July 29 - FLASH: Today protests are taking place throughout Arizona, and around the U.S. and Mexico, against attacks on immigrants. These protests are happening as Arizona's fascist law, SB1070, goes into effect. Yesterday, on July 28, a federal court judge issued a temporary order that halted the implementation of some of the provisions of this law but allowing other repressive and fascist provisions to go into effect. And SB1070 is but one element of the attacks on immigrants that must be opposed. Today's protests–and the work of revolutionaries within them–are very important.

The current (July 25) print edition of Revolution features substantial and timely analysis, background, and orientation for exposing and opposing the system’s fascist attacks on immigrants (the contents of that issue are online here at revcom.us). Watch this site for more coverage soon.

At this moment, we urge all our readers to watch, show, and spread, very widely, the video clip "Bob Avakian, 'Why do people come here from all over the world?'" from Avakian's historic filmed talk, Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About. The clip is available in English at www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDsRQyhKPfA and in Spanish at www.youtube.com/watch?v=abg4QCw8tLc. (Read more on spreading this video clip.)

On July 25, the organization WikiLeaks released on the Internet nearly 92,000 classified U.S. documents on the war in Afghanistan. The documents on the U.S. war in Afghanistan reveal, among other things, the killing of hundreds of civilians, activities of U.S. assassination squads, and other war crimes. Watch the pages of Revolution and online at revcom.us for coverage of this major development.

We encourage readers to check out important information on these latest WikiLeaks revelations available online at World Can't Wait (worldcantwait.org), including "Nearly 92,000 Classified Documents Leaked, Expose Truth of Afghan War"; "Pentagon Launched 'Manhunt' for Document Leaker"; "The Danger of the WikiLeaks' Leak: You Might Stop Thinking Like an American." Also check out info on national webcast presented by World Can't Wait, scheduled for Sunday, August 1: "Anti-War Leaders and Veterans Respond to WikiLeaks Revelations," featuring Dahr Jamail, Cindy Sheehan, Debra Sweet, and others.

The banner headline in the July 16 New Orleans Times-Picayune blared in big bold letters, "OIL FLOW HALTED." The day before, British Petroleum (BP) had, for the first time since the Deepwater Horizon well exploded on April 20, apparently stopped the flow of crude oil and methane gushing into—and poisoning—the Gulf of Mexico. 

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• The following call is from the Emergency Committee to Stop the Gulf Oil Disaster:
  GULF OIL DISASTER 100 Days of Outrage!
  Demands 100 Actions!
  Cities, Towns, Communities…Globally-the environment has no borders!
  Friday, July 30th 2010

Shirley Sherrod is a Black woman who used to be the Director of Rural Development in Georgia, under the U.S. Department of Agricultural (USDA). On Tuesday, July 21, she was forced to resign after Fox TV ran a video clip of a speech she had given and accused her of being a "racist."

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July 12, 2010. A World to Win News Service. It was with great sorrow and anger that we learned that the authorities in India captured and cold-bloodedly murdered Comrade Azad (Cherukuri Rajkumar), a leading member of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) known throughout the world for his work as the party's spokesperson, and party comrade Hemchandra Pandey. Following is a slightly edited statement by the CPI (Maoist) Central Committee released by the party's North Regional Bureau Press July 3, 2010.

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On June 28, a federal jury in Chicago returned a verdict of guilty on all counts against Jon Burge, a retired Chicago Police Commander who had tortured, and organized the torture, of Black men in Chicago for 20 years or more. Burge was found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice—NOT torture. He was found guilty only of lying to cover up the torture in which he and men under his command engaged from at least 1972 to 1993—when he was forced into retirement with a generous pension. Burge will be sentenced on November 15, 2010 and faces a maximum sentence of 45 years in prison.

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Arizona's fascist law against immigrants is set to go into effect on Thursday, July 29. People are coming to Arizona from all over to oppose this and to wage a political battle to stop this.
Revolution newspaper needs to be a major part of this mix.

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• Arizona's anti-Immigrant Law is Inhumane & Illegitimate
  Stop the System's Fascist Attacks on Immigrants

As the fascist anti-immigrant law SB 1070 goes into effect in Arizona, introduce people to Bob Avakian and the real revolution. Check out this clip, "Why do people come here from all over the world?" from Bob Avakian's historic filmed talk, Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDsRQyhKPfA and in Spanish at www.youtube.com/watch?v=abg4QCw8tLc

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The print version of "Arizona's anti-Immigrant Law is Inhumane & Illegitimate" contains an unclear paragraph. The corrected paragraph...

