Sometimes in an autobiography like this one, we learn about virtual secrets of state or profound matters of economics and foreign affairs. This book casts some light on intra-White House struggles in the Clinton administration, but it has nothing new in the areas of economics or foreign affairs.
After the failure of health care reform that Hillary Clinton tried to lead from 1992 to 1994, she shifted to symbolic roles typical of first ladies and vice-presidents–arranging social events and attending funerals for heads of state and other famous people. In such a role, it is possible to visit many countries without getting too deeply involved in the issues. Living History seems a little shallow on the issues of foreign policy, by simply accepting mainstream imperialist demagoguery in passing–e.g. the idea that the Sandinistas did not win legitimate bourgeois elections in Nicaragua in the 1980s, (p. 312) contrary to countless international observers.
Hillary Clinton's first concerns are health care, children and wimmin. However, defeating the domestic right-wing Republican agenda was also high on her list. In this book, she tells the public what the Washington Post and New York Times never explained on domestic politics, so it's a matter of a getting her side of the story out.
Red-baiting
Hillary Clinton makes it no secret that she came from a red-baiting household where the father's regular dinner-time conversation denounced communism.(p. 12) He was also rather a bigot against gays, Blacks and the usual suspects for white bigots.
When her father campaigned for Bill Clinton he did so saying he made an exception for Bill Clinton, because he believed that the Democratic Party was only "one step short of communism"(p. 164)--to which MIM would say, "if only." There is a whole section of Amerikkka with views similar to Hillary Rodham's father's–ready for fascism or monarchism.
Fear so much rules Amerikkkan politics, that the fearful fascist, monarchist and other reactionary currents have no clue what this "communism" thing is that they denounce. They only know that it rocks the boat of their economic privileges to rob other countries for cheap gas and benefit from slave labor.
Hillary Clinton fits in that category of the ignorant channeled onto a pre-set path as well. She started life as a "Goldwater girl" active for ultra-reactionary Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential campaign. In college she was a college Republican leader before resigning to become more of a Democrat. She admits that she hardly read anything but her home town paper well into college,(p. 31) while nonetheless gaining political leadership roles as a youth.
She admits that in her era, her generation debated endlessly about what it meant to serve the country. Many men she and Bill Clinton knew had died in Vietnam. However, Bill Clinton's and Hillary Clinton's opposition to the war was not based on internationalist principle. Instead, they doubted the "wisdom" of fighting a "land war" in East Asia–code words for saying the united $tates could not win, so what was it all about? She mentioned moral values, but it appeared to be in reference to whether making young men die for a futile war was just while some people escaped service. She was not able to come out and say that the killing of millions of Vietnamese was wrong and not able to generate global peace.
In another generation, Hillary Rodham would have ended up to the right of Barbara Bush, but Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton were the right-wing of a whole generation in upheaval. She did not avoid the interactions of the time and admits to discussing revolution; although only in passing and without going into detail other than to deny that she would ever participate, even if it did come to the united $tates as much of her generation believed in her day. "In my mind, Dr. King and Mahatma Gandhi had done more to bring about real change through civil disobedience and non-violence than a million demonstrators throwing rocks ever could."(p. 37) She does not bother comparing how Gandhi's liberated India fell behind Mao's liberated China in every statistic of well-being of the people. In other words, she took the easy way out of an issue she encountered, something that was to become her norm to the point where she admitted she originally even did not think about running for New York Senate, because of the difficulties it would entail in 2000.
In her book and apparently her whole life, she touches on some issues without bringing them into any coherent focus. She mentions the Black Panthers and how they could not get a fair trial, but not in depth, and certainly without explanation. "Hoover's FBI infiltrated dissident groups and, in some cases, broke the law in order to disrupt them. Law enforcement sometimes failed to distinguish between constitutionally protected, legitimate opposition and criminal behavior. As domestic spying and counterintelligence operations expanded under the Nixon Administration, it seemed, at times, that our government was at war with its own people."(p. 44).
With a little more detail she talks about Nelson Mandela–mostly in reference to steadfastness and forgiveness. Hillary Rodham made much of her Christian roots.
In Bill Clinton's second run for Arkansas governor, Hillary Rodham lets the reader know that the public red-baited them as happened later in life as well. When Bill Clinton lost his bid for a second term, an enemy called on the phone to say, "'I'm so glad that nigger-loving Commie fag Bill Clinton lost,' and then hung up. What could inspire such bile? I thought. It was a question I would ask many times in the years ahead."(p. 74) When Cubans had rioted during Clinton's term in Arkansas the voters punished him for "letting" the Cubans riot. Clinton had learned he had to nail down the "Bubba" vote before he could go anywhere.
In 1994, the Bubba vote abandoned Bill Clinton momentarily again: "If you believed everything you heard on the airwaves in 1994, you would conclude that your President was a Communist, that the First Lady was a murderess and that together they had hatched a plot to take away your guns and force you to give up your family doctor (if you had one) for a Socialist health care system."(p. 245) Hillary Clinton is looking at facts like these about a large section of the public and coming to different conclusions than MIM is.
