April 17-28, “Points of Attention” Days

Spread the Points of Attention... and Spread REVOLUTION

Updated April 22, 2019 | revcom.us

 

Updated April 22, 2019 with “Three Key Things About the Points of Attention”

From the National Revolution Tour

Every day, it seems that the outrages mount higher and grow more excruciating. We wake up and see families, driven from their countries by climate change and imperialist plunder or war, languishing at the border or under highway underpasses in the U.S. We see our youth, young women and men of so much promise, either gunned down by the police or by each other, as they act out the system’s warped values. We hear the intensifying threats of war, of amped-up repression, of demonization of Muslims. Sometimes it seems like a new state every day makes yet another assault on a woman’s right to control her body—a right which does not exist without abortion. There is the demonizing of LGBTQ people. And there are the ever-uglier threats from Trump, Pence, and their minions against any who would get in the way of their juggernaut.

“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!” —Bob Avakian

So we know about the first choice. But from April 17 to April 28, we aim to make the future posed by the choice for revolution much more real to thousands and thousands, to involve and work with hundreds in doing so and to expand the influence and organized strength of the movement for revolution. These are the days where we’ll be leading people to take up and take out the Points of Attention for the Revolution.

So, what’s the idea?

First read through—really read through—the Points of Attention and think about how much of the goals, methods, and principles of this revolution are packed into it.

Then get into this, from Bob Avakian, from his speech last summer, Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution:

Spreading the word, particularly as this is done together with others in a planned, systematic way, can be an important step in joining the organized ranks of the revolution and taking part in the process of building the revolution. A crucial next step in making this revolution real is that, “Thousands need to get organized into the ranks of the revolution now, while millions are being influenced in favor of this revolution.” Getting organized into the ranks of the revolution means acting together with others in a unified way, as an organized force, guided by the strategic plan and leadership for the revolution, building the revolution among broader masses of people, while also getting deeper into the principles, methods, and goals of this revolution, the basics of which are concentrated in the “Points of Attention for the Revolution.” A key form of revolutionary organization are the Revolution Clubs, which live by, propagate, and fight for the “Points of Attention.” The core of the Revolution Clubs are people deeply committed to revolution who closely follow the leadership of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which has the basis, in the new communism, to provide overall leadership for the revolution; but the Revolution Clubs also need to reach out to and involve growing numbers of people who are new to the revolution. The Revolution Clubs are a means through which “people can take part in and powerfully represent for the revolution in an organized way, as they learn more about the revolution and advance toward joining the Party.”

Imagine...

Then, imagine: Points of Attention up in the neighborhoods of the inner city on light poles and in laundromats, and on the bulletin boards of suburban high schools, being posted (openly or surreptitiously) by people who live or go there, with other people grouping around, reading and maybe debating; crowds of people in busy shopping areas or transit hubs, on subway cars or in long lines waiting to get into something, suddenly confronted with pop-up squads or flash mobs distributing the Points and getting into on-the-spot debate-and-discussion-knots over them; attention-grabbing imaginative stunts or pranks where the Points appear; or serious sit-down heart-to-hearts where the questions of could we live this way and what would it take and who is the leadership get joined. Imagine more: classrooms where the teacher or professor has the revolutionaries in to get into this; get-togethers with artists and scholars; figuring out how to get these into—and get these discussed and taken up—in the prisons.

Throughout: the Revolution Clubs and others getting people introduced to Bob Avakian, so they can learn about the humanity of the leader and the road he’s forged that are reflected in these Points, and in everything else he’s done.

Imagine all this where people are getting out the 5 STOPS at the same time, or with tablets or even trucks where some clips from Bob Avakian are playing, bringing alive the sharpness of the two choices we started with.

“What kind of ‘new world’ are you talking about?” “Here—let’s read this together and talk about it.”

“How you gonna get there?” “Watch this video and spread it, and let’s get into it as you do.”

Think about the whole range of questions about past, present, and most of all future that this opens up. Think about the debates over, say, Point 2 or Point 3, or any of the others, where people just getting into these struggle with each other to uphold one or another point. Think about the vibrancy where newer people are bringing their questions and what they run into to the more experienced, where community and struggle are built as we do.

This is part what we aim to set off. We want to hear YOUR ideas as well. For one reason, getting this going in the kind of geometric way we need to is new for us too. Let’s turn revcom.us into a platform where all kinds of experiences are being described and lessons being drawn and debated. Send your ideas and reports of experiences to revolution.reports@yahoo.com.

Let’s get going!

 

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.

 

The New BA Film on Campus

“OK, Who Wants to Choose Leaving the World as It Is?”

April 15, 2019 | revcom.us

 

From members of the Revolution Club, NYC

Recently the Revolution Club spoke in two classes at a local community college. We were invited by a professor who is also supportive of the National Revolution Tour. In both classes we watched a 30-minute excerpt from Bob Avakian’s (BA) speech Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution. The excerpt titled “5 STOPS” identifies five deep and defining contradictions which cannot be resolved in the interests of humanity under this system. It makes a powerfully scientific and substantive case for why we say that the system of capitalism-imperialism cannot be reformed, and instead it must be overthrown at the soonest possible time. The excerpt of the speech set sharp terms with the students by posing that in reality there are only two choices: We either live with the horrors of this society... or we make revolution. And the Revolution Club members who led this summed up and fought to keep bringing it back to those terms and not something else. (In the past there would be strong tendencies towards having long discussions or to feel like you have to answer every question in full, versus going back to and leading others to understand what the real and fundamental terms of things really are.) This was something that the Revolution Club identified as a shortcoming in the first class and worked to transform in the second class, which contributed to things becoming much more contentious, much more of a struggle, and set much more clear dividing lines in which students had to pick a side and fight for that side.

One student said this country has intervened in the affairs of so many other countries that it could never do the right thing; another student said the system could not be fixed because it’s all about money and profit and it’s all about wanting more and more. Others asked:  What is your definition of socialism?... If I work hard, shouldn’t I get more for that? How would you motivate people under socialism?... Socialism would never work in America because America was conceived valuing private property and socialism fails to understand human nature: people are inherently greedy and self-centered... After the system is overthrown, will you replace it with the dictatorship of the proletariat or will it be more of a democratic society?... What is your group going to do differently so that the socialism you are talking about is not short-lived like the previous experience?... Launching a revolution can’t happen now, so what would need to happen for it to be prime-time for revolution?

While the Revolution Club did very well in speaking to these questions, they mainly challenged people to go to the source, making the case for students to dig deep into the work that Bob Avakian has done on these huge questions and in particular highlighting the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, which sets forth a visionary and concrete plan for a radically different and better world, and the pamphlet from the Revolutionary Communist Party Central Committee, HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution.

Students were engaged, provoked, and challenged to think critically. It was important for the Rev Club to keep coming back to the main arguments BA makes in the “5 STOPS” excerpt on the unreformability of this system and the need to overthrow it. At one point a student said they liked what the Revolution Club had put forward but the problem was that people were unaware of all of this, people don’t know much, they don’t know what NAFTA, socialism, communism is. As was done throughout the presentation (especially the second class), the question was posed right back: Are you therefore arguing that nothing can be done and therefore accept and learn to live with the world as it is? Putting back the question to people and putting it back on them to make the argument was in part how we went at this differently than in previous experiences. At some point during the second class everyone was asked to raise their hands if they wanted to choose the first option (keep on living with the horrors of this system). No one raised their hand. And then before posing to students to raise their hands for the second option (make revolution), a student interjected and said it was too extreme to say there are only “two choices,” that there is another choice and that’s to develop the system, keep building it, make it better. Again the challenge was posed to explain how, to show the evidence for this (in opposition to the evidence from the “5 STOPS” that the system cannot be reformed)... which the student was not able to do. The Revolution Club got into BA’s analysis from the speech on what is the material basis for making revolution in a country like the U.S. and pointing to the leadership, strategy, and plan for doing this.

Through all of this there was the challenge and invitation posed to join the movement for revolution and in particular to support the Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution Tour. A number of students came up to ask about the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, some taking pictures of the front cover so they could remember the name and download it later. Students came up to sign up and ask more about the National Revolution Tour.

 

 

The Murder of Nipsey Hussle: Analysis… Experience… and the Need for Transformation

April 15, 2019 | revcom.us

 

The killing of Nipsey Hussle in front of his clothing store two weeks ago in Los Angeles has set off an extraordinary outpouring. His murder concentrated the outrage and pain that so many of the oppressed bear, seeing their loved ones cut down by violence—whether carried out by the police or by the oppressed acting against each other. What heightened it further was that Nipsey Hussle was someone who was seen by people as having “made it,” but had not left where he came from and was trying, by his own lights, to “give back.”

