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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/452/carl-dix-milwaukee-explodes-in-righteous-rebellion-as-police-kill-again-en.html

Revolution #452 August 15, 2016

Statement from Carl Dix:

Milwaukee Explodes in Righteous Rebellion as Police Kill Again!

August 14, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Saturday night people in Milwaukee poured into the streets in rebellion after police gunned down another Black man. The authorities wasted no time in demonizing the person gunned down, 23-year-old Sylville Smith—saying that he was armed and had a lengthy criminal record—trying to justify the murderous actions of their cops. But still people took to the streets, in the face of cops flooding the neighborhood armed to the teeth and even shooting at people to try to force them to disperse. People have righteously defended themselves in the face of this savage pig violence.

This rebellion is right on time. Despite police wearing body cameras, despite Department of Justice reports that expose the racism and abuse in police departments across the country, despite commission meetings and talk of reforms, police continue to kill people again and again. And the whole system continues to exonerate the killer cops when their murderous deeds get dragged into the light of day. People in Milwaukee have refused to accept this state-sponsored murder in silence, and they are right to do so. And everyone who stands for justice must have their backs.

This spirit must be built on and spread. In order to end the horror of police getting away with murder, it has to become part of an actual revolution; one that overthrows this system, defeating and dismantling its institutions of violent suppression, and brings into being a totally different and far better system. We need to live in a world where those responsible for public security would sooner lose their own lives than kill or injure an innocent person. It'll take a revolution to bring that kind of world into being.

The Revolutionary Communist Party is organizing right now for that actual revolution. The Party is preparing the ground—influencing people and society as a whole toward revolution and toward fighting the outrages of society... the Party is preparing the people—raising people's sights to the different world that is possible and the leadership we have in Bob Avakian and the Party he leads to realize that world... and preparing the vanguard—getting ready for the time when millions can be led to go for revolution, all-out, with a real chance to win.

If you hate seeing police murder Black people and others again and again, if you want to see a world where this horror is no more, get with the RCP and the ACTUAL revolution it is organizing! Go to www.revcom.us and join with the Revolution Club. Get organized for an actual revolution!

 

 

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Revolution #452 August 15, 2016

A Summer of Police Terror... Why? And What Can Be Done to STOP It?

August 15, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

It has been a summer of unceasing police terror and murder of Black and Brown people. And it has been a summer of roiling tension, anger, outrage, and outbreaks of resistance. Just this past week alone has witnessed a Department of Justice report on the Baltimore pig department. And, another outrageous murder, by a pig in Milwaukee—of 23-year-old Sylville K. Smith—followed by a righteous rebellion against that.

What is going on? And what needs to be done?

A Month of Police Terror & Murder

On July 5, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police tackled Alton Sterling, pinned him down, tased him, and then shot him dead in cold blood. His supposed “crime”? Selling CDs outside a store with the proprietor’s permission.

Who does something like that? Why aren’t they in jail right now?

Two days later, in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, police murdered Philando Castile. His fiancée, Diamond Phillips, was in the car with him, with her four-year-old daughter, and heroically live-streamed the murder to the world on Facebook. Philando Castile, a respected and beloved nutrition supervisor at a high school, had been stopped for driving while Black over 50 times before police murdered him in cold blood.

Who does something like that? Why aren’t they in jail right now?

On July 20, Charles Kinsey, a Black behavior therapist, was bringing a young autistic man, who had wandered away, back to his group home. In response, North Miami police pointed automatic weapons at Kinsey and ordered him to lie on his back with his hands up. Kinsey complied and tried to calm his patient. Moments later, one of the pigs shot Kinsey—still on his back with his hands in the air. Then these pigs flipped him over and handcuffed him—and also handcuffed the young autistic man. In this case, both Charles Kinsey and his patient survived.

Who does something like that? Why aren’t they in jail right now?

On July 28, Chicago police shot and killed Paul O’Neal. Under the spotlight of months and months of exposure, protest, and outrage, police released video eight days later. It shows them blasting away at this unarmed Black youth as if they were playing a video game or on a hunting trip. Police have no explanation for why the body camera of the pig that murdered Paul O’Neal stopped working just as the murder took place.

Who does something like that? Why aren’t they in jail right now?