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Imagine: You have a family you're supporting; you're on your way to the grocery store, or to work, or to pick up your children from school. You see a patrol car behind you. You realize if the cop stops you, he is going to demand you show your papers, and you know you can't. You'll be taken to immigration, locked in a detention center until you're deported, and getting back is nearly impossible. What will happen to your children when you're locked up? Who will take care of them? And if they're with you when you're stopped, will they be incarcerated as well? Will your family be separated, or given the "option" of everyone being deported, including children who are U.S. citizens.

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• Reporter’s notebook from Arizona Freedom Summer
• Raising Funds for Arizona Freedom Summer
• The U.S. and Latin America
  Tell Us, Now, Who Is the Great Respecter of Borders?
• Anastasio Hernández Rojas—Murdered by Border Patrol

1. 150 years ago, after Mexico became independent from Spain, the United States waged war on Mexico and stole a large part of its territory. This stolen territory includes what is now Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of California, Colorado, Nevada and Utah. One of the main reasons behind this was that slave owners in the southern U.S. needed more land.

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• Centerfold (PDF)

Armenia to Fresno to Berkeley

... My dad's parents emigrated from Armenia, before the big massacre of a million and a half Armenians by the Turkish authorities in World War 1. Even before the war, the Turkish government had carried out and encouraged brutal pogroms against Armenians for many years. My grandmother's and grandfather's families had both suffered from that, and they had left Armenia and come to the U.S. when my grandparents were young, where they met each other and married. So my father was born in the U.S., in Fresno, where his parents' families had settled as farmers because the climate and the kind of crops you could grow were similar to Armenia....

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• Spread Bob Avakian's Memoir Far and Wide!

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• Poster (PDF)

Six months ago, on January 12, 2010, a powerful earthquake struck Haiti, an island nation of about 9 million. The quake killed at least a quarter million people, and left over 1.5 million homeless. As Revolution brought out at the time, this devastation did not result solely from a natural disaster. It was made massively worse by a century of U.S. domination and especially by conscious U.S. policies of the last 30 years. These policies systematically destroyed much of Haiti's agricultural economy, forcing millions of former peasants to crowd into the small capital of Port-au-Prince in the hope of finding jobs or education. This flood of people was densely packed into poorly constructed housing, in conditions of extreme poverty, with little infrastructure—and all sitting on a known earthquake fault about which the people were never warned—and no basic housing codes were created and enforced, no emergency plans developed, etc. It was known that Port-Au-Prince would be a death trap in the event of a likely earthquake—but nothing was done about this. So the deaths of hundreds of thousands were not an "act of god" or "fate"—they were an imperialist crime against humanity. (See Revolution, #s 189-191 and #196.)

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Robert Perkinson is a professor of American Studies at University of Hawaii and the author of Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2008), a sweeping history of the U.S. prison system from slavery time to the present, with a particular focus on Texas. Revolution talked with Perkinson after a recent New York City book release event at Revolution Books.

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This week, the NAACP’s National Convention adopted a resolution that called on the Tea Party to dismiss bigoted elements from their organization. The resolution was attacked and ridiculed by Tea Party leaders like Sarah Palin who wrote, “Are liberty-loving, equality-respecting patriots racist?” In this light, we are reposting online an article that appeared in Revolution 10/4/09. The article begins:
On September 12, several tens of thousands of people demonstrated in Washington, D.C. ostensibly against the Democratic Party healthcare proposal in Congress. In fact, this march represented a major political statement by a fascist movement.

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For the latest updates and guidance on the campaign "The Revolution We Need… The Leadership We Have," check out the "This Week" column that appears in every issue of Revolution newspaper and online at revcom.us.

• The Campaign: Mid-Summer Report
• These Next Few Weeks:
  Special Efforts with this Issue of the Paper... Followed by Five Days of Saturation with the Message and Call... And Another Web-A-Thon!
• BAsics Open Mic Night in NYC
• Revolution Talk Screening in Park

To those who talk about "inoculating" people against the so-called "violence" of the masses. Who preach against protest. Who say "be cool." Who say they want to preserve a "peaceful and thriving Oakland" when the reality is that every day the police run rampant, brutalizing and killing our youth. Who cynically invoke the names of Malcolm X and Huey Newton in attempts to pre-emptively quell the outrage of the people. Who speak of "love" while they denigrate those who have taken a stand, calling them "outside agitators" and "extreme fringe groups." We say: 

WHERE IS YOUR OUTRAGE AT THE MURDER OF OSCAR GRANT? Oscar Grant, 22 years old, with his whole life ahead of him, was shot in the back at point blank range in front of his friends and hundreds of BART passengers. It was a horror. A violent, brutal, totally unjustified execution. 

