and the World Bank had just been created with the Bretton agreements Woods, along with the International Monetary Fund and other institutions, there was a character named John McCloy who had been Deputy Secretary of Defense under FDR, and who had also been a private attorney and had worked alongside the Rockefellers, first with Nelson Rockefeller and later with David Rockefeller. After World War II, he was offered to become the second president of the World Bank. He accepted the proposal, with one condition: that Wall Street be the engine of distribution of the bonds that were going to finance many of the World Bank's initiatives. So he asked for something that was outside the legislation, after conversations he had with Truman's Treasury Secretary, in the sense that Wall Street would actually be the deciding party regarding which countries the World Bank would support. These countries were capitalist countries and as the Cold War entered the capitalist countries got better deals. The Eisenhower government would finance countries that were most aligned with the ideas of John McCloy, who later became president of Chase, and those of other bankers of the time "

After the Second World War and from the period 1945/47 onwards, multinationals expanded globally, imposing production and marketing goals, counting in their favor the fact of having an immense world market without limits, and without competition, because the monopolies of the Other imperialist countries were destroyed after the Second World War. The political regime of the United States began to express the rise and dominance of the world capitalist economy by the American state. Upon becoming the new leading imperialist power in the capitalist world, the United States began to undergo changes in the country's political regime as a result of the emergence of institutions such as the Pentagon and the CIA, a whole series of new institutions that until then did not exist in the political regime.

The advent of these institutions transformed the political regime into one much more undemocratic than that which emerged from the First and Second North American Revolutions. As Novack states: " A representative democracy is alien to the economic tendencies of corporate capitalism. The advent of monopolistic rule not only stopped the spread of new freedoms, but also meant the contraction of the rights already acquired by the people. The Imperialism accentuates the contradiction...between the coexistence of power, the desire for profits and property of the dominant capitalists and political democracy. It inevitably feeds anti-democratic forces and tendencies due to the high centralization of command, required by the operations of big capital both in production as in political life" (5)

The appearance of horrific political regimes such as the Nazi or fascist regimes in advanced capitalist nations such as Italy or Germany endangered the lives of millions of people, and had its expression in all political regimes in the world. In the USSR, a totalitarian regime was established that deported dissidents and established concentration camps with millions of opponents. In the United States, to the extent that the growing presence of monopolies and the social class of magnates had transformed the state, giving it an increasingly imperialist character, institutions of a growing Bonapartist or totalitarian nature appeared in the political regime, such as the Pentagon, the CIA or the FBI. These institutions are opposed to the institutions of the bourgeois democratic regime, which express another different stage of the country's capitalist development.

With the emergence of the Pentagon, the CIA and the FBI, and the country's entry into World War I and World War II, in addition to the growing military interventionism in other countries such as Mexico, Haiti, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, or Cuba, it was taking shape. the American imperialist state, which became the first world power. The United States began to dominate the entire world politically, socially, economically and militarily. It moved its multinationals, and with it, its values, its culture, its language and its way of life globally. In the middle of the 20th century, the 5 continents of the planet began to live, breathe, feed themselves and carry out their daily lives, around the US system of life.

After the Second World War, the so-called "Cold War" ensued in the field of foreign policy, while in the field of domestic policy the so-called "Truman Doctrine" was developed , a brutal witch hunt and persecution of thousands of American citizens and journalists. , workers, artists, intellectuals, and soldiers. Both doctrines had as a common denominator the declaration that the Soviet Union was an imminent threat to the country's security. Truman promulgated Executive Order 9835 of 1947, which initiated a program of investigation of government officials, and the chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Joseph McCarthy, unleashed an extensive process of denunciations, unfounded accusations, denunciations, interrogations, irregular processes and blacklists with accusations of being communists, disloyalty, subversion or treason that developed between 1950 and 1956.

The political context of the attacks of McCarthyism were the enormous revolutionary processes that occurred between the world wars, which had given rise to the Soviet Union, had made it possible for the bourgeoisie to be expropriated in half of Europe after the Second World War, also in Korea, and that in 1949 the Communist Party led by Mao Zedong came to power in China. It was the fear of the advance of the revolutionary process and communism within the country that explains why Mc Carthy launched a furious persecution, leaving aside all legal principles, and destroying civil rights. Personalities such as Alger Hiss, president of the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953, or Hollywood actors such as Humprey Bogart, Charles Chaplin, or Bertolt Bretch, were accused of collaborating with communism.

The "witch hunt" carried out by McCarthy forever left the word "McCarthyism" as a term for situations where political opponents are persecuted and civil rights are not respected in the name of national security . Many sectors opposed McCarthy and denounced the "witch hunt" process , such as the prominent playwright Arthur Miller who wrote the famous play "The Witches of Salem" in 1953 or Edward R. Murrow who denounced it on the television program See it now . John Henry Faulk, radio comedy host and union leader of the Federation of Television and Radio Artists, also confronted McCarthyism, as well as the organization in Defense of the First Amendment of the Constitution, or the organization of actors who refused to appear before the McCarthy courts known as the "Hollywood Ten" . The battle of mass sectors ended with McCarthyism, and McCarthy was finally expelled from the Committee in a motion of no confidence by the US Senate in 1954, by 67 votes to 22.

The growing development of antidemocratic tendencies caused by the emergence of multinationals was expressed in the field of the political regime with the development of the CIA, the FBI and the Pentagon. Until 1941 the country's army was small, according to Novack: "...until 1941, the professional army - although not the navy - was relatively small for such a powerful power. This has been totally transformed over the course of the last quarter of a century. The United States now has military forces of unprecedented size, with enough firepower to pulverize the planet" (6) The Second World War was the great driver of the growth of the Armed Forces. Before the war there was no Pentagon, nor joint activity between the Army and the Navy, nor was there any command that centralized the actions of the troops.

It was in the Second World War that Franklin D Roosevelt and UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill established the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) in 1942, a combined military body between the United States and the British Empire. Recruitment for World War II was a mass phenomenon with more than 18 million soldiers and millions of working families who supported the war either by purchasing state bonds, contributing their children and loved ones as soldiers, or demonstrating at rallies. , and concentrations in the cities to farewell the troops that were massive. The number of soldiers killed in World War II was 400,000, a figure that was only surpassed by the Civil War, which shows that the fight against the horrible regime of Nazism was an enterprise supported by the masses.

This massive intervention in World War II involved a qualitative expansion of arms production from the development of the Department of Defense (DoD) that emerged from the merger of the Department of the Navy and the Department of War in 1947. DoD emerged under President Truman, and a joint staff led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied troops in the Second War, was formed. All these new Bonapartist institutions that emerged after the Second World War revealed the imperialist character of the North American state, and the cruelty of these institutions was revealed practically at the moment of their emergence. The Pentagon was in its infancy when in 1945 Curtis LeMay, general of the Air Force (USAF), carried out the strategic planning of the raids carried out by the Boeing B-29 Superfortresses that destroyed entire cities in the country. LeMay recommended that pilots fly at night at low altitude over Japanese cities to drop their incendiary bombs. The Bombing of Tokyo on the night of March 9 to 10, 1945, carried out by 334 B-29 bombers, was of unprecedented cruelty, with napalm bombs that destroyed a third of the city, and caused 100,000 deaths.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were ordered by President Harry S. Truman, and were carried out on August 6 and 9, 1945, when the nuclear weapon Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima on Monday, August 6, 1945, killing 166,000 people instantly followed by the detonation of the Fat Man bomb on Thursday, August 9, over Nagasaki, which killed 80,000 people and injured 130,000. They are the only atomic bombings in history. Of unprecedented cruelty, the victims died from radiation poisoning, leukemia, and different forms of cancer attributed to exposure and the radiation released by the bombs. The perpetrators of these crimes against humanity were decorated as "Heroes", and as a consequence of the defeat, the Japanese Empire was occupied by allied forces led by the United States, Australia, India, the United Kingdom and New Zealand.

These new emerging institutions such as the Pentagon and the CIA were equipped with qualified personnel for war, espionage, and the military industry through mechanisms such as "Operation Paperclip" carried out by the Intelligence and Military Service, which resulted in the incorporation of scientists from Germany specialized in rockets, chemical weapons, naval weapons and medical experimentation, through which more than 700 scientists and their families were secretly transferred, without an entry visa because they had all served the Nazi cause.

The brain of "Operation Paperclip" was Allen Dulles, lawyer and close friend of the Bush family, who, in addition to carrying out the mission of hiding the relationship between the Bush family and Nazi Germany, offered contracts to Nazi scientists during 1945. . In September 1945 the first group of 7 scientists arrived as "Special Employees of the War Department", among them Wernher Von Braun, Eberhard FM Rees, Wilhelm Jungert and Walter Schwidetzky . The Pentagon's concern was to recruit aeronautics and synthetic fuel experts, recover weapons and operatives to obtain secret Nazi nuclear weapons, equipment and personnel, or capture Nazi aeronautical technology.

It was in the period of rise of the United States, before the First World War, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) emerged, created on July 26, 1908 at the initiative of Attorney General Charles Bonaparte, who requested the hiring detectives, and investigators for civil rights issues and fraud cases. In the following years, local FBI offices were created in the main cities of the country under the command of J. Edgar Hoover, who became director of the FBI in 1924, and spent 24 years at the head of that institution, becoming the most senior official. important part of its history. The FBI is the institution in charge of espionage and internal intelligence in the country. But the institution that most expresses the growing dominance of US Corporations over world capitalism is the CIA. If the FBI does domestic espionage, the CIA does global espionage.

The CIA was created on September 18, 1947 by Harry Truman as an agency in charge of the collection, analysis and use of intelligence, espionage abroad, whether for governments, corporations or individuals, with the capacity to carry out covert operations and paramilitary actions and exert foreign political influence through its operational office, the Special Activities Division. The CIA had as its predecessor the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI, Office of National Intelligence), which were denounced for their relationship with the Italian and Chinese underworld.

After World War II, the FBI and CIA became ubiquitous secret police and military agencies, employing a legion of informants and provocateurs. All of these institutions that emerged in the first decades of the 20th century were covered by antidemocratic laws such as the Taft-Hartley, Smith and Landrum-Griffin laws, along with the witch hunt launched by McCarthy that affected democratic freedoms against unions, social organizations, and left-wing parties, especially the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party. As Novack states: "The unprecedented concentration of economic, political and military power in the gigantic corporations of private wealth and the exclusive command that monopolists seek over the decisive spheres of national life, are opposed to the preservation and extension of the democratic rights and institutions" (7)

The CIA tried to intervene in Cuba after the outbreak of the revolution in 1959 in defense of the interests of the North American corporations that dominated the Cuban economy protected by the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. This is how Howard Zinn tells it: "In the spring of 1960, President Eisenhower gave secret authorization to the CIA to arm and train anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Guatemala for a future invasion of Cuba. When John F. Kennedy began his presidency, he continued They went ahead with the plans and, on April 17, 1961, CIA-trained forces...arrived at the Bay of Pigs, on the southern coast of Cuba, 90 miles from Havana.They hoped to incite a general revolt against Castro. But it was a popular regime and there was no revolt. Castro's army crushed the CIA forces in three days." (8) Allen Dulles was the first director of the CIA, and led operations such as coups d'état or operations like the " Paperclip", but fell into disgrace due to the failure of the "Bay of Pigs" operation to invade Cuba.

American culture goes global

When the United States came to dominate the world economy in the post-war period, it also began to impose its culture, its music, its customs, its ideas and its traditions, as Leon Trotsky explained: "In recent years, the economic axis of the world has shifted . has displaced considerably...Naturally, this evolution has been in preparation since ancient times; there were symptoms that pointed to it, but very recently it has become a fait accompli, and now we are trying to realize this formidable change effected in the human economy and , consequently, in human culture...The European bourgeois does not want to believe that he is relegated to the background, that the United States are the owners of the capitalist world" (9)

If something symbolizes the dominance of the United States over global culture, it is Hollywood. The propaganda machine that culture means reached monumental proportions with the development of an industry that constituted a true machinery of social and political penetration of colossal dimensions, which allowed the culture, traditions and customs of the United States to become globalized. The history of cinema began on December 28, 1895, when the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière made the first public projection of moving images, the cinematograph. The Lumières' invention had as its predecessor Thomas Alva Edison's kinestoscope. They managed to make a more portable and functional camera from that device that recorded moving images, although it was not capable of reproducing them.

