Skip to main content

Speech Given by Paul Street, April 2, Chicago

No World War 3! It’s This System, Not Humanity, That Needs to Become Extinct!

Editors’ note: The following is the text of a speech by historian and author Paul Street at the April 2 protest in Chicago. The material in brackets was not said because of time considerations.

Chicago march against World War 3, April 2, with guy in hazmet suit holding the world.

 

Chicago, April 2, 2023. Photo: Special to revcom.us   

As the American news cycle shifts between mass shootings, tornados, and the indictment of Donald Trump on the least of his crimes, the U.S.-Russia proxy war in Ukraine rages on, killing hundreds of human beings every day. Thanks to this epic bloodbath, into which the United States has poured more than $75 billion dollars the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has recently put its Doomsday Clock closer to midnight than it has ever been. 

This isn’t Bolivia and Paraguay tussling over water rights. This is two imperial gangster states with enough nuclear weapons between them to blow the world up a hundred times over. [And one of those gangster states, Russia, is fighting what it considers an existential war on its own immediate and long southwestern border, a border that has been invaded with mass death resulting twice in modern history.]

[Does anybody here doubt that the United States would be threatening to use nuclear weapons if Russia and/or China were arming and funding a war in northern Mexico or southern Canada?  What if Russia and/or China floated some missile-carrying ships down the St. Lawrence Seaway into the Great Lakes? How about China putting its latest state-of-the art aircraft carrier in the Caribbean?]

Now, the minute we as actual socialists and communists and therefore as actual anti-imperialists start criticizing the U.S. role in Ukraine, some liberal or centrist and even an occasional leftist calls us apologists for Vladimir Putin. They say we don’t support the people of Ukraine.

Bullshit. Let’s get serious here. The advanced military hardware and intelligence that “our” government is pouring into Ukraine is not about about advancing or protecting democracy. And it sure as fuck isn’t about helping Ukrainians. The U.S. top general Lloyd Austin said it early on: it’s about weakening Russia.  It’s about weakening an imperial rival on its own immediate border by prolonging a conflict that has made life precarious and miserable for Ukrainians while tipping the world closer to nuclear war and ecological catastrophe.  

U.S. democracy promotion? Know any other good jokes? What, like in Saudi Arabia, where the most reactionary government on Earth relies on U.S. dollars and weaponry? What, like in the judeo-fascist apartheid state of Israel and dozens of other authoritarian regimes that are backed by Uncle Sam? Like right here at home, where money talks and bullshit walks  and what’s left of democracy is trumped by racist women-hating neofascism on a regular basis?

Say the chant with me: 1,2 3,4, slavery, genocide and war.  5, 6, 7, 8, America was never great.

Now, there are some folks who call themselves socialists and anti-imperialists who parrot the language of Putin. They support his criminal and murderous invasion of Ukraine. [I call them “the RT left.”]

That’s NOT us. We are quite aware that we live in the belly of the beast of the most dangerous and aggressive military superpower in human history. [We know well what the American Empire did to the Philippines and Korea and Central and South America and Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan, all the rest. We know from a documentary that came out last week that but for the antiwar movement in 1969, Richard Nixon was going to attack the people of Vietnam with nuclear weapons. We know about all the dictators and despots the American Empire has long backed and installed the world over. We know about the U.S.-Saudi nexus and the U.S.-Israel nexus and the U.S.-Central American death squad nexus. We don’t need any lectures on all that.]

We don’t need any lectures on U.S. imperialism. At the same time, we don’t support other capitalist-imperialist gangster states just because they aren’t America or just because Washington is fighting with them for wealth and power in the world system. 

So let’s be clear. We denounce Putin’s invasion. And anyone who thinks that the neofascistic Putin regime is some kind of virtuous anti-imperialist force is living in a dream world.

But here’s the thing: Russia is not our responsibility. We don’t live in Russia. The Russians need to overthrow their own gangsters. They need to make another Russian Revolution. Our responsibility is to take down our gangsters, our fascists, our capitalists and our imperialists right here in the USA.  Really, our task and that of the people of the world is to take down the whole damn capitalist system. This system, this unelected and interrelated dictatorship of capital, is imperialist by its very nature and that’s true whether you are talking about the top dog United States or China or Russia or England or France or Turkey or India. Our task here in the U.S. is to make a real North American socialist revolution.

“Let us not talk falsely now,” as Bob Dylan says, “the hour is getting late.” Imperialism, lethal inter-state competition and war are built into the very nature, the essence, the DNA of the capitalist world system. Asking or expecting capitalism not to engage in deadly, reckless imperial war and not to poison the natural environment is a fool’s game. It’s like asking a fish not to swim in water.

No World War 3!  It’s This System, Not Humanity, That Needs to Become Extinct.

Paul Street, historian, speaking in Chicago on April 2.

 

Paul Street, historian, speaking in Chicago on April 2.   

We are at a turning point in history. The capitalist-imperialist system is a horror for billions of people here and around the world and threatening the very fabric of life on earth. Now the election of fascist Trump poses even more extreme dangers for humanity—and underscores the total illegitimacy of this system, and the urgent need for a radically different system.

The website Revcom.us follows the revolutionary leadership of Bob Avakian (BA), the author of the new communism. Bob Avakian has scientifically analyzed that we are in a rare time when an actual revolution has become more possible in the U.S. He’s charted a strategy for making that revolution, and laid out a sweeping vision and concrete blueprint for “what comes next” in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America.

Revcom.us projects BA’s voice, leadership, and vision throughout society. It posts his timely leadership for the revcoms (revolutionary communists) and the whole movement for revolution, including his social media posts, and curates his whole body of work. 

Our website applies the scientific approach BA has developed to analyze major events in society and the world—why they are happening, how they relate to each other, how all this relates to the system we live under, where people's interests lie, how revolution is in fact the solution to all this, and what the goals of that revolution are.

Revcom.us acts as a guiding and connecting hub for the revcom movement nationwide: showing what’s being done, digging into what’s right and what’s wrong, and rapidly learning—and recruiting new people into what has to be a rapidly growing force. As part of this, revcom.us feature and promotes the weekly The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show on YouTube.com. 

Put it this way: there will be no revolution unless this website not only “keeps going” but rises to a whole different level!

DONATE NOW to revcom.us and get with BA and the revcoms!

Your donations contribute to:

If you are horrified at the Trump/MAGA fascism spawned by this system of capitalism-imperialism coming to power in the world’s top nuclear-armed superpower… outraged at the tremendous harm this fascism is perpetrating on people in this country and the whole world… hate the Dark Ages morality and Christian fascism that they are trying to forcibly impose…see the very existence of humanity being threatened by the increasing danger of nuclear war and destruction of the environment: Be part of supporting this revcom.us website that—now more than ever—plays a crucial role in exposing the system ruling over us and in leading people out of this madness to a radically different and far better future. 

See FIVE REASONS you should donate, spread the word about revcom.us, and urge your friends and others to donate and subscribe to this website.