Rahm’s Only Answer to Violence Among the People—Ratchet Up State Violence Against the People

From the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, Chicago Branch

September 26, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Chicago is known around the world for two things. One, for its murdering, lying, racist, cover-up-plotting, defendant-torturing pigs. Witness the video of Laquan McDonald, shot 16 times in cold blood by a Chicago cop, and the attempts by the pigs involved, the “police review” board, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the police department, the state’s attorney, and every level of the so-called justice system to cover it up. Two, the city is known as the murder capital of America. So far this year, there have been over 3,100 shootings and over 500 murders concentrated in the poorest, most destitute communities.

On September 22, Emanuel presented his vicious new blueprint to address the second thing (“gun violence”) while trying to chill out the outrage over the first (police murder) and draw people into collaborating with the police. His program overwhelmingly rests on hiring 1,000 more cops to boost the total police to over 13,000—beefing up the very police force that killed Laquan McDonald and many more people, and that daily terrorizes, degrades, and suppresses the people whose lives are already made a living hell by this white supremacist system. All this while nothing has changed since the McDonald murder video was released. His murderer has been charged but is walking around free. None of the other cops have been charged. Only a month ago the police murdered Paul O’Neal and videos showed the cover-up in progress minutes after he was shot. More police terror—this is the only answer of this system.

Emanuel wants to use the fact that people are very upset that every day people are killed in gang-related shootings to pull people back into having faith in the system and actively strengthening their reactionary genocidal program against the youth. His speech issued a deadly call for the “Chicago community” to come together as “partners” with the police. NO WAY! There can be no partnership between the enforcers of oppression and the people they oppress; it would only mean joining the brutalizing system in cracking down on the people and intensifying their oppression. The police are the enemy of the people. Their role, as Bob Avakian has said, “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.”

This plan is not neutral, it is very harmful. It identifies all 7,000 of the 8th, 9th and 10th grade boys from 20 of most impoverished neighborhoods and puts them into a program that keeps track of their “progress.” This has Orwellian Big Brother and even potentially genocidal implications, tracking the names and vital information of every single male youth and a record of their school attendance and ranking, arrests, and imprisonment. A handful of youths might get some opportunity to find a way into college or a job, while the vast majority are ground up in the meat grinder and with this program put even more directly under the thumb of a state that has nothing for them but more and more oppression and worse.

Emanuel did reveal one true thing in his speech: “I see kids who have a look in their eyes of hopelessness.” While admitting that there are many neighborhoods with desperate poverty, no jobs, no stores, nothing for the youth, he did not blame the structural racism that has locked them out and locked them down. He did not blame the blind workings of the capitalist system, which has moved the jobs that Black people used to depend on out of the city or automated them out of existence. He did not blame the conscious policies—including his own policies of slashing schools and social services, and destroying public housing—that have reinforced this oppression and often made worse pre-existing conflicts among different “sets.” He did not talk about the whole legacy of this rotten system and its history, including the vicious segregationist past and present of Chicago in which Black people were murdered en masse in 1919 for daring to use a “white beach” and in which even up to a few decades ago Black people were attacked by mobs for daring to move into “white neighborhoods.”

So, in fact, it is this system of capitalism-imperialism that is the cause of generations of youth who are born into a situation where their hopeless future is determined before they are born. The workings of this system force Black and Latino people into ghettos and barrios where the conditions of life are desperate. These conditions push many into crime to survive, and the system forces people into competition with each other and “models”“ the dog-eat-dog morality that serves that. Then the police come in as an occupying army, brutalizing and murdering the people, sending huge numbers off to prison, or setting them up to fight and kill each other. These are the “choices” that this system presents to the youth to choose from.

No, Emanuel, we will not let you try to turn it around and put the blame on the youth and their supposed lack of training in “character” and “morals” and “making good choices.” This shit about “character” and “morals” is coming from the very mayor who has enforced the racist policies that have taken the hope from these kids! What is Rahm Emanuel’s “character” in shutting down 50 schools and half of the community mental health centers a couple years ago, and a month ago laying off 1,000 teachers, school counselors, and nurses? The character of ruthless hatchet man for the system enforcing poverty and hopelessness! What are the morals of this mayor who knew about the police murder of Laquan McDonald, covered it up for over a year, and then when the court ordered the video to be released, threatened dozens of ministers and community activists that if they didn’t stop the people from rising up in their neighborhoods he would cut off the funding to their food and social programs? A shameless liar and sneak. And what kind of role model was Emanuel himself in his role of chief of staff of the Obama administration with its wars, its drone strikes, its support of Israeli criminal attacks on Palestine, etc.? A model war criminal.

Do the youth need better models? Do they need to break with the madness of fighting and dying in mayhem against each other, instead of organizing for an actual revolution against the system that has set them up like this? Yes, absolutely—and we, the vanguard, are working on that problem right now, challenging people to NOT fall into the system’s traps and to aim their anger at the source of the problem and get organized into the revolution. (See “Defiance and Protest Since Police Murder of Paul O’Neal.”)

This is a communist revolution to emancipate all of humanity and it takes up a liberating morality that serves that goal. (See “Points of Attention for the Revolution.”) As Bob Avakian says in BAsics, the youth that have gotten caught up in terrible things today are capable of GREAT things, and “it is the responsibility of those who are the vanguard to lead the masses to realize this potential.” With leadership and a lot of struggle for them to realize their revolutionary potential, they can stop fighting each other and start fighting the system. Their anger and daring and defiance need to be channeled into getting organized for an ACTUAL revolution to overthrow this system at the soonest possible time. We can aim for no less. There is the leadership for a revolution in Bob Avakian, and the party he leads—the Revolutionary Communist Party. There is a serious strategy for revolution—see HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution and the Message from the Central Committee of the RCP, USA “Time To Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution.” Get your hands on these messages now at www.revcom.us. Read them, and get them out everywhere.

 

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