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• Another OPD – BART Police Killing in Oakland

We want to know the toughest questions that you run up against. When you are getting out Revolution newspaper, or wearing the T-shirt with the image of Bob Avakian, or in some other way representing for revolution... what questions do you run up against that provoke you, or intrigue you, or bother you—and that you want help understanding and answering.

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• Vicious Government Attack on Lynne Stewart
  10 year sentence meant as warning to other lawyers
  (Updated 7/22/10)
• In Memory of George "Bill" Webber

One of the more important statements in the Manifesto from our Party (Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage) is the quote from Marx: "Once the inner connection is grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions breaks down before their collapse in practice." This is not just a matter of abstract theory—it has a broader effect. That belief weighs heavily on people who don't like the way things are—they are weighed down by a belief in the "permanent necessity of existing conditions." Over and over we are confronted by the fact that people can't see beyond the way things are now.

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Letters

An Historic Contradiction: Fundamentally Changing The World Without "Turning Out the Lights"

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It is this system that has got us in the situation we’re in today, and keeps us there. And it is through revolution to get rid of this system that we ourselves can bring a much better system into being. The ultimate goal of this revolution is communism: A world where people work and struggle together for the common good…Where everyone contributes whatever they can to society and gets back what they need to live a life worthy of human beings…Where there are no more divisions among people in which some rule over and oppress others, robbing them not only of the means to a decent life but also of knowledge and a means for really understanding, and acting to change, the world.

This revolution is both necessary and possible.

From: The Revolution We Need... The Leadership We Have
A Message, And A Call, From The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA

In Bob Avakian, the Chairman of our Party, we have the kind of rare and precious leader who does not come along very often. A leader who has given his heart, and all his knowledge, skills and abilities to serving the cause of revolution and the emancipation of humanity. Bob Avakian came alive as a revolutionary in the 1960s—taking part in the great movements of those days, and especially working and struggling closely with the most advanced revolutionary force in the U.S. at that time, the Black Panther Party. Since then, and while many others have given up, Bob Avakian has worked and struggled tirelessly to find the way to go forward, having learned crucial lessons and built lasting organization that could continue the struggle, and aim to take it higher, while uniting with the same struggle throughout the world. He has kept on developing the theory and strategy for making revolution. He played the key role in founding our Party in 1975, and since then he has continued the battle to keep the Party on the revolutionary road, to carry out work with a strong revolutionary orientation. He has deeply studied the experience of revolution—the shortcomings as well as the great achievements—and many different fields of human endeavor, through history and throughout the world—and he has brought the science and method of revolution to a whole new level, so that we can not only fight but really fight to win. Bob Avakian has developed the scientific theory and strategic orientation for how to actually make the kind of revolution we need, and he is leading our Party as an advanced force of this revolution. He is a great champion and a great resource for people here, and indeed people all over the world. The possibility for revolution, right here, and for the advance of the revolution everywhere, is greatly heightened because of Bob Avakian and the leadership he is providing. And it is up to us to get with this leadership…to find out more about Bob Avakian and the Party he heads…to learn from his scientific method and approach to changing the world…to build this revolutionary movement with our Party at the core…to defend this leadership as the precious thing it is…and, at the same time, to bring our own experience and understanding to help strengthen the process of revolution and enable the leadership we have to keep on learning more and leading even better.

From: The Revolution We Need... The Leadership We Have
A Message, And A Call, From The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA

• Works by Bob Avakian (PDF)

This historic event took place in Harlem, N.Y. on July 14, 2009

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Video Available!

• Rough cut of the video without the audience Q&A
• Rough cut of the of the Q&A that followed the dialogue
• Click here for the audio only of the July 14 dialogue (mp3)
• Watch the Youtube video announcement of the July 14 dialogue
• Response to Obama's "No Excuses" speech at NAACP convention by Carl Dix (Part 1 / Part 2)

Go to YouTube for these must-see videos:

• Sunsara Taylor
• "Sunsara Taylor discusses new book by Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn"
• "Vigil for Dr. Tiller in Union Square, NYC on June 1st 2009"
• Carl Dix
• "Carl Dix: Making Revolution, Fighting Police Brutality"
• "Response to Obama’s 'No Excuses' speech at NAACP convention by Carl Dix"
• Joe Veale
• "The Revolution Needs You: A Letter to Prisoners"
• "Next Stop Revolution"

Is believing in gods actually harmful? How has Christianity for centuries served as an ideology of conquest and subjugation? Why is the "Bible Belt" in the U.S. also the "lynching belt"? Why is there a rise of religious fundamentalism throughout the world? In the intensifying conflict between U.S. imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism, is the only choice to take one side or the other? Why is patriarchy and the oppression of women foundational to so many religions? Can people be good without god? These are just some of the questions explored in this provocative work by Bob Avakian.

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