The Lumières did not have excessive confidence in the technical and artistic possibilities of the new invention, but even so the screenings were attracting an increasing number of spectators with films that interchangeably combined two cinematographic trends: documentary cinema and fiction cinema. This is how the famous " Departure from the Factory" or "The Arrival of the Train at the Station" both from 1895 remain in our memory. Different German, North American and English inventors copied and improved the cinematograph, and once its economic potential was proven, the Cinema soon became a cheap and popular sideshow, despised by intellectuals. The firm of Charles Pathé extended cinema to all of Europe, so before the First World War, French cinema had taken over the world, the Pathé firm equipped 95% of the theaters in Belgium, 60% in Russia and 50% from Germany, just as US cinema imported French films.

From this era are David W. Griffith, Frizt Lang, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Cecil B. DeMille, Charles Chaplin, Friedrich W. Murnau, Vertov, and Jean Epstein. Already at the beginning of the 20th century, the production of the United States began to stand out, and in 1920 it produced 796 feature films, compared to the 646 produced by Germany or 65 by France, nearly 80% of the films shown in Europe were American, and Hollywood It started as the world headquarters of the film industry. At the end of this decade, the evolution of cinema was marked by the revolution brought about by the arrival of sound cinema, with the first film " The Jazz Singer" , by Alan Crossland. The studios, which at that time brought together all cinematographic activities vertically in the fields of production, distribution and exhibition, were forced to make large investments to adapt to the new sound recording technology. Film cameras, to ensure good tuning between the soundtrack and the image, began to roll at 24 frames per second, which also implied the reform of the exhibition halls and the financial structure of Hollywood.

Sound cinema concentrated the industry in the hands of big banks and the electronics industry, boosting the importance of screenwriters, which allowed the arrival in Hollywood of journalists, writers and playwrights such as the Mankiewicz brothers, Charles McArthur, Ben Hecht, etc., both from the East Coast and Europe, attracted by the enormous job offer that writing for the film industry represented. In the first years the film production center was installed on the East coast, around New York, but the climate of the area, rainy and with long winters, meant that many hours of filming were lost, so the producers moved in 1906. to the other West coast in an area around Los Angeles plagued by the species of trees called hollies, from which the name Hollywood comes, which in English means "holly forest ."

The '30s and '40s are the golden age of Hollywood, in which the "studio system" was forged when ten major film equipment manufacturers joined together to form the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC). MPPC took advantage of its monopoly power to impose the payment of fees to producers and exhibitors, but litigation led to the failure of the monopoly, and this allowed the emergence of the 5 that began to dominate the industry: Paramount Pictures, Loew's Inc. .which later became Metro Goldwyn-Mayer, La 20th Century-Fox, Warner BROS, and Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO). The consolidation of these business centers, called "majors", integrated the production, distribution and exhibition of films, and allowed the 1930s to become the "golden age" of Hollywood, based on the "star system", or cinema. based on glamorous movie stars, and the development of different genres such as musicals, film noir, adventure films, or horror films.

It was during this period that the North American film industry began to dominate the world scene not based on film production, but on the extensive distribution network they had not only throughout the United States, but throughout the world. These networks provided them with enormous advantages in terms of the possibility of lowering distribution and exhibition costs, and of directly accessing the benefits left by viewers at the box office, with which production did not account for more than 5% of the investments, distribution 1% and film exhibition the one that accumulated the most money, with around 90%.

The big 5 had managed to take over the most profitable theaters in the entire country, 16% of the total theaters, but those that contributed the best income. The Big 5 did not exercise their hegemony in the United States alone, but this power extended to the world market. After the First World War, the eight main companies were established outside the borders of the United States. During the last half of the '20s and the decades of the '30s and '40s, income from abroad was going to account for half of what was collected by an average feature film. By the end of the 1920s, Hollywood already dominated the markets of Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan, and since foreign taxes and tariffs were an impediment to the spread of Hollywood influence, the American State Department helped in a first moment for film companies to overcome these restrictions by collaborating with their trade association, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), created by the Big 5 to consolidate control over the industry.

Paramount, created in 1905 by Adolph Zukor, was the most powerful monopoly with studios in Los Angeles, New York and Paris, and a global distribution and exhibition network that had the largest number of theaters in the world, the Publix cinemas. Although its dominance suffered during the Great Depression, after the Second World War it managed to recover and once again took the lead with profits for 1946 that amounted to US$39.2 million. Paramount launched actors such as Mary Pickford or John Barrymore, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, the Marx Brothers, Mae West, or Marlene Dietrich to fame. Metro Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) dominated the 1930s and was founded by Marcus Loew, who partnered with the distributor Metro Pictures in 1919, and absorbed the Goldwyn Pictures Corporation in 1924. 

MGM launched Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, Judy Garland, and Elizabeth Taylor, among others. 20th Century-Fox was born on May 29, 1935 by the merger of the Fox Film Corporation and 20th Century Pictures, and launched Shirley Temple, Will Rogers, Tyrone Power, Betty Grable, Don Ameche, Maureen O'Hara, Gregory Peck, Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney, and Dana Andrews, although in terms of profits it was a long way from MGM or Paramount. Warner Bros. was founded in 1923 by Harry, Sam, Albert and Jack L. Warner, four Polish emigrants who released the first talkie feature in the history of cinema, The Jazz Singer , in 1927 and acquired control of several hundred theaters.

RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) emerged in 1928 from the merger of the Keith-Albee-Orpheum (KAO) theater circuit and the Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) studios of Joseph P. Kennedy, father of who was later the President John Fritzgerald Kennedy. The studio produced many interesting films, the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, but it will most be remembered for Orson Wells' Citizen Kane . The golden years of RKO passed between 1943 and 1947, but in 1950 the millionaire Howard Hughes would appear, who took over the presidency through a collaborator of his and ended up dismantling the company in the mid-1950s.

Universal, Columbia and United Artist were the small 3, with less importance within the industry. In 1938 the Roosevelt administration filed a lawsuit against the monopoly formed by the Big 5 and the Little 3. After being accused of conspiring to determine the contractual conditions of distribution and exhibition, in 1940 they were forced to comply with a system of rules regulating commercial practices. In 1944 the government again pressured the big five companies to divest themselves of their exhibition circuits, and finally, in 1948, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the simultaneous use of means of production, distribution and exhibition was exercising monopolistic activities and that the studios had to get rid of their movie theaters.

That is, the system that had made Hollywood prosper not only in the United States, but throughout the world was dismantled, marking the end of the "Golden Age" of Hollywood studios. At the beginning of the '50s Hollywood could not cope with the general decomposition of the studio system, but the arrival of television had a lot to do with this progressive decline, which became a tough competitor. With the end of the post-war period, the film industry entered its stage called "Post-Classical Cinema", while Hollywood entered the stage called " New Hollywood" with directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian de Palma, Martin Scorsese. , and Steven Spielberg who created products that innovated on existing genres and techniques such as "The Godfather", "Jaws", "The Exorcist" or "Star Wars" with which the modern concept of "commercial cinema" or Mainstream was established. .

Independent cinema later emerged in the '80s and early '90s with another generation of filmmakers including Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Kevin Smith, and Quentin Tarantino. The world continued under the influence of American culture, although the Copernican axis of its influence changed: From cinema and Hollywood being the center of the global influence of American culture, it became music and rock. Rock became the universal artistic expression, a true cultural-political-artistic movement that encompasses an almost infinite universe of genres and sub-genres and marked generations at all stages of their lives. But this movement that became global, has its origin in the very bowels of the country from an original form known as "rock and roll" that emerged from the fusion of 2 genres and cultures: Blues and country, black culture and white, a fusion not only of musical styles but of 2 cultures.

The white culture of country music is a descendant of the immigrant peasants from Europe who arrived in America and the African-American culture is a product of the massive arrival of people of African culture due to the development of slavery. That fusion that gave rise was only possible due to the rise of African Americans, young people, and women, a product of the process that unleashed the Third American Revolution. Rock incorporated influences from jazz, classical music and focused on the electric guitar, incorporating the new technologies of the time that allowed the incorporation of electric instruments and amplification, which led to the activity of large recitals and shows of masses. The Woodstock festival at the end of the '60s became the backdrop and soundtrack for the rebellion of the youth, black people's fight against the Vietnam War.

Starting in the '50s and '60s, and especially after the global impact that the emergence of The Beatles implied, the music industry became a global business with a penetration power greater than cinema, which displaced it as the dominant industry in the field. of entertainment, art and culture. In this way, it is not surprising then that many of the multinationals linked to the film industry later turned to the music market, and to dominate an industry among which were EMI of British origin, Universal Music Group of American origin, Sony Music of Japanese origin, Warner Bros Records, the American film company that expanded its businesses into the field of music, Polygram / Polydor controlled by the Dutch multinational conglomerate Phillips, and BMG Music of German origin.

As the decades passed, these companies intertwined their interests, absorbed others, or absorbed each other as part of the concentration process typical of capitalism, as the mass music industry developed on a global scale, and produced the transition from multinationals to Multinational Corporations. This is how there were finally 3 large conglomerates dominating the industry on the one hand Universal Music Group that absorbed Polygram / Polydor in the '90s, and EMI in the 2000s. 

On the other hand the conglomerates BMG and Sony were unified into the company Sony BMG in 2004 and Warner Music Group. Rock dominated the music scene between the '50s and '90s, and in this way music displaced cinema in the field of the entertainment industry, in turn other modern musical trends such as electronic music and rap displaced rock, developing a whole series of new techniques and developments linked to the digital era. If the guitar and electrical amplification were the center of the music industry during rock, the turntable, the DJ, software and digital programming are the center in the era of electronic music and rap.

Rap is a musical genre with global impact that emerged among the black community that gave rise to the hip hop culture that emerged in the South Bronx of New York in the mid-1970s. The vocal technique that characterizes this genre is the rhythmic recitation of rhymes and word games accompanied by a rhythmic musical background known as the English beat voice, which gave great rappers to the world such as 2pac, The Notorious BIG, Rakim, Eminem, Eazy- E, Ice T, among others. It is not the subject of this work to analyze the complexity of the artistic evolution of cinema, rock and rap, only to point out the impact that these artistic trends had on global culture, as an expression of the dominance of the United States over culture and art. during the 20th century.

The Bush Administration and the ghost of Vietnam

Ten days before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, lead singer of the country music band Dixie Chicks, Natalie Maines publicly criticized US President George W. Bush during a concert at the Shepherd's Bush Empire theater in London. There Natalie said: " We are ashamed that President Bush is from Texas ." The growing resistance of the people to the war began to be expressed in the emergence of a series of movements and organizations such as "Gold Star Families for Peace (GSFP), " Veterans for Peace " (in English, VFP) , " United for Peace and Justice " (in English, UFPJ ), " Code Pink ", "Military Families Speak Out", and " Casa Crawford Paz ", among others. GSFP was headed by Cindy Sheehan and her husband Patrick Sheehan, parents of soldier Casey Sheehan, who had been killed in Sadr Baghdad on April 4, 2004.

They began their activity by organizing talks, testimonies before Congress and then began coordinating more than 65 families of soldiers killed in Iraq. On August 7, 2005, 22 days before Katrina made landfall, the group camped in Crawford, Texas, where President Bush was vacationing on his ranch. Also leading the delegation were Bill Mitchell, father of Army Sergeant Michael Mitchell, Celeste Zappala, mother of Army Sergeant Sherwood Baker, Lila Lipscomb, mother of Army Sergeant Michael Pederson, and Sue Niederer, mother of Lieutenant Seth J. Dvorin. They, along with other relatives of soldiers killed in combat, set up camp in front of Bush's ranch and remained there in protest against the Iraq war, an activity that allowed them to achieve national notoriety.

Along with GSFP, another important organization called Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) began to mobilize, made up of personnel who had been serving since 9/11, in Iraq and Afghanistan. IVAW had been founded in July 2004, by Kelly Dougherty, representing Army Veterans, Tim Goodrich, for Air Force Veterans, and Mike Hoffman for the Marine Corps, among others. The organization is made up of veterans and active duty personnel from all branches of the Armed Forces, and launched a campaign against the government's recruitment of young people and the poorest sections of the population to send them to war, and He gained sympathizers throughout the country.

