Decoding Da Dubya Code

Revolutionaries, reporters and film crews assembled on Friday morning for a "Press Conference and Anti-Inaugural Banquet." It was held near Howard University at Café Manowaj, a cool and funky hang-out run by a crew of radical South Africans. Steaming breakfast dishes (named for people’s heroes and historical highpoints) soon appeared. Indymedia and RW reporters tended to order Amandla eggs. The Fox-5 TV guy was all over the Paris Commune French Toast. (His footage of our red-flag-filled cowboy-hat stomping made the 5 o’clock news that night.)

Sunsara Taylor: Are there any born-agains in the house who are deep into biblical armageddon prophesies? No? In that case, I first need to first walk you all through my ‘Armageddon Crash Course for post-Enlightenment Thinkers’....

At this very moment millions of people are being seduced into going for simple, good-versus-evil answers to the agonizing and growing complexities of the world. They are consumed with the coming Judgment Day, the return of Jesus, Armageddon, the Rapture.

Here’s the Revelations scenario rolling around in their heads: First, Israel finds peace and then the Rapture happens. God calls up his true believers and all those who are pure of heart—those 12 years old or younger. Cars pile up in huge crashes on the freeways as drivers are called up to heaven, airplanes plummet to the ground as the true-believing pilots disappear—there are black-outs and sheer havoc. The anti-christ, an internationalist talking world peace, rises through the United Nations. During the next seven terrible years of tribulation, punishment is meted out by a vengeful Jesus, the rivers will run six feet deep in blood, and people must be willing to fight and die for the Lord.

Okay, that’s the mindset of a good section of Bush’s audience. And knowing that, his speech was deliberately loaded up with lots of coded "End Times" language fashioned by his hotshot evangelical speechwriter, Michael Gerson—all designed to send the Armageddon addicts into orbit.

At the same time, the central thrust of Bush’s speech, and the clear message telegraphed to his imperial minders, cohorts and rivals—was an affirmation of the U.S. right and intention to rampage, to flex its "sole superpower" status and roll up the planet under its permanent domination (all cloaked in deceitful banalities: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.")

"The Communist Guide to the Top Ten Lies and Armageddon References in George Bush’s Inaugural Speech"

Scientifically, the word FIRE refers to combustion. But in the Bible, fire refers to the wrathful punishment of a vengeful God. When Bush said "a day of fire," he meant 9/11, which many Christian fascists believe is punishment for American’s turning their backs on Jesus.

The reality is that 9/11 and the rise of the Islamic fundamentalists cannot be understood without Bob Avakian’s writings on the Enlightenment, the massive dislocations of globalization, and the loss of revolutionary China as a pole of attraction in the world.

Many people were confused to hear Bush talk so much about "freedom," some figured he was just straight-up lying.

But when he says "Because we have acted in the great liberating tradition of this country, tens of millions have achieved their freedom," Bush is actually (believe it or not) referring to the never-ending U.S. conquest of Iraq, and telling the world to expect more of the same and worse! His global mission of "spreading freedom" is nothing more than the freedom of U.S. empire to further dominate the world.

Years ago, on Tom Snyder’s TV show, Bob Avakian pointed out that "If the exploiters are free to exploit, then the masses of people are not free to be free of that exploitation."

At the end of his speech, Bush speaks of "liberty and the Author of Liberty." The implication is that liberty is God’s will and its author is God.

Mainly Bush uses "freedom" as a stand-in for global configuring—but his use of vocabulary also allows evangelicals to hear a message that literally sanctifies American attacks in the world.

Listened to from this framework, the use of the word "freedom" 27 times and the use of "liberty" 15 times give this global mission of George Bush a true crusader feel.

Bush said: "From the day of our founding we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights and dignity and matchless value."

This, about a country that dragged Africans to its shores in slave chains? This, about a country that carried out systematic genocide against the Native inhabitants?

In contrast, Bob Avakian has recently written his memoir, From Ike to Mao and Beyond,about what he learned from Black classmates in an integrated high school during the 1950s and by getting to know leaders of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s. This played a critical role in his development as a revolutionary communist leader who has dug deeply into how revolution must and can uproot every last vestige of racism and national oppression.

Bush said in his speech: "Americans, at our best, value the life we see in one another, and must always remember that even the unwanted have worth."

Bush didn’t choose to speak openly about his plans to criminalize abortion and the doctors who perform them. But this deceitful talk of "valuing life," coupled with "the unwanted have worth" was clearly a set of codewords.

