Since Dolly Parton died on 25 August at the age of 80, tributes have poured in from across the world. Her music has filled radio stations and social media feeds, while politicians and celebrities have praised her talent, warmth and generosity.
Parton did things which materially improved people’s lives. Her Imagination Library has distributed more than 300 million free books to young children in five countries. The programme was inspired by her father, who couldn’t read or write, and gave working-class families access to books they might otherwise have struggled to afford.
Her foundation’s Buddy Program offered local children money if they finished school. The foundation reports that the dropout rate among the participating classes fell from 35 percent to 6 percent. Following the 2016 Tennessee wildfires, its My People Fund distributed more than $12 million directly to families who’d lost their homes.
Parton also gave Vanderbilt University Medical Center $1 million for COVID-19 research and later another $1 million for research into infectious diseases affecting children. Her song and film 9 to 5 gave a popular voice to the anger of working women facing low pay, sexism and petty workplace tyranny.
These things mattered. Charity can’t replace collective provision or abolish the class relations which produce poverty, but that doesn’t mean the books, medical research and disaster relief weren’t real. A Marxist analysis has no need to invent a cartoon villain or deny the good somebody did.
So why should celebrating Parton’s life be controversial?
Because another part of her public life was her enthusiastic support for the US military, including while it was destroying Iraq.
During the 1991 Gulf War, Parton visited Fort Hood in Texas to entertain troops returning from the Persian Gulf. Posing with soldiers and tanks, she shouted: “Saddam Hussein, you son of a bitch! You touch one of my men again and see what happens!”
The phrase “my men” captured the national chauvinism involved. The US soldiers were hers. The Iraqis they bombed, burned and buried weren’t part of the picture at all.
Parton maintained this support during the 2003 invasion. On Veterans Day that year, eight months after US and British forces invaded Iraq on the basis of deliberate lies about weapons of mass destruction, she released For God and Country, an 18-song tribute to the US military. Speaking about American soldiers fighting in Iraq, she told CBS: “We can’t give them enough praise and honor and thanks.”
To understand why this is so serious, the national mythology around Iraq has to be stripped away. The US war on Iraq didn’t begin in March 2003. The 1991 bombing campaign destroyed electricity plants, water systems, factories, roads and other civilian infrastructure. A comprehensive sanctions regime then prevented Iraq from rebuilding.
The sanctions were imposed through the UN, but the US and Britain were their main enforcers. They blocked or delayed billions of dollars’ worth of equipment for electricity generation, water treatment, agriculture, transport and healthcare. Medicines might be approved while the refrigerators needed to preserve them were blocked. Water-treatment plants could be admitted while their generators were refused as supposed “dual-use” goods.
The result was widespread hunger, malnutrition, unsafe drinking water, collapsing hospitals and preventable disease. By 2000, a UNICEF official reported that 25 percent of children in central and southern Iraq suffered from chronic malnutrition and another 9 percent from acute malnutrition. The documented social destruction was enormous, even though the exact number of deaths attributable to sanctions remains disputed. Iraqi adults and children died from dirty water, untreated infections, hunger and the destruction of services which had previously kept them alive. Denis Halliday, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, resigned in protest and described the conditions created by the sanctions as genocidal.
Then came the 2003 invasion and occupation, which amounted to genocide against the Iraqi people. Genocide isn’t limited to executions and death camps. It can also take the form of knowingly destroying the conditions which allow a people to live: their hospitals, water, food supply, security, homes and national institutions. Washington knew what twelve years of siege had already done to Iraq and proceeded to tear the country apart anyway.
Iraq Body Count has documented between 187,499 and 211,046 violent civilian deaths following the invasion. That’s a conservative record of identifiable civilian deaths, excluding many unreported killings, combatant deaths and those who died indirectly. A national household survey published in PLOS Medicine estimated that approximately half a million people died as a result of the war and occupation between March 2003 and June 2011.
Hundreds of thousands were killed at the very minimum. Countless more were wounded, displaced, traumatised or left to live among the ruins. Supporting the troops who carried out that invasion wasn’t a harmless expression of concern for young people in danger. It gave cultural and moral support to the armed servants of an imperialist state while they were committing mass slaughter.
From the perspective of Iraq’s victims, celebrating and supporting US troops means celebrating a genocidal invader, on par with the Nazis. Their material role as members of an invading and occupying army, which destroyed Iraqi life on an industrial scale is undeniable.
An Iraqi family whose child was killed at a checkpoint or whose home was destroyed by an air strike has no reason to regard the American uniform as anything heroic.
And the same applies to millions of people across Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and the many other countries subjected to US invasion, bombing, occupation or military interference. To them, the US military isn’t an abstract collection of hardworking sons and daughters. It’s the machinery which destroyed homes, killed relatives and enforced the interests of US monopoly capital.
Economic pressure may help explain why some working-class Americans enlist — though most US recruits come from middle income homes — but class background doesn’t erase their actions. Workers can be recruited to serve the bourgeois state, and serving to improve their own circumstances doesn’t erase the harm they’re doing.
US political culture trains people not to see any of this. Schools, churches, sporting events, films, television, news organisations and popular music endlessly repeat the language of “service,” “sacrifice” and “our troops.” American soldiers are presented as individuals with names, photographs, grieving parents and unfinished dreams. Their victims appear as vague foreign crowds, casualty estimates or “collateral damage.”
US deaths are tragedies. Iraqi deaths are statistics. US aggression is called a mistake, while resistance to occupation is called terrorism. The soldier firing the weapon is humanised, while the person standing in front of it disappears.
This racial and national hierarchy is essential to imperialism. The ruling class couldn’t maintain a worldwide system of military bases, invasions and coerced markets if workers in the imperial core recognised people abroad as their class brothers and sisters. They’re instead trained to identify with their own bourgeois state and to treat its armed forces as politically sacred.
Dolly Parton gave millions of children books. She helped families after disasters and funded useful medical research. She also lent her enormous popularity to the military machine which devastated Iraq. Both are true. A serious assessment of her life has to contain that contradiction.
Her death doesn’t make criticism improper, and grief doesn’t turn support for imperialist troops into an innocent personal quirk. Remaining silent so we don’t spoil anyone’s nostalgia simply asks the Iraqi dead to disappear again for the comfort of people in the imperial core.
We can value Parton’s music and acknowledge the real good she did without joining in the sanctification of the US military. Nostalgia isn’t an excuse for amnesia, and death shouldn’t grant political absolution.
