The "Freedom" of George W. Bush
K.C. Adams

Commentary

George W. Bush's freedom is Free Trade, the free movement of commodities and financial services around the world, the free movement of capital to overwhelm and devour independent economies. His freedom is the free movement of his weapons of mass destruction to prowl the seven seas, the skies overhead and even outer space. His freedom is to send spy planes to crawl along the borders of sovereign nations, to send U2 planes high in the sky above sovereign nations and have satellites from space peering down spying on the economies and life of sovereign people, preparing to attack them and take them over.

George W. Bush's freedom is to use the advantages of the industrialized countries to plunder the labour and natural resources of the poor countries, the countries that have suffered irreparable harm from the slave trade and colonial rule. It is the freedom to lock the former colonies and other poor countries into an endless cycle of debt repayment to the big powers, the World Bank and the IMF. George W. Bush's freedom traps the poor countries in the treadmill of using all their surplus social value to service their debts, to pay for the high-priced machinery and other goods owned exclusively by the big powers. Bush's freedom is to charge whatever his monopolies demand for their products and pay as little as they want for the products of the peasants and poor countries. His freedom is the long held freedom of colonialism and imperialism to plunder and pillage the world at their leisure, to build their empires, to send their troops everywhere, to spread their cultural and ideological values everywhere and crush the time-honoured beliefs of the world's peoples. His freedom is the freedom to send missionaries of American fundamentalism around the world to poison the thinking of the people, to stem the natural development of the people's thinking in dealing with the natural and social reality they face. He demands the freedom to force on them the dogma of the rich: neo-liberalism, the free market system and the multi-party democracy of the powerful.

It is the freedom of the powerful individual to lord it over the collectives of the people, to lord it over the interests of the society, to lord it over the natural environment. It is the freedom of the powerful individual to disrupt the harmony among individuals, their collectives and the society. George W. Bush's freedom is to stop the wheel of progress, a declaration that society is stuck at
the level of the "American way of life" where the only issue now is to protect America's interests and secure its place in the world as the sole superpower.

His freedom is to halt the development of human beings as thinking beings, to stem the development of their capacity to use their brains and natural abilities to solve problems, to involve themselves in politics and government, to solve the problems facing society through their own efforts, through their political empowerment. His freedom is to stop the humanizing of the social and natural world, the building of a world of harmony and peace where people work and struggle together, not against one another, not exploiting one another in a wild savage brutish scramble to survive but through developing their human qualities to work together for the common good, to share and live in peace and cherish the wellbeing of all people as much as their own wellbeing. His freedom means to crush the sovereignty of nations to protect what he calls the national interests of the U.S., the national security of the U.S. and by doing so unleash war, endangering the very existence of the human species.

In a world split into rich and poor both among nations and within nations, freedom for the rich means oppression for the poor. Freedom for the poor means restricting the freedom of the rich to exploit and plunder. Freedom is not abstract; it is real. Freedom is born out of the reality the people face and the necessary struggles that reality demands. It is not George W. Bush's freedom. His freedom is the people's enslavement.