To the congressional staffers, people within U.S. AID, former Democratic Party volunteers, delegates and more:

It is important that you've spoken out against the war crimes of your own government. That, at real personal risk, you have had the courage to call out the savage and totally disproportionate slaughter of Palestinian civilians by Israel, with full backing from the U.S. government. You have refused to stay silent, and complicit, in the face of this unfolding genocide. 

What you've done matters. Given the U.S. role in backing Israel—military, politically and economically—now and going back for decades, the people in the U.S. have a special responsibility to call out the crimes of our own government. And when this comes from within the U.S. government and institutions, this holds powerful weight. This contributes to the resistance that needs to spread—reaching into every corner of society—with the resounding cry, Stop the U.S.-Backed Israeli Genocidal War Against Palestine! Not in Our Name!

At the same time, your righteous outrage against this war crime needs to go further... and it needs to go deeper to the real causes.

You have been told your whole life that “America is a force for good in the world. Yes, it may be flawed. Yes, it may have done bad things. But,” you are told, “it is the best vehicle to 'fight for human rights' around the world.” And that the best way to make the change you want to see is to “work from within.” 

But is that true? Really true? Or is it a lie? A lie whose thin veneer is being shredded with every U.S. bomb dropped on Palestinian homes and schools, and every Palestinian baby blown to bits.

What is the reality?

America sits atop a global system of capitalism-imperialism, a system of brutal exploitation and oppression. And no, that's not rhetoric or curse words or jargon. It's a scientific description. 

Capitalism is a system whose oppressive division of labor today is international. This means networks of brutal exploitation, of people—including over 160 million children¹—slaving away in sweatshops, mines and farmlands, largely in countries of the “third world,” or “Global South” (throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America) all serving and benefitting the needs of the imperialist countries, with the U.S. clawing to stay on top. 

This is enforced through violence and terror on a global scale—through wars, unjust invasions, coups, death squads, bombs, chemical weapons, and torture. And, as you probably know, it's backed up by 750 American military bases in over 80 countries. This is not to mention the ecocidal nature of this system which can only treat the precious and finite resources of our planet as use-once-and-discard externalities.

If the U.S. doesn't violently assert its ability to control and dominate whole countries and regions, then other countries will step in in their competitive drive to get on top of this. This is what we're seeing right now with the intense and frankly very dangerous rivalry between the U.S., Russia and China—a contestation between nuclear-armed powers that threatens the very existence of humanity. 

In this jockeying for global control, Israel plays an essential role as a heavily armed bastion of support for U.S. imperial interests in the strategic region of the Middle East. This—and not the Israeli lobby, or greedy politicians—is why, in 1986, Biden said, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.” This is why every major political figure gives their full backing to Israel—going back decades! And why, even most of your “progressive heroes” are backing Israel, despite a few words of sympathy to the Palestinian dead—with the number of known dead now numbering over 14,000, along with 7,000 missing, many of whom are buried under rubble!

America's Genocidal Nature 

The U.S.-backed apartheid and slaughter of Palestinian people is not an anomaly to America's nature, it is a concentration of that nature. Many of you have rightly called what the U.S. is supporting Israel in, is a genocide of the Palestinian people. 

One staffer wrote, “I have a Master's Degree in International Human Rights, with a concentration in law and security. Basically I studied war crimes and genocide. And now I'm trapped in a job where I'm complicit in a fucking genocide because I need to pay off my student loans that I have from getting said degree. I am so sick to my stomach over this.”

This is important, and I'll come back to what it means to fully follow through on your sense of morality. 

The backing of Israel's genocide of Palestinians is not America's first genocidal war. It's not just that America was founded on the genocide of Native peoples, but that it has repeatedly conducted wars that fall into the legally accepted definition of genocidal slaughter. In the Philippines in 1899-1902 (between 250,000 and one million Filipinos killed), in Korea in 1950-1953 (between three to five million Koreans killed), in the war on Vietnam with over three million dead, in the 1965 CIA-backed coup in Indonesia which led to at least 500,000 and perhaps more than one million dead, in the death squads in Guatemala in the early 1980s that killed 75,000 people,² overwhelmingly indigenous Mayans... to name but a few. 

This is the much vaunted “rules-based order” constructed by the U.S. in the aftermath of World War 2—which has been watered with the blood of at least eight million people killed directly by America's wars, or by those backed with aid, training and guns from America.

The Blood-Soaked Truth Beneath the Cover of “Freedom and Democracy”

This system's mouthpieces—the politicians, pundits and media—cover all this over with the lie that America is bringing “freedom and democracy.” They rely on people being too comfortable with the spoils of empire to seriously examine what this actually rests on. In the case of Israel, this rests on the theft of land, indiscriminate slaughter and terror, apartheid-like conditions for Palestinians for over 75 years, and nuclear arms. Biden tells you that America is waging a global battle for “democracy vs. autocracy,” while currently backing the brutally repressive states of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others. This, along with a whole history of installing repressive states through coups and invasions from Indonesia to Iran, Brazil to Haiti and in many other countries throughout the world.

This is not just vicious, cold-blooded hypocrisy, though it is that. More fundamentally, it is a reflection that, as the revolutionary leader and thinker Bob Avakian (BA) said recently:

What motivates Biden and the rest—what they mean by the “national interests” and the “security interests” of this country—is not concern for the lives or the rights of people, anywhere, but the murderously oppressive interests of the blood-soaked U.S. empire, which they are prepared to enforce with genocidal violence and even with the danger of wiping out human existence.

