A Personal Take on Revcom

A Close Encounter with a Communist Mind: The Disturbing Psyche of Revcom’s Leading Light 

A personal take on Revcom from a Team Member:

In early childhood, I knew nothing about communism.  A topic this large was not discussed with young children.  I was blissfully unaware of the perils of communism and the factual histories of oppressive governments. That began to change during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

From that event I learned that a place close to the United States might send a nuclear bomb to destroy our country.  We children were given instructions to jump into a ditch and lay face down if a blinding light flashed while we were walking to school.  Neighbors began to talk openly about building bomb shelters.  We were frightened, alternately looking up at the sky and then around for a good ditch on our daily journeys back and forth to the school.  Eventually, when no blinding light appeared, we shrugged off the warnings.

Then came the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated.  Our fears were renewed. My parents began discussing why our relatives had come to America. One set had emigrated because their farms were taxed so heavily, they had to give up their land to the government.  The other set emigrated because Fascism was rising in their country.  Both sets were pulled to America by the promise of safety, opportunity, and freedom. My father made an attempt at levity so as not to scare us to death during these discussions. “Your Grandpa Louie thinks there is a communist behind every bush.” Our childish minds pictured Soviet-type communists, always in uniform, crouching behind the bushes at the edge of the woods.  But he would cryptically add, “Who people should be very afraid of is the Chinese.”  And he would walk away without explaining the thinking behind the statement, leaving us to ponder the possibilities.

That was it.  A blinding light and bomb shelters; the death of a president and the knowledge that previous generations experienced real oppressive governments. Scary bushes and people who ate Chicken Chow Mein and egg rolls who might harm us in the future.  A not-so-close encounter with communism.

Fast forward out of childhood.  Current events have brought communism so close as to awaken us from our slumber. Its dangers have become real and kinetic. It has been exposed as an evil that requires not only a cognitive understanding but also a spiritual one.

I have now closely encountered a real Communist.  His name is Bob Avakian.  He is a pillar of Revcom, one of the radical organizational products of Communist thinking and action. I didn’t have to meet him in person; he practically jumped through my computer screen with his bombastic ravings, self-congratulatory deification, and fanatical urgings to revolt against our current government. Here is a tiny sample of Revcom madness and methods from the website

• We Need and We Demand: A Whole New Way to Live, a Fundamentally Different System
• No, this country has never been great. It has always been a horror for masses of people
• Bob Avakian is the Marx of this era: An exceptional and rare revolutionary leader whose theoretical contributions have qualitatively transformed and advanced the science of communism…
• …he wages struggle with the wrong ways that this oppressive system has people acting and thinking, including slavishness to religion, which run counter to their fundamental interests
• Wealth and the family are completely bound together as opposed to going into a common pot that everyone can benefit from
• Revolutionary work…. is of heightened importance “with every ‘jolt’ in society—every crisis, every new outrage, where many people question and resist what they normally accept…

When I encountered Bob Avakian at Revcom on the Internet, I was asked to believe that communism is a real science, that fruits of all my labors belong in a common pot, that my whole life had been a horror, and any interest in religion isn’t in my best interest.  But the most outrageous and maniacal idea presented was that empathy for others can only be practiced when the social order I live in has been destroyed.

“Only when the historic objective of the communist revolution has been achieved—the abolition and uprooting of all relations of exploitation and oppression, everywhere—can empathy be applied with regard to people generally.”

A Communist Mind. Unquiet. Disturbing. Destructive. Dangerous. An encounter I have appreciated as too close for comfort, even if it was only on a screen.

AUTHOR

Anticommunism Action Team

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