REVOLUTION 3

USA: # 1 imperialist oppressor

[Audio transcript]

BOB AVAKIAN—REVOLUTION

Number Three

This is Bob Avakian (BA) back to get deeper into why we need a revolution.

Besides all the horrors that continually go on in this country, this is a world where, especially in the poorer countries, more than 150 million children are brutally exploited—forced to work long, hard hours in near-slave conditions —in mines, sweatshop factories and farms, creating wealth that goes to corporations and other big-scale capitalists in the U.S. and other wealthy countries. A world where for generations, millions of children have died every year from starvation and disease that could be prevented—something that is completely unnecessary and would not be happening except for the way the system of capitalism-imperialism, and the U.S. above all, dominates the world and forces so many people to live, and die, in horrific conditions.

And there is the massive unjust violence perpetrated by U.S. imperialism all over the world.

Just since World War 2, the military and “intelligence agencies” of this country have carried out invasions and massive bombings, coups, assassinations and other acts of depraved violence—slaughtering millions of civilians in Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other countries, with the widespread destruction forcing millions more from their homes and homelands.

This on top of the atomic bombing by the U.S. of two Japanese cities at the end of World War 2 in 1945, instantly incinerating hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians and subjecting many others to slow agonizing deaths from the effects of radiation.

All this so that the USA can be “Number One”—number one imperialist oppressor, number one in plundering and destroying people and the environment.

The USA is a country in which a woman is assaulted/beaten every 9 seconds. It is a country where huge numbers of women are raped and otherwise sexually assaulted every year; a country where the right to abortion has been ripped away from women, enforcing male supremacist control over their bodies, and their very being—in a very real sense a form of female enslavement. This is a country in which LGBT people are discriminated against, persecuted, bullied, vilified and abused, brutalized and outright murdered.

This is a system—the system of capitalism-imperialism—in which more than 40 million women are enslaved in international sex trafficking and the so called “sex industry”; where, especially in the poorer countries dominated by imperialist powers, hundreds of millions of women are cruelly exploited as a key part of the “supply chains” of the world economy and the overall capitalist-imperialist system, in which the U.S. has for decades been the dominant power.

And right now, before the whole world—with the support of the whole ruling class of this country, and its major politicians in both the Democratic and Republican Parties—the U.S. is fully backing and enabling the genocide being carried out by Israel against the Palestinian people, with tens of thousands of Palestinians killed, the great majority of them children, women and others who are not part of any armed forces opposing Israel, but are completely vulnerable victims of Israel’s ongoing massive slaughter.

Everything the rulers of this country have done, and are doing right now, they do in the name of their so-called “great American democracy.” But we have seen what this “great American democracy” is really all about. Once you see this, how can you allow yourself to believe that anything good can come from going along with all this—and why should any decent person want to be any part of this?

To those who say we don’t need a revolution, let me put this to you: How long can we let them continue to do what they do—to people here, to people all over the world? How long?! Why should we put up with this, when there is a whole other, much better way the world could be?

So I’m calling on everyone who cares about justice; everyone who is not afraid to face the sickening truth about this country and this system; everyone who can’t stand this world the way it is; everyone who righteously hates the fact that so many people here, and all around the world, are treated as less than human; everyone who is seriously agonizing about what the future will hold, or whether we will even have a future at all; everyone who has ever thought, or hoped, or dreamed about a better world—and, yes, everyone who says “I just gotta think about myself and do for myself, ‘cause there’s nothing I can do about all this anyway”: I am calling on all of you to rise above the muck, raise your sights to the possibility of a much better world and get with this revolution to make that a reality.

I’ll be coming back soon—getting even deeper into the revolution we need.