On May 26, Zbigniew Brzezinski (89), a major architect of U.S. imperialism and servant of the U.S. bosses, finally died. While history is made by the masses and outside the sole influence of just one person, Brzezinski played a disproportionately large individual role in helping shape the capitalist reign of terror we live in today.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was a professor at Columbia University in the late 1960s when, during a Progressive Labor Party-led student strike, he called for the arrest, trial and incarceration of the leadership of 1968 campus strikes—and “[i]f that leadership cannot be liquidated at least it can be expelled from the country.” (NY Times 5/26). Brzezinski shared the U.S. capitalist class’s concern for the fate of their empire, and eagerly offered his intellectual services to them.
Many of the student leaders to whom he referred were members of PLP. PLP remains proud to have been the publicly stated enemy of this arch-imperialist butcher!
Vietnam: Blow to U.S. Imperialism
Many readers of CHALLENGE have only known a world in which U.S. imperialism has waged perpetual war in the Middle East. They are too young to remember U.S. imperialism’s vicious assault on—and defeat at the hands of —the working people of Vietnam.
U.S. imperialism’s defeat in Vietnam was a major turning point, and changed the course of world history. Never again would U.S. imperialism adopt all out war, as waged there and in Korea. A “Vietnam syndrome” has forced US imperialism to wage war without exposing ground troops to mass casualties. Brzezinski led the charge into a new era, one where CIA operatives, air power and special operations troops wreak havoc in the furtherance of the interests of U.S. capital.
The U.S. bosses recognized Brzezinski’s usefulness in working out U.S. imperialist policies, despite these constraints, when he joined the powerful Rockefeller-backed Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski was elevated to a top position as National Security Adviser. Brzezinski articulated the strategic imperative that has guided U.S. imperialism in our lifetime—control the oil reserves of the Persian Gulf region, part of a larger worldwide “grand chessboard” that guides U.S. imperialism to this day.
Brzezinski’s boss made this policy plain as day with his “Carter Doctrine” of 1980:
Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.
For the capitalists, who see everything in terms of maximizing profit and minimizing costs, oil is by far the cheapest energy source to industrialize and fuel a military. Control of the Middle East means control of the world. He has advised and at times publicly criticized all presidents since Carter, including Barack Obama and most recently Donald Trump, for the absence of any coherent “doctrine” to guide U.S. imperialism (NYT 2/20).
Brezinski, then, has been an active architect of U.S. imperialist slaughter since 1980.  This period of time, which includes the complete reversal of the workers’ revolutions in both Russia and China, has seen U.S. capitalism’s lethal grip extend to every corner of the globe.
Godfather of the Mujahideen, al-Qaeda, and ISIS
An outstanding example of imperialist short-sightedness and unintended consequences comes from Carter’s support for the brutal anti-Soviet “mujahideen” forces in Afghanistan.
In 1978, the U.S. bosses, along with the bosses of Pakistan, began secretly funding and recruiting fascist Muslim religious extremists in Afghanistan. They called themselves the “mujahideen,” perverting another religious term for “personal struggle” to justify fascist beliefs. The goal was to overthrow the popular pro-communist government of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). Brzezinski hoped to “give the Soviet Union its Vietnam” (CHALLENGE, 9/17/08). Secretly supporting the mujahideen with an estimated $40 billion U.S. dollars, Brzezinski himself traveled to Pakistan in 1979, addressing the mujahideen training camps, stating “your cause is right and God is on your side” (The Nation, 2/15/99; BBC documentary “Cold War: Soldiers of God,” 5/8/12).
With Carter, Brzezinski and later U.S. covert support, the Afghan mujahideen recruited from around the world, including rich Saudi playboy Osama bin-Laden, who comes from one of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful families. The PDPA government survived the Soviet collapse until it was overthrown by a new generation of mujahideen fighters taking power: the “Taliban” (Pashto for “students,” short for “students of the mujahideen”). The U.S., Pakistani, and Saudi funding ensured the Taliban “students” came of age in mujahideen training camps, who recruited among thousands of young refugees displaced by war. The networks of Arab mujahideen fighters founded allied groups like “al-Qaeda” (Arabic for “foundation,” referring to their fundamentalist interpretation of Islam).
In the early 1990s, following the first U.S. invasion of Iraq and feeling betrayed by his former U.S. employers for stationing soldiers in Saudi Arabia, Osama bin-Laden and his al-Qaeda declared war on the United States. This culminated in terrorist attacks around the world, including the two major attacks on New York City, in 1993 and 2001. In 1998, Brzezinski downplayed his terrorist creation as “some stirred-up Muslims” and their global threat as “nonsense” (Counterpunch, 1/15/98). Following the second U.S. invasion of Iraq, al-Qaeda took advantage of Iraq’s political vacuum and, in 2011, spread to Syria. In 2013, a faction split, calling itself the “Islamic State,” often called “ISIL” or “ISIS.”
Butcher Brzezinski has left two other deep legacies: anti-Muslim racism and the mass displacement of workers. Much of the vicious anti-Muslim racism spawned by the U.S. state, domestically and globally, is in part thanks to him, as is the refugee crisis born out of imperialist wars.
Brzezinski’s World: Imperialist Slaughterhouse
The period since 1990 has been a trial by fire as U.S. imperialism ravages the Middle East through war and war-induced disease and dislocation. For the entire African continent, the period has been utterly devastating as rival imperialist powers back genocidal regimes to control minerals and resources. The world Brzezinski worked toward, has seen its sole remaining superpower, the U.S., back all sides in resource-rich Congo, where the largest armed conflict since World War II rages. The “free market” that reigns supreme allowed capitalist pharmaceutical corporations to stand idly by while HIV/AIDS ran rampant killing twenty seven million workers to date (aids.org; who.net) with the majority of these deaths being preventable. This same “free” market has starved millions more as arable African farmland is sown with crops for export in pursuit of maximum profit.
Throughout Zbigniew Brezinski’s unfortunately long life, he served U.S. imperialism faithfully, his final act helping Barack Obama craft his murderous policies to try reversing U.S. imperialism’s relative decline. Here was someone dedicated to anti-communism and imperialism, who lived to see Soviet imperialism vanquished and Chinese imperialism take its place as the main rival of the U.S., and who ultimately escaped working class justice. The same will not be true of the capitalist class he worked so hard to protect.
It remains for us to make good on the mortal threat Brzezinski perceived, in embryonic form, at Columbia in 1968 when he confronted the PLP-led student strike: the defeat of U.S. imperialism by powerful new communist movement, one dedicated to learning from the mistakes of past revolutionaries, winning state power and expanding the dictatorship of the proletariat until capitalism is defeated once and for all.