There Is No Santa Claus, and the Trump/Pence Regime Will NOT Be Ousted, Nor Will FASCISM Be Stopped, on the Basis of Corruption

August 27, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Bob Avakian (BA) paints the situation this way at the very beginning of his major filmed speech THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO!:

We are confronted by—we are now being ruled by—a fascist regime: relentlessly assaulting civil rights and liberties and openly promoting bigotry and inequality; acting with callous disregard or cold-blooded malice toward those they consider inferior and a drain or stain on the country; on a mission to deny health care to millions who will suffer and many who will die without it; crudely degrading women, as objects of plunder, breeders of children without the right to abortion or birth control, subordinate to husbands and men in general; defying the science of climate change, attacking the science of evolution, and repudiating the scientific method overall; a regime brandishing an arsenal of mass destruction and threatening nuclear war; intensifying state terror against Muslims, immigrants, and people in the inner cities; unleashing and giving encouragement and support to brutal thugs spewing vile “America First,” white supremacist, male-supremacist, and anti-LGBT venom—a regime that boasts of all this and declares its intention to do even worse.

These outrages—and not the regime’s disruptions of traditional imperialist foreign policy alliances and approaches, and its supposed “lack of patriotism” (more on this later), nor backed-up sewers of corruption that now overflow—are the key crimes of this regime and the central reasons it must be driven out. And note well: BA speaks of a regime, not a single individual, because while Trump occupies a critical spot in the regime’s hierarchy, the essence of the matter is the regime. Go here to get a sense of just how deeply and broadly this regime has already carried out its criminal changes and what they have in store (and then use this with others who still have no real idea of this).

Further: as we point out elsewhere in this issue: “These fascists are on a mission and on a rampage, and this regime will not be deterred or stopped by indictments, hearings, conflicts among themselves, or special reports alone—in fact, they will ‘double down.’” This flows out of the fact that this system is in a profound crisis—one with deep economic roots but stretching through all the political, social, and cultural institutions of this society. It is now routine for many commentators on all points of the political spectrum to draw analogies to the Civil War. Neither the regime, nor the movement that backs it, nor the roots that gave rise to it are going to be wished—or voted—away. Hence, the conclusion of the above-quoted paragraph: “There must be massive, in-the-streets resistance.”

The struggle that needs to happen is stirring, but still fighting for oxygen. The massive opposition to the sadistic and indeed genocidal breaking up of immigrant families, as well as dramatic individual actions (e.g., the nonviolent takeover of the Statue of Liberty); the brave stands taken against the threats of armed white supremacists, emboldened both by Trump’s escalating racist taunts and the regime’s intensified attacks on “minority” voting rights, its defense of police murder and brutality, etc.; the demonstrations against Pence, who concentrates the Christian fascist assault on women, LGBTQ people, science and critical thinking more generally; and, as we go to press, the demonstrations against the nomination of the Christian fascist Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court—all these are important. Resistance in the cultural sphere that homes in on these outrages—The Handmaid’s Tale is one important example but hardly the only one—need to be upheld and spread. All this needs to grow in breadth and in militancy. All this needs to be increasingly cohered around the interests of all humanity. And there needs to be a strengthened and clearer voice of those who convincingly indict the system itself for the monstrous crimes of the regime, linking them to the whole history and social structure of this country, and pointing to the need for a revolution.

Right now, though, there is a great deal of energy coming from the Democratic Party leadership and the mainstream media to go somewhere else—to focus on the corruption of Trump in particular and the people around him, or to accuse him of “treason” for the way in which he is disrupting “traditional alliances.” The immediate dangers here are threefold:

• First, the focus on these alleged crimes draws attention away from what is most serious, which is what we started this article with. To focus on corruption or so-called treason fits the interests of those within the system who do not want to see essential things about this system which Trump is “only” making much more monstrous called into question, and who do not want to see the principal victims of those crimes, along with those who hate one or another or all of those major crimes, taking to the streets in ways that can get out of their control.
• Second, this feeds illusions. If people do not get the actual depth of these contradictions and the ways in which they are intractably rooted in this system itself, then they will be vulnerable to thinking that the question of the regime will soon be easily solved through the normal operations of that very system. Unfortunately, more than a few people in the movement have been influenced by this outlook. Let’s be clear, everybody: The more these fascists feel really threatened, the more they will be driven to intensify their efforts to maintain and strengthen their grip.
• Third, these focuses—corruption, but also the “Russia thing” in particular—are designed to cast this battle in terms of “who is the best patriot?” Not only are these the wrong terms morally (what about the interests of all humanity and what about the huge crimes against humanity committed by America throughout its existence, beginning Day One?!?), these will kill you politically. These terms of “patriotism” open the door very widely to Trump, or whoever, to suddenly upend the situation by going to war or otherwise creating an international crisis and, on that basis, rally people around the regime, with the leading Democrats cheering it on from the right, thank you very much. We need to train people now to see through that shit, and the only way to do this is to lay bare the reality of what this country actually does and where that horror flows from. (See the clip on “Free yourself from the GTF (Great Tautological Fallacy)” from the film THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO!)

Why do the Democratic Party, CNN, the New York Times, and all the rest promote and insist on these terms? Because these are imperialist institutions whose existence depends on the American empire (that is, the system of imperialist military, political, and economic domination through which the U.S. extracts unbelievable plunder). These are NOT the interests of humanity—indeed, they are bitterly opposed to the interests of humanity! Yes, some of those at the top of this system indeed have differences, serious differences, with the Trump/Pence fascist regime—but these are differences which boil down to how best to preserve and protect that empire.

Right now, there needs to be a fight on two fronts. One, the main front, is a struggle with the Trump/Pence fascist regime. The objective of that struggle is not just to fight the regime, but to get rid of it. The other is a fight over what terms and how to conduct the first fight; while not the main thing people need to be doing, this battle bears very directly on whether people will only resist the regime, or actually fight to drive it out. If we the masses intensify our resistance on the right basis, we could conceivably and hopefully get to the point where the people will be in a strong enough position to make use of the contradictions between the two sections of the ruling class. We will be able to advance the agenda of both getting rid of this fascist monstrosity and moving forward to revolution and a whole different world, beyond the point of constantly toggling between fascism and the “normal” workings of imperialism (which again require the grinding up and oppression of billions of human beings every single day). If we don’t, then the masses will once again be used in the interests of a small clique and, worse yet, the interests of humanity will be betrayed and the very fate of humanity itself will hang in the balance.

And that, we cannot afford.