In clever tactics, she red-baits her opponents right back–by referring to their desire to use "big government" to oppose abortion rights–just as in China and then "socialist" Romania. The only reference to the Cultural Revolution in China says that Ken Starr reminded her of what she read in a book about the Cultural Revolution.(p. 503) Contrary to Hillary Rodham, the Cultural Revolution did not empower any Ken Starr. Salacious individuals like that were always shut up and put in their place under Lenin, Stalin and Mao–for example, to the point that Stalin preferred to be blamed for assassinating Kirov than to allow lots of major public gossip about Kirov's love life a la Ken Starr style publicity.
When both sides of a debate red-bait each other with scant information about communism, it's time to recognize that the resulting politics is that peculiar brand of sterility known as "Amerikkkan."
Hillary Clinton as gender bureaucrat
Hillary Clinton is the leader par excellence of a faction of pseudo-feminism, the dominant one if there is such a thing. Once Bill Clinton nailed down the white racist vote in the South by promising more jobs for police and more death penalties, it was inevitable that Hillary Clinton's life would boil and bubble in connection to the gender aristocracy, because the Christian Right failed to believe it had lost the battle for the soul of the Amerikkkan womyn.
Bill Clinton had lined up financial interests to support his campaign. He had also gained great popularity with the Bubbas of Amerikkka. Thus while in office what ended up consuming the Clintons their last six years was the gender aristocracy. There was no other line of attack for the other faction of imperialists facing them; although why the other faction was so ferocious is something Hillary Rodham does not really address adequately or in an interesting fashion.
In an agreement among the imperialists, issues of big money and which countries to bomb, invade or subvert were matters for the imperialists, but to give the commoner a sense of "democracy," the imperialists allowed the pornographers and paparazzi to set up shop. While the imperialists decide where to spend twelve digit military budgets, the general population gets to decide which imperialist is not enough like a monk to have office. These pornographers, paparazzi and sex-obsessed prosecutors like Ken Starr were all one and the same–what MIM simply refers to as part of pornography production for gender aristocracy consumption. The gender aristocracy is that social group of people with leisure-related privileges causing it to side with and enjoy the patriarchy, regardless of genitalia.
Hillary Clinton was a gender bureaucrat and not just a gender aristocrat, because she had a hand in setting the rules or had an influence in setting the rules for the patriarchy and gender aristocracy. She was one of the first of wimmin to keep using her maiden name; she advocated children's rights in the face of abusive parents, sought to shorten foster care and return children to parents in poor families and support a "pro-choice" position on abortion. Above all she symbolizes the professional working womyn and that is what a portion of the nutty reactionary public hates her most for and what that same public hates Bill Clinton "for allowing."
Of course, her influence on these questions started with her hair style and her dress. When she strayed from the gender aristocracy domain into health care reform the gender aristocracy– mostly females seeking to preserve a backward social system–punished her badly. So Hillary Rodham scurried back into gender aristocracy issues (e.g., p. 265) and may yet set her dominant imprint on these questions as president of the united $tates. However, from 1994 to 2000, Hillary Rodham Clinton faced the consequences that her own facile pseudo-feminism unleashed.
She tried valiantly to stay above the fray by supporting breast cancer research funding for example. Really her whole agenda was the least-controversial portion of a feminist agenda, watered down and smothered in electoral politics. However, by upholding her father's "rock-ribbed individualism" and allowing the focus of politics to become the lifestyle of females, she opened the door for what made her most miserable in office–the non-stop pornographic attacks.
The standard "good sport" liberal opinion of integrity is that the pornographers have to be allowed to make money photographing Princess Di or Hillary Rodham as the price to pay for "democracy" and a "free press." When the celebrities complain, the pornographers remind them who makes them famous in the first place–all true enough as the system stands now. As it stands now, it was Hitler in favor of shutting down the entire press just for the reason of this pornography alone.
In contrast, we Maoists are for a dictatorship of the proletariat. In 2002, our party congress passed the following statement: "In the united $tates, the Monica Lewinsky scandal shows that Amerikkkans too can be easily distracted from critical questions of political power. Under socialism, it will remain the task of the dictatorship of the proletariat to convince the masses not to make light of the party in a pornographic way as part of the deal of accepting communist leaders. One way we do that is that we will ask the masses not to persynally impugn communist leaders they do not see up close. Proletarian democracy does not mean spending time on baseless accusations: it means combining actual knowledge with participation. In some cases, it will continue to be necessary to repress the remnants of capitalist society so stubborn as to oppose selfless communist leaders in power for the sake of the overthrown bourgeoisie."