People very broadly have been wrangling with the meaning of his death and life. The National Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution Tour and the LA Revolution Club have been out with Revolution in the thick of this, listening to and struggling with people. For many among the masses—for most—the grief has been mixed with a sort of acceptance that the basic and bitter facts of life for most of the oppressed will never fundamentally change. Of those drawn to change, most spontaneously seek out roads rooted in the system that gives rise to the very conditions that kill thousands of Nipseys a year. This has been strongly reinforced by the likes of Louis Farrakhan and Barack Obama, who spoke at the funeral or sent messages. But for a critical minority, the struggle waged by the Revolution Club over the source of the problem (capitalism-imperialism) and the solution (revolution) provoked engagement. In a few cases, people were looking for this; in more cases, it took struggle. The fact is this: people need what only the revolution can bring to them.

Thursday, the day of his funeral, witnessed thousands packing the downtown venue where it was held and thousands more in the streets all along the way. In the days before and since, there’s been a more or less constant scene at Crenshaw and Slauson, the corner where Nipsey Hussle was killed. And this has continued to simmer throughout the city as we’re collectively and scientifically sorting through all this ourselves. We’re including below a statement from the Revolution Club released the day before Nipsey's funeral; two reports giving different perspectives from members of the National Revolution Tour; an earlier article written by Joe Veale; and a short poem.

WHAT REALLY KILLED NIPSEY HUSSLE?
AND HOW CAN WE GET
FREE OF THIS MADNESS?

Revolution Club, Los Angeles and the National Revolution Tour

April 10, 2019 | revcom.us

 

People are hurting over the outrageous murder of Nipsey Hussle.  One more Black young man full of promise so painfully gunned down by another Black person.  We are mourning – we need to mourn – the outrage of this murder.  And we also need to ask two hard questions:

1) What Really Killed Nipsey Hussle?

Whoever killed Nipsey was doing what this system has taught him to do; they always encourage the oppressed to lash out against each other.  But it is this system – capitalism-imperialism – that put the gun in his hands and the thoughts in his head.  It is this system – capitalism-imperialism – that has exploited, oppressed and killed Black people for 400 years, since the first slave was kidnaped and dragged to the shores of North America.  White supremacy was created to serve the needs of this system and it is built into it.  You can’t get rid of white supremacy without getting rid of the whole system of capitalism-imperialism that birthed it and keeps it going.  And the same thing holds true for all the other outrages of this system: the oppression of women and gay (LGBTQ) people; the persecution of the immigrants; the endless wars; and the destruction of the environment. 

2) How Can We Get Free Of This Madness?

You can’t beat the game by playing the game.  Maybe a few people can get in on the setup, but the masses of people here and worldwide will remain oppressed. We need a revolution to get rid of this system, not a program that tries to get in on it.  A revolution that is a real revolution – that defeats and dismantles the enemy’s instruments of violent repression, and brings into being whole new political structures, whole different economic relations and new social values among the people. 

Bob Avakian, the leader of the revolution, says there are two choices: either these horrors go on and on; or we make revolution.  Which will you choose?

There is a plan to do this; there is leadership to do this, in Bob Avakian; there is a place for you to go to learn more about this revolution, at www.revcom.us and @tuneintorevcom; and there is a way for you to get involved by getting into the Revolution Club. Come Saturday and follow @RevClub_LA

At 12:30pm and 1pm TODAY, there will be live speeches from the Revolution Club on Figueroa between 12th Street and Pico to get into this.  Now is the day to learn about and get involved in the real revolution.

 

 

Revolution Club, Los Angeles  • 323.424.6687 • @revclub_la  •  www.revcom.us

 

 

 

REVCOM.US received this flyer from the Revolution Club, Los Angeles and the National Revolution Tour. Thousands of these flyers have been distributed at the Nipsey Hussle Celebration of Life at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Thursday, April 11, 2019, and since then.

Bob Avakian Straight-Up
On the Revolution... And the Gangs

Reflections on Taking the Revolution to the Nipsey Hussle Memorial

April 15, 2019 | revcom.us

 

From a member of the  National Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution Tour:

There was a lot of openness to the full title of Joe Veale’s article, “To All Those Who Grieve for Nipsey Hussle... and Want a Better World.” People would run up to us and grab the article after hearing the title, based on both that it had something to do with Nipsey AND the truly yearning for a better world. This was real among thousands, I would say, wanting to know who we were and what this was about.

There was a difference, I felt, between getting out this article and the one titled, “WHAT REALLY KILLED NIPSEY HUSSLE? AND HOW CAN WE GET FREE OF THIS MADNESS?” The elephant in the room that it seemed few people wanted to touch was “being in the life” and the contradiction with what people are riding and dying for and whether this was harmful or not. There was an avoidance of even speaking to that in the memorial and throughout the day, I felt. Even as many talked about bringing people together, there was a broad feeling that this kind of senseless loss is something we have to learn to live with. Like the most you can do is figure out how to go out with respect and pay proper tribute to those who do. But why do we have to figure out how to live with all this, to prepare for parents to bury their children?

Some of what had brought people to the memorial: Nipsey was their favorite rapper and he was trying to do something good for the community. Others say that he had inspired them very deeply to better themselves and that they were capable of greatness. When asked what that meant, it was very much within the confines of making money but also giving back to others and the fact that he was about bringing unity and bringing people together.

I read the quote from BA about the meatgrinder to several people as a part of responding to those who were focused on Nipsey as an example of how to rise above their conditions:

Determination decides who makes it out of the ghetto—now there is a tired old cliché, at its worst, on every level. This is like looking at millions of people being put through a meatgrinder and instead of focusing on the fact that the great majority are chewed to pieces, concentrating instead on the few who slip through in one piece and then on top of it all, using this to say that “the meatgrinder works”!

—Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:11

One person said: I don’t want that to be true, I gotta believe that I am going to be the one who gets out. Another person said they agreed that masses of people are locked out, but what Nipsey was doing—by buying property and setting up a local business—was trying to get the rest of the people through the meatgrinder as well. Another person emphasized their “agreement” with BA, but “reinterpreted” it to say that it is not just determination, it’s also what resources and education you have available to you. Even those who had contradictory responses to this quote, when I asked them if they wanted to know more about this leader and this revolution, responded: oh yeah, definitely. Even though what they had said was contradictory, they were also still drawn to it. “This is exactly what I am always talking about with my friends.” They were seeing something in this they were uniting with, even though it was not fully how they were seeing it.

There were definitely people struck by what our flyer and agitation said about the “how to get out of this madness” and a hungering for something more. These included people who were from out of town. Some said: yes, revolution; I have been thinking about this. My main interactions were with young women, some who came from other places and wanted to know about this revolution and how they could be part of it. They conceived of revolution as fundamental change short of the overthrow of this system. Even when they would agree with you that the system needed to be overthrown—not surprisingly this was still in the confines of reform. They had come from out of town “looking” for something. When you asked people for their numbers to text them the video of the leader of the revolution, Bob Avakian—this was a key part of our plan for the day—they gave them. Also I was pulling out their phones and signing them up on the spot to follow us on Instagram, which people were very much open to.

When we got to Crenshaw & Slauson, there was a bit of a different feel: people having openness to the “this system has no future for the youth” posters. And when we said overthrow, people were asking how and sussing out our seriousness about revolution, what kind of revolution, how are you going to do that? People were trying to search for “meaning” in Nipsey’s death; it was making them think about their own lives and wanting to be remembered for something positive. There were a couple of people who I ran into who said that this “felt different” than Tupac and Biggie, and conspiracy theories about how they take out Black men once you get successful. Again the openness came either from women or people who were “unaffiliated”—but others took the flyer and I saw some people reading it.

There was an openness to engaging with what we were about, taking the flyer, taking it seriously and saying they were going to read it. So I tried to not get into a back-and-forth with this, but when I talked with people about the Points of Attention—is this something that interests you—people would say “of course, yes, this what I am into.” And people were following us and giving us their numbers. And I felt it communicated something real to actually be organizing this way, on the spot, with the texts, showing that we were aiming for something large. Because anybody who knows anything knows that if you are going to organize people, social media and texting are the main ways of communicating versus having a sign-up sheet or something. I was also telling people about the picnic and the showing of the film of Bob Avakian’s speech, Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution.

Some other reflections: I still feel that we need to struggle to bring forward “influencers” from the neighborhood who are up in the life, as part of bringing forward blocs of people. I mean, even look at somebody like Nipsey who had these networks and connections, what a huge effect he had on people, even while not being that radical; the fact that he did represent in their minds something different and also represented for the people in the neighborhood; again this was contradictory but I think we shouldn’t underestimate the impact this could have.

