Join us this Sunday August 29th 3 PM at 1857 71st Street or on zoom for a mass meeting to Get Organized Now for a Real Revolution.
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| People flee Afghanistan. Screen grab. |
As we wrote last week, nearly 20 years ago the fanatical Islamic fundamentalists of al Qaeda hijacked several airplanes and flew two of them into the World Trade Center, a massive office complex in New York. The center was destroyed and nearly 3,000 people were killed. They also attacked the Pentagon, headquarters of the U.S. Defense Department.
In response, the U.S., under Republican President George W. Bush, declared war against the government of Afghanistan, which had allowed al Qaeda to stay in their country. The Afghanistan government was headed by a fanatical and repressive Islamic fundamentalist group, the Taliban.
The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan cost tens of thousands of Afghan lives, as well as those of several thousand U.S. and European invaders. While this mission was draped in all kinds of honeyed phrases about “spreading democracy” and “liberating women,” in its essence it was about two things:
First, delivering the Mafioso-style message to every other force in the world that if they dared attack the U.S. or even allowed an attack to take place from their soil, they would be destroyed with a vengeance a hundred times worse; and
Second, trying to radically and violently extend U.S. power in a much broader and deeper way into the Middle East and Central Asia and, beyond that, the world. Power that exists to defend a worldwide empire of exploitation, terrible oppression, and destructive plunder of the environment.
In Afghanistan, those “grand designs” of the U.S. empire were ultimately defeated . When the number one oppressor in the world suffers a defeat, that is positive for humanity.
This defeat occurs at a time of great conflict in the U.S. ruling class, unprecedented since the Civil War. While no one can say how any one event will play out, it is very possible that this will heighten the conflict within the ruling class overall and its core institutions of force (armed forces, CIA, etc). These conflicts are deeply explored in these recent works from Bob Avakian— A New Year, The Urgent Need For A Radically New World—For The Emancipation Of All Humanity and THIS IS A RARE TIME WHEN REVOLUTION BECOMES POSSIBLE—WHY THAT IS SO, AND HOW TO SEIZE ON THIS RARE OPPORTUNITY—and carry with them the possibility to be ripened into a revolutionary situation.
So, for all these reasons, this defeat should be welcomed.
