February 12, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

“You Think You’re Woke...
But You’re Sleepwalking Through A Nightmare —

This System Cannot Be Reformed,
It Must Be Overthrown!”

The Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution Tour

 

To you who are fed up with this society and “solutions” that are no solution...

To you who are angry and defiant and want to see an end to the white supremacy, the patriarchy and its many forms of gender oppression, the persecution of immigrants, the imperialist wars and occupations and threats, and the capitalist plunder and destruction of the environment—an end to all, or any, of the horrible forms of oppression and exploitation that define and intertwine with this capitalist-imperialist society...

To you who seek not justice for yourself or even just your own people, but the Emancipation of ALL Humanity...

To you who hate the fascism of Trump and Pence, but see through “vote for me and I’ll set you free” and any road that just makes the present horrors a little more tolerable for some within the U.S., while people around the world suffer even more...

To you who choke on “I’m woke,” “I’m good,” “No worries” when the world is being torn asunder and who have no patience for the putrid morals and relations of this culture...

To each and every person who senses that none of these horrors will be solved by this dog eat dog capitalist/imperialist system and that something radical—a real revolution—is needed... even as you have a thousand questions as to what that revolution would look like and whether it is even possible:

There Is a Way Out of This Madness!

“Let’s get down to basics:
We need a revolution. Anything else, in the final analysis, is bullshit.”
—Bob Avakian

We are constantly told, openly and by implication, that there is no alternative to the present order. But that is wrong!

There is a scientific approach that makes clear this madness is unnecessary and indicates the potential pathways for change. There is an actual plan for a radically different—and radically better—society, on the road to wiping out all exploitation and oppression, and emancipating humanity. There is a strategy to draw forward the millions and millions needed to make that happen. There is the leadership, in Bob Avakian (BA), the architect of the new communism and the leader of the revolution. These are great strengths on the people’s side. But, what is now missing and urgently needed is YOU—to get with, support, and become an organized part of the revolution.

There is a project to put this revolution before millions and organize thousands into it. That project is the Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution Tour—starting out in Los Angeles in March and going around the country for the rest of the year. We’re going to boldly bring forward that science, strategy, and leadership for revolution and go right up against all the bullshit—the outmoded, petty, self-deceiving, and self-seeking bullshit that just ends up perpetuating the outrages of today.

But that’s not all. There’s no revolution without organization. We’re going to work: organizing for a revolution—enough now of everyone in “their lane,” with eyeballs glued to their screens. We’re gonna go everywhere, from the hard streets to the suburbs, from the hardscrabble rural areas to the campuses, and to wherever people are creating the new or debating the future. We’ll be giving people the concrete ways and means to support, contribute to, and join this revolution, in many different ways, big and small—with ideas and with practical involvement, with support and with questions and criticisms.

The tour will go far and wide, spreading and showing the film of the historic 2018 speech by Bob Avakian, Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution, that deeply answers the two questions in its title. And, the tour will get out the pamphlet, HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution, which concisely lays out the principles for how we get from the situation we are in today to actually winning an actual revolution.

Busting the People Out of Mental Shackles

We’ll call out the dead-end paths and mental shackles:

• The identity politics and all the similar rationales that end up with people looking out for themselves or their group, while the system grinds on, taking lives and crushing spirits, and dividing those who should oppose it;
• The religions that preach reconciliation and serve to keep minds away from confronting and changing reality as it really is;
• The entrepreneurialism—whether “legit,” gangsta, or NGO-style—that keeps everyone locked in the destructive, horrific capitalist present;
• The phony “socialism” that raises people’s hopes but only aims at repackaging and dividing up the spoils of U.S. domination of the world.

And we will definitely take on complicity with the Democratic Party, which poses as “the only alternative.” When in fact:

The Republican Party Is Fascist
The Democratic Party Is Also a Machine of Massive War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity
This System CANNOT Be Reformed—It MUST Be Overthrown!
We Need an Actual Revolution

The tour will IMPACT everywhere it goes—opening up debate, stirring up controversy, shaking up society so that people no longer feel they have to accept the unacceptable and adjust to injustice, and instead are inspired to get organized for a revolution to change everything.

The tour will work with the Revolution Clubs where they exist and help form new ones where they don’t. The tour will connect with people protesting and resisting this system’s crimes, especially those that concentrate the deep conflicts of this system. Stepping to people with revolution straight up, and coming from that place, we’ll unite in fighting injustice and oppression, and we’ll struggle with them to see the need and possibility for revolution. This is what it means to Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution. The tour and the Revolution Clubs are where you learn about the revolution while leading—contributing to building vanguard organization necessary to lead a revolution.

The tour kicks off in March in Los Angeles and Southern California. Your participation and your support are needed to start, sustain, popularize, and defend the tour.

What You Can Do NOW

• DONATE: Without hype, absent fundamental change, without revolution, the future of humanity and the planet hangs in the balance. This tour cannot be sustained without your contribution. Become a MONTHLY SUSTAINER and make it possible to keep the tour on the move through the rest of the year. People are pouring their money into politicians of the Democratic Party—who are nothing but war criminals or war criminals-in-training, competing to be commander in chief or representatives of this bloody empire. Make a Profound Difference and DONATE to the possibility of something that could get beyond this horror and radically change the whole world.
• Learn about this tour. Go to www.revcom.us to view the speech by Bob Avakian and to learn more about the tour, the movement for revolution, Bob Avakian, and the new communism.
• Get onboard. Go to revcom.us to see ways you can spread the word, get with the tour, and get organized.

A Radically Different and Better World IS Possible!

Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution Tour

 
Donate to
The Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution Tour:

 

 

There's Only 2 Choices.
Which One Will You Choose?

March 25, 2019 | revcom.us

 

The following is the text of the speech given at the March 23 Revolution Tour program and picnic. The speech was delivered by Sunsara Taylor and Tala Deloria

That was BA, the leader of the revolution. And he put it straight up: We have two choices: either, live with all this—and condemn future generations to the same, or worse, if they have a future at all—or, make revolution!

These are our choices, sisters and brothers. You are here because some part of this spoke to you. You don’t want to accept all this. Think about this. We’ve been in town just over a week and already two people told us about close relatives who were murdered by police. A 12-year-old told us his cousin was killed for wearing red sneakers. A 15-year-old told us his father was deported not once, not twice, but three times—when the kid was five years old, eight years old, and 10 years old. A woman told us about relocating across the country so she wouldn’t be found and killed by the man she thought was her partner. Multiply these stories by thousands... and if you look around the globe, multiply them by millions. Is this any way to live? Is this the future we want for the beautiful children running around in the park right outside, and the millions like them all around the world?

Those who rule over us want us to believe this is all that is possible, but that is a LIE. We can end all this, but ONLY if we end the system that is the cause of all this. Only if we make an actual revolution. This means the overthrow of this system. That’s right, we are talking about overthrowing this system—leading millions to rise up when the conditions are right to meet and defeat that violent repressive force of the old exploitative and oppressive order, to clear them away so we can build something new.

No, we can’t go out and do that right now because we are serious. But we are not just waiting, we are hastening that time and preparing for it. When you watch the full film from BA, which is available at revcom.us, he will break down the strategy for how this fight could be waged with a real chance to win, and how we work now to prepare for that time.

But we are not just about tearing this system down. We are about building a whole new society and world. A world where never again is an immigrant child torn from the arms of their parents, hurled across borders, or locked in a cage. Where never again does a Black mother or father have to sob over the casket of their child, shot down like a dog by the police—or by a kid from a rival set just down the street. Where never again does a woman know what it is like to fear walking alone at night because she might be attacked or raped—or to be treated like a punching bag in her own home. Where people of different genders or who love in a different way never again face bigotry or violence. Where never again is a family blown to bits by U.S. bombs dropped on Pakistan, on Yemen, on Somalia, or anywhere else on this planet. A world where the planet is cared for, not destroyed, for future generations.

This is possible—the blueprint for this new society is right here, in this Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, written by Bob Avakian. This lays out the laws, the education, the approach to culture, and more. This is a radical document; it is visionary, but it is also very concrete and real.

We could live this way. All of humanity could.

But ONLY if we make revolution. Again, these are the only two choices we have—accept this nightmare of a world, or make revolution.

Now, you don’t need me to tell you that most people right now don’t know a damn thing about this revolution. They don’t know who BA is, they don’t know the strategy he has developed, they don’t know—most have never even dreamed about—the kind of world I just described. And many are caught up in this system’s ways of thinking, going along to get along, clawing over each other to try to survive, caught up in the way this system sets us against each other—against people of different races, from different parts of the world, with different sexual orientations, and more.

We have to go to work on changing this—together. Because many millions and millions of these very same people really do care about the things BA talked about in the speech we just showed. You are not the only one.

We have to break people out of all the things that keep them from the revolution. We don’t need everyone all at once. But we do need thousands—and we need them soon. Thousands acting together, influencing millions for revolution.

This is why we are touring the whole country—looking for the people like you, people with real pride in being among the first to take this step that can open up a path for many others—and together with you we are going to have an even greater impact, to draw forward even more people. Then, to have an even greater impact and draw forward even more people, and again and again on a bigger scale each time. All preparing for the time—as BA gets into in the rest of the film—when we can launch the struggle for power with a real chance to win.

Now, some people are going to give you a hard time. They’re gonna say all kinds of stuff about the revolution and they’re gonna attack the leader of this revolution—because they know that while we the masses of people make history, we cannot do that without leadership. They’re gonna test you and they are going to test us.

Well, three things on that.

First, remember what we’ve learned today. There really are only two choices: accept this nightmare—or... [the audience answers: “Make Revolution!”]

As for all the other so-called “easier” ways out—which are just ways back into hell—BA says this, and we do too:

Let’s get down to basics: We need a revolution. Anything else, in the final analysis, is bullshit. (From BAsics 3:1)

Second, there are answers to these objections when people are sincere (and even when they’re not), and finding those answers is part of how you learn more. There’s nothing wrong with saying hey, I don’t know the answer right now, but you come back here next week and we’ll get into it. And if you run into something you can’t answer, let us know—there are many answers in this book [holds up BAsics], there are many answers on the website revcom.us, and there is all kinds of stuff we are going to have to work through together.

Third, controversy can be part of how people learn. It’s the only way to lead masses of people through a process of casting off this system’s ways of thinking and taking up something new and liberating. If everyone already agreed with us, we wouldn’t need a vanguard. So, yeah, we’re gonna have to struggle real hard with people. Most people are walking around thinking they know all this stuff but they’re sleepwalking through a nightmare. And we shouldn’t be scared to let ’em know! Because millions of those very same people really do hate one or all of those “5 Stops”—the white supremacy, the attacks on immigrants, the wars for empire, the oppression of women, and the destruction of the environment—that BA talks about, and that’s why we can pry them loose from the system’s way of thinking and win them over to revolution—some all at once, a lot of them over time.

But all this only happens if people like us—and I really mean that, every one of us in this room, all of you listening online, whether you’ve been into this for years or you’re hearing about it for the first time today—play a part. You don’t have to go from zero to 60; there is a role for everyone to play as you learn.

