Workers World Vol. 19, No. 9
March 1 – Once again, as on so many other occasions, an international crisis of enormous significance to the American working class and to the oppressed people throughout the world has come and apparently gone. No one can tell for sure whether it is really over. What is certain is that the Ugandan crisis is a made-in-U.S.A. product. It has been planned, fashioned, and coordinated with the principal branches of the government – the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department.
Secretary of State Vance as much as said this in his interview on CBS last Sunday when he admitted that the provocative statements made by President Carter and the one made earlier by UN Ambassador Young were all planned out in advance.
The campaign against the Ugandan regime has been long in the making and the effort of the Carter administration to embark on the road of brinksmanship on the African continent is only the latest in a series of moves calculated to strangle the national liberation movements in that part of the world. It will not succeed.
The crisis in U.S.-Uganda relations follows the same, almost exact pattern as was with the case of the Mayaguez and later the case of the tree-cutting incident in the DMZ in Korea last year. In each of these cases it was the U.S. that provoked the crisis. In each of these cases public opinion was carefully prepared in advance of the event and calculated to bring about the “appropriate” form of approval in all segments of the ruling class.
It should be observed that the most striking feature in each of these crises was the sudden unanimity on the course pursued by the government which seized the entire capitalist establishment, the bourgeois press, as well as the media.
How ironic that in the land where the ruling class boasts so much about diversity of political opinion and conflicting viewpoints on public issues, that when an international crisis of a potentially explosive character breaks out then all the vaunted diversity of viewpoints suddenly vanish into thin air and the crudest conformity takes over – a conformity that differs little from that which prevails in a totalitarian, fascist regime.
Let us see: During the Mayaguez crisis the Pentagon and the Ford-Kissinger administration carefully prepared public opinion for the provocation. A great deal of “diversity of opinion” in the ruling class existed regarding the U.S. course in Cambodia, which of course did not stop the bombardment of that beleaguered country. But when the Mayaguez provocation took place nobody in Congress spoke out against it. Nobody in high office took issue with the Ford-Kissinger-Schlesinger policy of trying to provoke this small country into a virtual war of annihilation.
The capitalist media soon found itself in unanimous agreement that the Ford-Schlesinger plan of attack was the right way to deal with retrieving the Mayaguez ship. Only much later was there some criticism but not, of course, on the principal issue – the unprovoked attack against a small Southeast Asian nation which had been under bombardment by the U.S. literally for years. The criticism centered on the issue of “expediency.”
No different was the U.S. provocation against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea with the tree-cutting incident. The Pentagon carefully staged that one very well indeed. Schlesinger, the nuclear war advocate, who was then Secretary of Defense, and now principal advisor on “energy” (which includes A-bomb production) to President Carter, threatened to unleash nuclear havoc against the Koreans in the event that they responded to the flagrant U.S. aggression. There was no opposition to Schlesinger’s nuclear brinksmanship. He was backed both in Congress and by the media.
The case of Uganda differs only in form and not in essence from that of Korea and Kampuchea. All three are oppressed nations which have struggled to free themselves from imperialist domination and aggression. In the case of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Kampuchea, and Laos, they have freed themselves from imperialist domination. Uganda has not been that fortunate. It is still a country barely emerging from neo-colonialism.
What the Anglo-American finance capitalists hold against the Idi Amin regime is that it has been trying to make the transition from neo-colonialism to national independence. The vicious campaign launched against Uganda has nothing whatever in common with any objection to political repression, dictatorial rule, or lack of observance of democratic norms. The anger against the Idi Amin regime by the Western imperialist press and the U.S. press in particular is occasioned by the predatory imperialist interests in Uganda and not the failure of the Idi Amin regime to abide by democratic norms. What they really oppose is the course Uganda has taken in restraining and limiting imperialist domination contrary to the hopes and expectations of the lords of high finance and industry in Britain, West Germany, and of course the U.S.
Not the lease factor involved in all this is the precious copper and tin in that area and the fact that this East African country offers an important vantage point from which to threaten all the rest of Africa, particularly southern Africa.
No one should be misled by the poisonous propaganda machine which has been working overtime to becloud the central issue. It is basically the orientation of the U.S. to strangle the national liberation movements in all of Africa and to topple every regime on that continent which doesn’t toe the line of Wall Street imperialism. This is the real issue.
It should not be forgotten that there have been more than 20 coups d’état in the past 25 years in Africa. All of them are the result of the cruel legacy left from the direct rule of the imperialist and the transition to a neo-colonial status. The Ugandan regime is merely the immediate target in a vast and complex plan of the imperialist powers to strengthen their stranglehold on that beleaguered continent by means of neo-colonial puppet regimes and to crush genuine revolutionary national liberation movements such as have successfully won power in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands.
For revolutionary Marxist-Leninists the political form and social system of the Ugandan regime should not pose any more of a problem in the struggle against imperialism than did the political form and class character of the Haile Selassie regime at a time when Italian fascism attempted its flagrant aggression against Ethiopia.
At that time it was well understood in the broad working-class and progressive movement that the political form and class character of the Ethiopian regime was not to be construed as a basis for justifying fascist aggression against a small oppressed country. The overriding issue then, as it is now, is the relationship between an imperialist oppressing national against an oppressed nation.
The fact that Haile Selassie’s regime in its political form was an absolute monarchy and its class system based on feudal relationships was not to be taken as an excuse to shelve the struggle against imperialist domination and aggression. This is the ABC of Leninist teachings.
At that time fascist propaganda tried to weaken the anti-imperialist struggle by constantly raising the nature of the absolutist monarchy under Haile Selassie and the existence of servitude in the mass of the population, particularly the peasantry. By and large, there were few who were taken in by this propaganda. Of course the fact that the imperialist democracies were opposed to the fascist aggression is a factor to be taken into account. In reality, however, their opposition was not based on any regard for the national independence of small countries but on the brutal fact that they themselves were anxious to take over in Ethiopia as they ultimately did.
How much does the U.S. aggression against the Idi Amin regime really differ from that of Mussolini’s aggression against Ethiopia? Does President Carter, the man who suggested to make Lieutenant Calley a national hero for the American people and who was a hawk in the Vietnam war, really differ in his approach to Uganda from Mussolini’s approach to Ethiopia. It’s only a question of form. Not of essence. The objective is that of imperialist domination and this is as true of Carter today as it was of Mussolini yesterday.
Of course, the political form of the state and the nature of the internal class struggle is all important. Revolutionary Marxists can never close their eyes to that. But it can never be an answer to justify imperialist aggression or allow imperialist propaganda to blur the nature of the anti-imperialist struggle. Certainly the bourgeoisie does not get sidetracked by its own propaganda. Its class interests are not blurred by appeals to abstract principles of justice and humanity.
It is interesting to note that practically as the same time that Carter and Vance were unleashing their campaign against the Ugandan regime on the basis of “human rights,” Vance made sure to give high praise to President Sadat who had just crushed a virtual nationwide rebellion of workers and students and had enacted a law which gives life imprisonment for demonstrations, sit-ins or strikes! The Carter administration has not extended its phony campaign for human rights to Sadat or the butchers Pinochet, Park, or Suharto, whose American-engineered coup d’état resulted in the death of close to a half-million people, and as many as a hundred thousand may still be in the jails of Indonesia.
The primary duty of the American working class is to defend Uganda against any and all imperialist attempts at aggression and not to be taken in by the poisonous propaganda which is calculated to pave the way for the aggression.
Last updated: 11 May 2026