On the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, August 6, about a dozen people in Houston gathered to watch the video of Raymond Lotta’s talk, “Robert Oppenheimer Served America’s Empire: We Have the Responsibility and Possibility to End This Horror, and Bring a Far Better World into Being.” Some of us had been out in the 100+ degree heat earlier, taking out the leaflet by the revcoms at a small protest.
Raymond Lotta speaking on "Robert Oppenheimer Served America’s Empire: We Have the Responsibility and Possibility to End This Horror, and Bring a Far Better World Into Being."
Most of us had not seen the film Oppenheimer, but Lotta’s talk opened up an animated and thoughtful discussion. One of the main things people probed and got at was: are American lives worth more than other people’s lives? The collective conclusion was—absolutely not. People questioned and rejected that justification for obliterating two cities and killing thousands of people, which both the U.S. government, and people generally, give for incinerating thousands of people in Japan. They also had questions about WW 2, the Soviet Union, and U.S. imperialism.
They also questioned what the hell the U.S. Communist Party did during this period, and how progressives or communist supporters could be so blinded by the lie that America is a force for good in the world that it led them to “justify” mass murder. As one person put it, why should we care about the moral dilemma of building bombs for U.S. imperialism and not care about, or even acknowledge, the thousands of people killed and countless countries destroyed by the U.S. from Hiroshima and Nagasaki all the way to today.
People got into the parasitism in this country and how they see the ideological baggage that needs to be challenged, especially now when humanity is again facing the threat of imperialist nuclear war. One person said this is the only world people know, they just don’t know how the world could be different—that needs to change. A couple of people commented that they found Lotta’s talk profound, disturbing, and challenging. Several people took bundles of We Need and We Demand and We Are the Revcoms to get out to others.