IVAW also gained supporters in Canada, Germany, Iraq and Afghanistan. Military Families Speak Out (MFSO) launched the "Bring Them Home Now " campaign in August 2003. It also emerged " Code Pink" was founded on November 17, 2002 by Jodie Evans, Medea Benjamin and other leaders, and was established as a women's organization against military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. Code Pink took delegations to Iraq, brought 6 Iraqi women on a tour of the country, made important exposes on war crimes in Fallujah, reporting on how the occupation affected the situation of Iraqi women. Another organization that launched a campaign against the Iraq War was the Crawford Texas Peace House, which accompanied Cindy Sheehan's protest, and carried out a courageous campaign in the state of Texas against the War. . Also emerging were "United for Peace and Justice " (UFPJ), which emerged in October 2002, and ANSWER "Act Now to Stop War and Racism." that emerged in September 2001.

In Europe meanwhile, the "Stop the War" Coalition (STW) emerged, bringing out the very popular slogan: "Not in my name." STW organized the largest demonstration against the impending invasion of Iraq on February 15, 2003, with attendance estimates of nearly 2,000,000 people, and on December 10, 2005 held an International Peace Conference attended by speakers from all over the world. Both GSFP, IVAW, MFSO, Code Pink, CTPH, UFPJ, ANSWER and STW had a common denominator: All of these organizations emerged between 2001 and 2004 in response to the invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq, the regime of the Patriot Act and the PNAC strategy. Its development expressed a profound process in defense of democratic freedoms against the policies of the Bush Administration, and its campaigns were based on the repudiation and rejection that millions began to express against the war, which explains why they were able to progress and develop quickly.

In turn, the emergence of all these organizations, along with that of thousands of activists who founded them, got involved, associated, collaborated or attended their events and calls, expressed a new generation of fighters for civil and social rights, who emerged in the first decade of the 21st century. This new generation of leaders and fighters provided the basis for the new movements that emerged later such as Occuppy Wall Street, but began to take the first steps in the defense of civil and social rights, confronting the Patriot Act regime, collecting the post of those who mobilized in the decades of the '60s and '70s, in the Vietnam and Cambodia Wars, the fight for the rights of the black race, youth, and women, an entire movement that defended civil rights and faced to the administrations of JFK, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon.

Now, in the first decade of the 21st century, it was not easy for these new leaders and fighters who emerged to carry out these demands, but they did it. And not only that. The new movement began to coordinate and link with the old movements of the '60s, '70s and '80s. For example, the leaders of the new anti-war movements began to coordinate with organizations such as Veterans for Peace (VFP), which was founded in 1985 by men and women veterans in the state of Maine promoted by Jerry and Judy Genesio, the Reverend Willard Bicket, Doug Rawlings, Ken Perkins, and Gerry Amelot. VFP organized protests against the intervention in Nicaragua in the '80s, but starting in 2003 it organized protests against the Iraq war, supported Cindy Sheehan, spoke out in favor of protecting civil liberties threatened by the Patriot Act, and demanded the dissolution of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Another old organization also began to operate, such as Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), which affiliated almost 25,000 veterans during the height of the Vietnam War. VVAW was one of the most influential anti-war organizations of the time, founded in New York in 1967, amid protests against the Vietnam War. Did all these new organizations already have the support of the majority of the country's population? No. When these organizations began to emerge, the majority of the population still supported President Bush's proposals and his claims and actions were only supported by a small minority of activists. Could then the activities of these organizations and their incipient development worry the Bush Administration and the establishment?

Yes, they could do a lot. The history of the country showed where circumstances could go, because it had lived the experience of the emergence of anti-war movements, which at first were small, but thanks to their insistence and persistent activity, they managed to transform themselves into a powerful mass movement that put on their knees to the Democratic and Republican administrations. There is a tradition of mobilization, resistance and struggle of the American people against war, a tradition that reappeared now facing the Patriot Act regime.

This tradition was punctuated through decades, confronting the policies of Democratic and Republican governments, as the United States emerged as an economic, political and military superpower, and it developed around a movement that had as its epicenter the fight against The vietnam war. The ghost of Vietnam once again hovered over the country's political situation, and appeared like a shadow over the Bush Administration. To better understand what the "Vietnam Syndrome" means for the country, it is necessary to know the entire process of mobilization against the Vietnam War that broke out in the '60s and then in the '70s. While the Pentagon troops were sinking in Iraq, the "Vietnam Syndrome" took shape again , a ghost that reappeared on the country's political scene, but now it went against the Bush Administration.

The entire process of fighting the Vietnam War involved an enormous process of mobilization that spanned the decades of the '60s and '70s, and jointly promoted the claims of minorities, youth, women, gays and lesbians, and He placed his demands at the center of the national situation. The fight against the Vietnam War took up the path of the struggle of African Americans as part of the Civil Rights Movement, a true social earthquake, of global reach, that impacted the political, economic, and social situation of the country, and detonated a series of new social and cultural phenomena whose impact remains valid to this day. Precisely, the social and political phenomena that were unleashed in the '60s and '70s are what the Bush Administration and the entire ruling elite feared would occur as their war efforts in Iraq failed. And his worst fears began to take shape.

The powerful mass mobilization against the Vietnam War

The Iraq War was a relatively brief military process, compared to Vietnam. NATO troops entered Iraq in 2003, and by 2006, the fundamentals of the military events had already been resolved, that is, the war and the defeat of NATO was accomplished in just 3 years. On the other hand, in the Vietnam War, the intervention of United States troops lasted 11 years, and without a doubt the experience of what happened 30 years earlier in Vietnam made the events in Iraq develop in a different and much more accelerated way, precisely because of the existence of a previous experience and tradition. When the Iraq War began, there were thousands and thousands of activists in the country and around the world who understood the content of the events that were about to unfold in Iraq, before the war took place.

An entire generation of activists had witnessed and witnessed the horrors, the massacres, the genocides of what the Pentagon and NATO troops were capable of in Vietnam. And when they saw the threat looming over the Iraqi masses, they did nothing more than respond in the same way that tradition and experience of 30 years earlier had indicated should be done. This accumulation of historical experience gave rise to the phenomenon that before Bush formally declared war on Iraq, mobilizations spread throughout the world, in numbers even greater than that which occurred during the Vietnam War.

By the time the Iraq war began, the experience accumulated in the Vietnam War was still fresh in historical terms, but it is worth reviewing the events that constituted it to understand how that experience began to act as soon as NATO troops entered the war. Iraqi territory. By 1964, Vietnam was a small nation that had become independent in 1956 from French imperialism after a long war of national liberation carried out by the League for the Independence of Vietnam (Viet Minh, abbreviated in Vietnamese).

The Geneva agreements recognized this victory and stipulated the division of the Indochina Peninsula region into 2 parts: North Vietnam and South Vietnam, areas that were to be unified after the call for general elections. But the South Vietnamese government led by Ngo Dinh Diem ignored the Geneva agreement and carried out a coup d'état with the support of the government of President Lyndon B. Johnson, the CIA and US troops as military advisors. Thus began the colonization process of South Vietnam with the tyrannical dictatorship of Diem. The Vietnamese people faced this dictatorship, forming the Southern National Liberation Front (Viet Cong, abbreviated in Vietnamese), a political and military force that achieved its first triumphs and opened a crisis in the Diem dictatorship. Faced with the collapse of its puppet government, the Democratic administration of Lyndon B. Johnson decided to intervene directly and bomb North Vietnam on August 5, 1964. Thus began one of the most important wars of the 20th century, between a small country, such as It is Vietnam and the most powerful capitalist power on the planet.

The War was a horrific human carnage and left a horrific toll of destruction with 281,896 soldiers dead and 300,000 wounded in the US military field; while for the Vietnamese people it was a true catastrophe: 5 million one hundred thousand civilians dead, 1 million 100 thousand soldiers and guerrillas killed in combat and a minimum of 600 thousand wounded. The US Armed Forces launched a total of 7 million tons of bombs, equivalent to 500 atomic bombs like those of Hiroshima, among which were a large number of chemical weapons, Napalm, bacteriological weapons, defoliants, etc., prohibited by the Geneva Protocol of 1925. 

This is how Howard Zinn explains it : "... million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia - more than double the bombs dropped on Europe and Asia in World War II...the planes sprayed toxic products to destroy trees and any type of vegetation, resulting in an area the size of the state of Massachusetts being affected by the poison. Vietnamese mothers reported birth defects in their children... Yale biologists, after exposing mice to the same poison (2,4,5,T), reported the birth of mice with defects and said they had no reason to believe that the effect in humans would be different." (10) The people of the United States protested vigorously against that horrible war.

The protests began in 1963 when an action committee called the League of Resisters emerged, which began its protests when no US soldiers had yet set foot on Vietnamese soil. In 1964 David Miller, a Catholic worker, decided to burn his military card in an act that received tremendous publicity, since it was the first card that was burned after the enactment that summer of a law of Congress that equated the destruction of a military card , to the serious crime of desertion. On May 12, 1964, 12 young men in New York publicly burned their draft cards, emulating Miller. After the bombing began, some 1,500 people marched through New York on December 19 in sub-zero temperatures, at an event featuring speakers Norman Thomas, Philip Randolph and AJ Muste.

At the same time, similar demonstrations took place in Minneapolis, Miami, Austin, Sacramento, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, Boston, Cleveland and San Francisco with the prominent presence of the singer Joan Baez. The axis of the fight against the Vietnam War was the student movement. Students by Democratic Society ( SDS) arose, a movement that expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s and grew from a small group to thousands of students at 32 different colleges and universities, the which issued the Port Huron Declaration in 1962, where it called to stop the arms race, the rejection of war, and the call for peace.

In February 1965, Lyndon Johnson began bombing Vietnam with Operation Flaming Dart, and the introduction of ground troops, which caused protests to grow. SDS organized sit-ins, events and pickets on University Campuses throughout the country; Signatures were collected and a call was made inciting civil disobedience. The Cincinnati Pacifists group organized a committee against taxes for the Vietnam War, a form of protest that came to organize more than 200 tax resistance committees. On March 16, 1965, Alice Herz, an 82-year-old widow who had fled Europe in the Nazi years, set herself on fire in protest in downtown Detroit and died 10 days later.

On April 17, the first major demonstration against the war was held, when the SDS called for mobilization together with the Civil Rights Movement, which brought together nearly 25,000 protesters in Washington DC. At that time in 1965, 48% of the population had a positive opinion of the war, 28% were against it, and the remaining 24% had no opinion. In August there were new protests in front of the Pentagon, with the massive participation of pacifist and civil rights movements, at the same time Berkeley activists carried out attempts to stop trains dedicated to transporting troops destined for war. Between October 15 and 16, protests were called in up to 80 cities around the world, including Rome, Paris and London.

In New York, the Fifth Avenue Pacifist Committee, a coalition made up of liberals, pacifists, communists, socialists and all groups opposed to the war, managed to bring more than 50,000 protesters to the streets. On November 2, 31-year-old pacifist Norman Morrison set himself on fire under the window of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's office in the Pentagon, and a week later, Roger La Porte, a young activist in the Catholic Worker movement of New York blew itself up in front of the UN. On November 27, 30,000 people mobilized in Washington and on the same day, President Johnson announced an escalation in military participation, raising the troop contingent from 120,000 to 400,000.

In February 1966, about 100 war veterans tried to enter the White House to personally return the president's war decorations, but were expelled. On March 26, demonstrations took place throughout the United States and several cities around the world. The demonstration that marched through New York managed to gather more than 20,000 people. In July 1966, Joan Báez and Muste proclaimed a tax war throughout the country, launching a campaign and refusing to pay their taxes to finance the war.

In the middle of that year, the polls already showed parity between those who opposed the war, reaching 37%, and those who supported the war, reaching 41%. Strikes, protests and demonstrations spread throughout the country as the famous heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali declared himself a conscientious objector, and refused to go to war. Cassius Clay was sentenced to 5 years in prison and stripped of his champion title, and was banned from professional boxing for 3 years. But the mobilizations grew and were unstoppable by April 1967, when 400,000 people marched through New York with Martin Luther King, Benjamin Spock, James Bevel and war veteran Barry Crumb at the head.

On May 2, Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell denounced the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the United States. The SDS movement became radicalized and made resolutions about supporting resistance to the war within the Army itself, called for the immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and, for the first time, made resolutions about the liberation of women and machismo. By 1967, in what was called " The Summer of Love," polls began to reflect that the majority of Americans thought that "war was a dead end."

In October 1967, a thousand recruits staged a massive return of their military cards in the Californian city of Oakland; and a group of 300 students from the University of Wisconsin tried to prevent an event from being held on the campus of the Dow Chemical Company, the company responsible for the manufacture of napalm destined for Vietnam. The police intervened and 68 were injured. On October 21, the day after the incident, 100,000 people demonstrated in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and 50,000 surrounded the Pentagon. In 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King sparked a wave of violence and protests across the country.