The day after his reelection, he called up a newly elected senator who believes in legally executing abortion providers, and said, "It’s time to get the job done."

Okay, in Bush’s twisted world, fetuses are holy persons and adult women are just incubators.

The Revolutionary Communist Party says, "Break the chains! Unleash the fury of women as a mighty force for revolution!"

In our new revolutionary society, women and men will develop new ways of relating with mutual respect and equality. And the impatience of women to tear up the old oppressive arrangements will actually be a positive factor that pushes the whole revolution forward until communism is achieved.

Bush said, "Leaders of governments with long habits of control need to know: To serve your people you must learn to trust them." Right. From the man who called the protests of millions worldwide against the Iraq invasion a "focus group."

Bob Avakian doesn’t huddle with advisors trying to manipulate or deceive the people. His approach is to put contradictions in the hands of more and more people, including the biggest questions of how to make revolution and how to run a society that the masses would actually want to live in. He leads the people to understand these contradictions and to help solve them.

He actually does trust the people and has confidence that with genuine communist leadership they can change the whole world.

Bush is effectively saying he recognizes no separation between church and state.

For example, Bush’s faith-based initiative: They are pulling millions of dollars in government funding out of secular social service programs and pouring it almost exclusively into Christian organizations.

Bush says, "Rights must be more than the grudging concessions of dictators; they are secured by free dissent and the participation of the governed..."

This, said at the most militarized inaugural address in history, where protesters were attacked, cordoned off, and even reactionary George Will said the whole affair looked like a banana republic under siege.

Bob Avakian understands that the proletariat must hold firmly on to state power once it is achieved, that it is not worth holding onto if it doesn’t just tolerate dissent, but foster it. Because even truths that bring to light negative things about the revolutionary vanguard can become part of what we need to learn to move society forward.

We’re getting up there in our Top Ten, this is Number Two. We saved it till the end because it is such a BIG LIE. Throughout Bush’s speech dwells this HUGE LIE that has been with humanity for thousands of years, causing untold slaughter and suffering, the lie used by all of the biggest tyrants in the world. That lie is GOD.

Chairman Avakian has said it is time to quit praying to things that don’t exist and time to be liberating our minds and moving to end oppression the only way it can be done—by fighting it.

Finally, let’s have a drumroll here for the Number One lie from Bush’s speech!

It is now supposed to be an assumed and accepted fact that communism was a failure—and that any hopes of a radically different and liberated alternative to capitalism are a false hope.

The actual history of socialist society puts to shame Bush’s mangling of the truth, and his smirking declaration that no society greater than the U.S. has ever existed. Au contraire!

Bursting through the cracks of the 20th-century lumbering imperialist death machine, the workers and peasants in Russia in 1917 and in China in 1949 made revolution and accomplished amazing things. They went from unspeakable poverty and misery to becoming the people who, for the first time in history, started to consciously transform society and themselves.

During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, workers, peasants and students were called upon by Mao Tsetung to struggle to keep China on the road to a classless communist world. They criticized those leaders who were trying to take things back to the old society. They debated philosophy, political economy, and world affairs. They got involved in the running of factories, hospitals and schools.

In the end, the communist revolutions of the Soviet Union and China were overturned. How should we sum this up?

Bob Avakian looks at these socialist experiences of the last 100 years, and sees a great start! But, he says, we can do much better and soar much higher.

Standing on the accomplishments of these great chapters in human history, and fearlessly examining the grievous aspects of these revolutions, Bob Avakian has re-envisioned what it will take to get to a communist world, and even what that classless society could look like.

Avakian’s approach combines the need for firm revolutionary leadership to hold onto power with involving more and more people in the process of exercising that power. It includes unleashing ferment, giving expression to the diversity in society as opposed to people being regimented and saluting an "official ideology." He is about moving society and the world to the point where there is no longer a need for a government of any kind; where the people consciously and voluntarily transform themselves and the world.

For all the real and monumental dangers that Bush concentrates, the same global shifts and changes that are driving Bush to his extremes are also bringing the possibility of Bob Avakian’s liberating future more sharply into focus. These two futures are colliding. If people come to know about Bob Avakian and throw everything they have into this battle for the future (for indeed, everything is at stake!) then some day folks will look back and be able to speak with profound truth and profound joy about the "shipwreck of capitalism."