You should have a form that describes six ways to contribute to this movement. Show the film of the speech from Bob Avakian, Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution, to family and friends. Post the Points of Attention around school, at the laundromat, and in other places. Join the street corner rally for revolution this Wednesday at West Adams High School on Vermont and Washington at 3:15. Donate and raise funds for the Revolution Tour. Come to the Revolution Center on Thursdays and Saturdays—to watch the BA film and more. Come out running with the Revolution Running Club. Fill this out before you go—and talk with us about other ideas you have.

Because if you refuse to consign children and grandchildren of today to live in this hell and worse, then you’ve got only one other choice—to join in making revolution. And there truly is nothing more meaningful or important you could be part of.

With that, I want to invite you to stick around, mingle, learn more about this revolution, start raising questions or ideas, have some fun.

 

From LA Across the Country: Getting Down with the Revolution and Getting into BA

March 25, 2019 | revcom.us

 

Saturday, March 23 marked a solid step forward for the National Revolution Tour, now focused in Los Angeles. People who are just turning their faces toward revolution came out to hear the first part of Bob Avakian’s filmed 2018 speech (Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution), as well as BA Through The Years. People gathered in different cities to watch the livestream.

They came as well to listen to a talk from representatives of the Tour, to break bread afterward with Tour members, and in many cases to get involved. People came from the climate march a week earlier, from the transit hubs and high schools where Tour members and volunteers went to agitate, from a union rally for Bernie Sanders, from the area around the park, and elsewhere in the area.

People came, in brief, to find out more about revolution, and as they ate donated ribs, vegan fare, and delicious conchas (Mexican sweetbread); they wrangled over a whole range of questions that had been gone into by BA in the film. If you walked from table to table, there were vets locked in deep discussion on the real role of the U.S. around the world; people hearing about what the Tour had done up in Sacramento and Vallejo, digging into the limitations—and damage done by—identity politics; and high school students drinking in what they were hearing and putting forward their views on it all. More than one person there had been attracted initially by Bernie Sanders but saw or sensed the American chauvinism saturating his thing and/or the limits of his electoral reformism, and wanted something different. Very notably, there were people talking about, and in one case wielding right on the spot with each other, the Points of Attention for Revolution.

In both the program and the picnic discussions that followed, Bob Avakian—what he said in the films, in the work he’s done, and in who he is—was a real presence. More than one person there had followed him from a distance and was feeling the need to “get in closer,” and others were just getting introduced to him and feeling strongly that “people need to know about this... and I need to know more about it.” The main talk at the program drew heavily from the crossroads laid out clearly in BA’s speech: “In fundamental terms, we have two choices: either live with all this—and condemn future generations to the same, or worse, if they have a future at all—or, make revolution!” This ran through the main talk and then continued in the discussions outside.

The Tour had a sign-up sheet with a range of activities, and a number of people committed to be part of one or more. Others bought copies of BAsics or the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America. Working with people on these next steps—working with them on how this is contributing to and fitting into making revolution, getting into their questions as we take this out further—will be critically important.

There was a certain point where, if you stepped away from a table for a minute and looked at the panorama, with people at a half-dozen or more tables intently discussing things with those who had been strangers a few short hours before, you could say to yourself, this is a beginning. And you would be right.

The Mueller Report:

Surprise, Mueller Did Not Save You
Wake Up & Get Serious
The Only Way to Stop the Trump/Pence Fascist Regime Is Through Mass Struggle

March 25, 2019 | revcom.us

 

On Friday night, March 22, it was announced that Special Counsel Robert Mueller, in charge of investigating Donald Trump’s possible cooperation with Russia in the 2016 election, had released his report and indictments were not going to be filed against Trump or anyone else who has not already been indicted.

For nearly two years, many people have been relying on this report as somehow the magic wand that would wave away the Trump/Pence regime. It will not happen.

The most important lesson to draw from this is that people have been diverted, bamboozled, and stupefied into becoming passive spectators, when what is urgently needed is massive, sustained nonviolent resistance to demand the whole regime be ousted. Becoming passive spectators rather than confronting the fact that the Trump/Pence regime is a fascist regime that has been steadily making progress in consolidating fascism, and that absent the people mobilizing, the regime will go on. The Democrats will continue, as they have, making petty amendments to process and steadfastly find every reason to avoid confronting what we actually face in the Trump/Pence regime. And they will consistently work to confine resistance to electing Democrats and maintain the facade of normalcy while accommodating, conciliating, and COLLABORATING with the Trump/Pence regime, aiding and ushering in an even more horrific future.

The top Democrats and their mouthpieces in the media like the New York Times crow that “so far [the report is] a vindication of the rule of law.” WRONG terms. The Times even lauds Trump for allowing it to go forward. Please! For the ruling class—including those who oppose the regime—the specter of people acting outside the normal suffocating confines of politics as usual (which it must be said is the process through which Trump/Pence came to power), is anathema, to be avoided. For them, as Bob Avakian said in the film of his talk THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America. A Better World IS Possible, order is more important than justice. For all who rule or who are angling within the system to be top dogs in this whole setup, what they fear most—even more than fascism—is the people who have the most interest and desire to stop all that this regime represents getting out of the bounds of politics as usual and acting on the things they are most concerned about.

But, that is not the case for the lives of the people here and around the world.

The Democrats and Piglosi have continually ruled impeachment off the table, claiming it would divide the country—as if the country is not already divided, with the wrong side of the divide having all the initiative and setting all the terms. They willfully lead people to blind themselves, soft-pedaling statements like Michael Cohen saying under oath before a House of Representatives investigation that he believed Trump will violate the rule of law to stay in power if the 2020 elections go against him. And Trump, rather than dial it down in the face of that, stepped it up a few days later by talking about how the military, police and “Bikers for Trump” are “rough” people who would support him in a crisis—with a definite implication that they would use force inside and outside the law to do that.

Further: The alleged ties to Russia are not and never were the reason WHY the Trump/Pence fascist regime had to go. They must go because they are FASCIST.

To be very clear: at this point, we cannot draw conclusions about what the report might say. Even without indictments, it could still contain important connecting-the-dots information that could be, but only will be, useful in the fight to oust the regime in the context of masses acting in the way Refuse Fascism has called for. But that will only be useful if guided by what we have printed now for two years:

The Democrats, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, etc., are seeking to resolve the crisis with the Trump presidency on the terms of this system, and in the interests of the ruling class of this system, which they represent. We, the masses of people, must go all out, and mobilize ourselves in the millions, to resolve this in our interests, in the interests of humanity, which are fundamentally different from and opposed to those of the ruling class.

This, of course, does not mean that the struggle among the powers that be is irrelevant or unimportant; rather, the way to understand and approach this (and this is a point that must also be repeatedly driven home to people, including through necessary struggle, waged well) is in terms of how it relates to, and what openings it can provide for, “the struggle from below”—for the mobilization of masses of people around the demand that the whole regime must go, because of its fascist nature and actions and what the stakes are for humanity.

What Is an Abortion and Why Women Must Have the Right to Choose

Life Cannot and Should Not Always Be Preserved

By A.S.K. | Reposted with a new introduction March 25, 2019 | Originally posted: January 23, 2005 | revcom.us

 

There is now a wave of reactionary laws that rip away women's rights to control their own bodies. Kentucky and Mississippi are the latest to declare abortion illegal after a fetal heartbeat is detected (which most often occurs after six weeks of pregnancy and long before many women know they are pregnant). This rests on a profoundly anti-woman stance and a profoundly anti-scientific pile of rubbish. In the face of this, we think it very important that our readers get a scientific understanding of what an abortion actually IS and spread this to others.

 

Is it true that a fetus is a form of life? Of course it is. It is made up of live cells, it is growing and processing energy, it has the capacity to mature and reproduce, it has a genetic system and so on.

Will an abortion destroy this form of life? Yes, absolutely.

Well then, isn’t an abortion killing another human being? No, absolutely not.

A fetus is not yet a human being. It is more like a seed or a sprout of a human being. It is "alive," but that is also true of all the other cells in a woman’s body. It has no life of its own yet. It is not yet a separate life from the life of the woman in whose uterus it is.

Just because something has the characteristics of "life" doesn’t mean people should necessarily preserve it. This is an obvious truth. Think about it: People routinely terminate "life" for what is seen as a greater good. We do this every time we eat—all the fruits, vegetables, and meats come from live plants and animals killed for our nourishment. People end "life" every time we cut a tree for firewood, every time we take antibiotics to kill off the live disease organisms which are making us sick, or even every time we kill other human beings in self-defense or to prevent them from causing other human beings to suffer and die.

In other words, we kill life to preserve and enrich other life . So what about the life of the woman?

The life of a woman who is forced to continue an unwanted pregnancy is endangered. She might have to resort to a risky back-alley abortion. And if she is forced to go on with the pregnancy, her life is weakened and degraded. She will be robbed of pride and self-respect because she has been told by society that she is essentially worthless—even an undeveloped bunch of cells that isn’t even a whole baby yet gets more respect and has more value than this woman! Because she is not allowed to control her own body, her own reproduction, not allowed to decide whether or not or when to become a mother, she has no more freedom than a slave.

If a woman doesn’t want to continue a pregnancy all the way (for whatever reason), she should have the freedom to end it, safely and easily. This is for the greater good—for the health and overall well-being of that woman, whose life we should value and cherish more than that of a partially formed fetus. And for the greater good of humanity. After all, isn’t it in the greater interests of all of humanity that women not be slaves?

The "right-to-life" people don’t see it that way at all. They have made it crystal clear that to them the life of the fetus is more important and has more value than the life of the woman in whose uterus it is. From a social point of view, these people who want to forcibly take away a woman’s right to abortion are nothing but vicious, rabid dogs.

But from a scientific point of view, they are also ignorant fools or calculating liars.

A Fetus Is Not a Baby—It is Part of a Woman’s Body

Have you seen the pictures they use? Check them out. These pictures are very often blown-up pictures of fetuses almost ready to be born (but the truth is that more than 90 percent of abortions in the U.S. are done in the first three months of pregnancy). These pictures are designed to make you feel like the fetuses women are aborting are just like cute little babies, ready to be held in someone’s arms and cuddled and burped. But they’re not! Far from it.

And have you noticed how the fetuses are conveniently pictured floating around all by themselves, as if they weren’t still inside a woman’s body? Where is the woman in all this? Even in most school textbooks they show you drawings or photographs of a fetus inside a uterus, but they don’t show you the woman it is part of! It sort of makes you forget the woman is even there!

One of the things the Operation Rescue types are doing is taking advantage of the ignorance many people are kept in concerning their own bodies—what happens inside a body, how a pregnancy develops, and so on. Let’s have a look at what the truth is about how a fetus develops.

The truth is that pregnancy is a process which takes some time. And it is not some mysterious event guided by outside forces either. It is part of the normal processes of the woman’s body. Not the man’s, who has nothing to do with it except for providing the sperm. Not the church, not the government, not any other person. It all takes place inside the woman.