On Monday, August 1, a team of Baltimore County cops went to 23-year-old Korryn Gaines’ apartment in suburban Baltimore to serve her with a warrant for a traffic ticket. Police claim Gaines threatened them with a legally registered shotgun. But who was threatening whom? Korryn Gaines was a Black woman trying to defend herself and her five-year-old child. She was literally under armed siege by police who illegally entered her apartment. Police murdered her and shot her son.

Who does something like that? Why aren’t they in jail right now?

And on August 3, 51-year-old William Bowers–a homeless white man–was riding a bicycle at 9 pm. That is the only explanation that LA County sheriffs have given for why they tried to pull him over. Sheriffs deputies claim Bowers ran. They opened fire, killing him.

Who does something like that? Why aren’t they in jail right now?

This is just one month of police terror and murder in America. And this list is far from exhaustive.

When police murder people–vastly disproportionately Black and Brown people–in this country over and over and over again, and don’t get punished, what can you conclude except that when they do this, they ARE doing their job?

This has to STOP! This is not something people can adapt to and live with, and still really be human beings. So we have to dig into what is behind this. And act on THAT basis.

The “Pattern and Practice” of the Department of Justice: All the Better to Eat You With

When the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) writes reports criticizing police departments, it identifies what it calls “patterns and practices” that these police departments carry out that violate the U.S. Constitution, or that are racist.

But there is another “pattern and practice” going on: Under Barack Obama, in particular, there has been a “pattern and practice” where, after police murder an unarmed Black person—and the murdering police are not even charged with a crime, or they walk free after they are charged—the DOJ comes in and issues a report that in part exposes illegal racist police brutality in these police departments. It happened in Ferguson, Missouri, after people rose up in outrage, and after the pig that murdered Mike Brown was not indicted. It happened in Cleveland, where there was no indictment in the police murder of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

In fact, just days after all charges were dropped against the pigs that murdered Freddie Gray, the DOJ came out with a report on the Baltimore Police Department. And so people are supposed to think: “At least Freddie Gray did not die in vain. The Department of Justice put out a report that criticizes the practices of the police and calls for reforms.”

But how can anyone with the capacity to think critically and a functioning heart find solace in that? What kind of “changes” are coming when murdering pigs walk free—sending a message that this IS the police doing their job?!

At the same time that they are intended to chill and divert outrage into the quicksand of relying on the system, these DOJ reports do have to acknowledge enough reality to have some credibility. And what comes out in that light is damning. The DOJ report on the Baltimore PD paints a picture of a situation where the nation’s eighth largest police force doesn’t even pretend that they are not targeting Black people for harassment and arrest. In a city of about 620,000 people, the police make several hundred thousand stops a year—overwhelmingly for no cause at all—overwhelmingly targeting Black people.

While a Department of Justice investigator was riding along to observe the Baltimore PD, a sergeant ordered a cop to stop a group of young Black men on a street corner and question them. When the cop replied that there was no basis to stop the youths, the sergeant told him, “Then make something up.” This—again—is how these pigs act while under scrutiny by the Department of Justice. And at one district, the template for police reports on arrests comes with the description already filled in: “black male.”

What do these numbers, and this incident, tell you about how pervasive, how total, police state terror is in the Black community? And any one of these stops could end like what happened to Freddie Gray.

The DOJ report on the Baltimore police describes an incident that should tell you more about the actual nature and role of these pigs than any politician or representative of, or apologist for, this system ever will. In this incident, police stopped a woman for a missing headlight and ordered her to get out of the car, strip, and stand on the sidewalk to be strip-searched! According to the DOJ report, she asked, “I really gotta take all my clothes off?” The supervising male cop said “yeah” and ordered a female officer to do the strip search, including a search of the anal cavity, in full view of the street! No weapon or contraband was found and the woman was released with a repair order for the headlight. Put yourself in her shoes. Think about what message this sends to not just her, but a whole community who witnessed or heard about it.

The woman later filed a complaint, and her story was corroborated, but the male cop who ordered the strip search only received a “simple reprimand”—for what was really a public, depraved, sadistic, obscene sexual assault committed by brutalizers in uniform. A slap on the wrist was the system’s message: “keep it up...”

What is going on here, if not terrorizing a whole people? If not sending a violent message, backed up by death threats and the most depraved abuse and brutality, that the lives of Black people mean nothing, their dignity means nothing, and that they have no rights at all that a white supremacist system is bound to respect?