Questions I have:

1. How do we get people stepping out of their situation and conditions; pulling back the lens even further, not just on their own conditions but the conditions of the world? That the system causing all this suffering is imperialism and what that does?
2. How do we get people to see that what they are living and riding and dying for is so petty in conjunction to what they could be living and dying for? And there is so much pride in it in one sense; how do we get some pride for being about this? What will your life be about? I mean, people are sacrificing, suffering, they have a lot of courage but all of it is serving to keep backing into the conditions that they are in now when it could be put towards really emancipating all of humanity. Stop repping for the system. Start repping for the revolution. It really is heartbreaking and infuriating when you think of it.

A couple of ideas:

• I think we should do this American Crimes series in the neighborhood, we should have videos on social media. Quotes from BA, like: “These imperialists make the Godfather look like Mary Poppins.” [BAsics 1:7]
• Social investigation in the community, getting more familiar with how people are thinking and reflecting and are there “circles” we could do in the neighborhoods.
• Is there a basis to go to the Marathon store or people involved with this to talk to either Nipsey’s brother or others about what we are about and see if they would support in some way? Maybe selling the REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! T-shirts there?
• Are there other pop culture influencers who we could send Joe Veale’s article to and ask them to tweet it? Could we get Joe on some of these shows, on the radio, etc.?

Dispatch from a National Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution Tour member:

Thousands of People Pour Out for the Nipsey Hussle Memorial—Revolution Takes to Staples Center with the Way Out

April 15, 2019 | revcom.us

 

People in LA have been playing the music of Nipsey Hussle. People have been out day after day to mourn over Nipsey, coming from as far as out of state even or selling their game consoles to travel down from Northern California. Cars cruised slowly down the street blasting Nipsey’s songs as the bass from the music rattled from the trunks of cars. Bluetooth speakers at the hips of people play the anguish and the joy people are feeling. Motorcycles doing wheelies and blowing smoke from their tires as they rumble fast past where Nipsey bought out an entire plaza on the corner of Crenshaw and Slauson, a historic intersection that dates back to ’92, the last time this many masses of Black people and many different kinds of people, came together to unite over another act of injustice from an unjust system.

Nipsey was taken at the young age of 33 and was a father of two children. People agonized and mourned over his death because he was taken at his best, someone who rose from the ghettoes of LA to “make it in America” and came up with the banner of TMC: “The Marathon Continues.” That slogan was about striving to establish a different class of Black capitalists within this system, at best. There was an objective need for the revolution, those who are representing the seven billion people on this planet, including the planet itself, to come out and relate in a good way to all of this, and to bring the real problem and solution to it all that could only be brought in from the outside, from the scientific leadership and vanguard that is necessary and essential to lead the masses of people, and yes, Black people, who have a tremendous and crucial role in ending all of oppression and emancipating all of humanity by joining the ranks of the revolution now as millions are being influenced in favor of this revolution.

The National Revolution Tour has been leading teams out to Crenshaw and Slauson and doing work at Crenshaw High School. Going out through the day and coming back late in the evening, this revolution has been figuring out the right agitation and the right touch to this, of solid core and a lot of elasticity BASED ON THIS SOLID CORE.

We began early in the morning on Thursday, the day of Nipsey’s memorial at Staples Center, a major arena, which would lead to a procession of Nipsey’s body through LA, into the heart of South Central. All of us convened for a brief orientation. Who are we? What do we represent? For whom are we doing this? Here we are with the vaccine for what the masses need to emancipate themselves and to take part in emancipating all of humanity, and we should step together with that scientific certitude. We should look to our leadership for guidance and know that our presence there at the memorial and procession will make an impact unto itself. With that, we ran out the door with our materials and our cups of coffee and traveled to Staples Center.

As we were preparing our materials, lining up posters of THIS SYSTEM HAS NO FUTURE FOR OUR YOUTH BUT THE REVOLUTION DOES! with stacks of stickers in a way to say, “Take these and get organized while organizing others” with two banners elevated high in the sky, one big “This System Cannot Be Reformed! It Must Be OVERTHROWN!” and “What Killed Nipsey Hussle? And How Do We Get Out of This Mess?” a stylish Black woman with very short hair in shades doing livestream came up immediately to ask what we were doing and about. She was invited to come back at 12:30 pm to hear a revolutionary speak to the question of what killed Nipsey and how to get out of this mess. She said she’d come back with her livestream. People like this came up to us all day. A young Black teen joined us on the spot and began passing out flyers and marched with us for most of the time.

As the lines began to form with hundreds and then thousands more coming from different directions in Downtown LA, the Revolution Club marched in formation, stopping in front of people to do agitation on “What Killed Nipsey Hussle,” asking “Who put the guns in their hands and the thoughts in their heads?” getting into the actual problem and solution, and then passing out flyers and moving on to the next section of people standing in line. We would huddle after and sum it up. What could we do different? What was the key link in agitation and appearance we had to make adjustments to? How could we bring it back home for people? So, we came back onto the court to bring the ball into the paint for a Sky Hook. In other words, we marched back to the line of people with the big sky-high banner of “This System Must Be OVERTHROWN!” behind the Revolution Club. This attracted a lot of cell phones leaping out of people’s pockets to take video and photos. The agitation got sharper and when we were done going through sections and blocs of people with it, we marched back chanting “We are the MIGHTY, MIGHTY REVCOMS!” If you’ve seen people at a sports game doing “The Wave,” you can picture a “Wave” developing of heads turning and cell phones coming up to record as the revcoms were marching in formation and chanting. A woman shouted how much she loved the diversity of the Revolution Club, and we organized her on the spot by leading her to follow @tuneintorevcom and sending her a prepared text message on the spot to welcome her to the revolution and a link to watch a clip of Bob Avakian. There were about 20 people we did this with throughout the day as a key way to organize people into the revolution and for them to be introduced to the leader of the revolution BOB AVAKIAN.

At 12:30 pm, we had our anticipated main event: Joe Veale, former Black Panther Party member and now revolutionary communist and follower of Bob Avakian, speaking to “What Killed Nipsey Hussle and How We Can Get Out of This Mess?” A Black man in a blue hat in his 30s, who was familiar with and loved Bob Avakian, recorded the whole thing from his phone.

Afterward, Noche Diaz got up and spoke of meeting one of these youths in Chicago, whose name was Quono, who had so much promise, energy, and potential to step into the revolution. So many like Quono are gunned down at such a young age. What killed Nipsey Hussle? What did our energies need to be drawn to and what did we need to do now?

Following the memorial service inside Staples Center, people poured out by the thousands and thousands as thousands were already outside. Now was the time to do sharp agitation at the street corner and banner on a loudspeaker. People both loved it and hated it. Joe Veale spoke again. We summed up the need to bring it home to the actual solution of revolution that overthrows this system, repetitively but flowing as a rhythm for different people walking past to hear and to be provoked, challenged, and inspired to step into the revolution. A member of the Revolution Club spoke to what it means of our youth killing each other because they look like and are just like them. A National Tour member got on and spoke with a lot of heart and science to how this system always gets away with these killings. Every time we have another one of our youths shot down and killed, this system laughs back at us from the top, while we cannot see who the real enemy is. There was a need for us to rise up for revolution. A hardcore from “the life” came up to confront the speaker, claiming this was disrespectful at Nipsey’s memorial. The speaker came back with the actual contradictions that should be posed to people: continue on and live with this all, or MAKE REVOLUTION. That’s it. Two choices. What is your life going to be about, really? As he spoke to the conditions people under this system are forced to live under, someone ran over and crossed the street to express their agreement and to get organized with the revolution.

We had made an actual impact on this terrain, on the people there, and ourselves being grounded on for whom and for what and bringing the “Two Choices” as posed by Bob Avakian in Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution:

And, 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!

As we packed our materials and got together again to sum it all up, including the agitation we did, someone brought to our attention what was happening on Crenshaw and Slauson: a livestream video feed of masses and masses of people, especially Black people walking down the streets in anticipation of the memorial procession about to pass through. I had been falling asleep in my chair but was awakened by this sight! Here was an opportunity to be out there among the masses of people, as they were grieving but celebrating the life of Nipsey Hussle. We did a quick stretching of our bodies and crammed into our cars, and drove down to the mass gathering, changing lanes, and rerouting through the streets in the neighborhoods.

Never have I seen so many masses in the streets! It was truly a celebration. Many, many people came up to our cart of materials, asking for articles of our large sheets of “To All Those Who Grieve for Nipsey Hussle... and Want a Better World” by Joe Veale of the Revolution Club. We ran out of posters of “THIS SYSTEM HAS NO FUTURE FOR THE YOUTH BUT THE REVOLUTION DOES!” An older Black woman on a walker demanded to take some articles and posters to her apartment complex because “These killings have got to stop and people need to know about this [revolution].” Two Latina women in their ’20s found great joy in getting stacks of the articles and passing them out to people they passed by. Two young Black kids on bikes took a poster to wave down at people as they pedaled down the streets. Many, many people talked about how celebratory the atmosphere was of different sets and people uniting over the loss of such a beautiful human being. You could feel the masses of people taking a long breath of fresh air, unafraid of walking down the street together and relishing the moment of being able to come together for something much, much bigger. There was also a broad openness to actually trying to find the actual solution to this mess.

