Skip to main content

You Are Heartsick About Buffalo and Uvalde—and Your Solution Is to Vote Democratic? What Is WRONG with That Picture?

“Hold on to Hope: Vote!”—the words of a homemade sign made by one of the thousands of protesters outside Houston’s George R. Brown Center during the recent NRA (National Rifle Association) convention. Many others had similar messages.

A common definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. If you drop your hands in a boxing match, and your opponent lands a solid cross to your jaw, you should learn not to drop your hands. If you have a horrible toothache that you think will somehow go away forever if you just put a few more dabs of a special ointment on it, you’ll end up with a terrible infection and even worse pain.

Those are trivial examples. But if you think that, after the latest spasms of horrifying violence in Buffalo and Uvalde shocked millions of people across the country, maybe now, maybe this time, voting Democrats into power will put an end to the excruciating violence that rips through this country, and the horrific violence committed by this country… then that’s a serious problem. It’s not only wrong—it serves to perpetuate the underlying problem.

So it’s good to think again. Look deeper. Dig for the roots of this problem.

BAsics 3:12 quotation by Bob Avakian

 

Where Did All These Guns Come from, and Why Can’t Society Stop the Killings?

Outrage. Shock. Seething anger. Millions of people in this country are filled with a sense that the seemingly endless slaughter of Black and Brown people, of youth, and now of school children, must STOP!

How did things get this far? How did it develop that weapons of war, capable of firing 600 rounds a minute, are readily available to racist fanatics, and hateful, twisted people?

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ended legal school segregation in a decision called Brown v. Board of Education. Racists across the U.S., but especially in the South, began a systematic effort to resist integration and the legal equality of Black people in all spheres of society, and to maintain the unchallenged white supremacist, male supremacist, and “traditional” domination they had enjoyed for decades. Over the following years lawyers, “scholars” and others developed theories and arguments in support of that effort. Reva Siegel, of the Yale Law School, wrote that “The modern …  gun rights movement (was) born in the shadow of Brown.” Within a decade, it became a movement shaped in the interest of a social force that is “… predominantly white, rural, and politically conservative.”

In short, unreconstructed woman-hating racists.

This reactionary movement intensified in the wake of upheavals and social movements among Black and other oppressed people, women, LGBTQ people, and others during the 1960s and ’70s, and it increasingly identified the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as what it considers the source of what it calls American “freedom.” Gun sales surged in the aftermath of rebellions and upheavals by Black people in cities across the country, and not just in the areas where a rebellion had occurred.

By the mid-1970s, the transformation of the National Rifle Association (NRA) from its origins as an organization primarily interested in hunting to a “mass organization of heavily armed white people in suburbs and rural areas” had consolidated. In the five decades since then, the essentially complete identification of the NRA with the Republican Party, which itself was becoming utterly fascist and openly white supremacist, consolidated.

(It is not as if everyone today who owns a gun, even an automatic weapon, is a stone fascist or racist. But the fascist movement has made a point of acquiring these weapons, opposing all restrictions on them, and over the past few years increasingly brandishing them to intimidate and even kill protesters and that is definitely the character of the NRA as a whole.)1

Announcing New work by BA, SOMETHING TERRIBLE, OR SOMETHING TRULY EMANCIPATING:

 

The Democrats Are an Answer—a WRONG Answer

The problem with the NRA isn’t that it has disproportionate influence, or that it pulls fascist leaders like Trump, Cruz, and Abbott around on a leash. The problem is that the NRA represents a core part of the fascist forces being mobilized aggressively to prepare for a civil war against those they see as their opponents.

That is why Republi-fascists are opposed to the weakest of concessions on “gun rights,” even in the wake of horrors like Buffalo and Uvalde.

And why does the Democratic Party leadership, many of whom speak with horror at the ongoing atrocities and mass shootings, never call on people who are fed up, sick at heart, and angry as hell at all these killings to take action, other than to vote for them—a course which has accomplished nothing? Because their greatest concern is holding together the system of capitalism-imperialism that they represent and as part of that they fear the upheaval and chaos that might result from directly confronting the fascists, many of whom are armed to the teeth and fanatical lunatics. They also fear what would happen if those they see as their base were to take to the streets and act “outside” of the normal channels, in opposition to this madness and mayhem. Right now, in a situation in which society is being pulled apart with the fascists determined to shed the “norms” and rules that have governed society for decades, the Democrats are desperately trying to hold things together and are willing on issue after issue to concede to these fascists… on their terms. Some of these Democrats may even be sincere in their expressions of grief and outrage. But when push comes to shove, they care about preserving this system and keeping masses of people bottled up a hell of a lot more than they do about human beings.

New Year's Statement by Bob Avakian

 

The Republican Party Is Fascist… The Democratic Party Is Also a Machine of Massive War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity

The Democratic Party, for 200 years, has been one of the main institutions that has presided over systems—first capitalism mixed with slavery, then capitalism-imperialism—based on the ruthless exploitation of people in this country and all over the world.