The SDS carried out a fighting plan called "Ten Days of Resistance", which continued with rallies, marches, sit-ins, and public classes that culminated in the strike day on April 26. Nearly a million students participated in that strike, the largest student strike in the history of the United States. After this, support for the SDS took a leap, and student membership in the organization increased drastically during the 1968-1969 academic year. This leap in student organization and people's mobilization coincided with a political event that was a turning point in the Vietnam War: The so-called "Tet Offensive."

A before and after in the Vietnam War: The "Tet Offensive"

On January 30, 1968, the Tet Offensive began, a military operation planned by the North Vietnamese government in which they launched attacks on 26 provincial capitals throughout South Vietnam. Although the armies of North Vietnam were defeated, the political consequences of the offensive tipped the balance in favor of their cause: After the Tet offensive, due to the large number of American soldiers killed, around 4,000, the rejection of the war in the country it increased. The Tet Offensive dispelled the myth that "US armies were invincible ", and demonstrated that North Vietnamese armies could enter anywhere in South Vietnam. In this way, they completely broke the feeling that "the US is winning" and left all the effort of almost three years of campaign useless. When General William Westmoreland asked for 200,000 more troops, his request was rejected, and he was removed from General Command actions in 1968.

A political crisis opened in Washington, and sectors of the Pentagon and the State Department perplexed and astonished by the Vietnamese offensive began to think that defeat was possible, or that Vietnam had to be abandoned. The credibility of Lyndon Johnson's government fell sharply, and by that time, only 35% of Americans supported intervention. To stop the Tet offensive, the US army had to resort to increasingly atrocious and aberrant killings and tactics that aroused global outrage. The My Lai Massacre, which occurred in March 1968, was hidden from the public until 1969, but veteran investigative journalist Mike Wallace asked war veteran Paul Meadlo on CBS News in 1969 if babies were murdered in Vietnam.

The answer to this question had a profound impact on American public opinion, on Nixon's presidency, and on the course of the Vietnam War. As Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan explain "Babies too," responded Meadlo, an Army private who, along with many other American soldiers, had carried out a raid against a Vietnamese village called My Lai on March 16, 1968. ..American soldiers massacred more than 500 civilians over the course of the day. "They begged and said, 'No, no.' And the mothers hugged their children and... well, we kept shooting... Instead of meeting the enemy, there were only families in the village, women, children and the elderly. "And then they began to kill them. They threw them into a ditch, they raped the women, they killed them. They threw the babies and shot them with bayonets." (11)

The political crisis in Washington was deepening. Joseph Hansen, leader of the SWP, described the situation in this way in February 1968 in an article in World Outlook: "The climate is not new. In fact, history teaches us to expect this type of atmosphere in the dominant circles when they confront to revolutionary rises that for them are always "something totally strange and inexplicable" (12) Hansen described the situation perfectly. What for Washington was "something totally strange and inexplicable" is that they were not facing a regular war in Vietnam, but rather they were facing a revolution. That is why, despite the enormous economic, technical and military superiority, they could not subdue the Vietnamese masses. And after warning of the problem they were in, Washington began to sense that their worst problems were also becoming reality within the country. nightmares. That revolution, which seemed so far away in Southeast Asia, had also begun to break out within the country.

The action of the masses in the United States was increasingly massive, forceful and defiant, and was annihilating the Johnson Administration. The political crisis set in, and with it, the debate in the dominant circles about what to do with the war, because the resistance of the Vietnamese masses joined the action of the masses of the US and the world, to put Washington facing defeat. On April 26, millions of college and high school students staged a massive boycott of their schools across the country, while in Chicago the authorities lost control of the city when during the Democratic National Convention in August 1968, the famous , and at the same time tragic, Chicago Riots.

The mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, prohibited assemblies, rallies, marches or meetings in public spaces, justifying the use of force to "break" the masses, but about 10,000 people surrounded the pavilion in which it was being held. the convention to demonstrate against the war. Daley deployed 23,000 police and National Guard units, protesters clashed with them, leading to violent riots and riots throughout the city. During the 6 days that the convention lasted, a real battle was fought between protesters and police for control of the streets of Chicago, but, while these events were developing in Europe, the French May broke out, another revolutionary process led by students and workers. Richard Nixon won the presidential election in late 1968 and took office on January 20, 1969, announcing the beginning of the phased withdrawal from Vietnam. On May 22, 1969, Canada announced that it would not detain the numerous military deserters from the United States who showed up at the border seeking permanent residence in Canada.

The Woodstock Festival, held between August 15 and 18, 1969, gathered between 400,000 and 500,000 and became a mass protest against the war, a symbol of the hippie movement and American counterculture. John Lennon, leader of The Beatles in protest against the Vietnam War, returned his Medal of Member of the Order of the British Empire in September 1969 through a letter addressed to the Queen of England herself, and on October 15, 1969 they had Thousands of demonstrations calling for the withdrawal of troops took place throughout the country. Millions of American citizens asked for the day off from work to participate in local demonstrations throughout the nation. In the first major demonstrations since Nixon came to power, on November 15, 1969, approximately 500,000 people participated in a large demonstration in Washington, DC. In that month of '69, 58% already thought that the participation of the United States was a mistake. In November 1969, when 69% were already opposed to the war, Nixon announced a gradual withdrawal of the more than 500,000 soldiers who were fighting in Vietnam at that time.

The withdrawal would last more than 4 years, but on April 30, Nixon announced military intervention in Laos and Cambodia, which intensified the protest. In response to these events, new waves of protests were organized, in one of which, held at Kent State University on May 4, 1970 in Ohio, the National Guard broke in and began shooting at the protesters, causing the 4 students died and 9 were seriously injured. The student reaction was unprecedented with more than 5 million students on strike. A few days later, 100,000 protesters gathered in Washington DC to protest the invasion of Cambodia and the shooting of the Ohio students. Police surrounded the White House with buses to block protesters from entering. In California, on August 29, some 25,000 Americans of Mexican origin participated in the largest anti-war demonstration held in Los Angeles. George Meany, leader of the AFL-CIO, began to feel that he was losing control of the workers' union center, when the first anti-war demonstration called by the unions was called in New York, ignoring the position of the Central leadership. who had been supporting the war.

In 1971, anti-war organizations announced that more than 500,000 people had demonstrated in Washington and California, the largest demonstration since November 1969. On May 13, 1972, protests spread again across the United States when Nixon announced its decision to mine North Vietnamese ports and launch new air attacks, in the so-called Operation Linebacker. But along with the irruption of the masses, the new fact was that the US army was collapsing. 

A crisis opened in the Armed Forces, which was going to leave an open wound forever. Marine historian Colonel Roberto D. Heini Jr. made the following assessment : "The morale, discipline, and combat capability of the United States Armed Forces are, with a few exceptions, below and worse than ever in this century, and possibly worse than any other time in American history . Heini wrote the report on June 7, 1971, in the Armed Forces Journal, which continued: "All indications show us that our army remaining in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or refusing to fight, murdering his officers and non-commissioned officers, riddled with drugs and with low morale where he is not on the verge of mutiny. Elsewhere, the situation is almost as dangerous as in Vietnam" (13)

This is how Zinn explained it: " Vietnam produced an opposition of soldiers and veterans like never before seen. They began as isolated protests...Individual acts multiplied...desertions increased in the armed forces. Thousands left for Western Europe, to France, Sweden and Holland. Most of the deserters crossed the border with Canada; a number was estimated between 50,000 and 100,000...The pacifist movement of American soldiers gained organization Near Fort Jackson, South Carolina, the first "American soldiers' cafeteria" a place where soldiers could drink coffee and pastries, consult pacifist books and talk freely with others...Other "American soldiers' cafeterias" were created in half a dozen points throughout the country. ...Clandestine newspapers began to appear on military bases throughout the country; in 1970 there were already more than fifty in circulation...In December 1970, hundreds of members of this group (veterans) went to Detroit to what would be called "Winter Soldier" investigations, to testify publicly about atrocities in Vietnam...In the summer of 1970, twenty-eight Army officers - including several Vietnam veterans -, saying they were acting on behalf of about 250 other officers, announced the formation of the Concerned Officers Movement, to oppose the war." (14)

On June 26, 1972, the US Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling in the case Healy v. James by which he declared that Central Connecticut State University's refusal to recognize SDS, the anti-Vietnam War student organization, was unconstitutional. The highest court found that the denial of recognition by university authorities to SDS was a measure that violated the First Amendment, which meant an enormous triumph for the student movement, and for the youth that constituted the heart of the movement against the Vietnam War. The ruling noted that SDS members were unconstitutionally deprived of their First Amendment right to freedom of assembly when a group was denied permission to form a group on the campus of Central Connecticut State College in New Britain. SDS.

The movement to fight for women's rights

To understand what the entire process of mobilization against the Vietnam War meant, it is necessary to carry out the analysis of another powerful social movement that developed alongside the fight against the war: The Women's Struggle Movement. Although this movement developed alongside the fight against war and as part of the Civil Rights movement, it is a historical movement that began much earlier and has its roots in the oppression suffered by half of the world's population. since centuries. The Women's struggle movement is of enormous depth because with its mobilization it questions the pillars of capitalist society such as patriarchy, and private ownership of the means of production. Women have been developing a historic process of fighting for their rights that far exceeds what happened during the fight for Civil Rights known as the "second wave " of fighting for women's rights, but it is necessary to know that this wave was a successor of the "first wave" that addressed a series of demands among which the demand for women's suffrage was placed as central. Knowing the first wave is essential to know why a "second wave" was necessary and also essential to know the development of the Civil Rights Movement and the history of the country. In the United States, the struggle of an oppressed sector such as women was always linked to the struggle of another oppressed sector, the blacks, as expressed by the integration of women in the American Anti-Slavery Society (ASS). ) in the Convention of 1839 .

The black slavery abolitionist movement incorporated women after a strong debate, since women could not speak to the public on an equal basis with men. When the Grimké sisters, who had been born into a slave-owning family in South Carolina, spoke out against slavery, the ministers of the Congregational Church issued a statement condemning their actions. But despite the disapproval of the church, Angelina Grimké spoke against slavery before the Massachusetts legislature in 1838, becoming the first woman in the United States to speak before a legislative body. On the other hand, Sarah Grimké published "The equality of the sexes and the condition of women", a text that was widely disseminated, and other women began to give public speeches in opposition to slavery such as Ernestine Rose, and Lucretia Mott who was a minister Quaker and abolitionist, Abby Kelley Foster, and Lucy Stone.

Just as the leaders of the women's rights movement supported the abolition of slavery, several members of the radical wing of the slavery abolition movement supported the fight for women's suffrage. The first women's rights convention was the Seneca Falls Convention on July 19-20, 1848, in the Finger Lakes region of New York, convened by five female Quaker social activists including Lucreta Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who presented resolutions fighting for women's suffrage with strong support from the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, in successful conventions with a lot of impact in the press.

Two weeks later, the Rochestere Convention on the Rights of Women of 1848 met, the first convention presided over by a woman, a step that was considered radical at the time. Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Candy Stanton began a teamwork that was crucial to the suffrage movement and the fight for women's rights: They agreed to suspend women's rights activities during the Civil War to focus on the abolition of slavery , but in 1863 Anthony and Stanton organized the Woman's National Loyal League, the first national women's political organization that collected nearly 400,000 signatures to abolish slavery in the largest campaign in the nation's history up to that time, with an impressive reach of more of 5000 members who constituted an extensive network of women activists.

After the Civil War, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the first woman to run for Congress, calling attention to the irony of being legally entitled to run for president and being denied the right to vote. The American and Equal Rights Association emerged, which divided into two wings, one, whose main figure was Lucy Stone, who were willing for blacks to achieve suffrage first, if necessary, and wanted to maintain close ties with the Republican Party. and the abolitionist movement. The other wing was that of Anthony and Stanton which argued that black women and men should be emancipated at the same time and work towards a politically independent women's movement that would no longer depend on abolitionists for financial and other resources.