As the memorial procession drove by with long black limousines and vans with their doors open with family members and friends blowing kisses to the masses of people as tears streamed down their faces and flowers strewn onto the top of the cars, the National Revolution Tour and Revolution Club LA did a last push of getting flyers out widely. It was not easy to leave this beautiful and historic scene with so many interesting people. There is much more to sum up about our work during this historic moment with the killing of Nipsey and the outpouring of the masses during the beginnings of a national tour to organize the thousands now while influencing millions to make revolution, and there is more to do and figure out to make the objectives and aims of this Tour real—of hastening while awaiting toward the time where millions of people like the ones we met out on the streets could be led to go for revolution, all-out, with a real chance to win.

 

To All Those Who Grieve for Nipsey Hussle... and Want a Better World

By Joe Veale, Revolution Club

April 8, 2019 | revcom.us

 

People are hurting, deeply, over the senseless killing of Nipsey Hussle. They talk about the way he wanted something better for the people and then got senselessly gunned down.

But what killed Nipsey Hussle?

Whoever pulled the trigger, Nipsey Hussle was killed by the system. A system that puts oppressed people in brutally raw conditions where they are left to kill each other off in genocidal proportions. Black against Black. Latino against Latino. One against the other. White against Black and Latino.

A system whose pig police, court system, prison system and military enforce these kinds of relations among the people—a system whose violence against the people—alongside of the horrible conditions this system has cast millions into—especially in the inner city—is repeatedly justified again, again, and again.

What will it take to not just get out of this horrible cycle but get beyond this and into a whole better world? Answer: Revolution—Nothing Less.

Revolution that leads millions to overthrow this capitalist-imperialist system—defeating and dismantling its instruments of coercion and violence—which brutally enforce this kind of shit here and even worse all over the world.

Revolution clears the ground to replace this system with a far better system and society that is outlined in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America—a constitution that has been authored by the leader of the revolution who has brought forward a new communism: Bob Avakian (BA). 

We have the science, the strategy and the leadership for this revolution, in Bob Avakian (BA). And there has never been a leader like BA before—someone who has taken the science of emancipating humanity to a new level, someone who has forged a strategy for making and winning an ACTUAL revolution in this country... someone who has never lost his connection to the people and can break down this science for people... and someone who leads the revolution strategically and practically. Check out his film, WHY WE NEED AN ACTUAL REVOLUTION AND HOW WE CAN REALLY MAKE REVOLUTION, at www.Revcom.us and dig into what he’s got to say... and you’ll see what I mean. We have the Revolution Club where you can be a part of and represent for the revolution as you learn more about it.

You need to get with this.

HOW Will We Get Out of This Madness?

People feel Nipsey Hussle cared about the people he came from. He was striving for a way, as he understood, to lead them out of the trap—the vicious cycle where one group is played off against the other and the system rolls along chewing up lives and spitting out bodies in the millions.

But the question is to be asked: what path, what roadway, will lead to overcoming, overthrowing the oppressor, and what road will lead you right back into the killing embrace—the real living horror of this system no matter how good your intentions are?

Let’s talk about it.

Nipsey Hussle sought to help the people by becoming a so-called “business man.” An owner of property and land. Aspiring to do what Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, the tech billionaires, do.

Investing in the “new frontier” of electronics and computer science, which today under the command of global capitalism feeds like a parasite off the great mass of the world’s humanity.

Nipsey Hussle strove to develop a class of people—Black capitalist—“self-made” millionaires and billionaires.

In his view, this is the solution to the problem that those trapped especially in the inner city—and caught up in “the life”—face. Bringing their enterprising spirit and willingness to be ruthless into the legit capitalist enterprise.

The problem with this is that capitalism depends on the exploitation of the masses, here and around the world. Exploiting people, including children as young as four years old, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who work in the mines digging for minerals like coltan and cobalt. These minerals are shipped to the sweatshops in China and other places where other exploited people put them into smartphones, laptop computers, and electric cars that are then sold, bringing in hundreds of millions in profit. Meanwhile, children in the Congo have their childhood stolen from them, and other people in China are worked like slaves—their very lives used up to produce our electronic gadgets.

Yes, the Zuckerbergs and Musks have great wealth; while the people worldwide are left in conditions without running water or toilets—unable to feed themselves, and dying from diarrhea, cholera, malnourishment, starvation, AIDS, and malaria. The whip of hunger and disease keep people trapped in these relations. It’s like the whipping machine during slavery. Only now the whip that takes chunks of flesh out of your body is the whip of starvation—the whip of watching your children shrivel up and die.

The global system of capitalist-imperialism, with the USA at the top of this food chain, means that a few people consume unbelievable amounts of wealth ripped from people all over the world; that people in the U.S. parasitically benefit from this while the lives of billions of people all over the world are ground up, chewed up, and swallowed up in sweatshops, factories, mines, and plantations.

Whole nations like Congo, Bangladesh, Haiti, and Mexico are ground down. This system leads to U.S. wars killing millions to stay on top; it means the destruction of the environment as it sucks up the earth’s resources for its profit-driven system; it means patriarchy and the oppression of women horrifically woven and reinforced through all this. It means millions of migrants thrown off the land, and the destruction of the planet.

This system has its own morals, values, and culture—that shapes people’s thinking in a way where everybody is in competition and fighting with each other to “get theirs.”

Their Game... and Our Future

This is the oppressors’ game. It always has been. This is what they let you do. If you do it legit according to the rules—if you are “successful,” they will celebrate you because it validates their murderous system and keeps the masses caught in the trap of thinking everyone can achieve the great American dream of becoming an entrepreneur—that is, a small-time capitalist leading to you becoming “the man” or “the woman.” This is like what Bob Avakian says about people going to the casino and hearing all the bells and seeing all the lights going off—and everyone thinking “somebody is winning and maybe it can be me”—when in reality this is part of the game—you thinking you can become a so-called winner. And for the one in million that slips through to “win,” they become part of the system that chews up and spits out the bodies of billions.

As long as you play this game, the house always wins. Those playing are always being played... for suckers!

We need a whole different setup, a different system, where the economy is geared NOT to make a few people rich, but to uproot and overcome all exploitation and oppression, all over the world... to meet the material needs of society and the people who make it up... and to take care of the environment for future generations. We need a system where everything—the schools, the culture, everything—does not encourage and reinforce all the dog-eat-dog reality, but gives backing to the real humanity that people aspire to, but constantly find themselves up against the system when they try to live that way. We need to make revolution in this country as our part in getting to that world.

THAT is what this revolution is fighting for. The choice is this: either live with this madness, or make revolution.

Yes, We Need to Stop Killing Each Other Off—but Bringing in the Pigs Is the WRONG Answer

People feel Nipsey Hussle did a lot of different things to “give back” to the people.

In my view, one of the most significant things he “gave back” are his reflections about the way the system plays you—and gets you to participate in your own genocidal oppression.

I remember hearing an interview where he talked about when you go into another hood to shoot it up—you pass by square-looking people and you let them go—you pass by someone from another race and you let them go—then you look for someone who is rolling through this hood in the same way you roll in your hood—“that’s the one you want,” he said—“that’s the one you shoot—the one that looks just like you.”

This reflected how this system conditions you and shapes you to carry out its work—eliminating a whole section of the population that it cannot profitably use—that is, exploit. The system looks at these youth and figures it can’t any longer exploit them the way it did their parents and grandparents—as a means to make profit in the cotton fields and later as the last hired and first fired in the industrial factories—so they get some killing each other off, and they mass incarcerate the rest.

Understanding all this—what it is all part of—we can see how significant and how righteous it is when gangs are able to form truces seeking to overcome this shit.

But it must be said straight up—working with the police to do this is working with the armed force of the very oppressor who put people in this situation in the first place. These police have been killing a thousand people a year, going after Black, Latino, and Native American youth with a vengeance, and enforcing a whole genocidal program of mass incarceration. Come on people, we know what they do. We know that they incite the gangs to go after each other and stir up shit to keep this going and to have an excuse to bring down the hammer on people. The role of these police is NOT to serve and protect the people and it never can be, no matter what they tell you—as BA says:

The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces all this oppression and madness. (BAsics 1:24)

Making Revolution NOW

We ARE making revolution, starting to organize the thousands needed now into the movement for revolution while influencing millions. Right now the National Revolution Tour is going all over the country, spreading revolution and organizing people. We are not just waiting for the revolution, we are hastening it and bringing forward the time when millions can be led to go for revolution, all out, with a real chance to win. 