The egg changes and develops into a fetus, and keeps on changing for nine months, only because the woman’s physiology (the way her body works) is making these changes happen .

Let’s review what happens in the first trimester of a pregnancy (1 to 13 weeks since the woman’s last menstrual period):

It all starts with an egg cell and a sperm cell. Each egg cell and sperm cell is alive.

Over a period of about 30 years a woman releases one or more of these live egg cells from her ovaries every single month. That’s a lot of egg cells over a lifetime! Every time a man ejaculates, he releases between 200 and 400 MILLION LIVE SPERM CELLS! And that’s definitely a lot of live cells! Of course most of the time they just all die. Funny, isn’t it, that even though eggs and sperm are "life" too, the right-to-lifers aren’t trying to "save" every one of them!

If even just one of those sperm cells released in a woman’s vagina swims into the uterus and out into one or the other of the two Fallopian "tubes" (on each side of the uterus), and runs into a ripe egg cell, fertilization can take place. That means that the egg and sperm have fused and the result is called a fertilized egg.

The fertilized egg gets pushed down the tube. The egg started off as one cell, but soon divides into two cells, then four cells, and so on. By the time it gets back to the uterus (a muscular sack only about the size of a small pear) the egg is still much smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.

For the pregnancy to keep going, this tiny egg has to stick to the sides of the uterus. If it doesn’t stick (implant), it will simply be flushed out of the uterus with the menstrual blood during the woman’s next period. When this happens—a form of "spontaneous abortion"—the woman doesn’t know it, because the size of the fertilized egg is so tiny.

If the egg does stick to the woman’s uterus, this triggers hormonal changes which will keep the woman’s next period from coming on. The way pregnancy tests work is that they measure these hormones in the woman’s blood or urine to tell if she’s pregnant.

The implanted egg is now called an embryo, and its shape starts to change as the cells start to move around to different positions. The cells are beginning to "differentiate." That means they are starting to take on different functions and form different kinds of tissues which will later become different parts of the body. Instead of all being the same, some cells will become skin cells or heart cells or eye cells, for instance.

Three weeks into the pregnancy, the whole embryo is still only about 2mm (2 millimeters) long, or about the size of the letter "o."

The placenta gets formed from a combination of some of the tissues of the woman’s uterus and of the woman’s embryo. It is a mass of tissue rich in blood vessels, which connects the embryo to the woman’s blood circulation system. During the whole pregnancy the fetus will remain attached to the placenta through the umbilical cord .

The placenta helps show how the embryo or fetus is very much part of the woman’s body for the whole pregnancy. The embryo cannot get food on its own, clear out its own wastes, or even breathe on its own. It gets oxygen and dissolved food nutrients (and sometimes toxic substances) from the woman’s blood through the placenta and umbilical cord. It gets rid of its wastes the same way, releasing carbon dioxide and urea into the woman’s bloodstream for disposal.

Just as a single live cell cannot survive independently of a body, the embryo cannot survive independently of a woman’s body because it is truly part of her.

After four weeks of pregnancy the embryo looks a little like a tadpole. It even has gill slits like a fish, and a bony tail! These are features shared by embryos of many different species of animals and reflect our common evolutionary history. The embryo is now about 5mm long, smaller than this: ooo.

By the third month of pregnancy the embryo, now called a fetus, starts to look a little more "human" as it grows arms, legs, sex organs, fingers, and toes. It is undergoing a lot of changes, but inside, its internal organs, muscles, skeleton, and nervous system are still very undeveloped. The whole thing is still only about 25mm long, or about this long: oooooooooooooo

ABORTION IN THE FIRST TRIMESTER (1 through 13 weeks since last menstrual period)

More than 90 percent of abortions done in the U.S. are done in these first three months of pregnancy.

This is the best time to do it. It is the easiest, safest, and cheapest time to do it. It does not need to be done in a hospital but can be done in a walk-in clinic. You don’t have to be put to sleep.

The way it is done is that a flexible tube the size of a straw is inserted up the vagina and into the uterus. This tube is connected to a bottle with a suction pump. When the pump is turned on, it acts like a small vacuum cleaner and sucks out the contents of the uterus. What comes out looks mainly like blood, since the embryo or fetus is still so small. The abortion is usually not very painful. The woman may feel "cramps" in her uterus similar to having an IUD put in. The whole thing lasts only about 5 to 15 minutes and then it’s over. The woman rests for a while, and then she can go home.

There is no doubt that if a woman is pregnant and doesn’t want to be, she should do everything possible to go to a clinic and get an abortion within the first three months since her last period. The sooner the better.¹

SECOND TRIMESTER: (14 through 24 weeks since last period)

This is a time when the fetus grows a lot. Starting around the fifth month, the woman is able to feel it kicking, even though it is still only about eight inches long. It may suck its thumb, simply because of a genetically programmed sucking reflex which facilitates nursing after birth. Its internal organs, bones, and muscles continue to develop. In the sixth month it grows rapidly, to around a foot in length.

But it is important to realize that it is still not "complete" and that a whole lot of development still has to go on. Even at the end of this trimester it cannot survive outside the woman’s uterus without special medical measures.Its brain is still very unformed. Its lungs are not ready to take in air. It is still very much a part of the woman’s body and completely dependent on her bodily processes.

Abortion in the second trimester can still be done. But it can be hard for a woman to find a doctor or hospital to do it. Because the uterus is softer and the fetus is bigger, there is a greater possibility of medical complications, such as a torn or "perforated" uterus or infections. It is important to get good medical care for these second- trimester abortions.

There are different ways of doing these later abortions. Sometimes a doctor will inject a saline solution into the woman’s uterus. This kills the fetus and makes the woman’s body go into labor, and the fetus is expelled like a live baby would be. Sometimes a doctor will give the injection and then leave the woman alone, or with just a nurse, to "deliver" the dead fetus. This is cruel and difficult for all concerned and it is totally unnecessary. There are other methods.

The best procedure for second trimester abortions involves a combination of dilation, curettage and evacuation (it’s called a D and E). The entrance to the uterus is stretched open (dilation), and the uterus is scraped with a metal loop (curettage) and emptied out (evacuation) by suction. This is a much better procedure: much safer, and less upsetting for the woman and medical staff than the "induction" abortions which cause the woman to go into labor. D and E abortions can be done from 12 to about 16 to 24 weeks of pregnancy.

Since abortion is so much easier (physically and emotionally), safer, and cheaper, in the first three months of pregnancy, why does any woman ever get one later than that? The answer is that sometimes errors are made with pregnancy tests, or a woman gets pregnant while taking pills, or with an IUD, and doesn’t realize she is pregnant right away. Sometimes she has to fight off the pressures of men or family members who object to the abortion out of their own backwardness. Sometimes she has to struggle through her own ignorance, fears, and lack of information before knowing what to do. Most often the delay is caused—and this is a real crime—by a lack of money. Increasingly, state laws that impose waiting periods and the lack of abortion facilities in rural areas will force more women to have abortions in the second trimester.

A high proportion of the women who are forced to get later abortions are young, poor, or women of color. This is another example of how women of color suffer a double oppression. And when laws are passed to force under-age women to get a parent’s permission before getting an abortion, more delays and more "late" abortions are certainly the cruel consequence.

While first-trimester abortions should be encouraged, and everything done to facilitate them, it is important to uphold the right of women to terminate an unwanted pregnancy at any time, and to provide women with the safest and the least physically and emotionally demanding abortions available at that time.

THIRD TRIMESTER (25 weeks or more since last period)

Abortions are rarely done in the third trimester except in emergencies to save the life of a woman. In such cases the doctor has to cut open the uterus and remove the fetus and placenta, and this would be considered major surgery.

The fetus still has a lot of development to undergo in these last three months of pregnancy. It grows a lot. But in the seventh month the fetus still only has a small chance of surviving if it is born prematurely because its internal organs are still not developed enough. In such cases doctors have to take special measures to try to finish incubating the fetus.

Final organ formation takes place in the eighth and ninth months. This is when the lungs finish developing. Until the lungs are finished the fetus would not be able to breathe air independently outside the uterus.

Also during this time lots of new brain cells are formed and major nerve tracks develop in the brain. In human beings a lot of the brain development continues to take place in the six months or so after birth . But by the end of the nine months of pregnancy the fetus is developed enough to be born and the woman’s body needs to expel the fetus before it gets too big to get past her pelvic bones! The woman’s body now goes into labor, contracting the muscles of the uterus, and finally pushing out the fully formed fetus.

As soon as the umbilical cord connecting the fetus to the woman’s body is cut, the supply of oxygen from the woman to the fetus is cut off and the newborn takes its first independent breath. This is its first act as an independent human being. It is now really a "baby." For the first time it is a truly separate life entity, and a separate social entity as well. From this moment it is really a separate human being, and should be treated as such.

A.S.K., the author of "Life Cannot and Should Not Always Be Preserved," is a contributing writer to the Revolutionary Worker with experience in the struggle for scientific experimentation as well as the revolutionary struggle.

Footnote:

1. Note from RW editors: The drug RU-486 is another method of abortion. Called the abortion pill, it causes the embryo to "unhook" and the menstrual period to start, flushing the embryo out of the uterus. It can only be used at the very beginning of a pregnancy. Anti-abortion forces are attacking this method, spreading misinformation and hysteria about its safety.

Another area that the right wingers have attacked is emergency contraception, or "Plan B," a pill that is taken within the first three days after sex. Plan B is not an abortion pill—it is basically a high dosage of ordinary birth control pills that works by either stopping the egg from fertilizing, delaying ovulation, or preventing a fertilized egg from becoming implanted in the uterus, depending on when the pill is taken in relation to the woman’s menstrual period and when the woman had sex. Right wingers have blocked women from being able to get this pill at pharmacies without a prescription so they can get access to it in time, and have spawned a movement of hospitals and pharmacies that refuse to offer the pill to rape victims, even though they are legally obligated to. [back]

You Can’t Change the World If You Don’t Know the BAsics

March 25, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

 

Every week, Revolution features one quote from BAsics, by Bob Avakian, the handbook for revolution. We encourage Revolution Clubs and other readers, everywhere, to take the time to discuss the quote—the whole quote—and to write us at revolution.reports@yahoo.com with accounts of these discussions, or thoughts provoked in yourself by reading the quote.

 

Cyclone Idai: Death and Destruction from a Criminal System

March 25, 2019 | revcom.us

 

The burning of fossil fuels causes warming oceans and rising atmospheric temperatures, which allow the atmosphere to hold more water and increase the wind speed associated with cyclones. Cyclone Idai—the worst in 20 years—produced more than two feet of rainfall in parts of the region—nearly a year’s worth—in just a few days. (Photo: AP)

 

Yet another violent weather disaster is causing massive death and destruction. Last week, tropical Cyclone Idai ripped through the southern African nations of Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. As of March 24, the official death toll in the three countries is more than 750, but the total number of those killed is expected to be much higher. CNN reports eyewitness accounts of 300 to 400 bodies lining the banks of a road out of Beira, Mozambique. Many bodies have been washed down rain-swelled rivers from Zimbabwe. The cyclone made hundreds of thousands homeless, and with the massive destruction of farms and roads, millions now face hunger and disease.

