Unless and Until...
June 12, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Photo: Sincerray/@215imagesworks
Think of it:
Think of the many different peoples who lived on the land that is now called America, numbering in the millions and millions... think how their lands were stolen and their cultures were attacked and think how—in all too many cases—whole peoples were totally wiped out, with those who remained (if any did) put into open-air concentration camps called reservations—and not just for a few years, but for hundreds of years, generation after generation after generation... right down to today...
Think of the people stolen from Africa—12 million in all!—kidnapped and put in chains to work as slaves, with one-third of them dying in the voyage over the Atlantic or in the first year here, and think then of entire generations being chained down, whipped, lynched, raped... with their names and cultures stolen from them... regarded and treated as less than human, with children sold away from their parents and adults sold away from their loved ones... and again not just for a few years, but for hundreds of years, generation after generation after generation... and then, even after the destruction of slavery through the Civil War, another 150 years of lynching, Jim Crow, last-hired-first-fired, murder by police and mass incarceration...
Think of the great wealth accumulated from this stolen land and labor through those generations, concentrated into the hands of a few, and then made the basis for the construction of a horrendous killing machine that went all over the world, from Asia to Africa, from Latin America to the Middle East, carrying out wars that slaughtered millions and millions and millions, grinding up and mutilating cultures, ruling over whole nations and peoples with dictators that they installed... and once again, not just for a few years, but for scores and scores of years, generation after generation... and not just in the past, but right down to today, with vast parts of the world turned into sweatshops for these monsters and other parts left to rot...
The bones and flesh of those hundreds of millions through the generations form the foundation of the material wealth that is the basis for the "American dream"— the lie that this is somehow a "great country," one which offers the promise of a better world and a "more perfect union" to those who live here, and which should be the ideal of those who don't. And still today, as these imperialists dominate and pollute and plunder, new generations in the hundreds of millions and more all over the planet find themselves drained of their lifeblood and their very lives to produce yet more wealth, to maintain and reproduce all the chains of horror. The military power produced on the basis of that cruelly amassed wealth continues to be wielded today all over the world by this government, in the service of defending that blood-soaked plunder and amassing even more of it.
And now we have the presidential candidates vying to be "commander in chief" of it all—competing to be able to rain down slaughter and/or enforce misery on people all over the planet—with hundreds of millions here in the homeland told that the most important thing we can do is to decide which one of these criminals gets their shot to run the whole ugly thing.
Unless and until people are led, as Bob Avakian recently put it, "to fully confront the actual history of this country and its role in the world up to today, and the terrible consequences of this," unless and until they come to grips with this, the real history of this country, the real basis of the "land of opportunity" and the "democratic system" that its rulers so endlessly brag about and its culture so hypocritically, disgustingly and self-blindingly celebrates—there can be no "real and lasting change for the better."
The series "American Crime" lays bare that "actual history" and that "role in the world up to today." Our aim is not to get those who read it to continue making their way in the world as they have been, but now with a conscience laden with the real knowledge of what this country has done. No. The purpose, rather, is to morally compel and intellectually drive you to do the rest of the very important work called for by BA in the rest of that brief but essential statement:
...to dig seriously and scientifically into how this system of capitalism-imperialism actually works, and what this actually causes in the world.
And
...to look deeply into the solution to all this.
Only on that basis can there be genuine hope for a better world.