We will be out there on Thursday at Nipsey’s funeral; and we will be out there after the funeral.

If YOU want to get beyond a world where masses of people are ground up and then slaughter or oppress each other... if you want a planet where all humanity gets emancipated... if you cannot wait another day or go another week under this system... then get with us.

www.revcom.us

@tuneintorevcom

Revolution Club Los Angeles:
(323) 424-6687
revclub_la@yahoo.com
@revclub_la
2716 S. Vermont Ave Unit 8
Los Angeles, CA

Nipsey Hussle

“White Power” Fascists Burn Down Tennessee Social Justice Center

April 15, 2019 | revcom.us

 

On Friday, March 29, the main building of the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee, was burned down in an arson fire. The center describes itself as a “catalyst for grassroots organizing and movement building in Appalachia and the South” that works “with people fighting for justice, equality and sustainability.” After the fire, the center said in a news release that they “found a symbol connected to the white power movement spray-painted on the parking lot connected to the main office.” It appears the fascist white supremacist symbol was put there by the perpetrators of the arson.

No one was killed or hurt in the Highlander arson, but the center said the fire destroyed “decades of historic documents, speeches, artifacts and memorabilia from movements of all kinds, including the civil rights movement.” The center has a long connection with the civil rights movement, including training Rosa Parks before she refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus, sparking the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott that brought the fight against Jim Crow into national focus.

The sign found spray-painted on the center’s premises was a symbol that looks like a hashtag with three vertical and three horizontal lines, which was first used by the Iron Guard, a fascist movement in Romania in the 1930s and ’40s. More recently, this symbol has been used by some fascist “white power” forces in various parts of the world. Notably, the internet-white-supremacist fascist who invaded two mosques in New Zealand this March and murdered 50 people—livestreaming it on Facebook with the aim of inciting other fascists and racists—had the same symbol painted on one of the guns he used in the massacre. The Iron Guard symbol has also been used by fascists in the U.S., including some involved in the 2017 “Unite the Right” march of neo-Nazi white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which protester Heather Heyer was murdered by one of the fascists—and after which Trump said there were “very fine people” among the fascist-KKK goons.

This attack in Tennessee—and other attacks on Black and other oppressed people, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, and women—are happening in the context of undisguised white supremacy coming from the highest levels of the U.S. ruling class. There is a president in the White House now who said after the mass murders at the mosques in New Zealand, when asked if if he thinks that “white nationalism” (that is, white supremacist fascism) is a significant problem, said, “I don’t really”; who paints all immigrants as “criminals”; and who attacks protesters against Confederate monuments for “trying to take away our heritage.” This is whipping up an intensifying fascist, racist wave in the South and elsewhere around the country. ¹

Here are just a few recent examples:

• Just two days after the Highlander arson fire, a memorial dedicated to slaves and Black workers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was vandalized with urine and racist graffiti written in permanent marker. University officials said one of the people allegedly involved has ties to a group called Heirs to the Confederacy.
• In October of last year, a white man cold-bloodedly shot and killed an older Black man and woman in a supermarket parking lot near Louisville, Kentucky. Not all the circumstances around the killings are clear or known publicly, and the alleged shooter’s motives are not known. But before murdering the two Black people, the shooter had tried and failed to get into a Black church, and a man who confronted the alleged killer reported that the gunman said, “Don’t shoot me. I won’t shoot you. Whites don’t shoot whites.”
• The Kentucky murders took place in the same week as two other major developments: pipe bombs were sent to the homes and offices of top Democratic leaders, particularly prominent Black figures, as well as wealthy liberals of Jewish descent and CNN. And a white supremacist gunman murdered 11 Jewish people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh as he shouted, “All Jews must die.”
• In November of last year, a white male gunman shot and killed two women at a yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida, before killing himself. The man was a self-proclaimed misogynist (hater of women) who posted videos and songs online proclaiming and advocating hatred and violence against women, Black people, gays, and Muslims.
• Around the time of the Highlander Center arson, three Black churches in the rural St. Landry Parish in Louisiana were hit by arson. On April 10, a young white man, son of a deputy sheriff, was arrested and charged with the arson of the churches. At this point, there have been no reported statements from the man himself and his motives are not clear or made public. But the burning down of Black churches cannot be separated from the current overall climate of rising white supremacist threats and violence, and the NAACP has called the arson of the Louisiana churches “hate crimes.”

For decades, there has been a growing fascist section in this country, including at top levels of power. To them, America was “great” when it was unmistakably white, Christian, and male-dominated, and the USA had unrivaled dominance over the world—but it’s gone to hell since. They find even the partial concessions that Black and other oppressed people won in recent decades to be intolerable, and this hatred—along with the same hatred directed at gains won by women and blatant “USA #1” madness—is a big part of what fuels this fascist movement.

The Republican Party is the main vehicle of this fascism. But the Democratic opponents of Trump have no real answers either. In fact they, too, support white supremacy, in a less blatant form. Just look at how Bill Clinton opened his run for presidency by making a special trip to witness the execution of a brain-damaged Black prisoner and then posing in front of a chain gang of Black prisoners at Stone Mountain, Georgia (a monument to the Confederacy), as a signal to racist whites that he would keep Black people in their “place”—and then, as a major part of his presidency, oversaw and pushed through repressive laws and policies that greatly expanded mass incarceration, particularly of Black and other oppressed people.² Or look at how Obama constantly put the blame for the whole oppressive situation Blacks and Latinos face on the people themselves, preaching that the problem was youths with saggy pants, “absentee fathers,” and so on—and how he attacked youths who rose up in Baltimore against the police murder of Freddie Gray as “thugs,” while his In-justice Department never prosecuted a single murdering pig.³ The Democratic Party must uphold this white supremacy because the system they uphold and serve—capitalism-imperialism—has had white supremacy so tightly interwoven into its every fiber that you cannot get rid of the one without totally uprooting the other.

The arson of the Highlander Center and other incidents involving fascist white supremacists are the crest of what is objectively shaping up in society. On one side are those like the NRA and various other neo-Nazi, KKK-type groups openly threatening civil war against anything positive in society—while at the very top, Trump openly agitates for violence by his fascist followers and minions (like exhorting his crowds to chant “Lock Them Up!”), and moves to ratchet up repression by the state against immigrants and others. On the other side are the Democrat leaders trying to corral the opposition into “acceptable channels,” even as they are one of the targets of the fascist forces.

Whether people are now cowed by or instead stand up to these fascist white supremacist attacks—and how this struggle is fought politically—has urgent implications for where the world is headed. There are real stakes in countering the storm troopers, and their leaders and representatives, in every sphere in society, doing so as part of a broader movement to drive out the fascist regime—and, in terms of the future of humanity, as part of advancing the 3 Prepares: Prepare the Ground, Prepare the People, and Prepare the Vanguard—Get Ready for the Time When Millions Can Be Led to Go for Revolution, All-Out, With a Real Chance to Win.

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1. According to a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies: Between 2007 and 2011, the number of [violent right-wing] attacks was five or less per year. They then rose to 14 in 2012; continued at a similar level between 2012 and 2016, with a mean of 11 attacks and a median of 13 attacks; and then jumped to 31 in 2017. [back]

2. For more on the crimes against the people by Clinton and other Democrats, see “The Most Recent Heinous Crimes Carried Out by Democratic Presidents or Congress: A Chart.” [back]

3. For more, see “Nostalgic for the Obama Years? Find Out How Much Harm Barack and Michelle Actually Did to Black People and Think Again.” [back]

 

Arson at Highlander Center, Tennessee, March 29. Photo: AP

White power symbol found painted on parking lot of the Highlander Center, the morning after the fire. (Photo: Knoxville Sentinel)

Case #23: The Afghanistan and Iraq War Logs and the Persecution of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and WikiLeaks

April 15, 2019 | revcom.us

 

Bob Avakian has written that one of three things that has “to happen in order for there to be real and lasting change for the better: People have to fully confront the actual history of this country and its role in the world up to today, and the terrible consequences of this.” (See “3 Things that have to happen in order for there to be real and lasting change for the better.”)

In that light, and in that spirit, “American Crime” is a regular feature of revcom.us. Each installment focuses on one of the 100 worst crimes committed by the U.S. rulers—out of countless bloody crimes they have carried out against people around the world, from the founding of the U.S. to the present day.

THE CRIME

In July 2010, WikiLeaks,¹ working with a number of major mainstream media outlets including the New York Times and the Guardian, published 77,000 classified U.S. military documents chronicling incidents in the U.S. war in Afghanistan from 2004 through 2009. Then in October, it published another 392,000 classified documents detailing U.S. military actions in the Iraq war, also from 2004 through 2009. All these documents and more were sent to WikiLeaks by U.S. Army whistleblower Private Chelsea Manning.