This is a glimpse of the future. With the warming of the planet, these kinds of extreme events will become more and more common. This then interacts with the way in which imperialism has retarded and distorted the development of roads, housing, and health care in the countries of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. And the result is millions vulnerable to death and devastation at a moment’s notice. What follows shows what we can expect will increase: unless we make revolution.

***

In scenes reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, survivors of Cyclone Idai remain trapped on rooftops or in trees. Reports from many areas are just beginning to get out. “We don’t have anything,” Josef Marius Jafate, a 29-year-old farmer living in an improvised roadside camp, told the Guardian. “We don’t have rice, or flour or any clothes. We need shelter. When is the help going to come?”

“The situation is simply horrendous. There is no other way to describe it,” Elhadj As Sy, secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), told the New York Times after touring camps for the displaced. “Three thousand people who are living in a school that has 15 classrooms and six, only six, toilets. You can imagine how much we are sitting on a water and sanitation ticking bomb.”

The response of the United States and other rich countries has been criminal. The U.S. has set aside a mere $700,000 for aid to the region! To put this into perspective, according to the Washington Post the cost of a single Trump trip to Mar-a-Lago is $3.4 million.

A Tale of Two Cyclones

At the same time as Cyclone Idai struck in southern Africa, what is called a “bomb cyclone” struck the central United States. There is massive flooding in Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri. Rivers burst over more than 200 miles of barriers in four states, leaving three dead and hundreds of homes and farms destroyed.

Both storms were historic in size and intensity and caused significant damage, but why is it that three people died in the U.S. while the death toll from Cyclone Idai may reach into the thousands? Even allowing for possible differences in the size or intensity of the storms, this still seems way out of proportion. So what could account for the difference?

Centuries of colonialism and imperialism have left the people in the region poor and vulnerable. Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe are some of the poorest countries in the world. People live in houses with corrugated aluminum roofs that can blow away. Sixty-nine percent of the people live on less than $1.90 per day. (To get a deeper understanding of this, go here.)

But, again—why? Portugal colonized the region starting in the 1500s, robbing the country of its natural resources including gold, rubber, and ivory. “Settlers” were brought in, and the land was stolen from the people and given to Europeans. After the British abolished the slave trade in 1807, eastern Africa became central to the trade, with approximately one million slaves kidnapped from Mozambique during the 1800s and sold. This depopulated whole sections of the interior. Even after slavery was formally ended in Portugal in 1869, it continued de facto in Mozambique with forced labor used in mines and plantations until the beginning of the 20th century.

During the 20th century, the United States became the dominant imperialist power in the world. For decades, the U.S. supported and armed the racist apartheid regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Between 1977 and 1992, South Africa and the United States funded a counterinsurgency war in Mozambique. Over one million Mozambicans were killed in the fighting or starved due to interrupted food supplies; an additional five million were displaced across the region. Much of Mozambique’s critical rural infrastructure—that is, its hospitals, rail lines, roads, schools, etc.—was destroyed.

Then, in the early 1990s, the U.S. and the other imperialist powers shifted gears and rearranged the form of imperialist domination in that part of the world—bringing in some of the very forces who had originally risen up to oppose colonialism to now preside over a new arrangement which maintained and even intensified the imperialist plunder (whatever the intent of some of the new forces in power). (To understand the dynamics involved in this, we strongly recommend Part IV of THE NEW COMMUNISM, by Bob Avakian, especially pp. 284-300.)

Under imperialism, Mozambique’s economy has been developed to produce sugar, cashew nuts, tea, and tobacco for the world market, while it must import food to feed its own people. The infrastructure of the region was developed not to serve the needs of the rural farmers but to enable Portugal and other imperialist powers to dominate and extract the wealth of the country. Even before the cyclone, malnutrition affected 43.7 percent of Mozambican children between the years 2005 and 2011.

With Idai, the agricultural output for the region has been ruined, leaving people facing starvation. There is a race against the clock as rescue workers struggle to gain access. However, the lack of infrastructure, the result of imperialist plunder, makes this difficult.

There is a threat of massive outbreaks of disease such as cholera spread by the lack of clean water. Sixty-three percent of the rural population does not have access to indoor water, and 90 percent does not have access to indoor sanitation during “normal” times. The minimal health care system that exists in the country is already overloaded, with over two million people with HIV and 46 percent of children in rural areas with malaria.

In 2016, the International Monetary Fund cut off aid to Mozambique, an action that greatly increased the suffering of the people. But while the people suffer, the imperialists and their puppets do just fine. Right now, the major international consortiums, led by ExxonMobil and others, are working to develop massive natural gas deposits off the coast to profit off the needs of a global economy dependent on fossil fuels. And within the U.S. itself, the entire economy sits on top of this global food chain, feeding off extreme misery in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and it can finance relatively up-to-date infrastructure as a result.

All these factors combined to make the devastation far worse in southern Africa than it would be in any comparable storm in the U.S.

Why Are Violent Weather Events Happening More Often?

Weather-related disasters are occurring more frequently due to global warming, which is mainly caused by large-scale burning of fossil fuels (oil, gas, and coal) that produces carbon emissions. These industries are at the heart of the imperialist economy. The burning of these fuels causes warming oceans and rising atmospheric temperatures, which allow the atmosphere to hold more water and increase the wind speed associated with cyclones. Idai produced more than two feet of rainfall in parts of the region—nearly a year’s worth—in just a few days.

Partly as a result of the global warming caused by burning fossil fuels, the region had been suffering from a severe drought. Drought causes hardening of the soil, which leads to more intense flooding. Sea levels are about a foot higher than a century ago, which increases coastal flooding.

Who is responsible? Africa produces just four percent of global carbon emissions—compared to 80 percent by the most industrialized countries that make up the G20 (an organization of the world’s largest economies). Historically, through 2016, the U.S. has produced 2,575 times the carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases as Mozambique.

Revolution—Nothing Less

This system has ravaged Africa for hundreds of years. The slave trade, savage colonial rule, brutal white supremacist warfare, and the installation of imperialist puppet regimes have gone along with unbelievably ruthless exploitation. And THIS has created the conditions for the horrors we are seeing in Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe.

The system’s incessant burning of fossil fuels that feeds greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is putting the very future of life on the planet at risk. The countries least responsible for climate change, such as those hit by Cyclone Idai, suffer the most.

At this point, these imperialists are not even living up to their own phony agreements, which wouldn’t stop the problem in the first place. The ONLY answer their system really has to this is even greater devastation and horror for billions on this planet—and the killing of refugees, either on the high seas, the deserts, or through militarized “barriers.” The ONLY SOLUTION is a communist revolution, whose guiding principles include developing the economy in a way that contributes to “advancing the world revolution to uproot all exploitation and oppression and to emancipate all of humanity,” “protecting, preserving and enhancing the ecosystems and biodiversity of the planet for current and future generations” (from the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian), and overcoming the legacy of imperialist oppression of whole sections of the globe.

 

Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced by Cyclone Idai in Mozambique, Malawai, and Zimbabwe.  Here people wade through flood waters to seek refuge in Beira, Mozambique, which was badly damaged by the weather. (Photo: AP)

The infrastructure of the region was developed not to serve the needs of the rural farmers but to enable Portugal and other imperialist powers to dominate and extract the wealth of the country.  With Idai, the roads and bridges suffered a devastating blow, and agriculture has been ruined, leaving people facing starvation. (Photo: AP)

The region had been suffering from a severe drought. Drought causes hardening of the soil, which leads to more intense flooding after extreme storms because the soil cannot absorb the water. Here, after Cyclone Idai caused mudslides in Chimanimani, Zimbabwe, the people from the community search for those who were missing. (AP Photo/KB Mpofu)

Obama’s War Crimes in Afghanistan—A Simple and Quick Reminder

March 25, 2019 | revcom.us

 

On 9/11, in 2001, the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon came under attack. The U.S., under George W. Bush, attacked Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, and then invaded and occupied the country. After declaring “victory” in 2004, Bush was forced to steadily increase troop levels as the overthrown Taliban grew stronger partly due to the brutal, oppressive nature of the U.S. occupation.

It was Barack Obama, who had encouraged people to delude themselves into thinking he was a peace candidate, who carried out one of the biggest and bloodiest escalation of the entire Afghan war. Starting in 2009 Obama tripled troop levels from 30,000 to 100,000, and implemented a new strategy to defeat Al Qaeda,¹ reverse the Taliban’s momentum, and build up the oppressive Afghan government, particularly its military forces. The heart of this new strategy was a brutal “counterinsurgency” campaign aimed at holding key areas and killing more Taliban: it included stepped-up bombings, drone strikes, nighttime raids, assassinations, and detentions.

Under Obama, U.S. air attacks skyrocketed. In his first five years, the U.S. dropped 21,000 bombs and missiles—six and a half times the number dropped in Bush’s last five years.² Obama convinced many that U.S. air strikes were “exceptionally surgical and precise.”³ In reality, some of the war’s worst atrocities and war crimes took place under his command. Between 2009 and 2014, over 1,000 civilians were killed by U.S. air strikes,⁴ which obliterated homes, wedding parties, and villages, and thousands more in ground assaults and targeted assassinations:⁵

• In May 2009, between 26 and 140 Afghan civilians, mainly women and children, “perished in the blink of an eye,” in the villages of Shiwan and Granai, in western Afghanistan when their homes were destroyed by U.S. bombs.⁶
• In February 2010, U.S. Special Operations Forces murdered five Afghan civilians celebrating a birth in the village of Gardez, then tried to cover up their crimes by removing the bullets from the dead bodies.⁷
• In October 2015, the U.S. destroyed a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing 19, and wounding dozens of patients and staff.⁸

Under Obama, U.S. forces and their Afghan clients stepped up dead-of-night house searches and detentions in the U.S.’s network of more than 36, often secret, prisons and detention centers, which terrorized whole swaths of the population. Since the war began at least 15,000 Afghans have been detained on little or no evidence, brutally beaten, tortured, and sometimes killed.⁹

After Obama withdrew most U.S. ground forces in 2014 and bragged about ending the war, he continued U.S. drone and air attacks, with U.S. forces dropping 1,337 bombs, missiles and other munitions in 2016 alone—a 40 percent increase over 2015,¹⁰ and forged a strategy of drone warfare in Afghanistan that reduced the risk of U.S. casualties but still led to murderous “collateral damage,” i.e., assassinations of civilians not linked to any “terrorist” related activity, a broad catchall categorization to include any and all of the U.S.’s enemies at any given time—between 65 and 105 deaths in 2016 alone.¹¹

“Turns out I’m really good at killing people,” Obama bragged in a cold-blooded moment of candor. “Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”¹²

The U.S. promised to improve life for the Afghan people, but over half Afghanistan’s 35 million people remain impoverished, a quarter of them severely, constantly facing hunger. Chronic malnutrition has stunted the growth of a staggering 60 percent of Afghanistan’s children under five. Over 98 percent of the working population makes less than $3.10 a day.¹³

For all their bombings, killings, torture, and atrocities, the U.S. and its allies were never able to defeat the Taliban (which was aided by Pakistan¹⁴) or get control of Afghanistan. Instead, their war crimes and imperialist occupation fueled the growth of the oppressive Islamist forces they were fighting. At this writing, the U.S. is negotiating with the Taliban for an end to the war, a negotiation which could well return the Taliban to power. This is a stark illustration of how imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism are both reactionary forces, which reinforce each other, even as they clash.¹⁵

In this situation, Barack Obama played a key role in continuing—and legitimizing among a wide swath of the U.S. population—the overall U.S. “war on terror” even as U.S. rulers felt compelled to scale back some of their grandest ambitions. Obama continued and escalated the war in Afghanistan in order to attempt to preserve U.S. global credibility, defeat the Taliban, and maintain U.S. imperialist dominance in the Middle East and Central Asia. He returned U.S. forces to Iraq when ISIS emerged as a major force, and he greatly expanded the number and breadth of the overall U.S. drone war across the region—launching 10 times as many strikes on Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia as Bush had.¹⁶ And he did all this while claiming the U.S. was winding down its wars, and that the actions it was taking were surgically targeted against enemy forces.

