By Debra Sweet

From World Can't Wait l Original Article

Even before the terrible killings in California this week, I'm asked these questions very frequently in my work with World Can't Wait:

"What the h*** is going on in the world? What should we do about ISIS?
"How do you keep going? Where is the hope?"

The answers are anything but simple. It will take a lot of struggle and sacrifice on the part of many millions of people to bring true justice when there's acute polarization in the world — with wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a small number of people, while in the world as a whole, the great majority struggle, often unsuccessfully, to even secure the basic necessities of life.

But why this is happening is knowable, if we go beyond the outward appearance of events with a scientific approach to reality. It's possible to withstand being bamboozled and hoodwinked, to paraphrase Malcolm X, into thinking your governments' interests are yours, and to stick to principles such as valuing lives of people elsewhere as much as those where one lives, if you look at the system underlying their interests.

A talk by Bob Avakian given in 2007, "Bringing Forward Another Way" is a great help in understanding why the U.S. government has had to pursue its "war on terror;" what it reveals about the weakness, and utter depravity, of this system, and how we could transform it.

I've gone back to this analysis repeatedly since the Bush years, to help explain the phenomenon of reactionary Islamic fundamentalism; how the US ruling class both lies to us and deceives themselves; and why "what matters fundamentally is not what anyone or any group of people might want subjectively, or might be thinking at any given point, but what the underlying and driving contradictions and dynamics will confront people with." Here's an excerpt:

“What we see in contention here with Jihad on the one hand and McWorld/McCrusade on the other hand, are historically outmoded strata among colonized and oppressed humanity up against historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system. These two reactionary poles reinforce each other, even while opposing each other. If you side with either of these "outmodeds," you end up strengthening both.

While this is a very important formulation and is crucial to understanding much of the dynamics driving things in the world in this period, at the same time we do have to be clear about which of these "historically outmodeds" has done the greater damage and poses the greater threat to humanity: It is the "historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system," and in particular the U.S. imperialists..."

"It is interesting, I recently heard about a comment that someone made relating to this, which I do think is correct and getting at something important. In relation to these "two historically outmodeds," they made the point: "You could say that the Islamic fundamentalist forces in the world would be largely dormant if it weren't for what the U.S. and its allies have done and are doing in the world-but you cannot say the opposite." There is profound truth captured in that statement.”

I invite you to dig in and see what you find in this talk. We'll be talking about it on the conference call Thursday night, December 10. Download / read here: