Tuesday, January 17, 2023

Truest statement of the week II

Biden is the leader of a supposedly democratic government that is buried in secrets, many of which are known to other governments in the world, but are not made known to the American people. As far as the US ruling class is concerned, the American people must be kept in the dark about how US wars are prepared and what the trillion dollars in annual US military-intelligence spending is really buying. It fears that if the American people knew what crimes were being carried out, they would rise up in anger and outrage.

That is why a courageous exposer of secrets like WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is being held in a British dungeon on a US extradition warrant: his “crime” was to make public evidence of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, records of torture at Guantanamo Bay, diplomatic cables documenting conspiracies to subvert and bully governments around the world, and CIA techniques for hacking and surveillance.

The American corporate media has turned the Biden documents affair into a further justification for suppressing secrets and keeping the American people ignorant of what is being done in their name.

The World Socialist Web Site will not join in this campaign. We base ourselves on the tradition of the Bolshevik Party. When the working class took power in the 1917 October Revolution, one of the first actions of the new government was to publish the secret diplomatic agreements of the Tsarist regime, in which the world was to be carved up among the imperialist powers. That is how the international working class must be defended against the provocations of world imperialism.

 

-- Patrick Martin, "Biden and the secrets of the national security state" (WSWS).