Obama is nothing less than a war criminal, and far too many liberals continue to delude themselves and engage in willful denial.

 

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1. Al Qaeda is the reactionary Islamic jihadist organization founded by Osama bin Laden, which has had camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. [back]

2. “War-related Death, Injury, and Displacement in Afghanistan and Pakistan 2001-2014,” Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, May 22, 2015 [back]

3. “Obama’s covert drone war in numbers: ten times more strikes than Bush,” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, January 17, 2017 [back]

4. According to a 2016 article in the Atlantic magazine, “Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent… this counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths… The absurdly low figures cited by Obama administration figures were lies.” “Obama's Weak Defense of His Record on Drone Killings,” Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, December 23, 2016. [back]

5. “War-related Death, Injury, and Displacement in Afghanistan and Pakistan 2001-2014,” Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, May 22, 2015 [back]

6. Bob Dreyfuss, “Mass-Casualty Attacks in the Afghan War,” The Nation, September 19, 2013; “Afghanistan: The MASSACRE and The LIES,” revcom.us, May 17, 2009 [back]

7. Larry Everest, “Made in America: The Gardez Massacre,” revcom.us, April 4, 2010 [back]

8. “Massacre at Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan-U.S. Bombs Send a Bloody Message to the World,” revcom.us, October 3, 2015. See also, “The Massacre in Kandahar, Afghanistan And the Terror of U.S. Occupation,” revcom.us, April 1, 2012 [back]

9. “Pentagon Seeks to Overhaul Prisons in Afghanistan,” New York Times, July 19, 2009. There have been widespread reports that U.S. forces tortured and abused hundreds of detainees at firebases or other installations, and that the CIA has operated secret detention centers holding “ghost prisoners” (detainees who are not given any legal rights or access to counsel and who are likely not reported or seen by the International Red Cross). [back]

10. Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars – The World Is A Battlefield (Nation Books 2013), pp. 328-330. Obama began to slowly withdraw most U.S. forces from Afghanistan in 2011 claiming the U.S. was meeting its goals. In December 2014, the U.S. formally ended combat operations, but continues to carry out air and drone attacks and engage in combat along with Afghan security forces. “War-related Death, Injury, and Displacement in Afghanistan and Pakistan 2001-2014,” Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, May 22, 2015 [back]

11. “Obama’s covert drone war in numbers: ten times more strikes than Bush,” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, January 17, 2017. Because of the U.S.'s misleading categorizations and disinformation, independent observers have had difficulty determining exact estimates of collateral deaths. We are in the midst of sorting through such estimates and will keep readers posted. [back]

12. Micah Zenko, “Obama’s Final Drone Strike Data,” Blog Post, Council on Foreign Relations, January 20, 2017 [back]

13. United Nations Human Development Report, 2018: Country Profiles, Composite Index; “10 Facts About Hunger In Afghanistan,” United Nations World Food Programme, November 2015 [back]

14. See, Steve Coll, Directorate S – The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Penguin Press 2018): starting around 2005, Directorate S went back into action, this time not to defeat the Soviets, but to undermine the American project in Afghanistan. [back]

15. See, “Under Peace Plan, U.S. Military Would Exit Afghanistan Within Five Years,” New York Times, February 28, 2019; “700 Afghan Women Have a Message: Don’t Sell Us Out to the Taliban,” New York Times, February 28, 2019 [back]

16. “Obama’s covert drone war in numbers: ten times more strikes than Bush,” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, January 17, 2017 [back]

 

Imperialist Feminism Rears Its Ugly Head Yet Again

March 25, 2019 | revcom.us

 

As the U.S. negotiates with the Taliban working towards a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the New York Times is reporting that some feminists and women's rights advocates in the U.S., like Eleanor Smeal of the Feminist Majority, are pleading with Congress to have the Trump regime and the UN include Afghan women's rights in the agenda of the “peace” talks with the Taliban.

Smeal had earlier co-signed a letter to the New York Times in February advocating against immediate U.S. withdrawal, saying it “... will result in the deaths and abuse of hundreds of thousands of women, among them a new generation of educated women who have taken on positions of leadership in business and government.”¹

Let's look at what happened in the first round of this, of appeals and rallying around the U.S. ruling class, on the issue of Afghan women's rights: 

Within days of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Bush regime began targeting the Taliban in Afghanistan. This included what the New York Times described as “an unusual international offensive” to “publicize the plight of women in Afghanistan”² in order to justify the war the U.S. was about to launch.

Top Bush officials began courting American feminists who were long-time critics of Taliban abuses against women.³ “The White House (which had just abolished the office of women’s ‘initiatives’) began contacting women’s rights organizations and asking them to seek ‘common ground’ with the administration that had iced them since its inception,” author Susan Faludi wrote.⁴

Many American feminists took the bait. Days after U.S. B-52s began pounding Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, prominent feminists hailed the Bush regime for “taking action.” For example, Smeal, even then the head of the Feminist Majority, declared at Congressional hearings on the status of women in Afghanistan, “We have real momentum now in the drive to restore the rights of women." The organization circulated a petition thanking the Bush regime for supposedly promoting women’s rights in Afghanistan.⁵ 

On May 24, 2002, 20 prominent feminists and women’s organizations—including Smeal’s Feminist Majority, Gloria Steinem, Eve Ensler, Meryl Streep, National Organization of Women, and others—published an “Appeal to George W. Bush, President of The United States” in the New York Times. It called on Bush to “keep his promise” to send more troops and aid to Afghanistan in order to “protect the lives and secure the future of Afghan women.” It stated American women had supported the war in Afghanistan “in large part because they believed your promises that it would liberate Afghan women from abuse and oppression…The war against terrorism will only be successful if the struggle for peace and democracy succeeds."⁶

A “Fig Leaf” for War—A Cruel Reality for the Women and People of Afghanistan

As Susan Chira of the New York Times writes this weekend:

Afghan women were never at the heart of American strategic interests, said Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert at New York University who worked on Afghan issues in the Obama administration. Military goals come first. 

“You do things for people in order to get a permissive environment to help your military operation.” [emphasis ours]⁷

There you go: an American ruling class figure focused on national security is stating, as plain as day, what their main imperatives were, that their concern for Afghan women was but a “a fig leaf, a way to make military intervention more palatable to the American public via photographs of girls going to school,” said Chira, articulating the sentiment of an Afghan women's rights activist. 

Appeals from American women's rights advocates to the Bush regime, despite their sincerity and intent, were based on and reinforce a profoundly upside-down view of reality.

Bob Avakian gets to the heart of the matter:

The essence of what exists in the U.S. is not democracy but capitalism-imperialism and political structures to enforce that capitalism-imperialism. What the U.S. spreads around the world is not democracy, but imperialism and political structures to enforce that imperialism. (BAsics 1:3)

The U.S. imperialists are not only incapable of uprooting Afghanistan’s oppressive traditional economic and social relations—including patriarchy and the reactionary Dark Ages culture and religious strictures—but they never intended to do so. Their goal was extending U.S. domination, with means consistent with that.

In his 2006 talk Bringing Forward Another Way, Bob Avakian makes clear the imperialist motives behind the U.S. war. And in pursuit of those aims, the U.S. made alliances with pro-U.S. Islamic fundamentalists, reactionary militias, and feudal power brokers in Afghanistan who represented the same oppressive relations the Taliban did. And in that light, it was not in the interests of the U.S. imperialists to push for an actual uprooting of the oppressive relations keeping women in chains. Similarly, the U.S. has firmly backed the Saudi monarchy, a major strategic ally, as it has enforced medieval laws and regulations against women for decades.

What has all this meant for Afghan women? Despite a few cosmetic changes in their formal legal status, Afghan women remain imprisoned in oppressive traditional relations and Islamic strictures. In many ways they’re far worse off than ever.

The constitution endorsed by the new pro-U.S. “Islamic Republic of Afghanistan” in 2003 enshrined Sharia (Islamic) law as coequal in shaping Afghan life—in other words, brutal, oppressive male right and patriarchy. This U.S.-backed regime in 2009 tried to pass a law legalizing a husband’s “right” to rape his wife, before an international outcry forced it to back down. And in 2014, the regime attempted to push through another law to enable men to abuse and rape female relatives.⁸

Some two-thirds of Afghan girls do not attend school, and 87 percent are illiterate.⁹ At least 70-80 percent face forced marriage, many before the age of 16. Afghanistan has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.¹⁰ Nearly 90 percent of Afghan women are victims of domestic abuse.¹¹

The support of American feminists for the U.S. war not only helped legitimize these horrors in Afghanistan but also the whole global “war on terror”—which is actually a war for empire that has caused rivers of blood of millions of people to flow around the world.

However horrific these realities, the Taliban—as an even more reactionary Islamic fundamentalist force—represents something potentially more grotesque. Now, as America's negotiations with the Taliban are in full swing, the Trump regime has dispensed with the niceties and the “fig leaves” and are not even talking about women's rights. Yet, people like Eleanor Smeal seem to be at it again, pleading with Congress and the UN, advocating against immediate U.S. withdrawal, while the U.S. imperialists have made and continue to make their goals and means clear. 

What the women of Afghanistan are confronting is a horrific crime against humanity, and a crime of this system—that all people of conscience should be part of resisting, in the U.S., in Afghanistan and all over the world. But any attempts to do this by appealing to those very powers that rule over and enforce this system further contributes to this and perpetuates these horrors. 

The New York Times article quotes another Afghan policy expert saying, “Women were pawns in the game in 2001. And now they are again.”

This is and will be the horrific reality … going on and on … as long as U.S.-dominated capitalism-imperialism maintains and exercises its monstrous grip on the world. What is needed is to sweep this away at the soonest possible time through an ACTUAL revolution.

 

---

1. Letter: “Should the U.S. Pull Out of Afghanistan,” New York Times, February 7, 2019.  [back]

2. “A NATION CHALLENGED: SHAPING OPINION; First Lady to Speak About Afghan Women,” New York Times, November 16, 2001. The Bush regime’s campaign included a November 17 national radio address by Laura Bush, in which she claimed the war was “also a fight for the rights and dignity of women,” and appearances by a who’s who of war criminals from Vice President Dick Cheney to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell.  [back]

3. In the 1980s, the U.S. armed and organized Mujahideen fighters and helped create Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Under Taliban rule in the 1990s, which the U.S. supported in certain ways, women were banned from going to school and working. They were not allowed to leave their homes without a male relative or be seen in public without a burqa. For defying the regime's repressive laws, women were openly flogged and executed.  [back]

4. T. Redtree, “The Hypocrisy of “Newly Minted Feminists”… And David Horowitz’ Dangerous Agenda,” revcom.us, October 21, 2007.  [back]

5. Smeal also stated, “There is no way to wipe out terrorism and establish a civil society there without the inclusion of women.” Congressional Testimony of E. Smeal on the Plight of Afghan Women - Part I, Part 2, Feminist Majority, October 10-11, 2001.  [back]

6. “Appeal to George W. Bush, President of The United States,” Equality Now, May 24, 2002; see also, “Women Leaders Call for Expansion of International Peace Troops and More U.S. Funds to Restore the Rights of Afghan Women,” Feminist Majority, April 8, 2002.  [back]

7. Susan Chira, “Women Here Are Very, Very Worried,” New York Times, March 22, 2019.  [back]

8. “A law that would permit Afghan men to hurt and rape female relatives,” Guardian, February 6, 2014.  [back]

9. Afghanistan: Girls Struggle for an Education, Human Rights Watch.  [back]

10. Afghanistan’s maternal mortality rate addressed at national health conference, USAID, April 6, 2017.  [back]

11. Afghanistan is Failing to Help Abused Women, Foreign Policy, May 1, 2015.  [back]

 

With Trump's "Blessing" Netanyahu calls for Israel to annex West Bank settlements

Updated April 8, 2019 | Originally posted March 25, 2019 | revcom.us

 

On March 21, Trump declared “it is time” for the U.S. to “fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty” over the Golan Heights—a militarily strategic region of Syria seized by Israel in a war in 1967. A story on the announcement in a leading Israeli newspaper was headlined, “Trump’s Golan Declaration: Blessing for Netanyahu, Message to Russia.” What that article didn’t say is that this “blessing” has genocidal implications for the Palestinian people. And the “message to Russia” is a Mafia-style provocation and threat that ratchets up the danger of war.

A “Blessing” with Genocidal Implications

Israel is literally built on the blood and bones of the Palestinian people, whose land was stolen through terrorist ethnic cleansing. In 1948, almost a million Palestinians were violently forced from their land, villages, and homes, fleeing with only the possessions they could carry. First-hand accounts by the founders of Israel document that Palestinians were raped, tortured, and killed in that orgy of terror (see the special issue of Revolution on Israel). Since then, the violent ethnic cleansing has continued.

In a one-sided war in 2008-2009, Amnesty International concluded that Israel killed 1,400 people in Gaza, including some 300 children and several hundred other unarmed civilians. Three Israeli civilians were reported killed in that “war.” In an even more deadly massacre in 2014, Israel killed more than 2,000 people in Gaza, including targeting people seeking refuge in United Nations schools. The UN estimated that 65 percent of those killed by Israel in 2014 were civilians. These massacres were carried out against people who have been locked down in a densely packed, open-air prison, denied construction materials, electricity much of the time, and ability to travel for medical care, education, or to see loved ones even in other parts of Palestine. And in the West Bank region of Palestine, degrading checkpoints, terror by Israeli settlers and dehumanizing and violent abuse by the Israeli authorities are a daily fact of life.

Trump’s “blessing” for Netanyahu was that the timing of this announcement was taken by all as an endorsement of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition in Israel’s upcoming elections. That coalition is increasingly dominated by fanatic Jewish fundamentalists who openly call for the violent extermination of the Palestinian people. As documented in the New York Times, this includes forces with “a long history of expressing support for violence against Palestinians, expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories, and a ban on intermarriage or sex between Jews and Arabs,” and whose “platform calls for annexing the occupied territories, rejecting a Palestinian state, [and] expelling ‘enemies’ of Israel—a euphemism for Arabs.” This is the coalition Trump “blessed” with his endorsement of the annexation of the Golan Heights.

Beyond that, Trump’s announcement has specific, ominous implications for the 2.8 million Palestinians living in the “occupied territories” of the West Bank, territory seized by Israel in the 1967 war. It was a signal to the Israeli right to pursue their agenda of annexing some or all the West Bank. Netanyahu’s ruling coalition includes hard-core Zionist fascists who demand, and are organizing to carry out, the violent expulsion of all Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories. Israeli annexation of any or all of the West Bank would dramatically ratchet up the danger of a whole new level of genocidal ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

And Trump’s “blessing” was accompanied by a literal blessing by Trump’s Christian fascist, “end times” lunatic secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who posed in an interview with the Christian Broadcast Network that it was possible that God raised Donald Trump to be president of the United States in order to protect Israel from Iran, and who declared “the Lord is at work” in Trump’s announcement.

A Mafia-Style “Message” to Russia

The “message to Russia” in Trump’s announcement is that as the war in Syria winds down, the U.S. will aggressively defend and expand its domination of the Middle East. The bloodbath in Syria involved a wide range of competing reactionary forces including ISIS and other fundamentalist jihadist forces; pro-Iranian militias from Lebanon; Iranian military operatives; Russian airstrikes; Israeli airstrikes; groups organized and armed by the U.S.; and U.S. troops. This was, on all sides, a massive crime against humanity and the people of Syria in particular. Framing this hellish mix was contention between Russia (which has a very significant military base in Syria) and Iran, on the one hand, and the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia on the other.

Trump’s backing for Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights—land conquered from Syria in 1967—is a slap in the face to Russia. And this move by Trump comes as the U.S. rulers have Iran in their crosshairs. They see it as a major threat to their domination of the Middle East. Trump’s message to Russia, which has close relations with Iran, is that of one Mafia boss to a rival: don’t stand in the way of whatever moves we make against Iran.

And this “message to Russia” comes from a demented bully in the White House with his finger on the nuclear button. It ratchets up the danger of a potentially catastrophic war in the Middle East and beyond.

If you were expecting outrage from the Democrats in the face of Trump’s endorsement of Netanyahu and his genocidal allies, and his trampling on international law, their muted—at most—response tells you something about their fundamental unity with Trump even as they have differences in how best to prop up Israel and contend with rival imperialists. Some Democrats, mainstream commentators, and “non-partisan” former U.S. diplomats complained that in trampling on international law that is supposed to prohibit countries from annexing territory seized in war, Trump took away a diplomatic weapon the U.S. needs, for example to use against Russia’s seizure of a part of Ukraine. They fear what might come of tearing up global norms that have served to keep the U.S. at the top of a world of exploitation and oppression for decades. And they argue that Trump’s uncritical embrace of the most openly racist and genocidal forces in Israel endangers the stability of Israel and its ability to portray itself as a bastion of enlightenment while it serves as a regional fortress and global hit man for the U.S. empire.

But again, these disagreements with Trump are over how to maintain Israel as a vicious, nuclear-armed power to dominate the Middle East, because the U.S. empire does need Israel as a vicious, nuclear-armed hit man for its interests in the region and around the world.

The Interests of Humanity

For the Palestinian people, for the people of the Middle East, and for the vast majority of the seven-plus billion people on this planet, Trump’s backing of Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights is an obscene endorsement of crimes committed by, and worse crimes coming from, Israel. And it accelerates the threat of an utterly unjust war that could be a disaster for humanity.

Those crimes must be exposed and opposed, especially by people in the U.S.—not because they cut against the interests of “our” country but because we live in the belly of the beast that needs Israel to serve as a vicious hit man to continue to crush bodies and spirits around the world to feed it. And as we expose and oppose Israel’s crimes, and U.S. backing for them, we are called on by humanity to do this as part of seriously organizing and preparing for the actual revolution that will do away with the oppression of whole peoples, wars of empire, armies of occupation and crimes against humanity.

 

Map: Dank Chicken

Q&A: The rise of fascism & struggle in international communist movement.

A Q&A following the speech: Why We Need An Actual Revolution and How We Can Really Make Revolution.

Crossroads in Sacramento: Four Straight Answers to Four Big Questions

From the Revolution Club, LA

March 18, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Two weeks ago, the DA in Sacramento refused to file charges against the pig who murdered Stephon Clark. At the Republican DA’s despicable press conference, she dragged up all this demeaning and completely irrelevant shit to smear Stephon Clark’s character and make it seem like he wanted to commit “suicide by cop.” Two days later, the Democratic attorney general, Xavier Bacerra, also announced there would be no indictment from the state level. Unlike the Republican, he emphasized what a “devastating loss” it is, how much he values “the sanctity of human life” and feels the pain of Stephon’s family. These crocodile tears don’t mean squat: Both the Democrat and the Republican agree on the end result—that the pigs who chased unarmed Stephon Clark into his grandmother’s backyard, gunned him down in a hail of bullets and left him to die while they turned off their body cameras to get their story straight, were justified!

So, question one: What does it tell you that the Democrat and Republican sang the same song of “we’re not gonna indict,” in two-part harmony? It tells you that this system has no answers to the murder and criminalization of our youth. This oppression is knit deep into the fabric of the system of American capitalism-imperialism, and it can only be dealt with by overthrowing that system.

Right now a lot of different forces are trying to focus everything toward changing some law. That this is gonna be the answer, what people should be pouring their energies into. So, question two: What does it tell you that there are states that have no such laws like California, there are all kinds of cities that now require minicams on their pigs, there are the community review boards that stretch from Seattle to Sarasota and these places, too, have rampant murder by pig? Come on! This won’t answer shit! So, again, it tells you that you can reform this system all you want, but until you get to the root cause—which, again, is American capitalism-imperialism, which requires white supremacy—nothing will ever change for real.

Third point: seems like everyone, including some so-called militants, are now preaching for people to go to their “safe space” and cool down on the fighting back. What does that tell you? It tells you that those who are doing this are scared of you standing up and raising your heads and going further. Right now we have the system on the defensive. Now is not the time to retreat to “safe spaces”; now is the time to build the revolutionary understanding, determination, and organization of this struggle, to spread it, and to make it part of building toward the time when millions can be led to go all-out, against this system, with a real chance to win. And we, the Revolution Club, have the science, the strategy and leadership, in Bob Avakian (BA), the architect of the new communism and the leader of the revolution, to do that. Don’t let them tell you to go into retreat—and don’t fall for it.