These reports were written by U.S. military personnel—so some facts and descriptions in them may be skewed, incomplete, censored, or covered up. But they were never meant to become public. And they graphically indicate the depth and extent of mass murder of civilians, torture, and war crimes carried out by U.S. forces under George W. Bush and Barack Obama in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Obama administration immediately responded to the publication of the war logs by launching an intensive hunt for the whistleblower who leaked the documents and a global campaign to take down WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. Chelsea Manning was eventually arrested, tried in a military court and sentenced to 35 years in prison—the longest sentence ever given a whistleblower. Her sentence was commuted in 2017—but only after she had spent seven years in prison, 11 months of it in 23-hours-a-day isolation that a UN Special Rapporteur on torture deemed “cruel and inhumane.” She was denied critically needed medical care related to being a transgender woman.

Assange’s arrest on April 10, 2019 in London—after being forced out of the Ecuadorian embassy where he had been granted asylum and stayed for the last seven years—is a dangerous leap in the campaign of persecution initiated by Obama and escalated under the Trump/Pence fascist regime. And it goes along with the continuing persecution of Manning, who was jailed for refusing to testify in front of a grand jury investigating Assange.

The following gives a sense of what WikiLeaks revealed.

Afghanistan War Logs, 2004-2009

According to Assange, “20,000 lives that have been lost in Afghanistan [are] documented and exposed by our material.” They include accounts of what, in military jargon, are called “blue-on-white” incidents—in which soldiers wound or kill civilians. Some examples:

• Coalition soldiers fired into a bus full of children, wounding eight. A U.S. patrol machine-gunned a bus, wounding or killing 15 of its passengers. Other soldiers mortared a village, killing a wedding party including a pregnant woman, in an apparent revenge attack.
• A group of U.S. Marines went on a shooting rampage after coming under attack near Jalalabad—19 unarmed civilians were killed and 50 were wounded. The troops recorded false information on the incident.
• U.S. Special Forces dropped six 2,000-pound bombs on a compound where they believed a “high-value individual” was hiding after supposedly “ensuring there were no innocent Afghans in the surrounding area.” A senior U.S. commander reported that 150 Taliban had been killed. But local people reported that up to 300 civilians had died.

Iraq War Logs, 2004-2009

• The war logs revealed at least 105,000 Iraqis had been killed just between 2004 and 2009—66,000 of them civilians, including hundreds killed at U.S. checkpoints. This was at least 15,000 more people than the military had ever publicly reported.²
• A video leaked by Manning, titled Collateral Murder, shows a 2007 helicopter attack in Baghdad. U.S. forces massacred 12 civilians and wounded two children, chatting, sometimes laughing as they fired. They opened fire on a group of 7-8 – “all right – ha ha -- I hit ‘em....oh yeah look at those dead bastards” – then fired on people trying to put the victims in a van – “you should have a van in the middle of the road with 12-15 bodies...oh yeah, right through the windshield – ha ha.” After a U.S. tank rolled over one of the Iraqi victims, cutting him in half – “I think they just drove over a body...Really?..[laughing]...Yeah.”
• The U.S. claimed it didn’t torture, but the logs revealed the U.S. military issued an order in July 2004 directing U.S. forces not to investigate any breaches of “military conduct” unless U.S. troops and those of its “coalition” were “directly involved.” This was a green light to encourage Iraqi forces to do the torturing for the U.S., which refused “to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.”
• The WikiLeaks files reveal that prisoners were also routinely burned with cigarettes, electrocuted, raped, and beaten with any available implement, such as steel rods, wire cables, television antennas, chains, water pipes, fan belts, and rubber hoses, as well as fists and feet. Some were executed, but the U.S. never punished Iraqi forces for carrying out such tortures. Instead, U.S. military interrogators used “deliberate threats” to turn prisoners “over to the Iraqi ‘Wolf Brigade.’” One interrogator told a prisoner that “he would be subject to all the pain and agony that the Wolf battalion is known to exact upon its detainees.”

THE CRIMINALS

Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and their administrations, which carried out the war crimes and crimes against humanity exposed by Manning and WikiLeaks.

President Barack Obama, who claimed, “The fact is these documents don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already informed our public debate on Afghanistan,” and went on to claim that the “new strategy” the U.S. developed would address them. Meanwhile, his administration unleashed a furious investigation to find and arrest the whistleblower who leaked the war logs. And after Manning was identified as the whistleblower and imprisoned, Obama declared her guilty before she’d even gone to trial. At the same time, the U.S. launched a full-court press of repression, threats, deceit, and manipulation to silence Assange and shut down WikiLeaks, even though they had not been charged with a crime. The attacks included being “removed from the Internet ... their funds have been frozen ... media figures and politicians have called for their assassination and to be labeled a terrorist organization.”³ (Democracy Now!, December 7, 2010)

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who condemned “in the most clear terms” the leaks of any documents, which she claimed put Americans at risk—this was part of the global effort to take down WikiLeaks.

The Pentagon claimed releasing secret military documents could endanger U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians. General James Mattis denounced WikiLeaks: “I just thought it was a—just an appallingly irresponsible act to release this information. It didn’t tell us anything, that I’ve seen so far, that we weren’t already aware of.”

The Trump/Pence regime escalated this assault and moved to arrest Assange—which Obama had felt he needed to avoid (even as he tried other means to silence Assange, who was forced in 2012 to seek asylum at Ecuador’s London embassy, where he was confined until his arrest). In 2017, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo said, “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service.” The regime then filed an indictment on March 6, 2018, charging Assange under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The indictment alleges that Assange was part of a conspiracy to access a computer without authorization in order to obtain classified information that “could be used to the injury of the United States.”

THE ALIBI

On one hand, the U.S. rulers attempted to downplay the extent of what WikiLeaks exposed. Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said the documents were “essentially snapshots of events, both tragic and mundane, and do not tell the whole story.” At the same time, they claimed the leaks endangered their personnel and interests. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Assange and his sources “might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.” Others claimed the leaks could lead to military and civilian deaths.

The Trump/Pence regime now claims Assange isn’t a journalist but a non-state hostile intelligence service.

THE REAL MOTIVE

Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks’ courageous release of the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs (along with some 250,000 secret State Department cables) has been very damaging to the U.S. imperialists because they provide vivid, direct, and unassailable evidence that the U.S. routinely carries out all manner of crimes across the world, from torture and rape in Afghanistan to mass murder in Yemen and illegal spying at UN headquarters. They document how the U.S. manages a global network of brutal client regimes as key links in their empire of oppression and exploitation. These secret cables show that the U.S. lies about all of it. And the U.S. can’t simply end such practices: war crimes, torture, and oppression are built into the way U.S. imperialism and its military operate around the world.

The U.S. claims that Manning and WikiLeaks endangered lives. But an analysis of the WikiLeaks cables reveals that what is being threatened is the ability of U.S. operatives—people who have orchestrated great crimes—to endanger and kill people around the world in service of U.S. dominance.

For the imperialists, secrecy is essential because everything they’re doing is unjust and against the interests of the vast majority of humanity. In their own home base, secrecy is extremely important for the imperialists to keep broad sections of the population in a state of blissful ignorance and complacency about what the U.S. is actually doing around the world (coupled with fear that any link to criticizing the U.S. could open people to persecution) and to minimize opposition and resistance.

At the same time, the WikiLeak’ed documents and cables that Manning provided also show that far from being omnipotent “masters of the universe,” the U.S. rulers are feverishly working to shore up and extend their dominance in the face of extremely difficult contradictions and challenges. All that has led to very sharp struggle within ruling class ranks and the empowering of a fascist regime, which is hell bent on crushing its opponents and now using the persecution of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning as part of an all-around assault on the press and the rights of the people.

IN HER OWN WORDS

In 2010, Manning put her life on the line by providing these files to WikiLeaks so as to incite, in her words, “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms.” She said at the time: “This is one of the most significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of 21st century asymmetric warfare.”