How Did We Get Here?

Besides acknowledging enough reality to deceive people, and to allow people to deceive themselves—that the Department of IN-Justice can or will effect meaningful change—DOJ investigations and reports on police departments are a form through which the Obama administration has pushed for certain kinds of reforms in how the inner cities are policed. But before examining what those reforms amount to, let’s take the unpleasant but revealing step of putting ourselves in the shoes of those who preside over this crisis-wracked empire of global exploitation and oppression. And how Black people, and police, fit into that picture.

Find out more about the revolution         Find out about BA, the leader of the revolution

Black people have been subjected to the most inhumane, depraved, violent demonization and oppression since they were dragged to these shores from Africa and enslaved to build up tremendous wealth at the foundation of the U.S. empire. Under slavery, there was the whip and the gallows, systematic rape and torture. Under Jim Crow, there was the lynch mob and the Klan. And when it served this system to exploit Black people in factory jobs in the cities, the police were there to keep them “in their place.” The capitalist-imperialist system grew strong on the basis of white supremacy and it has always violently enforced white supremacy because this system cannot function without it.

Then came the 1960s. White supremacy came under fire as never before since the Civil War. There were powerful and inspiring uprisings against police brutality that intersected with a defiant and disloyal movement against the Vietnam War, and a general atmosphere of rebellion. Facing this, the U.S. government made a calculated move to unleash police repression and terror against the movements for change and sections of the population, branded and sold as a “war on drugs.”¹

While concessions were made in the form of outlawing some outrageous forms of overt, legal discrimination against Black people, and while jobs and some other opportunities were opened up, it was only a relatively small, if significant, minority who were allowed to “move on up”—while the masses of Black people, after a brief period of concessions, found themselves in an even worse situation by the beginning of the 1980s.

Through the mad dog-eat-dog “logic” of the capitalist system, jobs that had been available to Black people in the factories of the inner cities were moved to places where people could be even more viciously and ruthlessly exploited. The inner cities were “de-industrialized,” left as economic dead zones. People were driven to desperate measures to survive, while the powers that be flooded the inner cities with drugs.

For generations since, the “war on drugs” and a more general “war on crime” has been a cover for cops kicking down doors; people being locked up for small amounts of marijuana; harsh sentencing laws; occupation armies of police in Black and Latino communities harassing, beating, and killing people. The ruling class, under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, imposed racist sentencing criteria, such as the law punishing possession of crack cocaine (more common in poor Black communities) 100 times more harshly than powder cocaine (more popular among the white middle class).

This has been part of a whole offensive. From the schools to the “social agencies,” the masses of Black people (especially those at “the bottom” of society) and other oppressed peoples became surveilled, policed, abused, and harassed to an unbelievable degree; deprived of rights, humiliated at every turn, and even had their children taken away from them.

Under Bill Clinton, the number of people in U.S. prisons for nonviolent drug offenses went from 50,000 to over 400,000! Nearly 60 percent of these were Black people, even though they constituted only about 15 percent of drug users. (For documentation and analysis, see “Top Government Official Admitted: The ‘War on Drugs’ IS a War on the People” at revcom.us)

Resistance, Rebellion, and the Potential for Revolution

From the point of view of the class of capitalists who rule over this system of exploitation and oppression, all this adds up to seeing millions of people in the inner cities as dangerous “social dynamite," people to be kept down at the point of a gun. Which brings us back to the Obama administration’s reforms, and intense disagreement within the ruling class over them.

These differences are framed by the fact that over the past five years or so, a movement of resistance has erupted against police terror. It has never been the case that people simply accepted police brutality. There was the LA Rebellion in 1992. There were exposures of the CIA crack connection in the work of journalist Gary Webb and others. Under the leadership of Bob Avakian (BA), the Revolutionary Communist Party consistently exposed and opposed the “war on drugs” as worse than crack, going back to the 1980s. In fact, BA paid close attention during this whole period to analyzing the rapidly changing situation and to both doing exposure of, and strategically leading resistance against, this outrage of the system, as part of organizing for an actual revolution.