And that leads to point four: revolution means something very specific. To quote the statement that we run on our website, revcom.us:

An actual revolution is a lot more than a protest. An actual revolution requires that millions of people get involved, in an organized way, in a determined fight to dismantle this state apparatus and system and replace it with a completely different state apparatus and system, a whole different way of organizing society, with completely different objectives and ways of life for the people. Fighting the power today has to help build and develop and organize the fight for the whole thing, for an actual revolution. Otherwise we’ll be protesting the same abuses generations from now!

Conclusion: If you DON’T want to fight these abuses generations from now, if you DO want to find out more about the way out of this madness and participate in actually bringing a new world into being, then get with the Revolution Club... and get into BA.

East Pittsburgh, PA, and the Murder of ANTWON ROSE:
Yet Another Back-Shooting Pig Walks Free for the Murder of an Unarmed Black Teenager

March 25, 2019 | revcom.us

 

On March 22, a Pennsylvania court handed down a “not guilty” verdict on a white cop on trial for the murder of Antwon Rose, a 17-year-old Black youth. This was just two weeks after DAs in Sacramento, California, refused to indict the pigs who murdered unarmed Stephon Clark. Once again, angry outcries and anguished tears pour out from family and friends at seeing a killer pig walk away free after murdering their loved one in cold blood.

Last June 19, Antwon and another passenger were in a taxi when it was stopped by the police in East Pittsburgh. The murder was partially captured on a video that shows the killer cop firing three shots—into Antwon’s back—just seconds after he and the other passenger began to run from the car. On the video, a woman bystander can be heard shouting, “Why are they shooting? All they did was run and they’re shooting at them!” The cop claimed he thought Antwon had a gun. Antwon was unarmed—and, again, he was shot as he was running away from the police.

Antwon had just finished his junior year in high school when this pig so brutally cut his life short. After Antwon’s murder by the police, his school released a poem he had written, titled “I Am Not What You Think,” for his 10th grade honors English class. The poem said in part: “I see mothers bury their sons / I want my mom to never feel that pain / I am confused and afraid.” During the trial, Antwon’s mother wrote a letter asking the prosecutors to paint a picture of her son as a real human being: “He was a rose that grew from concrete. Despite darkness all around him, he was kind, loving and funny. The smile that emanates from photos of him truly reflects who he was.”

This was one of the rare cases when, after large and angry street protests, a murdering pig was actually charged with a crime and put on trial. The cop and his lawyers argued that the cop was simply “doing his duty” and that he felt he was under “threat” when he thought Antwon was raising a weapon—even though, in reality, he was unarmed. And the jury—conditioned by this system’s culture—agreed with that, coming back with an acquittal in just four hours after the closing arguments in the trial.

With the outrageous acquittal of the pig who murdered Antwon Rose the lesson is once again clear: This will go on and on and on and on, until this system is GONE. And the only way that will happen is through an actual REVOLUTION.

Enough Is Enough! Time’s Up for This System! No More!

 

“Just Doing Their Job”

One Month in SF Bay Area: Pigs Kill a Man for Shoplifting, and Other Pigs Walk for Cold-Blooded Murders

March 25, 2019 | revcom.us

 

Just in the month of March in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is not yet over as of this writing, police in one city shot down a man for supposedly stealing from a thrift store, and other killer cops were allowed to walk for previous murders. This is on top of the failure to indict the cops who murdered Stephon Clark in Sacramento, shooting him in the back in his grandmother’s backyard for holding a cell phone these cops say they thought was a gun.

The Murder of Charles Ballard

On March 13, just outside the border of Oakland, Charles Ballard, a 41-year-old Black man, was shot and killed in a thrift store parking lot. Alameda County sheriff’s deputies fired “at least” two dozen shots, killing Ballard and seriously injuring a woman in the car he was driving. The supposed reason? The pigs suspected Ballard of shoplifting from the thrift store, and were supposedly in danger when he tried to pull out of the parking lot.

The Murder of Chinedu Okobi

On March 1, across the bay from Oakland, San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe announced that no charges would be filed against the police who tased Chinedu Okobi to death last year. Okobi, an immigrant from Nigeria, had been jaywalking, according to police, when pigs went after him in cars and on foot, knocked him to the ground, and tased him repeatedly. On a video of the incident, Okobi can be heard calling out “What did I do?” and “Get them [taser wires] off me!” The cops tased him again and again, until he died. All of this is on video.

The DA declared that deputies acted within California law and had been under department orders to enforce jaywalking laws more stringently. The fact that the cops lied about what happened and later admitted that they lied (after the video came out) didn’t make any difference to the DA. Under the state law in California, if someone resists police and tries to flee, even if fleeing for their life from a band of murderous thugs as Okobi did, the police are supposedly justified in using force. And under this system, it is the DA’s job to back this up.

The Murder of Joshua Pawlik

On March 6, Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley said she would not file criminal charges against four Oakland cops for shooting and killing a homeless white man, Joshua Pawlik, last year. Pawlik was lying asleep in an alley near the MacArthur BART station. The police came up on Pawlik and started yelling orders at him: “Take your hand off the gun,” and “Don’t move.” When he finally woke and started to sit up, police immediately fired 22 shots. Police said he had reached for a gun nearby. Oakland Police Chief Anne E. Kirkpatrick reviewed the case in an internal investigation, and only “lightly disciplined” the officers involved. Kirkpatrick ignored the video from cops’ own body cams that showed that Pawlik had not even reached for the gun—he was just waking up, startled, when he was hit with a hail of bullets. The cops’ whole story was a lie.

Apparently, this complete whitewash of the crime did not sit well with the federal monitor of the Oakland Police Department, which has been under federal oversight for the past 15 years. The federal monitor criticized the OPD chief’s decision to give only a slap on the wrist to the cops who murdered Pawlik as “disappointing and myopic.” The message is that the chief should not have been so crude in the exoneration of the murdering cops, particularly in light of the video showing what actually happened.

So what was the result of this federal intervention? The pigs caught on video brutally shooting and killing a homeless man were suspended from the force, and may face termination, rather than just “lightly disciplined.” In other words, just another slap on the wrist for the killer cops who “serve and protect” this oppressive system.

 

The National Revolution Tour at the UCLA Union and Workers' Strike

Sharpening the Revolutionary Challenge: Bernie Sanders Is Nothing But #BEB

March 25, 2019 | revcom.us

 

The Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution Tour went to the UCLA union and workers’ strike where Bernie Sanders was scheduled to speak.

It was important for ourselves to grasp and project that it was a righteous demand for workers to call for equality and decent wages, but the reality is that humanity is locked in a worldwide system of oppression and exploitation of capitalism-imperialism. We brought the core message that none of the 5 Stops could be resolved under this system, we need a revolution, and we have the leadership in Bob Avakian who has developed a strategy and plan for an actual revolution and how society could be run radically different than the #BEB.

We stood outside the corner where people were streaming in from the rally with a big banner with the #BEB and an enlargement that said #BourgeoisElectoralBullshit and passed out the Revolution broadsheet en masse.

Many were perplexed about the #BEB. “What is BEB?” It’s right in front of you; get into the Revolution newspaper to find out.

There were some people who heard the agitation that this system cannot be reformed, it must be overthrown; we have a strategy to do that and we need that, not #BEB. There were at least three people who came up and said they agreed with everything we said, like really agreed with it; including that they weren’t really there for Bernie but were looking for something radical. And saw us; and were like that! There was the contrast of BEB but also that we have a strategy for overthrowing this system and a vision for a radically different world.

One 17-year-old came all the way from Compton, to “be cool” until he met us and was drawn to the truth. He told us his brother had just been shot by the police (lived through it) and his brother is in prison. He said all his life he had been saying we need to overthrow the system, was against the wars and people would tell him that he was crazy. We organized him on the spot to run with us. Another person, who told us about having been in prison, said they had been following the Tour online and watched the #BEB Reveal on Facebook. They said, “I really feel that this system cannot be reformed; it does need to be overthrown, but I don’t know where/how to spend my energies.” They said they felt it so bad that they felt like crying.

Another woman, who had a shirt that said power to the people, signed up on the spot and is offering to bring food for 20 people and gave $20 on the spot. (WE SHOULD HAVE BEEN RAISING MONEY A LOT MORE! THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT WAYS TO ORGANIZE ON THE SPOT AND YOU SHOULD ASK EVERYONE!) She was like, yes, I know what you mean about revolution—this is what I want. I’m not really that into Bernie but he just seemed like he was the best you could do.

There was an importance to proceeding from ALL of the 5 Stops, not just the white supremacy or not just the attacks on immigrants; because we are talking about the emancipation of all humanity and you can’t stop any of these things without stopping all of these things because they are rooted in the same system. Even many people who didn’t agree with us that Bernie is #BEB couldn’t deny the truth about this system’s wars for empire and we used the centerfold of the #BEB broadsheet with people, bringing them up against what this country has done all over the world.

One of the questions we posed in the agitation repeatedly: “How many murders does an organization have to commit before you consider it a murderous organization?! That’s the Democratic Party. The Republican Party Is Fascist. The Democratic Party Is Also a Machine of Massive War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity. This System CANNOT Be Reformed—It MUST Be Overthrown! We Need an Actual Revolution.”

There were some people who feel the desire for overthrow vs. reform, especially among the more oppressed people, even while they have a lot of different ideas about what that actually means. We kept hitting at the reality that BA poses in his speech from last summer: “We have two choices: either, live with all this—and condemn future generations to the same, or worse, if they have a future at all—or, make revolution!”

There were also some people who we knew, who have listened to BA who were telling us, “Yeah, I know Bernie isn’t the whole solution, but isn’t he on the road to the solution? Isn’t this a step in the right direction?”

NO. This is a step back into the system of capitalism-imperialism that is the source of these horrors; we need a revolution. We have a strategy for that. And a vision for that. This is what people need. Not getting roped back into the election circus. And wielding the quote from BA on the back, “The essence of what exists in America is not democracy but capitalism-imperialism....”

There were students who were listening and checking this out; not a lot but some who were not among the hardcore base of Bernie but had come out to hear what he was going to say.

We passed out the BEB spreadsheet along with the Tour kickoff flyer and announced that the Tour is in town to organize for revolution. People came forward provoked to ask questions, to declare their agreements and disagreements and a few who came to try to drown us out with blowhorns. But we made an impact by chanting “B-E-B! B-E-B!” when Bernie Sanders came on to speak.

At the end, some of the DSA organizers said this was a workers’ strike not a Bernie rally and they didn’t understand why we were there. This was interesting because they didn’t want to advocate or defend Bernie even though we all know they had invited him to be there. Some of them felt defensive about that and didn’t want to have that conversation.

We have a question about how we did at organizing based on BAsics 3:1, overall, but we rolled with the 17-year-old who came to the rally to spread the polemic from Tala Deloria and materials on the Tour at one of the main dorm buildings. We summed up the positive impact and importance of doing meaningful revolutionary work like what he had been a part of, not only joining us on the spot at the rally and then getting into the POAs, but also by spreading the revolution on the campus.