But other women leaders emerge like Lucy Eldine González Parsons, a radical and anarchist labor leader, with powerful oratory, born a slave, and daughter of a black Mexican and a mestizo father from the Creek indigenous nation, who fought with her husband Albert Parsons against racial segregation. When her husband Albert Parsons was imprisoned and sentenced to death in the episode known as the "Chicago Martyrs" that became a reference for the entire labor movement, Lucy Parsons continued her fight and in 1920 she would be labeled by the Chicago Police Department. as "more dangerous than a thousand insurrectionists." Lucy had ideological disagreements with other anarchists such as Emma Goldman, due to her idea of ​​considering the class issue more important than gender issues and the fight for sexual freedom. Emma Goldman was an immigrant, Lithuanian, anarchist and revolutionary who suffered imprisonment and persecution. She made public her opposition to the First World War, considering it an act of imperialism, for which she was deported to Russia.

Meanwhile, and as a result of the developing division in the women's movement, the American Women's Suffrage Association (AWSA) led by Stone was formed; and on the other hand, the National Women's Suffrage Association (NWSA) led by Anthony and Stanton. The AWSA, which was especially strong in New England, was initially the larger of the two rival suffrage organizations, but declined in strength during the 1880s, during which Stanton and Anthony were more widely known as leaders of the suffrage movement. and most influential in determining its direction. The NWSA was led by women only, while the AWSA included both men and women among its leadership.

When the country's Constitution was amended with the 15th Amendment that granted equal suffrage without regard to race, Stanton and Anthony opposed it and claimed that by emancipating all men and excluding women, the amendment would create an "aristocracy of sex. " " which gives constitutional status to the idea that men were superior to women. In 1869 Francis and Virginia Minor, husband and wife suffragettes from Missouri, outlined the "New Exit" tactic, which consisted of women attempting to vote and filing lawsuits if they were denied that right, protected by the 14th Amendment.

In 1871 the NWSA officially adopted the New Exit strategy, and soon hundreds of women attempted to vote in dozens of localities, but the Supreme Court in 1875 ended the " New Exit" strategy by ruling in Minor v. Happersette "the Constitution of the United States confers the right of suffrage on no one." The NWSA decided to pursue the much more difficult strategy of campaigning for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women's right to vote. Susan B. Anthony was arrested for voting in the 1872 presidential election, and when asked during the trial if she had anything to say, Anthony responded: "... my natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights , are all equally ignored." In 1878 Senator Aaron Sargent, a friend of Susan B. Anthony, introduced a women's suffrage amendment in Congress, which 40 years later would become the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.

Over time, the NWSA became more aligned with the AWSA with less emphasis on confrontational actions and more on negotiation, and in 1890 the two organizations merged as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), with Stanton as president. , and Stone as president of its executive committee. Anthony became president in 1892 when Stanton retired in her old age, increasingly radicalizing her positions which made her uncomfortable in the new organization that was becoming more conservative. In 1895 Stanton published "The Women's Bible" which attacked the use of the Bible to relegate women to an inferior status, thereby distancing Stanton further and further from the suffrage movement which was itself suffering a decline. and was declining in strength. In 1895 Carrie Chapman Catt came to the leadership and modified the movement's policy by establishing a work plan with the organization of Women's Clubs, which had been mostly reading groups focused on literature, transforming them into organizations that fought for civic improvements for women. .

The International Women's Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) was created in Berlin in 1904 with Catt as president, as an alternative to the International Council of Women, which was reluctant to support the fight for suffrage. NAWSA redoubled the fight by confronting reactionary organizations such as New York's Tammany Hall that opposed suffrage because they feared that women would lead them to lose the control they had established over groups of male voters. At the end of the 19th century, the concept of the "New Woman" emerged to characterize the increasingly independent activity of women, especially the younger generation, moving from domestic places to public spaces, riding bicycles or marching. and parades with thousands of women marching through the streets, something unusual for the time. NAWSA organized a suffrage rally in Washington the day before Woodrow Wilson was sworn in as president, which was brutally suppressed by the cavalry, sparking widespread public outrage over the incident, which cost the police chief his job, brought publicity to the movement and gave it new impetus.

Women gained the vote in Washington states in 1910; in California in 1911, in Oregon, Kansas and Arizona in 1912, and in Illinois in 1913, which opened the prospect of achieving the vote nationwide. In 1912 the Progressive Party formed by Theodore Roosevelt supported the female vote, as well as the Socialist Party. In 1916 the conventions of both the Democratic and Republican parties approved women's suffrage. The entry of the US into World War I in April 1917 had a significant impact on the women's struggle. NAWSA cooperated with the war effort, with Catt and Shaw serving on the Women's Committee for the National Defense Council, but without abandoning the fight for women's suffrage: In January 1917 they picketed the White House with banners demanding the vote. feminine, and a flag that read: "We, the women of America, tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million American women are denied the right to vote." But from there enormous political and social changes took place after the country entered the war.

The first theorists of the socialist Women's movement date from this time, such as Alejandra Kollontai, who was the Russian Minister of Social Affairs in the time of Lenin, in her work "The New Woman and Sexual Morality" written in 1918, and in Germany, Clara Zetkin, who organized the first International Women's Conference from which she promoted a great women's socialist movement. As soon as the Russian Revolution took place, abortion was declared legal and countless rights were granted to women. In this same period in which the First World War occurred an enormous change in the social situation of women based on the need to replace the men who had entered the army, and women moved to the workplace. such as steel factories and oil refineries, which meant the massive proletarianization of thousands of women, and an enormous sociological change of social mobility with great political consequences.

Suddenly millions of women had access to jobs that put them in a position to fight for equal conditions with men, carrying out the same jobs, which also meant that many women became breadwinners in their homes. By June 4, 1919, the 19th Amendment was presented to the Senate, was voted to be ratified by the state legislatures, and after being ratified on August 18, 1920, it became law, thus the election of 1920 It became the first presidential election in which women were allowed to vote, a historic victory that put women at the center of the revolutionary process and had international repercussions. During this period, great scientific research emerged on the question of Women.

The American Margaret Mead, in her ethnographic research of the 1920s and 1930s, questioned the sexist and sexist vision of a biological nature according to which the sexual division of labor in the modern family was due to the innate difference between public behavior, productive of men and women. In her comparative study "Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies" in 1935, she introduced the revolutionary idea that, because the human species is enormously malleable, sexual roles and behaviors vary according to sociocultural contexts, and she was a pioneer in the use of the concept. "gender" widely used later in feminist studies.

The process of transformation of women in society was just beginning. By 1945, more than 2.2 million women were working in the war industries, building ships, aircraft, vehicles and weapons, munitions plants and farms, driving trucks, and entering the professional areas of work that were previously the exclusive domain of men. The country echoed a phenomenon that was global. In the Allied countries, thousands of women enlisted as nurses who served on the front lines, and there was a large increase in the number of women serving in the armed forces, especially in the Red Army of the Soviet Union. In the US approximately 400,000 American women served in the armed forces, and with the Women's Armed Services Integration Act women served as permanent and regular members of the armed forces in the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and the Force Recently formed Air.

This entire process of social transformation of women was the basis for the development of the "second wave" of the Women's Movement that began in the early 1960s and lasted throughout the 1970s. Just as the first wave of feminism focused primarily on overcoming legal obstacles to suffrage, the second wave had a wide variety of issues, such as unofficial inequality, sexuality, family, place of work and perhaps more controversially, and the right to abortion. In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir contributed one of the best-known books of feminist theory of the 20th century: "The Second Sex" where she explains the role of the state, the church, the school, the family in continuing female oppression. It demonstrates that the inequality in which women find themselves has no biological, physiological or psychological reason, but that the economic structure in which they are found and their material conditions intervene in the situation of women.

In 1963, the American author Betty Friedan wrote a book from the field of social psychology called "The Feminine Mystique" and together with Kate Millet and other important figures of feminism they founded the National Organization of Women (NOW). Millet promoted radical feminism that criticizes patriarchy, the family, and relationships. When in 1960 the Food and Drug Administration approved contraceptive pills, a true "Sexual Revolution" was triggered , from sexual activity no longer being linked to a merely reproductive act. In 1965 Casey Hayden and Mary King circulated a text on sexism in the Civil Rights Movement, and NOW spread throughout the country. In 1968 Robin Morgan led several members of the New York Radical Women to the No More Miss America protest because they considered the pageant sexist and racist. In 1970 there was an immense mobilization of women in Washington and on January 22, 1973.

This entire process of struggle and mobilization of women, which was developed together with the struggle of African Americans, gays and lesbians and the youth movement against the war, obtained a historic triumph when the Supreme Court of Justice in a historic ruling established the right to abortion, in relation to the case called Roe vs. Wade. With the Supreme Court ruling in favor of Jane Roe, the fight for women's rights achieved a triumph with national and international repercussions. Due to its hierarchy, the Supreme Court ruling annulled the laws that criminalized abortion in the different states and prevented legislation against it. It established that denying the right to abortion could be considered a violation of the constitutional right to privacy protected by the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, and forced the modification of all federal and state laws that prohibited or that restricted abortion, and were opposed to the new decision.

The struggle of the LGBT movement

At that time another powerful movement developed and was a fundamental pillar of the Civil Rights Movement, the sexual liberation movement. As Sam Deaderick and Tamara Turner explain : "...After the destruction of the European gay rights movement by the Nazis and Stalinists, compounded by the social, economic, and political disorganization of Europe during and after World War II Worldwide, international gay political activity waned until it gained momentum in the U.S. But even before this revival, American gays had a profound influence on popular culture—theater, film, dance, art and design, poetry and drama. - and many gays became activists in movements, parties and organizations that did not address gay rights. Gay bars and bathhouses, private clubs and other gathering places flourished, but the gay community was virtually invisible to outsiders Gay protest was difficult to organize in the United States, a land that had institutionalized women's oppression, sexual puritanism, and sexual stereotyping. Only rare and short-lived attempts at organization were made before the second half of the 20th century, and only a few stellar people showed courage to defend sexual freedom. (14)

The struggle of the gay movement had a historical milestone from the events known worldwide as the " Stonewall riots", an uprising that was a true insurrection of gays, lesbians, transvestites and transsexuals that took place in the early morning of June 28, 1969. against a police raid on the pub known as the Stonewall Inn located in the New York neighborhood of Greenwich Village. This insurrection is frequently cited as the first time in the country's history that the LGBT community fought against a system that persecuted them, and is generally recognized as the beginning of the modern pro-LGBT rights movement in the country and the world. When at 1:20 in the morning on Saturday, June 28, 1969, plainclothes police officers burst into Stonewall together with the Public Morals Squad, they triggered a true insurrection that unleashed an unstoppable movement throughout the country and gave rise to fighting organizations that They established the general guidelines of the gay movement nationally and internationally.

The Stonwall attendees, gays, lesbians, transvestites and treansexuals, were brutally repressed that night and the police tried to take them all to prison, but they refused to be imprisoned, and to hand over their documents. They joined together to avoid the raid, they overturned the buses in which the police were trying to transport them to the police stations, they took over the pub, the surrounding streets, they picketed and violently and bravely rejected the police raid. The events of the early morning of June 28 of 1969 were not the first confrontation between gays and the police, neither in New York nor elsewhere. There had already been riots at Compton's diner in 1966 and at the Black Cat Tavern in Los Angeles in 1967. However, several circumstances made the Stonewall riots memorable: One of them was the location of the place that favored the protesters over the police through the narrow streets, and the other is that it was developed in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York. The New York neighborhoods of Greenwich Village and Harlem had become the place of residence of a considerable part of the gay population after the First World War despite the fact that New York City had passed laws against homosexuality in public and private businesses.

The social repression of the 1950s sparked a cultural revolution in Greenwich Village, and a group of poets and artists known as the "Beat Generation" emerged who wrote openly about anarchy, drugs, and homosexuality, including Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs were both residents of Greenwich Village, and in the early 1960s a campaign to rid New York City of gay bars was in full swing. The struggle of gays had been going on for several decades since pioneers such as Henry Gerber, a German immigrant who in 1924 had founded the Society for Human Rights in Chicago, which was the first homosexual association in the country, to Harry Hay, who in 1950 together with a group of Followers founded the Mattachine Society or San Francisco women who came together to form the Daugthers of Bilitis (DOB) group for lesbians.

But without a doubt Stonewall was a before and after. Gays, lesbians and transgender people who were for many years publicly humiliated, physically harassed, fired, imprisoned or admitted to psychiatric hospitals; who lived a double life, keeping their private lives secret and away from a sociopathic personality disorder, had proudly taken to the streets with the Stonwell uprising, giving them freedoms and organizations on a level never seen before. The insurrection had defeated the city's police department's Tactical Police Force (TPF). The next day, and in the following nights, thousands of gays and those who supported the gay cause returned to Stonewall's Christopher Street, and courageously and determinedly displayed their homosexual affection in public. They went from marginalization and clandestinity to showing themselves in public and on the streets like never before seen in any city in the world.