Now, in recent years, millions of people—and not just Black and Brown people, and not just those most directly under the gun—have come to question, or refuse to accept, that to this system and its police, the lives of Black people do not matter. Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, along with other important exposures and scholarly research, has had a societal impact. All this, along with the agitation and struggle around the murder of Trayvon Martin by the vigilante George Zimmerman, went into forming the ground on which the powerful protests and rebellions against police murder of the past two years have erupted. The legitimacy of the monopoly of the use of violence by this system is being called into question in serious ways. And that has posed a real danger and problem for the ruling class, and is the context for rather intense debate in their ranks over what to do.

Rulers Debate Over HOW to Keep Black People Locked Down

On one side of that debate, you have the vicious, ugly zombies and ghouls who were on parade at the Republican convention. They insist that the response to outrage and rebellion must be to double down. To declare that saying “Black lives matter” is a hate crime. In a major speech at the RNC, Rudy Giuliani promised—threatened, that is—that Donald Trump would make America safe the same way Giuliani did when he was mayor of New York. That was “Giuliani time”—a reign of police terror against Black and Brown people—where none were “safe” from being stopped, beaten, tortured or worse. In that time, 187 people were killed by New York cops. And this and more fed into and defined what it meant when Trump declared, “I am the law and order candidate.” (For one element of Trump’s history in whipping up lynch mob terror against Black people, see “How Trump Agitated for the Railroad of the—Innocent!—Central Park 5” at revcom.us)

But what about the Democrats and Hillary Clinton? What kind of “reform” are they talking about?

When Hillary Clinton talks about police reform, it is always framed in “making law enforcement as secure and effective as it needs to be.” And, “[W]e must work to strengthen the bonds of trust between our communities and our police.” (HillaryClinton.com).

Why? Why frame it like that? Why not demand an end to police terror and murder—in which case the last thing you’d want is making “law enforcement” as “effective as it needs to be” or promoting collaborating with these thugs and murderers. Why? Because the Democrats are also a party of the ruling class,and they are not trying to solve the problem of murder and terror by police. If they were, they’d say so. They are trying to solve the same problem Trump is—but differently. They insist that changes, reforms, are essential in order to effectively keep millions of desperate Black, Latino, and Native American people locked down and under control.

The Democrats argue that more emphasis needs to be placed on “community-based policing” that enlists people as collaborators and snitches in enforcing police terror. That more effort must be made to brand and package police violence as “responding to the needs of the community.”

The DOJ report on Baltimore, along with similar reports on other cities, calls on police to dial down “broken windows” policies. These are policies that sweep up vast sections of the Black community under the pretext of open-bottle laws, riding a bike on the sidewalk, playing cards or dice, disorderly conduct, blocking a sidewalk, or a whole range of laws rarely if ever enforced in middle-class white neighborhoods. The Democrats argue that these policies make it impossible to enlist conservative church ministers (of all faiths) and others as collaborators.

All this—the DOJ reports, the Democrats’ enticements to the “negotiating table,” the enlistment of clergy and others into “community policing”—are not good, or “sort of good.” These are part of a package to keep the same miserable conditions—the same exploitation and oppression—in place. You cannot change the function of the police until you change the character of the society that they are protecting. Bob Avakian has put it succinctly:

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)

So all these “reforms” amount to a plan to keep the lid clamped down on the oppressed communities, to defang some of the resistance and crush the rest, to keep the masses in those communities oppressed, and to maintain the police as an occupying army in those communities, with a bit of velvet glove and a snitch network to go with the iron fist. Welcome to the counter-insurgency.

And these different and conflicting approaches are debates over how to keep Black people and other oppressed people violently under control.

How Long Must This Go On?

Indict, Convict, Send These Killer Cops to Jail—this is something people have to fight for and not back down on. We don’t need commissions that tell us what we already know, with recommendations on how to shore up and maintain a killer system. The ongoing epidemic of police murder and terror must STOP.

And resistance to police brutality can contribute to ending police terror if it increasingly is connected with preparing for an ACTUAL revolution. After all, after 350 years, is it not time and past time to finally end the iron web of white supremacy, and the capitalist system that gave birth to it and cannot do without it? Is it not time and past time to be rid of all this—to get to a new world, one that really is possible, where the power of the state backs people up who are moving to uproot and get rid of all this oppression and where it stops any and all who would bring it back?