From day one, this exploitation has been enforced and cohered by brutal violence. And for 200 years, the Democratic Party has been one of the main institutions presiding over the continuation and deepening of the violence and hate baked into the country’s founding—the enslavement, the lynch mobs, the Trail of Tears, the broken bones and burned villages, the corpses hanging from trees, the women raped in cotton fields. The Democratic Party was a determined upholder of slavery. The Democrats were the party of open white supremacy, Jim Crow, and lynch law, for a century.

Democrats were in power when the U.S. obliterated two Japanese cities with nuclear weapons—the only time such weapons have been used; they were in power when a years-long bombing campaign called “Operation Rolling Thunder” unleashed literally genocidal atrocities on the people of Vietnam, war crimes whose effects continue to this day.

These are but a tiny portion of a blood-soaked history that could fill volumes—and should be much better known by anyone who thinks that “voting Democratic” is going to make society less violent.

And it’s not ancient history. Decades of mass incarceration of Black, Brown, and Native American youth have put generations behind bars, and made the U.S. the country with the world’s largest prison population. Mass incarceration took off with a so-called “Crime Bill” spearheaded by Biden when he was a senator, and signed into law by Bill Clinton.  

Today, even as a rampage of police murder continues and intensifies across the country, and in the face of unprecedented outpourings of tens of millions demanding change and raising the cry “Black Lives Matter,” Biden’s solution is to “fund the police, fund the police, fund the police.” And “rising stars” like Mayor Eric Adams of New York—the Black Giuliani—call for giving the police more license to carry out violent repression.

And if you’re nostalgic for the Obama years—know that when youth in Baltimore rose up in rebellion at the brutal police murder of Freddie Gray, Obama called them “thugs”—but never said a word condemning the brutalizing, murdering pigs. When Michael Brown, a Black youth, was shot and killed by a cop in Ferguson, Missouri, Obama said he had “complete confidence” in his “Justice” Department when they refused to file charges against the cop.

Right now, the Democrats under Joe Biden are risking nuclear war, with its unimaginable horrors, to gain advantage over  Russia, their imperialist rivals in the war in Ukraine. Under Biden and Democratic leadership, the U.S. has continued militarizing of the U.S. border with Mexico, and driving immigrants out of the U.S. at a faster pace even than Trump.

So no, limiting your opposition to voting for Democrats and hoping for the best does not lead to meaningful or worthwhile change. It perpetuates the delusion that change is possible within this system.

This System Is Coming Apart

As Bob Avakian wrote in “Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating: Profound Crisis, Deepening Divisions, Looming Possibility Of Civil War—And the Revolution That Is Urgently Needed”:

It is this system which is the basic cause of the tremendous suffering that people, all over the world, are subjected to; and this system poses a growing threat to the very existence of humanity, in the way that this system is rapidly destroying the global environment, and in the danger of war between nuclear-armed capitalist-imperialist powers, such as the U.S. and China.

All this is reality, and no one can escape this reality. Either we radically change it, in a positive way, or everything will be changed in a very negative way.

Killing and imprisoning masses of Black and Brown youth, deporting millions of impoverished people, waging genocidal wars and loading up its nuclear arsenal, denying women the basic right to control their own bodies—these aren’t indications of a system that is broken, or isolated convulsions of racist or seemingly “deranged” individual violence. These aren’t “bugs” that can be tweaked out of the system, this is the way it works. This system isn’t “broken,” it is splitting at the seams, from top to bottom.

And it is becoming more and more difficult for its rulers—Democrat and Republi-fascist alike—to hold it together. The turmoil tearing at society isn’t going to go away. It could spell even worse horrors for humanity—but it also could lead towards growing numbers of people recognizing this reality for what it is, and seizing on the rare situation we are in, one in which there is the possibility of making revolution in this monstrosity of a country, and doing something really wonderful and emancipating for humanity.

The hour IS late. Dare to break with what you have thought and accepted as true.  It is unconscionable to accept the slaughter of innocents as the way things have to be.

Help Make 2024 Our Year—a Year of Revolution! 
Donate to Revcom.us

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.

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

So what should you give to make 2024 our year—a year of revolution? 
Everything you possibly can! 
DONATE NOW to revcom.us and get with BA and the revcoms!    

Your donations contribute to:

  • Promotion of BA on social media and the Bob Avakian Interviews on The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show 
  • Strengthen revcom.us as an accessible, secure, robust website able to rise to the challenge of meeting the extraordinary demands of navigating the storms and preparing for revolution in this pivotal, unprecedented year
  • Fund revcoms to travel to national “hotspots,” where extreme contradictions are pulling apart the fabric of this country and creating the possibility of wrenching an actual revolution out of this intensifying situation
  • Expand the reach and coverage of revcom.us
  • Printing and distribution of key Revcom materials including the Declaration and Proclamation