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kleenexwomanGoing up to college in a half hour. Brian wanted me to take up some fliers for the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, something he belonged to six months ago when he was also a vegetarian. He's still got some friends who are active in the party, and ran into some the other night when he was out slumming. They gave him a stack of fliers about a foot thick. I don't know how he managed to lug it home.
I skimmed through the flier looking for interesting things. Apparently the Communist Party has decided to lay off on the "Destroy the capitalist pigs" stuff and is going for a much more inclusive tone. I was looking forward to reading about how the rich were destroying the world, but instead they decided to bash George W. Bush, which doesn't exactly take a lot of effort to do. I was disappointed.
They did come out quite firmly against bookburning and wiretapping, which I thought was ironic. I pointed this out to Brian. He explained that the whole Stalin/Lenin purge thing was "old-school Communism." It's a kinder, gentler Communist party--they even pointed out several times that, if given control of the government, they would "foster dissent." Which is naturally the best way to encourage a stable government.
The second half of the flier was a Call To Revolution that managed to not mention the fact that nobody in the Party has a definite plan for the revolution or what they're going to do once they take over. Or if they do, they're keeping it a secret. Presumably only Bob Avakian (Chairman of the Party, and according to the flier an all-around nice guy who has "studied deeply the revolutions of the past and taken up the responsbility for charting the course of revolution today") knows.
So we've got five hundred of these things sitting on a small table in our foyer, right next to my copies of "Eat the Rich," "All The Trouble In The World," and "Give War A Chance." I expect them to spontaneously combust any minute.
ETA: They didn't. Maybe if I added the Manifesto and "Atlas Shrugged" to the pile...
I skimmed through the flier looking for interesting things. Apparently the Communist Party has decided to lay off on the "Destroy the capitalist pigs" stuff and is going for a much more inclusive tone. I was looking forward to reading about how the rich were destroying the world, but instead they decided to bash George W. Bush, which doesn't exactly take a lot of effort to do. I was disappointed.
They did come out quite firmly against bookburning and wiretapping, which I thought was ironic. I pointed this out to Brian. He explained that the whole Stalin/Lenin purge thing was "old-school Communism." It's a kinder, gentler Communist party--they even pointed out several times that, if given control of the government, they would "foster dissent." Which is naturally the best way to encourage a stable government.
The second half of the flier was a Call To Revolution that managed to not mention the fact that nobody in the Party has a definite plan for the revolution or what they're going to do once they take over. Or if they do, they're keeping it a secret. Presumably only Bob Avakian (Chairman of the Party, and according to the flier an all-around nice guy who has "studied deeply the revolutions of the past and taken up the responsbility for charting the course of revolution today") knows.
So we've got five hundred of these things sitting on a small table in our foyer, right next to my copies of "Eat the Rich," "All The Trouble In The World," and "Give War A Chance." I expect them to spontaneously combust any minute.
ETA: They didn't. Maybe if I added the Manifesto and "Atlas Shrugged" to the pile...