Protesting Murder and Terror by the Police Is Absolutely Righteous and Necessary!
STOP MURDER AND TERROR BY POLICE NOW!!
We Need Revolution! 

July 8, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

July 17, 2016: At this point, it is not clear exactly what happened in Baton Rouge today—where several police were shot and killed. But the points in the following statement remain relevant and correct.

A Point of Orientation for Right Now:

In the past few days, in the face of yet more new and awful videos documenting the real role and behavior of the police, people have once again begun to rise up righteously.  Despite an incident in Dallas in which five police were killed, THIS PROTEST MUST CONTINUE AND INTENSIFY AND PEOPLE MUST CONTINUE TO SEEK THE CAUSE OF THE PROBLEM AND ITS SOLUTION.

The protest movement that arose once again in the last few days is positive and important.  Slanders must be met with the truth and attempts to suppress this movement must be defeated.   Attacks on the families of the victims must CEASE.

These protests came after the cold-blooded blue-coated murderers of Tamir Rice and Eric Garner and Sandra Bland and Freddie Gray and Rekia Boyd and Andy Lopez and countless less well-known victims have walked free.  These protests come after months of promises, months of advice to “make reasonable demands,” months of advice to “do something sensible and vote” and generally to work within the system: a system that is criminal at its core and never will and never can give a rat’s ass about the people they grind under and exploit and oppress.

Let’s say it straight out: the amount of police who have been killed by people is tiny—tiny—compared to the amount of people they have killed month in and month out, year in and year out.  So don’t let them change the subject.  The subject that must be addressed is this: how do we END murder and terror by the police, what must be done to STOP it?

Reality Check #1:

Over 500 people have been killed by police in the US since January 1 this year.  In just the past few days, police murdered Alton Sterling in Louisiana for the “crime” of being Black and selling CD’s on the street.  They murdered Philando Castile in Minnesota for the “crime” of being Black, having a broken taillight, and following the order of a cop to show his drivers license.  The week before that they murdered Ronnie Shumpert for the “crime” of being Black and running away from one of these trigger-happy racists. 

There will be hundreds of others this year, just like there were over 1000 last year—disproportionately Black, Latino and Native American.  People killed like dogs or worse than dogs for the “crimes” of selling loose cigarettes on the street, having a mental breakdown, asking “why” to a pig when you are stopped for changing lanes, or—and here’s the one these cops really lash out for—running for your life and safety when you see one of these murderers stalking you or coming after you.  And even when the struggle of the people has forced an indictment, none of these murderers have been punished—or if they have, it has been a slap on the wrist.

And this goes on over and over and over again.  The mother of Philando Castile is right to call this a “silent war against Black people.” 

Why does this happen?  As Bob Avakian, BA, the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA has said,

The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces all this oppression and madness.

BAsics 1:24

Reality Check #2:

This chronic police murder comes on top of centuries of the wanton murder of Black people by the official armed forces of the state, by mobs of backward racist white people, and by white individuals—all of which has gone almost totally unpunished.  Go back to the slave catchers.  Go back to the Ku Klux Klan.  Go back to the racist white mobs that drove Black people out of “white neighborhoods,” beating them and sometimes killing them, and not just one or two but dozens and scores and even hundreds at a time.  Go back to the lynch mobs and the “strange fruit.”  Go back to the killings of those who had committed the “crimes” of trying to register Black people to vote, or the “crime” of going to Sunday school while you were a Black 14-year-old girl in Birmingham.  Black lives have NEVER mattered to this white supremacist system, except as a means to amass the much vaunted wealth of this capitalist-imperialist, gold-plated hellhole.  As BA has said:

There would be no United States as we now know it today without slavery.  That is a simple and basic truth.

BAsics 1:1

TIME IS UP ON THIS SYSTEM.  We need revolution.

Reality Check #3:

This violence in turn is part of something larger—an empire, a whole system, which imprisons, drives from their homes, maims, and kills incredible numbers of people.  The U.S. armed forces have directly killed at least eight million people since World War II, and they have indirectly killed—through its lackeys and proxies—even more.  From Korea to Vietnam, from Indonesia to Iraq, from Central America to Palestine, there’s almost nowhere in Africa, Asia or Latin America that these imperialists have not slaughtered people.  As Martin Luther King said, the U.S. “is the greatest purveyor of violence in the contemporary world.”  Who can deny it?  And again, for what?  To protect the ability of these imperialists to exploit people in every single corner of the globe, to ruin their environments, to rip up and ridicule their cultures, to prevent their right to self-determination, and so on. 

Again, to quote BA:

The U.S. military, which they claim is "heroically protecting you," is in fact the machinery of slaughter and destruction enforcing a system of oppression and exploitation that causes horrendous suffering and death on a massive scale throughout the world.

And:

The essence of what exists in the U.S. is not democracy but capitalism-imperialism and political structures to enforce that capitalism-imperialism.  What the U.S. spreads around the world is not democracy, but imperialism and political structures to enforce that imperialism.

BAsics 1:3

That system and all its violence is illegitimate.  That system and all its violence is criminal.  That system and all its violence must be stopped.  That system has no right whatsoever to carry out this violence and these organs of reactionary violence need to be dismantled, the whole system that they buttress and enforce must be overthrown, and something much better brought into its place.  In other words, what the people on this planet and all over the world, including here, desperately need is a real revolution.

Reality Check #4:

The only solution, again, is a real revolution, in which this system is overthrown.  And we are building a movement FOR revolution.  This revolution, in order to really have a chance at winning, would need to involve millions of people who have become convinced of the need for this revolution and who, with the emergence of a deep-going revolutionary crisis in society, would be determined to fight to carry out such a revolutionary struggle and to fight to win.  That time is not yet here.  To find out more on how to bring that time closer go to revcom.us or check out the Revolution Club.

As the Revolution Club Points of Attention make clear:

“We are going for an actual overthrow of this system and a whole better way beyond the destructive, vicious conflicts of today between the people.  Because we are serious, at this stage we do not initiate violence and we oppose all violence against the people and among the people.”

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