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This is The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show; June 1, 2022....

Revolution. Nothing Less.  We mean it.

I don’t care whether you are 14, 44 or 94 years old.   Look out at the world, what do you see?

Children slaughtered.  Ten years old—their whole lives in front of them, cowering under desks, texting desperately for help, while self-centered pigs cower and point their guns at parents desperate to save their children.  Parents, willing to act and risk all for the children. But the cowering pigs a mirror of the society, the system and this country. Cowering ... looking out for themselves with no heart for the people—the children or their parents.

Revcom.us wrote: “Contrast the police paralysis in Uvalde with how over and over and over again, police instantly, almost instinctively, open fire on defenseless Black, Brown and Native American people, even children.” Eight-year-old Fanta Bility; 13-year-old Adam Toledo; seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones; and 12-year-old Tamir Rice who was playing with a toy gun on an empty playground murdered by police less than two seconds after arriving on the scene.”

Revcom wrote: “What this stark contrast illustrates is the profound reality of what Bob Avakian has said:”

The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces all this oppression and madness.             BAsics 1:24

Don’t push the faces of children of Uvalde from your mind just yet, don’t blot out the police holding guns at parents while their kids bleed out.  No, as agonizing, as sick as this spectacle was, as depraved as the 18-year-old gunman was, as predictable as the cover-up of the police and media has been, as perverse as the politicians are with their prayers layered over the fascist Republicans calling for turning schools into armed camps and the Democrats fecklessly throwing up their hands; all of this was a fitting concentration of America.  

Everywhere you turn—the lookout for # 1, the brutal and deadly force used to further the interests of the system; the disregard for life and the planet in pursuit of profit, the venality and criminality submerged beneath holiness to pacify people, the jingoism and flag waving a mask over centuries of genocide, white supremacy and patriarchy.  This is America.  Abiodun, a member of the Last Poets who pioneered what would become rap and later hip-hop spit this poem at a program in Harlem Stage to debut Bob Avakian’s BAsics—the handbook for revolution:

America is a terrorist,
Killing the natives of the land.
Killing and stealing has always been
America's master plan.
To control the earth and everything on it,
To divide and conquer is all they wanted.

America is a terrorist.
No one wants to admit
Pointing the finger at others,
is the ironic part of it.
 

It is the 19 children and two adults in Uvalde and it is the 10 Black people shopping who were murdered for being Black a week before in Buffalo.  It is the 23 million people, overwhelmingly from poor Third World countries, who have become “climate refugees,” displaced by extreme weather events that are becoming more common and destructive because of global warming.  And, 3.5 billion people face the prospect of the places they live becoming parched deserts unhabitable potentially within 50 years.  This past week the Environmental Performance Index showed that almost none of the countries in the world will meet the net zero greenhouse gas emissions target of the Glasgow Climate pact. No surprise... that the U.S. was among the leaders in pollution.  This is what "America First" from Trump and "America is Back" from Biden means.

Here on The RNL Show we have sharply brought out from Bob Avakian how the U.S. has turned the war in Ukraine into a proxy war with Russia endangering the whole world with the threat not just of wider catastrophic war, even World War 3, but has increased the danger of a nuclear war with the existential danger to humanity that poses.

Then there is the very looming danger of the U.S. Supreme Court taking away the right of women to abortion. This forced motherhood would be female enslavement, with wombs and women sites of government surveillance and potentially a crime scene.

In the face of all this, many have said words like those of New York Times Opinion writer, Michelle Goldberg:

Even as people learn the names of all those murdered children, the most common sentiment is not “never again,” but a bitter acknowledgment that nothing is going to change.  America is too sick, too broken.  It is perhaps beyond repair. 

A follower of the new communism of Bob Avakian and friend of the revolution made this insightful observation:

there is a broad feeling now, among “decent people,” that “something is really wrong IN this country,” but they don’t yet recognize that “something is really wrong WITH this country.” 

As the saying goes: True That.  Bringing this understanding:  that something is really wrong WITH this country, is what we bring every week on The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show.  Looking at and analyzing all the workings of this system, how all this absolute madness is connected to an economic system and a culture that fragments and isolates people from each other into billions of powerless individuals competing against everyone else, in a heartless world of “winners and losers,” rather than the world we could have—of freely cooperating human beings taking care of each other and of nature REQUIRES SCIENCE. 

What is extraordinary about The RNL Show and our website revcom.us is that this is where you get, where you can learn, the breakthrough in the scientific approach to society and to revolution developed by the revolutionary thinker and leader Bob Avakian. I cannot today take the time to go into this, but I will say this: Bob Avakian has brought forward the way out of the madness of today— a method and approach to know and change the world; a strategy to actually prepare for and make a revolution; an analysis that we are living in a rare time where out of the very horrors that are building there is the rare situation where a revolution to emancipate humanity is possible; and he has written a blueprint for a new society in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America.  This is the shit.  You care about the world? You want to change it?  This is who, and where, you go and the movement you get with.

Today’s show is going to feature quite a bit about the crucial juncture we are at in the battle for abortion rights.   I want to close this week’s commentary with the following from a recent article from Bob Avakian: THE CRUCIAL FIGHT FOR ABORTION RIGHTS AND ENDING ALL OPPRESSION; Broad Unity and Necessary Struggle

In order to finally put an end to all this completely unnecessary suffering, it is necessary to fight against all these different forms of oppression, plunder and destruction—and fight to put an end to this system, which is the fundamental source and cause of all this—linking together, in this way, the different streams of struggle and directing them toward the solution: overthrowing this system and bringing into being a radically different, truly emancipating system—a socialist system, aiming for the ultimate goal of a communist world, where all exploitation and oppression will be finally ended, everywhere.

Right now, there is an urgent need, and basis, to unite people very broadly, from many different political perspectives, to rise up in massive, non-violent but determined, sustained resistance to stop the Supreme Court from ripping away the right to abortion. This is a crucial battle in its own right—it is a concentration of the fight against the oppression of women—and it is an important part of the overall fight for a more just society and world, and a future worth living for humanity.