Rumors claimed that the Stonewall uprising had been organized by SDS students or the Black Panthers, but the reality is that for several days thousands of people took to the streets and clashed with the police in street battles that included looting in the e They promoted the "Liberation of Christopher Street" day . Within weeks, Village residents quickly organized into activist groups to concentrate efforts on establishing places where gays could demonstrate openly without fear of arrest. Within six months, gay activist organizations such as the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the Gay Activists Alliance had been created. In addition, 3 newspapers were founded to promote gay and lesbian rights and a process of founding homosexual rights organizations broke out throughout the United States and internationally. On June 28, 1970, the first Gay Pride Marches took place in the cities of New York and Los Angeles, commemorating the anniversary of the riots, which was established as a methodology of struggle that is celebrated to this day throughout the world.

The Gay Movement had achieved a triumph. Thousands of gays began to show themselves and publicly defend their condition, which was unthinkable just a few years ago. Stonewall could have been possible because it occurred within the framework of a revolutionary process that questioned the Nixon government, the Armed Forces, the decisions of the Democratic and Republican Parties and mobilized millions of people, young people, workers, African Americans, the most humble strata, and oppressed of the population. The victory of Stonewall allowed gays to raise their voices, take to the streets and develop a powerful movement.

The Bonapartist attempt of the Nixon government

This immense victory was the product of an enormous mobilization that encompassed the Sexual Liberation movement, the women's movement, the anti-war movement, the youth movement, and the movement for the rights of African Americans, based in working-class sectors. and popular. At the same time, this entire enormous mobilization process collided with the framework of deeply reactionary institutions such as the Pentagon, the CIA and the FBI, which had been consolidated since the Second World War. A revolutionary movement fighting for democratic freedoms and rights could not coexist within the framework of an increasingly undemocratic regime. Inevitably between both opposing trends, enormous clashes were going to occur.

The reactionary and increasingly dangerous nature of the new political regime that was beginning to loom over the United States was denounced by President Eisenhower himself in 1961 in the speech at the end of his mandate, a speech in which the concept of "complex" appeared for the first time . military-industrial". There Eisenhower stated: "...In the councils of government, we must avoid the purchase of unjustified influence, whether sought or not, by the military-industrial complex...We must never allow the weight of this conjunction to endanger our freedoms or democratic processes" (15) Several reactionary counteroffensives were launched from the regime and the Democratic and Republican administrations against this entire mobilization process, and these counteroffensives sought to hit, crush and roll back the set of processes that led to the mobilization. .

Within the framework of the first reactionary counteroffensive, one of the most dramatic moments in the country's history occurred on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas: The assassination of President Kennedy. This assassination turned Eisenhower's warnings into a prophecy. According to the investigation carried out by the Warren Commission, Lee Harvey Oswald, an employee of the Texas School Book Depository, murdered President Kennedy while he was driving in the presidential car. However, like Lincoln's assassination, the assassination is subject to controversy and speculation. The Warren Commission investigation was based on FBI reports and after 10 months of investigation the report concluded that it could not find evidence of an internal or external conspiracy, but rather that Oswald acted alone.

The theory of the lone assassin was a characteristic of the great assassinations in history. The deaths of Kennedy, that of Abraham Lincoln, that of John Lennon were the work of "loose madmen" without any "internal or external connection", in the words of the Warren Commission, something that is almost impossible to accept without qualms. Much evidence has accumulated around the possibility that Kennedy's assassination was linked to the CIA and that Lee Harvey Oswald himself was a CIA agent, which was denounced by Victor Marchetti in his book "Cult of Intelligence" Subsequently, the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), established in 1976 to investigate the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, issued its final report based on the testimony in 1979. by James A. Wilcott, former CIA finance officer, that Oswald was recruited among the military by the CIA with the aim of placing him as a double agent for the Office of Naval Intelligence in the USSR.

The HSCA concluded in its 1979 report that President John F. Kennedy was likely assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. He severely criticized the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, the Warren Commission, and the Secret Service was called deficient in its protection of the President. Regardless of the direction of the assassination investigation, Kennedy's death had political implications that expressed a growing tendency towards Bonapartism within the country's regime. The pressure from Bonapartist institutions such as the CIA, the Pentagon or the FBI, which needed to confront and defeat a revolutionary rise that was shaking the country and the world. When Kennedy was assassinated, he had presented the Civil Rights Bill to Congress 4 months ago. But after JFK's assassination, the credit and prestige for the sanction of the Law went to the Administration of his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, who had become president after JFK's death.

On the other hand, the Johnson Administration, while presenting the Civil Rights Act a year after the draft was written, began the operations that led to the Vietnam War, an escalation that was of interest to the Pentagon that began shortly after the death of JFK. . None of this means that Kennedy played a progressive role in relation to the workers and people of the country or the world, quite the opposite. The Kennedy Administration shamelessly governed in the service of the Corporations, as demonstrated by the role played by Kennedy Administration Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a Ford man. The Kennedy Administration provided enormous services to the development of the Military-Industrial Complex by placing President Ford as Head of the Pentagon. On the other hand, the imperialist character of the North American state was accentuated in the Kennedy Administration when the invasion of Cuba was carried out. However, the Kennedy Administration proved unable to stop the revolutionary rise that engulfed the country.

The growing tendencies towards Bonapartism in the country's regime ended up liquidating the Kennedy Administration itself, so the death of JFK was a coup d'état that aimed to impose a Bonapartist escalation that developed during the Johnson Administration and reached a peak with the Nixon Administration. There is a direct connection between the death of JFK and Nixon. Jack Ruby who murdered Oswald was a mafia-linked thug employed by Richard Nixon, who had been a witness for Richard Nixon during the McCarthy witch hunt in 1947. Under the Johnson Administration, a second reactionary counteroffensive was developed consisting of aberrant acts, true attacks on democratic freedoms that expressed the antidemocratic bias of the country's political regime. During that period, the leaders of the black struggle movement Malcom in 1959 and during the Lyndon Johnson government period it was against the Black Panthers, the Socialist Workers Party and various political and social organizations. As part of this second reactionary counteroffensive, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, one of the younger brothers of former President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated.

Robert Kennedy served as one of JFK's most trusted advisors, and after his brother's assassination he remained in the position of Attorney General of the United States for nine months in the Johnson Administration. After his resignation in September 1964, he was elected senator for the state of New York and ended his relationship with Johnson due to their disagreements over the Vietnam War, announcing his own campaign for the presidency in a battle for control of the Party. Democrat in which he defeated McCarthy in the California primary election. But after making his victory speech he was assassinated in the early hours of June 5, 1968, an assassination that eliminated Nixon's most important rival in the presidential race, which opened the doors to the reactionary government of Richard Nixon who no longer He had no major contender on his way to the White House.

Both the first and the second reactionary offensive could not stop the revolutionary process that was shaking the country, which is why the third counteroffensive was even more important and more serious. The Nixon Administration led this counteroffensive in which there was a serious attempt to establish an undemocratic political regime where the Executive Branch would override other powers of the state and overwhelm democratic freedoms to hit hard, crush the mobilization process that the country was experiencing, and intervene. also about the world situation. The Nixon Administration relied directly on some of the most undemocratic organizations of the country's political regime for its objectives, the FBI, the Pentagon, or the CIA, with an essential pillar of the Nixon Administration being Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Kissinger was the direct representative of the military-industrial complex, and the Corporations based on his close relationship with Nelson Rockefeller, a figure who, based on his dominant presence, eclipsed all the rest of the cabinet officials. From his position as National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State, Kissinger acted as a true royal power, surpassing the functions of the Executive Branch, and of diplomacy, that is, of internal and external government. Kissinger was the clearest expression of the attempt at Bonapartism that the Nixon Administration involved.

In 1955, Kissinger had been an Advisor to the National Security Council and the Security Operations Coordination Board. He worked in foreign policy supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation and was a member of the RAND Corporation. At the same time he served as a consultant to several Government agencies, including the Office of Operations Research, Arms Control and Disarmament, and the State Department. Kissinger was president of the powerful 40 Committee, a high-level organization made up of representatives from the State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon, who made decisions and measures about the situation that most concerned these institutions: Communism. Kissinger was appointed National Security Advisor in the Nixon Administration and not only limited himself to carrying out his duties, but also became involved in practically all the activities of Richard Nixon's government.

Once re-elected in 1972, Nixon awarded Kissinger with the Secretary of State, the position that Colin Powell would hold in the Bush Administration. But by taking over the leadership of " Foggy Bottom," as the State Department is ironically known, and controlling international politics, Kissinger redoubled his power in the Nixon Administration's cabinet, and imposed a new approach on it, assuming a role, not one of advice. and obedience as usual, but dominant, strong and to a certain extent self-sufficient, regarding the foreign policy of the United States.

Kissinger carried out a policy of rapprochement with the People's Republic of China, as part of a new strategic alignment against the USSR. Kissinger managed the ceasefire and withdrawal from Vietnam, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize, but while he appeared as a "Standardbearer of Peace" in Vietnam, because he gradually withdrew troops from South Vietnam, at the same time he proceeded to carry out a massive bombing of Cambodia to disrupt the operations of Vietnamese People's Army and Viet-Cong units. The Pentagon sought to dismantle the Viet Cong and to that end launched raids into South Vietnam from within Cambodia's borders.

Kissinger had been involved in Indochina even before his appointment as National Security Advisor since 1965 at the invitation of Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge with successive tours. The bombing campaign of Cambodia aggravated the civil war against dictator Lon Nol and the insurgency of the Khmer Rouge, who sought to overthrow that dictator in 1975. The Pentagon bombing of Cambodia caused the deaths of some 40,000 combatants and civilians. While receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Kissinger promoted "Operation Condor" , a plan to coordinate operations between the leadership of the dictatorial regimes of the Southern Cone of America - Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia - with the CIA in the 1970s and 1980s. Framed in the Truman Doctrine, "Operation Condor" , translated into an international clandestine organization for the practice of State terrorism that orchestrated the murder and disappearance of tens of thousands of opponents of the aforementioned dictatorships.

The strategic blow that American imperialism suffered in Vietnam meant a qualitative weakening from the international point of view that prompted the Pentagon and Kissinger to act trying to balance positions with the Soviet Union. Kissinger's negotiations on strategic arms limitation that culminated in the SALT I Treaty - Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Leonid Brezhnev, then Premier of the Soviet Union, did not mean a decrease in the arms race, but the limitation of certain weapons considered more dangerous while the Military-Industrial Complex continued to develop spectacular weapons production.

Kissinger also negotiated rapprochement with China through summits with Zhou Enlai and Mao Ze-Tung in 1972, seeking to form a tacit, anti-Soviet alliance between China and the United States, the purpose of which was to create even more pressure on the USSR and begin to gain ground. The agreement was of great strategic importance considering that this management allowed China to later be a great lifeline for capitalism 20 years later. After the fall of the Berlin Wall with China's entry into the WTO (World Trade Organization), there was an enormous flow of investments from North American Corporations to China, a perspective outlined 20 years ago by Kissinger from "Foggy Bottom".

Then, under the leadership of Kissinger, the Nixon Administration supported Pakistan in the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 with the aim of confronting the Treaty of Friendship signed by India and the USSR, using an alliance with Pakistan, India's enemy, and therefore of the Soviet Union. In this way, Kissinger also sought to increase American influence over the Middle East region, especially when the Yom Kippur War occurred in 1973 in which Egypt and Syria jointly and by surprise attacked Israel, crossing the line established by the armistice of the Sinai.

The Nixon Administration ordered the largest military air operation in history to help Israel on October 12, 1973, which triggered the Oil Crisis of 1973, following the decision of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which grouped the OPEC countries plus Egypt and Syria, to not export more oil to countries that supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War, a measure that included the United States and its Western European allies. Kissinger's number one priority was to end the Yom Kippur War, and then try to lift the economic blockade imposed by OPEC. Meanwhile, with military and logistical support from the Pentagon, Israel advanced with military victories that led it to recover the territories lost at the beginning of the war and gain new ones in Syria and Egypt. Kissinger pressured the Israelis to give up part of the newly captured territories, contributing to a resumption of relations between the United States and Egypt, which ended in a close partnership between the two.

