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Boo Hoo Hoo

"Waaa!Waaa! Waaaaah! U.S. imperialism is being mean to me! Make them STOPPPPP!"

Those weren't the exact words of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) last week when she “apologized” for her failure to vote against more funding for a major element of Israel’s massive weapons system, the “Iron Dome”—but they may as well have been. This supposedly “defensive”1 weapons system was given to a country notorious for unprovoked wars, for outrageously disproportionate slaughter against any force that opposes them, for arming itself with between 100 and 200 nuclear weapons, for a decades-long grinding genocide against Palestine and Palestinians in particular, for assassination and sabotage and torture and... well, you get the picture. And if you don't, and even if you think you do, go here, here, and here.

AOC wipes tears after she voted present to Israel Iron Dome funding bill.

 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wipes tears after she voted "present" to Israel Iron Dome funding bill.   

The House of Representatives passed this funding overwhelmingly, by 420 to 9. Ocasio-Cortez sat “firmly” on the fence by voting “present.” “Present” means that she was too cowardly to take a stand one way or the other on whether the U.S. government should even more thoroughly lavish arms on its Middle East attack dog. She then wrote a letter saying that she had to vote this way because she wasn’t given time to explain this to her constituents in such a way as to prevent it from tearing her community apart by creating a “real sense of panic and horror.” (Go here to read her statement.)

She moves on to say that “I wept.... Yes I wept.” Perhaps she includes this so everyone can understand how “deeply conflicted” she felt about letting this new round of financing Israeli terror and oppression in the Middle East go unopposed, how much her unprincipled capitulation troubles her. And then she apologizes to those who feel disappointed. Yada yada yada.

Palestinian woman expresses anger at massive carnage caused by Israeli airstrike.

 

Palestinian woman expresses anger at massive carnage caused by Israeli airstrike on Gaza, May 2021.     Photo: Anadolu Agency-Ali-Jadallah

For those of you who feel “betrayed” or “sold out” by AOC, the point here is most definitely NOT AOC’s individual act of political cowardice. Nor is the lesson you must solemnly draw is to “never trust AOC.” If that’s all you do, then you’ll again let yourself be played by the next opportunist who comes along.2

The lesson to learn from this disgusting display of crybaby capitulationism is where it flows from: the political line of "democratic socialism." This “democratic socialism” in fact boils down to a more equitable division of the spoils and plunder carried out by imperialism.3 In fact, “democratic socialism” is ANTI-revolutionary.4 And the actual capitulation of this trend to imperialist power is nothing new either.5

Older Palestinian woman waits with two children to fill water bottles during water crisis.

 

People suffer from water crisis because Israel significantly reduced the amount of water allotted to the West Bank, May 2020. Israel controls the main three trans-boundaries aquifers in the occupied Palestinian territories.   

If you actually DO care about the people of the world and what the system in this country does, and will do, to them until its instruments of force and violence and its built-in institutional structures of worldwide exploitation and oppression are forcibly dismantled through a real revolution… then you actually need to engage with the revolutionary-internationalist work and line of Bob Avakian, and get with the Revcoms who follow him.

AOC may strike a pose and—sometimes—sound real “radical.” But when push comes to shove she, and the trend she represents, will cave in to the interests of the capitalist-imperialists. As Lenin said over 100 years ago, “People always were and always will be the foolish victims of deceit and self-deceit in politics until they learn to discover the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. The supporters of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realize that every old institution, however barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is maintained by the forces of some ruling classes.”

BAsics 3:12 quotation by Bob Avakian

 

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FOOTNOTES:

1. The Iron Dome is being presented as an ostensibly “defensive” weapons system for Israel. But in reality, given this is marshaled in the service of an overall political and military strategy that involves expanding Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestinian West Bank territories and its ongoing blockade of Gaza, the claim of this being “defensive” is highly questionable. Additionally, by further minimizing Israeli casualties and economic disruption, this weapons system provides Israel a strategic “cushion” that is likely to extend genocidal Israeli bombing of places like Gaza in the event of conflict. For example, the 2014 bombing and invasion of Gaza by Israel claimed the lives of 2,251 Palestinians and 73 Israelis. [back]

2. As Frederich Engels, the co-founder, along with Karl Marx, of scientific communism, memorably said about betrayals by leaders, "…when you inquire into the causes of the counter revolutionary success, you are met on every hand with the ready-made reply that it was 'Citizen So and So' who betrayed the people. But this reply does not explain anything. It does not even explain how it came to pass that the people allowed themselves to be betrayed. And what poor chance stands a political party whose entire stock in trade consists in the knowledge of the solitary fact that 'Citizen So-and-So' is not to be trusted." [back]

3. See “The Imperial Chauvinism of the Jacobins Today” by Nayi Duniya, and “David Brooks—the Not So Great Pretender—and the Profound Differences Between Trump, Sanders and Actual Socialism,” by Bob Avakian. [back]

4. See “Jacobins Yesterday, Jacobins Today: A Brief Summation,” by Bob Avakian. [back]

5. The most notorious example being World War I, when mere months after resolving together to turn any imperialist war into a civil war and revolution for socialism, almost all the supposedly socialist parties in the Second International, a worldwide organization of socialist parties at the time, went along and voted to finance their governments' roles in that monstrous imperialist horror show: a war that took around 20 million lives. [back]

Help Make 2024 Our Year—a Year of Revolution! 
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From the genocide in Gaza, to the growing threat of world war between nuclear powers, to escalating environmental devastation… the capitalist-imperialist system ruling over us is a horror for billions around the world and is tearing up the fabric of life on earth. Now the all-out battle within the U.S. ruling class, between fascist Republicans and war criminal Democrats, is coming to a head—likely during, or before, the coming elections—ripping society apart unlike anything since the Civil War. 

Bob Avakian (BA), revolutionary leader and author of the new communism, has developed a strategy to prepare for and make revolution. He’s scientifically analyzed that this is a rare time when an actual revolution has become more possible, and has laid out the sweeping vision, solid foundation and concrete blueprint for “what comes next,” in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America

The website revcom.us follows and applies that leadership and is essential to all this. We post new materials from BA and curate his whole body of work. We apply the science he’s developed to analyze and expose every key event in society, every week. Revcom.us posts BA’s timely leadership for the revcoms (revolutionary communists), including his social media posts which break this down for people every week and sometimes more. We act as a guiding and connecting hub for the growing revcom movement nationwide: not just showing what’s being done, but going into what’s right and what’s wrong and rapidly learning—and recruiting new people into what has to be a rapidly growing force.

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