The UCLA campus was graced with live entertainment Thursday. Members of Revolution Club at UCLA chanted about killer cops while a shirtless man wearing Texas flag shorts exhorted students to pray Donald Trump into office near Bruin Plaza.
It is almost as if each side intended to give a live performance of a political cartoon. Although they are separated by political differences, both the Revolutionary Communist adolescents and the shirtless geezer are megalomaniacs who regard themselves as prophets of righteousness. These protests ooze of such self-aggrandizement and solemnity that one cannot help but smile in mild amusement.
But not all were amused. Some students found the protests annoying, while others grew angry. Unfortunately, I witnessed more animosity stirred up against the Trump supporter than the communists. This makes little sense since the two groups have far more in common than one might first perceive. On the one hand, we have a man who simultaneously preaches against fornication and abortion while praying for an adulterer and former pro-choice advocate to become president. On the other hand, we have students who propose to end police brutality using a political ideology responsible for the deaths of millions of people in the 20th century.
What characterizes both the shirtless Trump supporter and Revolution Club is their inflated self-image and disregard for relevant facts that would challenge their narratives. Although they seem to differ in many ways, both use their politics as excuses for outlandish behavior and verbally clubbing people over the head. Because of these shared characteristics, we ought to view each group as flip sides of the same coin.
The shirtless Trump supporter is one of the latest examples of a series of campus preachers who like to complain about students’ sexual practices more than preaching the gospel. Not all of these preachers are the same, but the ones who use their platform to yell at students rather than say anything worthwhile tend to be in the majority. They justify their behavior by regarding themselves as mouthpieces of God and arbiters of righteousness who are persecuted for their beliefs. However, most of the time students oppose them because they are simply unpleasant people.
On the other side, Revolution Club replaces God with Bob Avakian, the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, replaces Christianity with communism and replaces yelling at students about fornication with chanting about police brutality.
Instead of blocking freeway off-ramps, the group chose to block part of Bruin Walk on Thursday, chanting: “The whole damn system is guilty as hell! Send those killer cops to jail!”
This chant is as meaningless as when a campus preacher last quarter rambled about which son of Noah Mexicans are descended from. Any rhetorical power found in the group’s chant derives from a vague use of words. The fundamental rallying cry of every Revolutionary protest is that we live in an evil system that must be destroyed, but they conveniently never specify what exactly this evil system is. They also never explain how injustices – like particular cases of police brutality – are the direct cause of this system. Sure, they may call the system “capitalist” or “imperialist,” but these terms are equally vacuous.
The Revolution Club’s evil system rhetoric works by projecting abstract bogeymen of injustice onto society and then asserting these bogeymen can only be defeated through implementing Bob Avakian’s version of communism. The evil system rhetoric also gives them something to protest about so that they can pride themselves on being heralds of righteousness.
The rhetoric is not the only problem. Communism as an ideology has claimed the lives of millions of people wherever implemented, whether it be China, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, Nicaragua or Vietnam. Offering communism as a solution to supposed police brutality is not only ironic and absurd on the face of it, but also horrifying.
Regardless of whether or not regimes in the Soviet Union or China were “truly” communist, the Revolution Club admires nations from the 20th century that inflicted massacre and famine on their own people. Bob Avakian is outspoken in his admiration for communist China, and by implication, his admiration for Mao Zedong, one of the largest mass murderers in history. Mao is directly responsible for the mass starvation, cannibalism and torture that came as a result of his policy, the Great Leap Forward, claiming the lives of tens of millions of people within four years. Members of Revolution Club proudly associate themselves with admirers of murderers and totalitarians.
Both the campus preachers and the Revolution Club distort events to incorporate them into their narrative and satisfy their emotional needs. UCLA students who display outrage at Trump supporters or rude campus preachers ought to display the same kind of outrage to Revolutionary Communists. As with the Trump supporter, the Revolutionary Communists’ protest on Bruin Walk on Thursday manifests their deep-rooted narcissism. This narcissism stems from Bob Avakian, who describes members of the Revolution Communist Party as “emancipators of humanity” along with other equally grandiose terms. In reality, they are like bad street performers, armed with unenlightening chants, bad drum playing and odd displays of self-victimization.
However, the best reaction to these groups is not outrage or anger. The best response we can have when witnessing campus events like these is amusement. Campus preachers and Revolutionary Communists do us a service by providing UCLA students with live entertainment between classes and exposing all of us to differing opinions.
Wow, man. What a work of journalistic integrity here. YOUR smugness and inflated sense of self-importance (a charge which you, unsurprisingly, direct at others) is as glaring as the self-righteous disgust you project due to people openly expressing opinions other than your own. But I guess everyone can’t be as smart as you, can they? Ah, the burdens of unappreciated genius! Your “column” reads like a walking, talking comments section of a NY Post article.