The bourgeois press, particularly the liberal-run media, has gone to great lengths to portray recently deceased Democratic Party politician and former President James Earl Carter Jr. as a “humanitarian” and “peacemaker.” Carter was the 39th president, the executive officer for the U.S. capitalist rulers, from 1977 to 1981.
“To all of the young people in this nation and for anyone in search of what it means to live a life of purpose and meaning — the good life,” then President Joseph Biden eulogized, “study Jimmy Carter, a man of principle, faith and humility.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that Carter always acted, often with brutal methods, to defend the interests of the U.S. ruling capitalist class in both foreign and domestic policy.
Peter Baker, writing in the New York Times, said Carter “became one of his generation’s great peacemakers with his Camp David accords, bringing together Israel and Egypt.”
In his book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, Carter promoted the lie that Israel is primarily to blame for the conditions the Palestinian people face in Gaza and elsewhere. This lets the reactionary bourgeois forces there, such as Hamas and Fatah, off the hook.
It is Hamas’ course, above all, that has ensured conditions in Gaza remain deplorable. For decades Hamas has used Palestinians as human shields, believing their deaths help it win political support and financial backing. Its oft-stated aim is to destroy the state of Israel and kill as many Jews as possible. In 2009 Carter met with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and embraced him.
It is Hamas’ Tehran-backed pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023 — killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, wounding thousands, raping and mutilating dozens of women and kidnapping 250 hostages — that is responsible for the recent fighting in Gaza.
Carter falsely accused the Jewish state of “apartheid,” charges Hamas and its supporters use to justify the Oct. 7 pogrom.
It’s preposterous to say that what exists in democratic capitalist Israel today is apartheid. There are 9.9 million people living there, 21% of whom are Arabs, mostly Muslims, almost all of them citizens with the right to vote and who can travel anywhere they want.
In apartheid South Africa, some 24 million Black Africans, the overwhelming majority of the country’s people, were barred from citizenship and the right to vote. Every aspect of their labor and life was under the control of the apartheid rulers.
Carter backs apartheid South Africa
When the apartheid rulers of South Africa invaded newly independent Angola in 1975, Carter as president in 1978 sided with them against the new Angolan government. Despite the efforts of Carter and U.S. administrations that followed his, Angola, backed by tens of thousands of volunteer Cuban forces, won a decisive victory in 1988. This victory “broke the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressors,” Nelson Mandela explained, and opened the road to the collapse of the apartheid government and system.
Carter was a fierce opponent of Cuba and its socialist revolution. He accused Cuba of being a violator of human rights and encouraged Cuban counterrevolutionaries’ efforts to bring down Cuba’s revolutionary government.
On New Year’s Eve 1977 in Tehran, Carter toasted the notorious shah of Iran, saying because of his “great leadership,” Iran “is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.” The shah used his brutal secret police force to ruthlessly suppress opposition.
The next year, anti-shah protests broke out in Iran’s major cities. The shah responded by ordering his forces to fire on demonstrators, killing hundreds and wounding thousands. By October 1978 strikes paralyzed the country. Workers, farmers, women and oppressed nationalities in their millions carried out the historic Iranian Revolution in 1979.
Carter was no friend to working people at home, either. He invoked the anti-working-class Taft-Hartley law in a failed attempt to break the 1977-78 111-day coal miners strike. Using it, he ordered the miners back to work and threatened to fine or jail their union leaders, confiscate their union treasuries, and even to cut off food stamps for their families.
Far from a record of promoting people and human rights, Carter’s slavish support for the U.S. capitalist rulers at home and abroad made him an enemy of humanity.