 

SOURCES

“Iraq war logs reveal 15,000 previously unlisted civilian deaths,” Guardian, October 22, 2010

“Iraqi leaks show scale of civilian casualties,” ABC News, October 23, 2010

“WikiLeaks: Exposing War Crimes of a Criminal War,” revcom.us, August 15, 2010

 “WikiLeaks Files Shine Light on U.S. Accountability for Torture in Iraq,” revcom.us, January 16, 2011

“U.S. Lashes Out At Wikileaks,” revcom.us, December 19, 2010

Larry Everest, “What Wikileaks Reveals: Cables, Lies & Murder,” revcom.us, December 19, 2010

“Chelsea Manning Sentence Commuted: Welcome Manning’s Scheduled Release from Prison—Condemn Her Outrageous Seven-Year Imprisonment,” revcom.us, January 17, 2017

 

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1. WikiLeaks is an international organization that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of otherwise unavailable documents while preserving the anonymity of sources.  [back]

2. “The data cannot be relied upon as a complete record of Iraqi deaths. IBC [Iraq Body Count], for example, had previously calculated that up to 91,469 civilians were killed from various causes during the period covered by the leaked database. While detailing the 15,000 previously unknown deaths, it also omits many otherwise well-attested civilian fatalities caused by U.S. troops themselves. Nor does the Pentagon data cover any of the initial invasion fighting throughout 2003; IBC has identified 12,080 purely civilian deaths in that year. The U.S. figure is far lower than another widely quoted estimate of more than 650,000 ‘excess deaths’ extrapolated on a different basis and published in a 2006 study in the Lancet.” Guardian, October 22, 2010  [back]

3. Republican Senator Mitch McConnell said Assange is a “high tech terrorist,” and Newt Gingrich said he is an “information terrorist” who should be arrested as an “enemy combatant.” Influential right-wing columnist William Kristol asked, “Why can’t we use our various assets to harass, snatch or neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are? Why can’t we disrupt and destroy WikiLeaks in both cyberspace and physical space, to the extent possible?” Sarah Palin, writing on her Facebook page, asked, “Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?”  [back]

Science, Humanity, and Seeing the "Unseeable"

April 15, 2019 | revcom.us

 

Wednesday, April 10, astronomers at six different sites around the globe announced the release of an image of a black hole, along with scientific papers backing up this very exciting scientific breakthrough and explaining it further.

Black holes have been one of the ultimate scientific expressions of what is real but cannot be seen by human eyes. A little more than 100 years ago, Albert Einstein completed the theories of special and general relativity. These are some of the fundamental theories in physics, and reveal a mind-bending universe in which time and space and matter (the stuff that makes up everything in the universe, from energy to atoms) are not separate things, as scientists had thought and everyday experience seems to show, but instead are interwoven, and they bend and twist and mix with and shape each other. Traveling clocks slow down with accelerating speed, and light bends as it travels around stars. Before scientists actually found evidence of black holes in the universe, general relativity pointed to their existence—matter squeezed so tightly, making the pull of gravity and the warping of time and space so great that nothing, not even light, can escape their grip.

The image of the black hole released this week is a further confirmation of Einstein’s theory. And it points to and opens the door to further exploration and deeper understanding of very basic things about our universe. All of this is a very big deal.

Bob Avakian (BA) has emphasized that “everything that is actually true is good for the proletariat, all truths can help us get to communism.” For more on this, we highly recommend “Bob Avakian in a Discussion with Comrades on Epistemology—On Knowing and Changing the World.” In this excerpt, BA talks about scientific discoveries like the Big Bang and what preceded it as both interesting in their own right and how they are, “not in a narrow way,” part of the rich process of the search for truth and the advance to communism. And everyone can learn science!*

We are including on this page a correspondence from a reader about this important scientific advance, as well as pictures and a video.

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* See excerpt from the book SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION, On the Importance of Science and the Application of Science to Society, the New Synthesis of Communism, and the Leadership of Bob Avakian, An Interview with Ardea Skybreak, in which Skybreak makes the point, “I firmly believe–and I can provide evidence of this–that people who are not even trained in basic literacy can actually function as scientists.”

The just-released image of a black hole in the center of the galaxy Messier 87.

 

Why is the first-ever image of a black hole that was just made public by scientists a big deal?

Black holes are at the extreme limits of what science at this time can investigate and understand. They are so dense and their gravity is so powerful that nothing, including even light, can escape their grip. So until now, there has been no picture of what they are like. Now, scientists have found a way to get an image—so we can “see” what it is like around a black hole for the first time. This in itself is a big deal. More, this image confirms some of what scientists already knew—in particular, it confirms predictions of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. And the successful observation of a black hole also opens up a new avenue to find out more about big, unanswered questions about the universe and matter. All of this is extremely important for humanity. The quest for knowledge continues.

From a reader:

This week, in an important scientific breakthrough, scientists released an image of a black hole in the center of the galaxy Messier 87, which is 55 million light-years away from the Earth. (A light-year, how far light travels in a year, is about 5,880,000,000,000 miles—so Messier 87 is very far away from Earth.¹) The black hole is enormous—its mass is billions of times the mass of our sun.

“We have seen what we thought was unseeable,” said Shep Doeleman, the astronomer who headed up the globally coordinated effort to study black holes, which involved radio telescopes on four continents and is called the Event Horizon Telescope. The image that emerged is not a picture in the sense we usually think of these things. The telescopes were radio telescopes, which “see” and record radio waves, not light. A very big part of the scientific challenge in this was how to correctly coordinate, gather, and then compile information gathered from the corners of the Earth.²

But first, before going into that, a bit of background on black holes. Even the idea of black holes was originally startling to scientists. At first black holes were just a kind of theoretical abstraction—about 100 years ago, one scientist studying Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity showed that the math in the equations Einstein developed pointed to how, if matter were packed densely enough, gravity would be so strong that nothing including light could ever escape.

Einstein himself at first found this so contrary to his sense of the world that he was skeptical about the result. But over decades, increasing evidence pointed not just to the fact that black holes exist, some the size of large stars, but also that extremely massive ones are at the center of every galaxy, including our own, the Milky Way. And in 2017, in a landmark observation, gravitational waves were detected for the first time, and general relativity showed that they had to have come from two black holes 10 or more times as big as our sun that merged together.³ (See “Hearing the Universe for the First Time” at revcom.us.)

And now, astronomers have produced an extraordinary picture of an immense black hole, billions of times larger than our sun.

Physicist Brian Greene wrote on Twitter: “It is hard to express how utterly remarkable and astoundingly delightful it is that mathematical scribblings can predict something as bizarre as black holes and then, looking to the skies with sufficient diligence, we find them.”

The image of the black hole was a result of an extraordinary scientific process. Since light can’t escape a black hole, seeing what’s inside is impossible, and getting a picture of its edge is difficult, having never been done before. Scientists so far had only detected black holes indirectly, for example by seeing how they affect stars rotating around an invisible massive core at the center of a galaxy.

The scientists needed a telescope as big as the Earth to get an accurate picture of something so far away that it takes its light 55 million years to get to Earth. They made a telescope that big by combining the work of many people scattered across the planet—100 scientists on four different continents using eight huge radio telescopes focused on Messier 87 at exactly the same time, timed by extremely accurate atomic clocks, for four days in a row. They accumulated so much data that it was impossible to send it over the internet, and they had to store it in hard drives that they physically carried to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to analyze. One of the telescopes was in Antarctica, and they had to wait until winter was over to ship the hard drive from there. The scientists leading the effort set up four different teams, with no communication with each other, to each analyze the data to make sure that no one would “fudge” the results to get what they might think would be a better picture.

The analysis took years of hard work, and sophisticated computer algorithms—especially, as reported, one developed by Katie Bouman—were needed to combine data from these eight radio telescopes from around the world working under the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration. All this produced the cohesive image which has now captured the imagination of the world.

The image shows the black hole in the center. The image doesn’t clearly show the black hole’s event horizon (the edge, which once you cross, you are in the black hole and can’t get out). The event horizon is what the project’s name refers to. The image shows a “shadow” cast by the light bending around the black hole, outside the event horizon. Scientists estimate from the size of the shadow that the mass of the object is 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun.

And the light around the black center is uneven, thicker at the bottom than the top. Scientists conclude that this indicates, among other things, that the black hole is probably spinning.

While black holes are the ultimate expression in physics of “once you fall in, you can never come out,” they are at the same time extremely dynamic objects. The black hole in the center of Messier 87 is surrounded by an accretion disk—matter swirling around and falling into the black hole. And this process of the black hole “eating” matter around it and growing bigger produces an enormously powerful jet of particles, which bursts out of the edge of the black hole and zooms off into space at nearly the speed of light. (That jet is not captured in the image that the Event Horizon Telescope took, as the image does not have enough detail. But see an artist’s rendering of the jet on this page.)

In a further mind-bending twist, in the 1970s, physicist Stephen Hawking used the methods of quantum mechanics (the theory of the nature and character of the very small particles and waves that make up the world at the level of atoms) to show that black holes emit radiation, which came to be known as “Hawking radiation.”⁴ So it turns out black holes aren’t really completely dark after all! And this is different from what is predicted by the theory of general relativity.

