Letter sent to Mic.com editors
Sunsara Taylor Calls on Mic.com to Retract Smear Piece Against RefuseFascism.org, the RCP, Bob Avakian, and November 4th Protests
November 3, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
To Mic.com,
I am writing to demand that you immediately retract the smear piece published yesterday on Mic.com by Jack Smith against RefuseFascism.org, the RCP, Bob Avakian, and the November 4th protests. I also demand that you prominently publish a statement from RefuseFascism.org that makes clear what it and the November 4 protests are actually about, and that corrects your lies and misrepresentations about the RCP, Bob Avakian, and Revolution Books.
The Trump/Pence regime is carrying out one vicious attack on the people after another. For weeks, they have escalated threats to destroy North Korea. This week they openly upheld white supremacist slavery-defender Robert E. Lee and took advantage of a horrific incident in New York City to further demonize Muslims and attack the rule of law.
RefuseFascism.org is the only national organization that sounded the alarm that this is a fascist regime and has an actual plan to stop it before it is too late. That plan takes a leap with nationwide protests on November 4. Even in the face of a tidal wave of threats that are very serious and not the joke that your article treats them as, RefuseFascism.org has refused to be intimidated and pledged itself to carry forward with these protests.
Yet, two days before this mobilization that anyone with their eyes open to the dangers of this regime should be coming out to attend, Mic.com chose to prominently feature a lie-filled, anti-communist smear piece on RefuseFascism.org, Bob Avakian, and the Revolutionary Communist Party. Despite the fact that I spoke extensively to your reporter about these questions with substance, this piece never truthfully reports on or engages what RefuseFascism.org, the Revolutionary Communist Party, or Bob Avakian are actually about. Nor does it engage the question at hand: Are we confronting a fascist regime and what should be done about it? Instead, it strings together one anti-communist trope after another from unnamed “experts,” who, by the way, offer no serious assessment of the current situation or plan for stopping the nightmare represented by Trump/Pence either.
In fact, the RCP has played a significant role in initiating Refuse Fascism, joining together with others from a wide range of viewpoints from the very beginning around a single unifying demand: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go. But don’t take my word for this—go to RefuseFascism.org and find out for yourself. If you want to know what the RCP actually says about its role in this, then go here for its statement on this. Bob Avakian has led the RCP in taking this up, as can be seen from the recent speech he gave which is available to all on film here, as well as extensive earlier analysis (see here, here, and here)—which your writer refuses to quote or engage!
Far from being “shrouded in mystery” (another classic McCarthyite slur) the orientation and plans for November 4 are there for all to see at RefuseFascism.org. As for Bob Avakian—there are not only distortions but outright falsehoods in your article. Serious and principled people will find out the truth by going here for Bob Avakian’s official biography and here to find out what he actually says, rather than being scared away by “unnamed sources” who throw around slanders.
Your reporter also refuses to confront the question as to whether we are indeed facing a fascist regime in power moving to consolidate actual fascism. If anything is a mystery, it’s this—what does he actually think of the analysis available at RefuseFascism.org, analysis coming from a wide range of sources with a wide range of viewpoints? And here’s another mystery: why is Mic.com publishing “journalism” that positively reeks of the COINTELPRO* hit jobs of the late ’60s and early ’70’s?
But here’s what’s not so mysterious—how this kind of anticommunism works. Many of your readers—at least, those who have at all looked into the Holocaust—may be familiar with the German pastor Martin Niemöller, who resisted Hitler and spent years in a concentration camp. Niemöller wrote:
First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.
Let it not be said that Mic.com responded to this historical warning by answering, “First they came for the communists, so we joined in the attack.” That would do great harm to everyone under attack and to all those seeking to stand up to injustice.
Take down the article and put up something real.
Sunsara Taylor
Writer, www.revcom.us
Advisory Board, RefuseFascism.org
*COINTELPRO is short for the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program during the 1960s and ’70s which viciously targeted—with lies, smear campaigns, and violence—groups and individuals who were generally resisting the U.S. government’s many crimes, in this country and around the world.
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