Walls

New Year's Eve, Cairo: One critical impetus for the Gaza Freedom March is the impeding move by Egypt to build a deep wall at the Gaza border that would cut off the flow of essential survival material for the people of Gaza. I’ll be writing more about the nature of this planned wall, and the terrible danger it presents based on what I’ve learned from other delegates on the March. Stopping that wall has been a demand of the Gaza Freedom March.

Right: The Egyptian mass media, even while providing somewhat sympathetic (and very prominent) coverage for the Gaza Freedom March, has been inundating the public with fears that "drugs and contraband" are going through the Gaza tunnels and endangering Egypt's security. This from a regime that has blocked any possibility of legal commerce and criminalized the transport of any goods in or out of Gaza.
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Tonight, a bunch of us including a young crew from Canada are relaxing a bit in the hotel lobby, summing up the tumultuous events of the last few days, and watching one of the cable news neworks. A story comes on about the impact of global warming on the highly vulnerable country of Bangladesh – a country which is almost entirely very near sea level. A slight rise in the level of the world’s oceans, resulting from the melting of glacial and polar ice, threatens to flood much of Bangladesh – a densely populated country of 160 million people.

This particular story focused on how Bangladesh’s larger, more powerful neighbor, India, is building a wall, 2,100 miles long, to seal the border between the two countries. The high, heavily reinforced barbed wire fence is not going to keep out water, it’s being built to keep out people. Scientists are saying that some 15 million people will be displaced in low-lying regions of Bangaldesh by mid-century, and the wall is to seal them into desperate Bangladesh and out of India

When the story ended, a delegate commented with bitter insight: “Seems like the solution to everything these days is to build a wall.”

What an indicting truth! In a world that so badly needs global cooperation among people, all the capitalist system can do is build walls – to keep people out, or to keep people in. All, in one way or another, to fortify a system of grotesque inequality and brutal oppression.

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What almost nobody knows, these days, is that in a communist world, people would be able to pool their energies, creativity, and unleash the positive side of diversity and uneven development to solve the massive problems humanity faces.

As the editorial in the current issue of REVOLUTION says: “The world cries out for revolution, communist revolution which, as the Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA states, can bring  ‘a whole different way of life…in which human beings, individually and above all in their mutual interaction with each other, can throw off the heavy chains of tradition and rise to their full height and thrive in ways never before experienced, or even fully imagined.’ (Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage. A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, September 2008. See revcom.us.) A revolution to bring about this whole new era in human history is both necessary and possible. And we have, in Bob Avakian, the leadership we need to advance on this path…"

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Links: Global Warming: Catastrophe from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal | Excerpt from Raymond Lotta webcast: "The Elephant in the Room: Can Anything Short of Revolution Solve the Environmental Crisis?"