Although Hillary Rodham makes it clear throughout the book that her work and her husband's work suffered because of sleaze and mud-throwing–not just during campaigns either--Hillary Rodham never suggested an overall solution to the problem, and as such she is an accomplice to the pornography made about her life and the life of the whole political system. The basic difference is that Hillary Rodham knows no way out of the generalization of pornography while we at MIM are willing to tell people that with MIM in power, we will be doing without the cheap entertainment of dousing politics with pornography. We will not alternate power with Republicans depending on which side did a better job hurling pornographic accusations last. ("You cheated on your wife"...."no you did"...."you had oral sex with Monica Lewinsky 13 times"....."but you had three different interns....") We are much more intolerant of pornography than Republicans or Democrats.
That is another exposure of why we say Hillary Rodham is a "gender bureaucrat." Her power as an imperialist or wife of labor-aristocracy-vote-getter Bill Clinton is not in question. What is interesting is the gender aristocracy question; although she complains at length about Kenneth Starr's production of pornography, she does nothing to challenge that system of production. Typical was her response to Eli Wiesel: "What is wrong with America? Why are they doing this?" [reference to Monica Lewinsky obsessing–ed.] he asked and Hillary Rodham replied, "I don't know."(p. 447) That's why she is a gender bureaucrat, just a different faction of power-holder in the same system of hierarchy. She's unwilling to come out and challenge the underpinnings of what is happening and ends up accepting the pornography as a "good sport."
Republican leader Newt Gingrich cheated on his wife. He went down. The new speaker of the House Livingstone was caught cheating and he lost his job and also resigned from Congress in 1998. What had happened under the Clintons was that political power came to depend on whoever did a better job taking advantage of the dynamics of leisure-time. The Republicans played this card especially because they believed that Bill Clinton had them beat among the labor aristocracy and they knew he and Hillary had the pseudo-feminist vote locked up. Their only counter was among Christian wimmin, especially home-makers who the Republicans sought to bring to the fore with their line against abortion and professional wimmin.
In the scheme of things, it appeared that the Republicans are on the losing side of a trend of history, since more and more wimmin worked and played important roles in the parasitism of the economy; however, Republicans sought to make Hillary Clinton appear to be tolerating non-monogamy while also meeting with men in public places without her husband–another thing they did not like from back in her Arkansas days to the present time. The game was to make all wimmin fear what privileges they were giving up with the changes in life that Hillary Rodham seemed to symbolize. Some Amerikkkan wimmin thus considered the dynamics of their own leisure-time and "family" in their attitude toward Hillary Clinton. Many wimmin believed she should dump Bill Clinton and go home to bake cookies and they placed this above any consideration of say where the Middle East peace process was going or how to spend or not spend 12 digits of money on "defense." This was one faction of the gender aristocracy. Even more important and indicative of the gender aristocracy was its consumption of every aspect of the Bill Clinton bimbo scandals–Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones & Monica Lewinsky.
Hillary Rodham points this out herself as she notes the context of how Bill Clinton's speeches and actions against Al Qaeda were drowned out by non-stop coverage of Monica Lewinsky. Bill Clinton could bomb another country he learned, and the television stations would still give more time to Monica Lewinsky than anything else. Hillary Rodham again made an important observation without drawing any proper conclusions. What it showed was that the parasites were so secure in their parasitism in that time of prosperity that they were prepared to regard as minor and insignificant virtually any foreign policy problem while attaching utmost importance to the intrusion of new oral sex into the family.
The private sufferings of Hillary Clinton show that gender problems do have a relatively independent dynamic in leisure-time as only MIM stresses in the communist movement. Too many calling themselves "Marxist-Leninist" attempt to do away with discussing gender oppression by simply talking about divisions in the working class or how the employers save money at wimmin's expense. When a faction of the imperialists and the majority of parasites themselves believe themselves to be enjoying prosperity, we see that gender issues can come to the fore and make and break the top imperialist political careers. True, behind-the-scenes, the top imperialists may be manipulating the public for unseen reasons, but there is no doubting the sincerity of the fascination or the effort to consume pornography by the gender aristocracy. The phenomenon of Monica Lewinsky cannot be reduced to an imperialist plot and we doubt very much that one faction of the imperialists wanted to take down both Clinton and Livingstone: the gender aristocracy has to be accorded its own power for any explanation of that whole phenomenon.
For MIM we have made it no secret that there will have to be a "re-civilizing stage" of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the imperialist countries. The population will have to live without sponging off the Third World proletariat for a while –a stage of several years--before it is ready to interact in a fully humyn way with the rest of the world as qualified and equal participants in the building of socialism. Beyond the economic sponging off the Third World proletariat is also the attitude toward politics that came with it–namely that war, death, starvation etc. were someone else's business. Nor will it be proper for people to do away with economic parasitism and still place chasing down the latest version of Monica Lewinsky gossip above life-and-death issues facing the global proletariat. Hence, MIM will also be cracking down on pornography broadly construed, not just ending economic parasitism in the re-civilizing stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is how we answer the whole Hillary/Bill Clinton problem.