In this summation, a member of the Revolution Club said she was really coming to appreciate the strategic importance of challenging people about the #BEB. She commented that when people looked at the banner and saw all the politicians being grouped together, it made them ask, “OK, then who and what are you for?!” It was a fight to break people out of thinking along the terms of the #BEB and we put to people the reality that there are three futures possible in the world right now: the mainstream imperialism of what has been, the fascist future being rapidly consolidated... or revolution and the struggle to emancipate all humanity.

Read here

Find artwork for social media, posters here

From RefuseFascism.org:

Our mission: Millions in the streets demanding In the Name of Humanity, Trump/Pence Must Go

Updated December 3, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Our singular demand:

In the Name of Humanity, The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!

How does that happen?

Every fascist move by the Trump/Pence regime should be met by more struggle and involve more and more people and diverse political forces opposed to the moves of this regime. And this struggle needs to be aiming at and preparing for nothing less than driving out the whole regime through the non-violent massive struggle of people staying in the streets day after day, creating the kind of political crisis that could drive out the whole fascist regime.

[1] The most defining thing about the recent elections is that the fascist program of the Trump/Pence regime became more consolidated and its fascist social base was more fully unleashed. Pipe bombs sent to leading Democrats and CNN. A hideous antisemitic massacre. Racist murders of African-Americans. Vicious anti-immigrant lies of an “invading caravan” to be met by US Troops who Trump said should shoot if the refugees throw rocks. Trump whipping up his rallies – Nuremberg style. On top of two years of the regime eviscerating what are supposed to be civil and legal rights, banning Muslims, locking in a majority fascist Supreme Court, stoking violent white supremacy and xenophobia, hateful misogyny, and ripping up international alliances and ramping up the threats of war. The Trump/Pence regime and the forces within it have said they view this presidency as the “last chance” to secure their vision for this country. This will continue and grow worse – with Trump now firing Sessions, attacking reporters, doubling down on his racist nationalism – unless and until it is stopped by the masses of people acting in fierce and sustained opposition outside the confines of politics as usual.

[2] The Democrats winning a majority in the House did not change this. The Democratic opposition throughout the elections and Nancy Pelosi’s post-election speech, refused to confront Trump’s fascism, but instead normalized, accommodated, and then promised to collaborate with the regime that is bringing an American fascism. About the Democrats, it could be said:“ First they came for the Muslims, and I protested once and then let it happen… Then they came for the immigrants, and I voted for healthcare and stayed mum.” They are determined to maintain order – even if that is the order of fascism – rather than risk the instability that it would take to confront and drive out the fascist regime and the nightmare they are hammering into place.

[3] The people who hate and fear this whole fascist nightmare and direction must now ACT with great determination in the streets – while organizing to move tens of thousands and soon millions to join them in the streets – with sustained determination until we drive this fascist regime from power in the name of humanity.  This is why we are organizing a movement – aiming to bring hundreds of thousands and millions into the streets – to say: In the Name of Humanity, The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!

From the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA

To Do This, We Need To Know:

Why we need an actual revolution.
What we need to do now.
How we could defeat them.

You Think You Are Woke...
But You Are Sleepwalking Through A Nightmare

Get Organized for An ACTUAL Revolution to Emancipate All Humanity

Updated November 10, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

 

 

 

Noche Diaz Presenting the Lifetime Fire Extinguisher Award to Al Sharpton at the Sacramento, CA State Capitol.

 

Thousands Raised...Many Thousands to Go...
Donors speak out about why they gave to The Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution Tour

Includes new statements posted as of May 27, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

The Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution Tour has started in Los Angeles, as the start of a national Tour going across this country. There have been events in different cities to kick off the Tour that raised funds, and send-off parties for volunteers heading to Los Angeles, where funds were raised. The call to donate financial support for the Tour has already brought some significant donations that indicate the real, if beginning, potential for very broad support for this Tour. This includes people who have given matching donations—one for $2,000 if others would match it—and a number who agreed to sustain the Tour on a monthly basis. There are others who have agreed to donate food for the volunteers going on the Tour, and some who have made things to be sold to generate funds for the Tour.

The many thousands of dollars raised so far is just a very small portion of what is going to be needed to support this Tour, and sustain and grow the movement for revolution, organizing thousands now and impacting the whole society that this Tour is setting out to do.

Here is the basic truth. Bob Avakian (BA) emphasizes in Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution, “Networks of people, working together to spread the word about and organize people into the revolution, need to be built, and expanded, in all parts of the country—and linked together.” Very importantly, this includes building up financial support now for the Tour as part of that process. There can be no revolution without financial support. There will be no revolution without organization of people of all strata, networks of people who are an essential part of the strategy for an actual revolution.

Many thousands donating now—including many people who are just hearing about the need and possibility for an actual revolution for the first time—will make it possible for this Tour to shake things up at this crucial moment in history, when so much hangs in the balance for humanity.

The statements on this page from donors give a living sense of the different ways people are seeing the importance of contributing by donating to the Tour, and calling on others to join them in this historic effort.

"I felt inspired to give today because humanity is suffering and needs this tour. I heard the statement from a donor and I matched it."https://t.co/XtAzVOkhZE pic.twitter.com/35WmvIm0JM

— NYC Revolution Club (@NYCRevClub) March 8, 2019

Reposted from RefuseFascism.org
The Mueller Investigation diverted, bamboozled, and stupefied people into waiting passively...

The Trump/Pence Regime Is More Dangerous Than Ever

March 27, 2019 | revcom.us

 

MASS PROTEST

Friday, March 29 at 5pm

Trump Star, Hollywood and Highland, 6859 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles 90028

 

The long awaited Mueller Investigation resulted in no indictments of the highest level officials of the Trump/ Pence regime and a summary of the report stated that there was no collusion with Russia. This has unleashed the Trump/Pence Regime to go on a full throttle fascist offensive demanding investigations of their opponents, calling for resignations and blacklisting by the media. They are escalating their full program against the people on every front. And, Trump is giving a full out fascist rally in Michigan on Thursday.

The stark reality is that in the wake of the no indictment Mueller report, The Trump/Pence Regime is More Dangerous Than Ever.

And, what of the opposition? Demobilized. Disoriented. Or, worse, told by the Democratic Party leadership to move on to bread and butter issues. And, yes, they are saying the full report should be released, which it should be. But absent serious protest from below – from the people – this will not happen, and even more important the whole fascist juggernaut will barrel ahead. That is why everyone who sees the need to stop this regime and what it is doing to the people and planet needs to come into the streets on Friday, March 29th.

For two years, people have been diverted, bamboozled, and stupefied by the Democratic Party leadership, Rachel Maddow and MSNBC, CNN, the NY Times, LA Times, and others into passively waiting for the Mueller investigation to stop the Trump/Pence Regime. The anger of millions has been corralled, domesticated, and diverted away from massively resisting the totality of the danger posed by the Trump/Pence Regime.

The time of waiting for a savior, of relying on the regular workings of the system – voting in Democrats who will not mobilize the people to act in our own interests, must be over. Waiting for 2020 is frankly absurd given the danger posed. Trump’s 'Make America Great Again' is a 21st century fascist program of Manifest Destiny – 'America First' – wrapped in the flag and Mike Pence’s Bible taken literally, with a program of white supremacy, misogyny, and xenophobia. And they are unleashed. Steve Bannon, Trump's former chief strategist is urging Trump to go “full animal” and “bludgeon” his opponents. And Trump recently raised the specter of extralegal violence by the military, the police, and others fascists against any serious opposition to his regime.

The time is now to take to the streets, to sound the alarm and get organized. March 29th. 5PM. Hollywood and Highland at the Trump Star. Be there.

In the Name of Humanity,
We REFUSE to Accept A Fascist America!

This Nightmare Must End:
The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!

 

RefuseFascism.org is a movement of people coming from diverse perspectives, united in our recognition that the Trump/Pence Regime poses a catastrophic danger to humanity and the planet, and that it is our responsibility to drive them from power through non-violent protests that grow every day until our demand is met.

 

Refuse Fascism Mass Meeting
Sunday, March 31 at 3pm ~ location TBA ~ call 323-946-1742

 

RefuseFascism.org                     @RefuseFascism

From Revolution Club LA and National Revolution Tour:

The Trump-Pence Regime Is Fascist and
More Dangerous Than Ever
The Democrats Are War Criminals And Cannot Be Relied On
We Need To Rely On Ourselves To Drive Out This Regime...
And Most Of All We Need A Revolution!

March 27, 2019 | revcom.us

 

MASS PROTEST Called by RefuseFascism.org
Friday, March 29 at 5pm
Trump Star, Hollywood and Highland
Los Angeles

 

Donald Trump and the whole Trump-Pence regime is FASCIST.  They are openly white supremacist (against Black people, Latinos and immigrants). They are openly woman-hating and gay-hating.  They openly treat the rest of the world with contempt and stoke the fires of war. They will bring the hammer down on anyone who opposes them.

And right now, because the “special counsel” Mueller decided not to bring charges against Trump, they are out for blood. They think it’s “hunting season” and the masses of people here and all over the world are in their sights. They are going after abortion rights, they are going after immigrant rights and Muslims, they are backing the brutal police 200% against Black and Latino youth, they are tearing up the environment like there's no tomorrow, they're going after their own rivals “on top of society” – and on and on.

The Revolution Club says that the people have to resist this, and right now we are supporting a mass demonstration on Friday night, called by Refuse Fascism, to drive this regime out. This is urgent – we can’t let these pigs steamroll their way to outright, open fascism.

The Democrats are NOT our friends, still less can we count on them in any way to “deal with this.”  The Democrats have been bamboozling people not to take to the streets to demand Trump-Pence fascists be removed from power. They told us to rely on this Russia investigation. Now they tell us to put our faith in the elections. They just want to chill the people out because they are part of the same system. It's urgent: we can't let the fascists steamroll us to fascism or the Democrats derail our struggle for a radically different and better world.

AND we also say this: we refuse to accept a world where the only choice we’re given is between the openly fascist Trump and his war-criminal, deceiving rivals the Democrats.  We are fighting for REVOLUTION – for overthrowing this whole system and bringing into being something radically better. Everything we do – including being out there on Friday night – is part of fighting for this whole new world and getting to it, as soon as possible.

This is not just talk. We have the strategy and leadership to do this, we have the plan for a new society and we have the determination to make this real. Check out the speeches of the leader of the revolution, Bob Avakian (BA), both on the threat posed by this regime and on how we can make revolution – for real.  As BA has said: “...we have two choices: either, live with all this—and condemn future generations to the same, or worse, if they have a future at all—or, make revolution!”

Go to www.revcom.us to watch these speeches; or come to the Revolution Center on Saturday at 3pm (2716 S Vermont Ave #8). And for sure: join us on Friday night, at the Trump Star.

Revolution Club, Los Angeles & National Revolution Tour

revclub_la@yahoo.com * @revclub_la * 323.424.6687