America is waging a global battle for its imperialist interests—and trying to line you up behind it with honeyed words, “democratic” delusions and the twisted notion of “American exceptionalism.” It is to your credit that you refused to do so in the egregious case of Israel. But it is your responsibility to dig deeper and to seek out real solutions.

There IS a Way Out of the Madness

Now here is a hard, but ultimately liberating truth. The only solution to this nightmare—the only way to put a stop to this system's drive towards war and slaughter—is a revolution to overthrow this system, and replace it with a fundamentally different, and far better system.

The declaration from the revcoms, We Need and We Demand: A Whole New Way to Live, A Fundamentally Different System brings to life that, 

A whole different way of living is possible: a whole different way to organize society, with a radically different economic foundation and political system, emancipating relations among people and an uplifting culture—all of this oriented to meeting the basic needs and fulfilling the highest interests of the masses of people.

With the urgency the situation requires, 

WE DECLARE AND DEMAND:

The Existing Capitalist-Imperialist System And Institutions Of Government In This Country Must Be Abolished And Dismantled—And Replaced By A New, Socialist System Based On The CONSTITUTION FOR THE NEW SOCIALIST REPUBLIC IN NORTH AMERICA.

On this basis, 

The new socialist government will not develop or use nuclear weapons and will take concrete steps and wage determined struggle to abolish nuclear weapons everywhere, with the ultimate goal of finally abolishing wars among human beings, with the abolition of the capitalist-imperialist system, and all systems and relations of exploitation and oppression, which are the basis for wars. This new socialist government will move, quickly, systematically and effectively, to address the already acute and fast accelerating environmental crisis, with the aim of bringing into being a world where humanity can truly be fit caretakers of the earth.

The revolution to bring this society into being is not just urgently necessary, it is possible. And we are in a time when this revolution—even in this powerful country—has become more possible.

What Are Our Choices?

Many of you are rightly agonized about the future—the 2024 election with the Republicans determined to install all-out fascism on one side, and on the other side, the Democrats carrying forward this genocidal war while aggressively and dangerously facing off with Russia and China. 

As one former 2020 Biden campaign and Biden admin staffer wrote, “Yes, I still view Trump as a fascist. Yes, I still view Trump's potential 2nd presidency as inherently more dangerous than a Biden 2nd term. But, I cannot morally justify working for someone who is supporting a massacre, someone who is as out of touch with Israel's role in a genocide as he is. I can better spend my time working and advocating for a genuine cause. It's not just me. I know many people from the admin/WH and campaign who are feeling the exact same way: a knowledge of how close fascism is to us, and yet a refusal to cross the moral lines of working for an Admin's campaign that is actively lifting up a genocide.”

This is important: To get caught up in the BEB—the Bourgeois Electoral Bullshit—and choose between a party of fascism and a party of war crimes and crimes against humanity is not a moral choice.

But it's also not our only choice! The real choice is not between the all-out fascist Trump and the war criminal Biden. The real choice is between this system, and the revolution that's needed to overthrow this system.            

A revolution you should get into and get with. This revolution is not some far-off fantasy. Society is being ripped apart and will not be stitched back together on the basis of the “normal way” things have been—which was always full of oppression and terror. The crisis and deep divisions in society can only be resolved through radical means, of one kind or another—either radically reactionary, murderously oppressive and destructive means, or radically emancipating revolutionary means.

And it is within the extreme political instability, and the deep divides—throughout society and at the highest echelons of power—that the potential exists to wrench out a revolutionary future. If there is a growing force for revolution fighting to break people's thinking out of the soul-crushing confines of this system... and organizing masses into this revolution. 

There is a strategy and plan for revolution. There is a deep analysis for how revolution could be wrenched out of these intensifying storms. There is a sweeping vision, concrete blueprint and firm foundation for how to run a whole new society and system in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America. There is a force that you can join. There is leadership for this revolution in Bob Avakian, who authored this Constitution and who has developed the new communism, a framework for human emancipation.

A word on this leader: Bob Avakian is completely different than all these politicians and pundits of this system—whether they're cynical hacks or seemingly sincere. All these people you are told to look to and follow, do not see beyond the confines of this horrific system. In opposition to all this, Bob Avakian (BA) is a revolutionary. He recognizes that, “There is nothing more unrealistic than the idea of reforming this system into something that would come anywhere near being in the interests of the great majority of people and ultimately of humanity as a whole.”

He refuses to settle for anything less than what is required for the emancipation of humanity, he is hard-core for the revolution that this requires and he tells it like it is. To learn about who BA is, what shaped him, and to raise your sights to a whole different way the world can be, watch the Interviews he did last year on The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show.

If you have not dug into BA's work, especially the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, you cannot say that “there is no alternative” to working within this system. This Constitution is a living application of the new communism which crystallizes the profound lessons learned from the first stage of communist revolution—the tremendous advances, and the errors, even grievous errors. 

If you have not engaged Bob Avakian, you have no basis to argue that another world is not possible or that revolution can't be made in America. And you are denying yourself, and humanity, the only way out when the future truly hangs in the balance. 

Again, from Bob Avakian:

We, the people of the world, can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to continue to dominate the world and determine the destiny of humanity. They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible. And it is a scientific fact that we do not have to live this way.