After the end of the Yom Kippur War, the Carter Administration, through the Camp David Accords, achieved that after the return of the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt recognized the state of Israel. Kissinger also actively participated in the negotiations regarding the Rhodesian War, and sponsored the negotiations between the Moroccan representatives and the Spanish Government, which ended with the departure of the Spanish Army from the Sahara territories and its transfer to Morocco and Mauritania. as well as annexation of East Timor by Indonesia ruled by dictator Suharto.

It is because of this immense position as an all-powerful official of the Nixon Administration, as the most emblematic Secretary of State, even to the point that this position is directly identified with him, that Kissinger became the maximum expression of a Bonapartist political regime that attempted prevail by relying on the CIA, investigating and perpetrating crimes against humanity on various continents. However, not even Kissinger's intense activity was enough to defeat the revolutionary process that was developing within the United States. At that time, the denunciations of Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, known as the "Pentagon Papers" , broke out and were published on the front page of the New York Times in 1971 .

As Howard Zinn explains : "... Ellsberg was an economist who had studied at Harvard, had been a naval officer and worked for the RAND corporation...he helped write the history of the Vietnam War for the Department of Defense, and then he decided to make public a classified document, with the help of his friend Anthony Russo, a former man from the RAND corporation. They had both met in Saigon where they were so affected by the different experiences they had as direct witnesses of the war that they felt. There was great outrage over what the United States was doing to the people of Vietnam. Ellsberg and Russo spent night after night, hour after hour in a friend's advertising agency making copies of the 7,000-page document. Ellsberg then gave copies to vain congressmen. and the New York Times. In June 1971 the Times began printing selections from what became known as the Pentagon Papers. This was a national sensation. The Nixon administration attempted to have the Supreme Court prevent further publications from appearing, but the Court ruled that this would be a "prior restraint" on press freedom and therefore unconstitutional. The government then prosecuted Ellsberg and Russo for violating the Espionage Act by distributing classified documents to unauthorized persons, and they faced a long prison sentence if convicted. However, the judge threw out the trial while the jury was out. deliberating given that the events of Watergate, which were then coming to light" (16)

After Daniel Ellsberg's publication of the "Pentagon Papers" in 1971, Perry Fellwock, who had been an official at the National Security Agency (NSA), contacted Ramparts Magazine, a monthly of the radical, progressive and anti-militarist left, where he spent hours explaining what the NSA was, which revealed the existence of the Echelon satellite network and further lifted the veil on the practices of the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. The "Pentagon Papers" scandal was another hard blow for the Nixon Administration, which pushed it even further towards its crisis and subsequent fall. It was the event known worldwide as the "Watergate" scandal , consisting of the discovery of telephone spying against the Democratic Party, which caused the fall of the Nixon Administration.

Planned by Nixon's main advisors, HR Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, with the support of President Nixon himself, the advisors carried out espionage in the Watergate office complex in Washington, headquarters of the National Committee of the Democratic Party, as denounced by 2 journalists from the Washington Post, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, June 17, 1972. The Senate investigation revealed that Nixon had a magnetic tape recording system, a very serious attack on democratic freedoms.

But the enormous mass mobilization that the anti-War movement represented liquidated this anti-democratic attempt and what remained of a government immersed in crisis and unpopularity. That is why the Watergate case was not a simple matter of espionage. It was the end of the attempt to establish an undemocratic political regime, in which the president would override other powers of the state and subjugate democratic freedoms. A political regime of these characteristics called "Bonapartist regime" , supported by spies, thugs, undemocratic institutions such as the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, based on the persecution and elimination of all kinds of internal and external opposition would have been in case of prevail, a change in the history of the United States.

But the Nixon Administration's attempt failed. Cornered after a series of legal battles, the Supreme Court and accusations from the House of Representatives and the Senate, Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974 and became the only president in the country's history to resign from office. His successor, Vice President Gerald Ford, granted Nixon a controversial pardon for any federal crimes he had committed during his term.

Nixon's fall was depicted in the 1976 film " All the President's Men " by Alan Pakula, and was another enormous triumph achieved by the mobilization. As Nahuel Moreno explains : "... the policy...of imperialism, since the beginning of the revolutionary stage...Crush the revolution with military methods...Break down the Vietnamese struggle militarily and thereby threaten the rest of the colonial peoples of the world, do not go out and fight for independence because they are going to continue crushing you. This failed. It failed because they were beaten... there was a Bonapartist project that the government controlled everything, thoroughly, it went over the top of parliament and the two-party system, tried to control the other party... He was also defeated" (17)

The Third American Revolution of the 20th Century

The fall of Nixon was the final episode of a revolutionary process that shook the United States and the world. The convergence of the women's struggle, the movement of the black race, sexual minorities, youth and the fight against the Vietnam War resulted in the triumph of a revolution that followed in the footsteps of the 1st American Revolution, the War of Independence in the 18th century, and the Second American Revolution, the Civil War of the 19th century. What was known as "The Fight for Civil Rights" was an enormous revolutionary process that included the participation of popular organizations and unions, which mobilized enormous masses of the people, which had deaths, martyrs and leaders.

At the same time, the entire process of mobilization against the Vietnam War, together with the Civil Rights Movement, achieved a series of democratic triumphs of a historic nature that had an impact on the country and the world. It shook several governments, brought down Nixon, led the army to defeat Vietnam, won rights for blacks, women, youth, sexual minorities and the entire country's people, but they had a global impact, and they last to this day. . The triumphs achieved by the mass movement in this period constituted the Third North American Revolution, that of the 20th century.

In turn, the union of all these mobilization processes together, added to the resistance of the mass struggle in Vietnam, caused the simultaneous collapse of the Saigon regime and the Nixon Administration. Eight months after the fall of Nixon, the fall of the Thieu puppet regime occurred in Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, on April 30, 1975. That day the Viet Cong took control of the city and put an end to the war. War with the Vietnamese triumph which allowed the reunification of the country. The defeat of Vietnam was a blow that the country's ruling classes had suffered, a defeat that was felt by the army commanders, the bankers and the rulers, and led to the fall of Nixon and Thieu, almost simultaneously. For the ruling class it was a severe defeat.

But for the people, it was different. On May 11, 1975, more than 80,000 people celebrated the end of the war in Central Park, New York. These historical events forever marked the history of the United States, and left behind the so-called "Vietnam Syndrome", which the successive Democratic and Republican administrations that succeeded Nixon suffered. Every time some of the governments in power outlined the possibility of starting a war or an invasion, the ghost of Vietnam was present, again and again. The enormous mass mobilization, in which the most diverse social movements converged, the movement for women's rights, the anti-war movement, the movement of students, workers, and sexual minorities, had achieved the withdrawal of the troops in Vietnam, and caused military defeat in Southeast Asia, in partnership with the resistance of the Vietnamese people and the global mobilization against the war.

By itself, this extraordinary military triumph achieved by the conjunction of the global mobilization against the war, the Vietnamese masses, and the American people, is enough to classify what happened in the '60s and '70s as a revolution. But this was not the only achievement of the revolutionary process. The convergence of 3 struggles, that of women, that of the movement of the black race, sexual minorities, youth and the fight against the Vietnam War, and known as "The fight for Civil Rights" was an enormous revolutionary process . As Howard Zinn defined it: " The black revolution, both north and south, arrived - as if by surprise - in the 1950s and 1960s...Vietnam was the first great defeat of the American global empire after the World War II. This defeat was achieved by revolutionary peasants in a foreign country and by a surprising protest movement at home...the great revolt of sectors of the population arrived...the blacks, the women, the native Americans, the prisoners , soldiers, etc..." (18)

The characteristic of every revolution is that it provokes changes in the political regime. In the case of the Third American Revolution it was no exception. The triumph of the Third American Revolution of the 20th century introduced four enormous changes in the country's political regime: Firstly, it liquidated the Bonapartist project of Richard Nixon's government, supported by the Pentagon, the CIA and the FBI, leaving all of these antidemocratic institutions in crisis for several decades, installed the "Vietnam Syndrome", that is, for 30 years, the United States Armed Forces could not carry out any more invasions, except for the invasion of the small island of Grenada in 1983.

Secondly, the triumph of the Third American Revolution caused the disappearance of the Jim Crow regime of racial segregation that had existed for a century in the country. The police states whose racist and xenophobic political regimes were semi-fascist supported by repressive institutions, the police, the Ku Kux Klan, the White Citizens Committees, were liquidated. Along with the disappearance of these police states, all the racist legislation imposed since the time of the Compromise of 1877 that ended the Reconstruction period fell. Thirdly, the triumph of the Third American Revolution by consolidating the granting of the vote to the excluded black population, definitively instituted universal suffrage, an issue that was in the country's Constitution, but was a dead letter since the racist oligarchy of the South had prevented it from being implemented.

Under the impact of the wave of democratic victories, another occurred when the United States Supreme Court struck down laws prohibiting interracial marriage, in the 1967 case Loving v. Virginia. This case, a landmark civil rights case, was brought by Mildred Loving, an African-American woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, who had been sentenced to a year in prison in Virginia for marrying each other. Their marriage violated the state's anti-miscegenation statute, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited marriage between people classified as white and people of color. The Supreme Court decision ended all racial restrictions on marriage in the United States.

Fourthly, the triumph of the Third American Revolution achieved a historic achievement for the women's movement when it achieved the right to abortion, and another historical achievement for the Sexual Liberation movement: Gays and lesbians came out of the closet. Taking into account that every triumph of the women's movement weakens patriarchy and private ownership of the means of production and change that are pillars of the capitalist system, the triumphs achieved by the women's movement also had a profound impact on the country's political regime.

Imperialist crisis and the "Trilateral Commission"

The Third North American Revolution produced the fall of Nixon, and the failure of the Bonapartist project. In this way, the antidemocratic framework embedded in the heart of the country's political regime that emerged after the Second World War, received its first slap. However, the nature of permanent danger implied by the network of deeply reactionary institutions such as the Pentagon, the CIA and the FBI provoked all kinds of protests and the emergence of the anti-arms movement.

As Howard Zinn explains: "...On June 12, 1982, the largest political demonstration in the history of the country took place in New York's Central Park. Almost a million people gathered to express their will to end the arms race. Scientists who had worked on the atomic bomb added their voices to the movement, which was growing by the day. George Kistiakowsky, a chemistry professor at Harvard University who had worked on the first atomic bomb and who later served as a scientific advisor under President Eisenhower, he became the spokesman for the disarmament movement. His last public statements, before he died of cancer at the age of 82, were published in an editorial in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists magazine in December 1982." I tell you this as my last parting words. Forget the channels. There is simply not enough time before the world explodes. Instead, focus on organizing with others who think like you..." (19)

The triumph of the Third American Revolution left the bourgeois democratic regime in profound weakness and its 2 most important parties completely in crisis. This was the sign of the James Carter Administration in the second part of the '70s. Not because it was a weak government, this government was still a government of the Corporations, as Howard Zinn explains: " The presidency of Jimmy Carter, between 1977 and 1980, seemed like the attempt of a part of the ruling classes - the represented by the Democratic Party - to win back disillusioned citizens. But Carter, despite making some gestures towards blacks and the poor, despite talking about "human rights" abroad, remained within the historical political parameters of the American system, protected the wealth and power of corporations, maintained the enormous military machine that depleted national wealth and created alliances between the United States and foreign right-wing tyrannies" (20)

The weakness of the regime, its parties and the rise of the masses within the country and the world were evident in the report that a group of intellectuals and political leaders from Japan, the United States and Western Europe, constituted in "The Trilateral Commission" , published in 1976, titled: "The governability of democracies." There the neocon ideologue Samuel Huntington wrote the section of the report that dealt with the United States as described by Howard Zinn: "Huntington wrote that in the sixties, there was a great increase in citizen participation "in the form of marches, demonstrations, protest movements and organizations with 'cause.'" There was also "a much higher level of self-awareness on the part of blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students and women - all of these sectors mobilized and organized differently ...HM has accused an increase in unionism among white-collar workers." All these processes resulted in "the reaffirmation of egalitarianism as an objective in social, economic and political life" (21)

The traces of the Third American Revolution They are perfectly visible in the Huntington report. According to Howard Zinn in "The Governance of Democracies" he noted: " The essence of the Democratic wave of the sixties was a general challenge to the existing system of authority, both public and private. In one way or another, this challenge manifested itself in the family, the university, business, in associations... in politics, government bureaucracy and the armed forces. People no longer felt the same obligation to obey those they had previously considered superior in age, rank, social position, skill, character or talent. Huntington said that all this "produced problems for the governability of the democracies of the seventies" (22) Huntington added that the president needed the support of a large popular coalition to win the elections. However, as Howard Zinn explains: "the day after your election... what counts is your ability to mobilize the support of the leaders of the key institutions of a society and a government... This coalition must include the key people in Congress, the executive sector and the ruling caste framed in the private sector" (23)

What worried Huntington was the loss of government authority. But Huntington worked informing the organized Trilateral Commission, which expressed Rockefeller's dominance over the US economy and multinationals over the world economy. As Howard Zinn explains : "...Huntington was reporting all of this to an organization that was vital to the future of the United States, the Trilateral Commission, organized by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski in early 1973. Rockefeller was a leader of Chase. Manhattan Bank and an influential financial figure in the United States and around the world, Brzezinski was a professor of international relations at Columbia University and an advisor to the State Department. The Trilateral Commission was created to promote the union between Japan, Western Europe and " (24)

The Third North American Revolution, however, did not end capitalism. It shook imperialism, its Bonapartist institutions and armies, but the mobilized masses did not have in their front leaders and organizations that wanted to end the capitalist state, and impose socialism globally. Quite the contrary, existing socialist organizations, such as the Communist Party of China or the USSR, invariably ended up making agreements with imperialism, and renounced extending and coordinating the global struggle against the imperialist state, its institutions and its monopolistic companies. Left to survive, even in crisis, and hit, capitalism globally launched its counteroffensive to recover, and that counteroffensive was well prepared by organizations such as the Trilateral Commission, which expressed the domination of multinationals over the world economy.

