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"There's nothing wrong with seeing the flag for what it stands for. But there's something wrong with allowing the flag to stand in our way for emancipating humanity."

July 13, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

From a speech about the bloody red-white-and-blue flag of this bloody system:

I want to talk about our flag on this anti-Fourth of July event and about this "Red, White and Blue." Red is for the blood of the genocide of Native Americans and the slow genocide happening today to the youth, the blood of slavery of black people and the slavery today, the blood of the workers trapped in burning factories like the Triangle Shirtwaist factory and the factories in Bangladesh collapsing, the blood of the miners who are entombed and buried in the mines that they work in.

White is for white supremacy since America's beginning from the Atlantic Slave Trade, from the Constitution and its documents solidifying the U.S. as its own state to run its machinery of misery to say "I'm a self-made man, I own all of this!" in the same way a batterer, a rapist, or an abusive husband tells a woman "I own ALL OF THIS" with her body. From slavery to legal segregation to mutilation and lynchings to the slow genocide, the purity of whiteness is still evident and enmeshed in this flag.

Blue is for the blues. Blue is for the boys in blue, and I'm not talking about the [Los Angeles] Dodgers, but I mean the police, the ones with the badges, the pigs who stop and frisk and brutalize and murder youth every day, and the patrols terrorizing, deporting, and shooting down people.

The stars on the flag are the dreams, the lies — "The American Dream" is a dream that can never be reached and is a constant nightmare for the masses of people every night. The "dreams" turn into seeing stars, all 50 of them founded by domination, brute force, and rape, by the blows this system throws at the heads of people, blow after blow after blow and the stranglehold it's got on people. The stars are the tears poured forth by women, Native American people, and all people who this system grinds up, chews up, and fucks over.

The square around the stars is a 8x10' cell that confines these dreams inside the housing unit, the same one that over 2 million prisoners and tens of thousands of children are detained.

The stripes are for the cages of slavery, colonization, forced assimilation and indoctrination. If you rotate the flag 90 degrees clockwise for the stripes to point down, you have the prison bars of mass incarceration, the black lines between the red and the white standing for the black people whose lives have counted for nothing but to profit off of or death. The outline of the flag is the prison courtyard that surrounds us.

The flag is draped over the people and the country and spread around the world as a curtain, burqa, a veil, to keep them from seeing the reality of oppression and the truth and understanding of the workings of this system draining the life out of humanity. Just think about why some people from other countries hate this flag. There are contradictions underneath this flag, erupting from the jolts from patriarchy and white supremacy woven into the fabric of this flag. The edges of this flag is frayed by these contradictions. In the special issue of Revolution newspaper on the "A Declaration: For Women's Liberation and the Emancipation of All of Humanity," it says:

"For the rulers of the U.S. the reassertion of the 'traditional family' and 'family values' became an indispensable part of not only reasserting patriarchy but also stitching back together the reactionary fabric of society that had been significantly frayed."

The American flag contains in its fabric all that is putrid and rancid with the stench of capitalism-imperialism. There's nothing wrong with seeing the flag for what it stands for. But there's something wrong with allowing the flag to stand in our way for emancipating humanity.

As our statement goes, "Stop thinking like Americans, START THINKING ABOUT HUMANITY!" This flag needs to be put in the historic museum of horrors along with other flags like the Nazi flag and Confederacy flag.

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