Workers Voice Socialist Movement condemns the racist and sexist massacre in Atlanta that has taken the lives of 8 people, 6 of whom were Asian women. This most recent tragedy follows a year that has seen thousands of anti-Asian attacks across the U.S. It is urgent that we put an end to the racist violence afflicting our Asian and Pacific Islander siblings. To do so, we must get to the root of the problem.
Many attribute the rise in attacks to Trump’s racist scapegoating of China for the U.S. failure to control the coronavirus. But Trump is simply the most racist expression of a broader propaganda campaign—pushed by Democrats and Republicans alike—to prime US residents for war with China.
Asians have endured decades of violence at the hands of U.S. imperialism from the Chinese Exclusion Act to the Japanese internment camps to the murderous wars on the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Korea. Each one of these atrocities was accompanied by a racist campaign to turn workers against their Asian siblings. The most recent slew of lies, slanders, and racist anti-Asian caricatures took off around the time of Obama/Biden administration’s “Pivot to Asia” which signaled a move by US imperialism to more directly target China for U.S. domination. Polls show that in only the last ten years, U.S. public opinion has dramatically reversed from a once favorable view towards China.
U.S. politicians and the big business media have always needed to demonize the people they’ve targeted for attack because they would have much less success openly admitting that the U.S. is committing mass murder to benefit a few bankers, bosses, and war profiteers. For years they’ve fanned the flames of Islamophobia so that US residents and soldiers would be duped into accepting war on Muslim majority countries like Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan. And they resorted to the most disgusting means of dehumanizing Asians in order to justify the murder of millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, Korean, Filipino, Indonesian, and Japanese people, including children.
On March 1, 2021—as millions struggle to survive a pandemic— Admiral Phillip Davidson, the military head of the Indo-Pacific Command, requested an extra $27.3 billion in taxpayer dollars to bolster U.S. efforts to threaten China with violence. To justify his request, Davidson referred to China as “the strategic threat of the century to the U.S.” How many Asians are among the “collateral damage” that these admirals and billionaires are willing to accept in order to sell this lie?
To treat the cancer of racism that is eating away at U.S. society, we have to eliminate the source of its power. Workers can break the chains of racism but we must challenge head-on the lies and slanders that Wall Street and the Pentagon trot out to sell their wars or justify their domination of the world.
Racism and oppressions of all sorts are promoted by the capitalists because when workers are divided against one another they pose less of a threat to the dictatorship of the rich. But if we workers of the world unite to fight for our common interests—for food, healthcare, and housing—their racist lies will increasingly fall on deaf ears. United, workers even have the power to put an end to their murderous wars.
Solidarity with our Asian brothers, sisters, and siblings!
Workers and all oppressed people of the world unite to end U.S. imperialism and white supremacy!