As Howard Zinn explains: " The Trilateral Commission also wanted to resolve another situation caused by the fact that business no longer recognized national borders. In 1960 there were eight American banks with branches abroad, in 1974 there were 129. The The assets of these foreign branches amounted to $3.5 billion in 1960, and $155 billion in 1974. The Trilateral Commission saw that its task would be to help create the international relations necessary for the new multinational economy" (25)

The Trilateral had to respond to another challenge of capitalism and the North American state: The crisis of the Keynesian regime and the multinationals that had led the post-war economic "boom", but by the mid-1970s it was already showing clear signs of exhaustion and needed a transition to a higher regime of capitalist accumulation. All this led the monopolistic conglomerates to align themselves around conservative governments that had the capacity to impose their force, and as we saw, around the governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, a counteroffensive against the popular and working classes around the world began. . A brutal offensive by the Corporations, which benefited as Howard Zinn explains: "The Reagan administration, with the help of Democrats in Congress, lowered the tax rate for the very rich to 50%, and in 1986 a coalition of Republicans and Democrats sponsored another "tax reform" bill that lowered the top rates to 28%. A school teacher, a factory worker, and a millionaire could all pay 28%." (26)

The Third American Revolution gave rise to social and political realignments. He caused the Roosevelt-led Democratic Party coalition to break up, and the racist wing of the party that included corrupt machines like New York's Tammany Hall to shift to the Republicans. On the other hand, he caused liberals who had often supported Republicans against racist Democratic machines like Tammany Hall to switch to the Democratic Party. In the economic field, Reagan's counteroffensive meant cuts in social assistance for the poor, lower taxes for the rich, an increase in the military budget, and an offensive within the judicial branch to roll back the legal gains obtained by the III North American Revolution. As Howard Zinn explains: " By the end of Reagan's term, the gap between rich and poor in the United States had increased dramatically. While in 1980, top corporate executives earned 40 times more than the average worker earned. On average, they earned 93 times more in 1989. Although all members of the lower classes had worsened, those who suffered the most were blacks, Hispanics, women and young people..." (27) Imperialist-capitalism needed to overcome the exhausted Keynesian regime, and move to a higher accumulation regime.

The union of the "two great struggles" against the Bush Administration

The historic achievements of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights laws of 1964 and 1965, and the triumph of the Third American Revolution of the 20th century, did not mean the end of oppression, racism and discrimination in the United States. They are enormous achievements , great advances achieved with revolutionary mobilizations, but the postponement, marginalization, oppression, and inequality in the country continued for African Americans and minorities. Economic marginalization, job discrimination, lack of equal opportunities, police persecution and murder of young people continue to be scourges suffered by African Americans to this day, which is why the fight for their rights continues to be a permanent and daily task.

But with the arrival of the attempted establishment of the Patriot Act regime 40 years after the promulgation of the laws of 1954 and 1965, the Bush Administration intended to erase in one fell swoop many of these achievements that the American people achieved with struggle, sacrifice and martyrs When Hurricane Katrina made landfall it laid bare the Bush Administration's horrific, brutal and racist policy toward New Orleans. But the repudiation that the criminal policy of the Bush Administration provoked in the population was such that the historical movements of the Third North American Revolution once again rose on the horizon.

These historical movements, the "two great struggles " that marked the history of the country, the fight against War, and for Civil Rights, resurfaced, reunited and were reborn, now with new protagonists, leaders and organizations. In March 2006, the "Walking to New Orleans" march was held , organized by VFP, MFSO, GFSP and IVAW, the organizations that were fighting against the War in Iraq, together with the organizations that were fighting in New Orleans for the reconstruction of the city. after Katrina. The march was along the Gulf Coast from Mobile, Alabama, to New Orleans, and among the protesters' demands was the immediate end of the war in Iraq and the redirection of funds to help rebuild the areas damaged by Katrina not only in New Orleans, but also in Mississippi and Alabama.

It was logical that these protests would develop: The entire behavior of the Bush Administration in the face of Katrina was criminal. The population saw through the media images of President Bush partying with his Republican friends in California, while the city of New Orleans was dying. Television screens broadcast images of Vice President Cheney playing golf, while thousands of African-American citizens suffered a catastrophe.

The Bush Administration was completely unconcerned with the reality of African-American citizens suffering from the scourge of Hurricane Katrina, as recognized in his memoir: " No Higher Honor. A memoir of My Years in Washington." Condoleezza Rice, who was Secretary of State at the time and the highest-ranking person of color in the Bush Administration, recounts in the book that when the hurricane hit New Orleans, she chose to take a few days off, traveled to New York, and stayed at the Palace before going out to dinner, and seeing a play.

The indifference of Bush Administration officials to the Holocaust of the people of New Orleans was shocking. Thousands of African Americans succumbed while the most important African American in the Bush Administration simply called Secretary of Homeland Security Mike Chertoff to ask if there was anything she could do to help in Louisiana, since Chertoff told her that he would call her if he asked her. needed. After speaking with Chertoff Rice hung up, got dressed and went to see Spamalot, a musical on Broadway. The next morning, she went shopping at the Ferragamo store.

In the midst of the tragedy in New Orleans, the African-American Secretary of State tried on shoes in an expensive store in New York. While the secretary of state enjoyed her shopping trip in Manhattan, TV images projected the cries of despair, the hardships of tens of thousands of needy and hungry black and white citizens barely surviving in a dark and nauseating convention center and in a sports stadium. The entire Bush Administration was plunged into discredit, FEMA and HS were left in the middle of the accusations. Michael Chertoff, head of HS, who had appointed Michael D. Brown as director of FEMA, and Brown himself were in the crosshairs of the crisis. On Friday, September 2, Bush praised Brown's work, addressing him directly in friendly terms saying, "You're doing a wonderful job," when FEMA's dismal performance was national knowledge.

Subsequently, Bush declared that he was not satisfied with the results and finally on September 3 he accepted that the federal performance in New Orleans was not good. Brown was temporarily replaced as head of FEMA and then resigned. On September 12, Bush just appeared in New Orleans, and on September 13, 2005, after visiting New Orleans, he took responsibility for the failures of the federal government during a press conference. Racism when it came to receiving help from the authorities extended to the Latino community, and the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) alleged that Latinos affected during the tragedy were marginalized when it came to receiving help from the government.

The repudiation spread among the population and became increasingly important in public demonstrations, in concerts held in New York to raise funds, the legendary singer-songwriter Tom Waits expressed his protest against Bush, and the musician Cyril Neville, a member of one of New Orleans' most legendary bands, the Neville Brothers, wore a T-shirt that said "ethnic cleansing in New Orleans". The repudiation was also based on the disastrous situation suffered by the population of New Orleans.

In 2006, neither the promised aid nor the money raised had reached New Orleans; Half of the population had not yet been able to return to the city, its neighborhoods and its homes. The reconstruction of the countless homes destroyed by water and wind had not begun and the repair of the dikes was postponed. Some leisure, jazz and cultural centers reopened in the French Quarter, but tourism numbers remained well below pre-Hurricane levels for a time. In July 2006, the population had dropped to about 200,000 souls, from the almost 500,000 it had before the hurricane. That is why on September 24, some 300,000 protesters against the war in Iraq filled the main avenues of Washington in the first major anti-war protest and in New Orleans, in one of the largest marches that would take place. The "two great struggles" were once again united.

The "Vietnam Syndrome" was back, with a familiar postcard that the Bush Administration, the Neocon and the Pentagon immediately recognized. Ron Kovic, the mutilated Vietnam veteran who inspired the protagonist of the film Born on the Fourth of July by director Oliver Stone, spoke at the mobilization. Kovic addressed the protesters alongside actress Jessica Lange, MP Cindy Sheehan, British MP George Galloway, Reverend Jesse Jackson, popular leader Jim Hightower, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, singer Joan Báez, Reverend Al Sharpton and Etan Thomas, star of the Washington Wizards professional basketball team. "The people of the United States are beginning to rebel. The force of a hurricane will be nothing compared to the storm of protest that is heading directly towards the White House," Hightower declared at the festival that took place at the end of the march.

And as the anti-war movement grew in the United States, thousands of people marched through central London to demand that British Prime Minister Tony Blair withdraw the 8,500 British soldiers stationed in Iraq. The fury of the Hurricane had been unleashed. But now it was not about the forces of nature of Hurricane Katrina. It was about the strength of the American mass movement, its outrage at the racism of the Bush Administration, and the beginning of the resistance against the war and the Patriot Act regime that was radiating everywhere. An Eminem rap, "Mosh" expressed it with all the lyrics: "... Let's go together, let's all explode just a little...all you can see is a sea of ​​people, some white and some black, No matter the color, what matters is that we are together. To celebrate the same cause, no matter how long it takes...Rebel...stomp, push, crush, screw Bush until they bring our troops home...There outside the oval office...No more blood for oil, we have our own battles to win..." 

Eminem published these lyrics in October 2004, when the Bush Administration was winning re-election, and achieved the highest vote for a candidate for office. president in history up to that point, in the days when things were still going well for the PNAC. But 2005 was the year things turned around and by the end of 2005, everything had completely changed. Now what predominated was the rejection of the Bush Administration's policy, the PNAC, the Iraq War and the Patriot Act regime. The resistance and rejection of the masses began to hit hard all the institutions of the state and the country's regime.

The Bush Administration suffered the onslaught, and with it, all the institutions of the political regime, the political parties, officials, agencies, ministries and the state bureaucracy also suffered. The impact of the crisis hit the country's political regime starting in 2005, and impacted the complex and contradictory relationships established between the country's different institutions. But this political regime is designed to favor a certain social class that dominates the country and the world. The oligarchy that dominates the United States is a social class whose development must be studied exhaustively. The development of this social class, its birth, evolution and subsequent formation, are topics that we will develop and analyze starting in the next chapter.

NOTES

(1) Nahuel Moreno. Painting School. 1984

(2), (3) and (4) Interview by Lars Schall with Nomi Prins 3-6-2014

(5) (6) y (7) George Novack. "Democracy and Revolution" Pathfinder Press 1977

(8) Howard Zinn. "A People's History of the United States" 1980

(9) Leon Trotsky. " Europe and America." 1926

(10) Howard Zinn. "A People's History of the United States" 1980

(11) Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan "Four words that changed the course of history." Democracy Now. June 22, 2018

(12) and (13) Joseph Hansen. World Outlook. February 1968

(14) Howard Zinn. "A People's History of the United States". 1980

(15) Tamara Turner. "Clara Frasier synthesizer of feminism and Marxism." Freedom Socialist 2008

(16) Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address to the nation, January 17, 1961

(17) Howard Zinn. "A People's History of the United States". 1980

(18) Nahuel Moreno. Painting School. 1984

(19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 y 27) Howard Zinn. "A People's History of the United States" 1980

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