Drive Out The Bush Regime!

Revolution #016, October 2, 2005, posted at revcom.us

At the same time as we take up the call to action this weekend, people need to think toward a bigger battle – the struggle to DRIVE OUT THE BUSH REGIME, especially the big mobilizations being called for November 2. The Bush agenda goes way way beyond New Orleans, atrocious as that was and is. To take just one example, there are high-up advisers in the Bush crew (like Pat Robertson) who push for policies that have a clear genocidal thrust against Black people. For another example: Bush himself has slyly encouraged the “minutemen” vigilantes on the border with Mexico, who attack people who have been driven to this country to look for work – because of the ways in which the U.S. has wrecked their countries.

Bush has a whole agenda on women – trying to outlaw abortion, and more generally trying to force women back into traditional roles and taking away the rights they’ve won to participate in society. He wants to put them in a position of utter submission, giving a free hand to brutality, and even doing away with – or sharply restricting – the right to divorce. He’s got the backing of a movement that wants to turn this country into a religious dictatorship, and he has given them powerful positions in the military and courts and his administration. In fact, this very minute he is using the whole Katrina thing to give these people even more power and position and benefits! His regime has made torture a “legitimate thing” and rammed through laws that make it possible to put people in jail without charges and without seeing a lawyer or family – all on Bush’s say-so. He’s stirred up bigotry against gay people and attempted to make them permanent second-class citizens in the constitution.

And then, on top of it all, the Bush regime started and maintained the horrific and shameful war in Iraq– a war built on lies, that has already taken 100,000 lives, with no end in sight.

This is not just a bunch of bad stuff, or “business as usual,” but a whole deadly direction of society that has to be reversed. People who compare Bush to Hitler are right to do so. We can’t afford three more years of this madness. We can’t keep taking worse and worse and worse, telling ourselves that we just have to wait. If we all keep waiting, the people will soon be too beaten down to reverse it. No, we can’t wait – the WORLD can’t wait – there has to be a massive movement, now, drawing on all of society, united to drive out the Bush regime.

It’s like the call for November 2 says:

“That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop, you will learn–or be forced to–accept. There is no escaping it: the whole disastrous course of this Bush regime must be STOPPED. And we must take responsibility to do it.”

This is what is being planned for November 2 – to start a whole movement that day, to get society going in a whole other direction, with extremely powerful outpourings. The problems we face are bigger than just Bush – Bush himself is the product and representative of the system of capitalism and imperialism, which produces daily horrors for billions, and which must itself be abolished for people to truly get free. But Bush does represent that system right now, in a very ugly form with a very ugly agenda he is jamming into place, and getting rid of him would be an important victory for the people and could be a step – a huge step – toward the larger goal of revolution.

But it won’t happen without you – standing up yourself and organizing others. It won’t happen without you linking up with the Revolutionary Communist Party and with other people active around this movement, and working together to draw in friends, and relatives, and people you don’t even know into this movement. It won’t work without, right now, getting organized. Get on the website worldcantwait.org. Invite over your friends, or talk to people at work. Listen to their ideas and argue with them if you have to, and then join together to do what needs to be done

And that’s yet another reason to take this weekend and step out for the people victimized not just by Katrina, but by the system that caused and is causing so much needless suffering in Katrina’s wake. Let’s struggle, let’s fight for this, and as we do so let’s raise our understanding and develop our muscles for the many struggles to come.