Revolution #270, May 27, 2012
Joe Veale: Salute to the BAsics Bus Tour
The following is the transcript of an audio statement posted at basicsbustour.tumblr.com on May 24:
This is Joe Veale. I'm a former member of the original Black Panther Party. I'm a present member of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
Revolutionary greetings to the BAsics Bus Tour! I truly wish I could be there with you all. It is very inspiring, what you are doing. In a real sense it is a life-and-death question. Life and death for revolution, and the struggle to emancipate all of humanity. Whether there is real hope and inspiration for that – this depends on BA being everywhere. It depends on what the BAsics Bus Tour is doing. It depends on people knowing who is BA and what he stands for.
This reminds me of stories I heard about revolutionary China when I was first being introduced to revolution as a youngster. Why Mao and the revolutionaries had to launch the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—a revolution within the revolution. Mao, the revolution, and the socialist road leading to communism—to what Marx called the "four alls"—was under attack, was in danger of losing and suffering a terrible defeat. And it was happening at a time when most people in China did not know what Mao stood for, was preventing them from getting on the revolutionary road and finding ways to strengthening this road. Well the youth, the Red Guards, took the Red Book of Quotations of Mao Tsetung all over, to the far reaches of China. Now the masses began to know that the communist ideology, representing their hopes and inspiration for emancipation and began to understand how, in those circumstances, it was decisive for them to take up this ideology and fit themselves to rule society along this path. Though in the end we lost socialist China, and it still hurts, it is mainly because of what was accomplished in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, it booming out all over China, and out into the world, that we have a leader like BA today.
BA has developed and done more in strengthening the human emancipating communist ideology than what Mao was able to do. It is all right there in BAsics, on the bus tour. Similar to Mao's situation at that time, the masses in this country do not know BA, what he stands for, what he means for revolution and human emancipation. The BAsics Bus Tour is changing all that. What an inspiration! I send my deepest love. How fitting, how appropriate, the BAsics bus is now in the South, the birthplace of all the wealth and prosperity of the USA, of dehumanizing of Africans, violently turning them into slaves and to people considered not human, along with their near genocide of Native Americans, all in the pursuit of the freedom to accumulate private wealth. How appropriate to go to Florida, where there is mass outrage against the racially targeted murder of Trayvon Martin, where with their typical ways the ruling authorities and their flunkies and talking heads in the media are trying to blame the victim like they always have done and always do for their white racist brutality and murder that is embedded in all social interactions that the masses have with this society. Uniting with that outrage, with the grief and anger, bringing it together with BA, with his revolutionary understanding and vision. To the BAsics Bus Tour, I salute you. What you are doing by taking BA everywhere, gives me hope and inspiration. Hope and inspiration for the possibility of a whole new society and a whole new world.
Again, with revolutionary embrace, Joe Veale.
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