In the time since Hawking’s results in the 1970s, the attempts to understand more deeply what happens to the stuff that falls in, what is going on with black holes, and what actually happens at the event horizon, have led to sharply contending theories among physicists. There are different theories, for example, about what happens when an object falling into a black hole crosses the event horizon—does it pass through without much change, at least initially? Interpretations of this based on general relativity indicate that it might. Or is matter “shredded” by an intense “fire wall” at the event horizon? Quantum mechanics seems to point in this direction. And no one really knows about what is going on inside the event horizon, in the interior of the black hole.

The two most fundamental theories in physics—quantum mechanics (the theory of the nature and character of the very small) and general relativity (the theory of gravity and the large-scale structure of the universe)—have to both be applied to get at what is going on in a situation as extreme as a black hole. Neither alone is able to answer what is going on. And in some important ways, they give different results. These problems point to one of the big unanswered questions in physics: how general relativity and quantum mechanics relate to each other and to the deep foundations of the physical world. Studying black holes is one very important way to open up and shed light on these huge and very basic questions.

The leaders of the Event Horizon Telescope have big plans to do further work. One black hole they have already focused on and hope to image in the future is the black hole at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. This black hole—called Sagittarius A* and located 26,000 light-years from Earth—is much smaller than the one in Messier 87 but important and interesting in its own way. And, more generally, how and why these massive black holes formed and what role they have in the formation of galaxies and stars is not understood. There is much to learn.

People look at what religion calls “the heavens.” They look at the stars, the galaxies. They can see a small part of the vastness of the universe, and they can imagine the greater vastness of the universe. Or they can look on a small scale, look with a microscope and see a small microbe or whatever, and be amazed by what goes on internally within that. They can ponder the relation between what you can see with a microscope and what you can see with a telescope. This is an essential quality of human beings. Human beings will always strive for this. Far from trying to suppress this, or failing to recognize it, we can and should and will give much fuller expression to it.

Communism will not put an end to—nor somehow involve the suppression of—awe and wonder, the imagination, and “the need to be amazed.” On the contrary, it will give much greater, and increasing, scope to this. It will give flight on a much grander scale to the imagination, in dialectical relation with—and in an overall sense as a part of—a systematic and comprehensive scientific outlook and method for comprehending and transforming reality.

—Bob Avakian, BAsics 4:30

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Footnotes:

1. A light-year is a measure of distance astronomers use. The nearest neighboring star to us is 4.2 light-years away. It takes light from our sun eight minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth.[back]

2. Many people have an image of an astronomer as someone who just looks through a traditional telescope. That has not been true for over 100 years. Today, instruments like radio telescopes use sensitive electronics to record data from observations of space, and the data is stored and analyzed using powerful computers.[back]

3. Long before they were observed, gravitational waves were predicted by the theory of general relativity. Gravity is the force that holds us to the surface of the Earth and underlies the orbiting of planets around stars, and for which Einstein’s general theory of relativity had a radically different understanding than had existed before.[back]

4. Quantum mechanics was developed to model things like what constitutes atoms and the motion and interaction of subatomic particles (constituent parts of the atom), the world of the very small. For example, the width of a human hair is one million carbon atoms. So Hawking was looking at the workings, interaction and interface between the very small and the very big, at the edge of black holes.[back]

 

From A World to Win News Service:

Wave of Protest Sweeps Out Algeria’s Hated President

April 15, 2019 | revcom.us

 

Revcom Editors’ Note: The following is an excerpted and lightly edited contribution from A World To Win News Service.

In light of the events in Algeria, and now Sudan, we really encourage readers to examine the orientation and guidance captured in Bob Avakian’s 2011 statement on the Arab Spring in Egypt, on what is sorely needed at such times of upsurge and ferment.

April 5, 2019. A World to Win News Service. People began flooding into Algiers’ main square in the early morning today before it filled up. By afternoon the square and surrounding streets were solidly packed with people celebrating their victory, the fall of the hated President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. The same happened in cities throughout the country. The hundreds of thousands in the streets—and millions more broadly—felt a once-in-a lifetime exuberance. They were dealing a powerful blow to the hogra,¹ the humiliation of the people, in their individual lives and as a nation, at the hands of a corrupt clique, obsequious to foreign powers and cruel to the masses of people.

There had been massive demonstrations every Friday for seven weeks since the president, in power for twenty years, announced he would run for a fifth term. First, in an effort to appease the anger, he reversed his decision about running again. Finally, he was forced to resign immediately. People’s joy is mixed with a growing determination to drive out a whole regime, now seeking to save itself by throwing overboard its leading figure. The protesters invented a new word, “Fridayize,” vowing to keep going until they also drove out the loyalists to whom Bouteflika had handed over the government.

But now the army has stepped up to openly establish itself as the real power. Despite the reputation it still enjoys for winning the country’s independence in 1962, after eight years of French genocidal warfare to maintain its colonial domination, people who are now largely united against a detested president are going to come up against an institution at the core of the state Bouteflika administered—the state that has kept the country dominated by imperialism economically and in every sphere and corner of society. This subservience is the real source of the nation’s humiliation and the stunting of the people’s aspirations.

This is one of those moments when millions of people begin to throw off some of the weights that have kept them down, refuse to let themselves be crushed not only materially but in their souls, and reaffirm their dignity and determination to make their own future. Such moments are crucial, and can be positive. But it is also true that we’ve been here before and can’t ignore lessons paid for in so much blood over and over again. For the people have not yet made a revolution, and unless they do, in the most thoroughgoing way, the forces of the old order, in Algeria and especially the imperialist powers and their system, will maneuver to assert control and rule, and at times even take revenge on the people—as has been seen only too often, including in the recent Arab Spring.

Algeria’s victory in its war of liberation back in the 1960s heralded the defeat of the old colonialist system that ruled over most of Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Young people have unfortunately seen little like the country’s effervescent, hopeful atmosphere in its early years. It welcomed liberation fighters and revolutionaries from all over, including Europe and the U.S.

Yet that struggle was not led by a genuinely scientific approach that could revolutionize the country on every level, from its economy (a system based on exploitation and driven by the needs of the global imperialist system) to all the social relations of domination and the thinking they give rise to and enforce. Instead of following the basic path socialist China was taking in those days under the revolutionary leadership of Mao Zedong, building an economy that could allow independence and make it possible to change the whole society and support world revolution, Algeria’s leadership tried to obtain a “better deal” for the nation within the existing framework of nation states, by maneuvering among the imperialists, including the by-then imperialist Soviet Union, as well as France and the U.S. The U.S. has been a growing factor especially in recent years. The temporary “success” of Algeria’s turn to oil and gas exports as the motor of its economy allowed Bouteflika’s government to buy time and support, but this only made the country more fatally dependent on imperialist capital and markets. Today’s youth, the majority of the population, face not only hardships but no prospects of a real future.

Algeria’s streets have remained mostly silent for two decades, since the 1990s civil war between the army and Islamic fundamentalists when both sides massacred countless civilians and terrorized intellectuals. After cancelling an election the Islamists had won, the army eventually brought in Bouteflika. Observers say that the country mainly remained on the sidelines during the 2011 “Arab Spring” because of the fear of another such period. Today, a great many Algerians feel that their rebirth has only taken its first step. Many hope that a constituent assembly and new elections can put the country on a new path. But in neighboring Tunisia, following the toppling of the hated French-dominated Ben Ali regime in 2011, prolonged haggling between old regime forces and their old and new rivals helped gradually smother the revolutionary spirit. As for the army, its leaders are part of the post-independence, imperialist-dependent bourgeoisie no less than Bouteflika’s family members and cronies—and competitors—in private enterprise.

Look at Egypt. There, after the 2011 toppling of U.S.-backed Mubarak, people thought that the army could play some kind of positive role. “The people and the army are fingers of one hand,” they chanted, acting on hope rather than evidence. The youth movement thought it could “use” the army to oust a post-Mubarak Islamist government. It ended up under the rule of a general whose regime combines subservience to the U.S. and Israel (and their ally, fundamentalist Saudi Arabia) with religious and other forms of backwardness to impose the dark night covering Egypt today.

France has already thrown down a marker demanding political continuity in Algeria—which means the continuity of imperialist domination—and the U.S. and other powers, increasingly squaring off against each other in North Africa, are not going to want to leave it to the Algerian people to decide. In Algeria, like everywhere else, the army and the whole state apparatus will have to be confronted and overthrown in a revolution guided by the long-term goal of ending the global imperialist system and all forms of exploitation and oppression.

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1. Hogra means contempt, disdain, and exclusion, and also describes an attitude that condones and propagates violence against the many, the forgotten and marginalized masses of people.  [back]

 

On March 17, 2017, A World to Win News Service (AWTWNS) announced its transformation into a more thorough-going tool for revolution based on Bob Avakian’s new synthesis of communism. Read its “Editorial: Introducing a transformed AWTWNS” here.

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

April 15, 2019 | revcom.us

 

 

Every week, revcom.us features one quote from Bob Avakian. 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.