There is a real strategy to do this. There is a way in which these forces of violent suppression could be defeated. There is the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America that shows how a new society could be built that uproots white supremacy as part of getting to a world beyond ALL exploitation and oppression. There is the leadership of Bob Avakian, who has brought all this forward as part of his new synthesis of communism, and is leading the Revolutionary Communist Party right now to carry all this forward.

What is missing, what is urgently needed, is YOU.

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1. John Ehrlichman, a top government official under President Nixon in 1969, admitted this in a 1994 interview on the “war on drugs”:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

 

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/452/usa-force-for-good-or-neck-deep-in-blood-en.html

Revolution #452 August 15, 2016

U.S.A.: Force for Good in the World? Or Neck-Deep in Blood?

August 15, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Do you know what your government is doing right now in the countries stretching from North Africa through the Middle East to Central Asia? Pull out a map and pick a spot:

Yemen. Take Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world. Just this week, Saudi Arabia resumed its savage bombing campaign against the Houthi population—destroying a potato chip factory in the capital Saana and killing 14 people. Human rights organizations report that over the last 18 months, the Saudis have deliberately bombed factories, schools, markets, homes, even hospitals, and are responsible for the majority of the 7,000 men, women, and children killed in the war they launched 18 months ago.

On August 13, Saudi bombs hit the home of a school principal in Northern Yemen killing his wife and four of their children. Then, as is standard Saudi operating procedure, a second airstrike killed more of the principal’s relatives, while rescuers were trying to free them. At the same time, the Saudis bombed a school, killing ten children and injuring 28 more. When rescuers brought survivors to a Doctors Without Borders sponsored hospital, they were asked to leave because the Saudis systematically target hospitals for bombing.

How has Obama reacted? By selling Saudi Arabia another $1.15 billion in arms on top of the $20 billion provided since the war began. By working to prevent Saudi war crimes from even being investigated at the United Nations. And by quietly deploying in May “a very small number” of troops to Yemen.

This reactionary war has shattered Yemen and left 12 million people—half the population—on the brink of starvation and another nine million in urgent need of humanitarian aid.

Libya. The U.S.-NATO bombing in 2011, carried out by Obama and Hillary Clinton in the name of saving lives, made life a nightmare for millions of Libyans. Muammar Gaddafi, Libya's ruler, was overthrown and Libya has been turned into an anarchic battlefield between gangster militias and a haven for jihadists, including ISIS. Thousands have been killed, 400,000 internally displaced, and perhaps 600,000 to a million have fled to neighboring Tunisia. No one knows how many have been among the thousands who’ve drowned in the last several years fleeing across the Mediterranean. Now, the U.S. has started bombing again and may have secretly deployed troops.

Syria. Five years into the Syrian civil war, the U.S. continues to insist that it’s an innocent bystander. They claim that the slaughter of 470,000 and the terror that’s caused 11 million to flee their homes is entirely the fault of the reactionary Assad regime, the Russians, and forces like ISIS. Yet on August 7, the New York Times reported that the C.I.A. has been supplying anti-Assad “resistance” forces with TOW anti-tank weapons – knowing some will end up in the hands of the reactionary jihadist Nusra Front, linked to Al Qaeda. This has been part of a U.S. policy of cynically letting its enemies—Assad, Russia, Iran, and the jihadists—bleed each other while working to prevent any from winning decisively. This has included directly or indirectly backing ISIS and other jihadists via allies like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which the U.S. backs and often operates through. 

Now it’s escalating: In the last two years, the U.S. has launched more than 10,000 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, mainly against ISIS, but killing a minimum of 1,568 civilians, according to Airwars. More than 100 were massacred in two bombings in Syria alone in recent weeks. And the U.S. is adding to its 4,000-some troops in Iraq and sending ground forces into Syria.

Egypt and Bahrain. Obama has claimed the U.S. supports Arab uprisings against tyranny. In fact, it provides billions in arms to these tyrannies, who’ve unleashed their U.S.-trained militaries against mass uprisings. In Egypt, there were mass killings of protesters after the 2013 military coup—900 on August 14 alone—17,000 more were wounded and 41,000 detained, charged, or sentenced over the next year alone.

And this small sample doesn’t even touch the U.S. drone wars being carried out across the region, the U.S. trail of carnage and betrayal in Afghanistan, or its vicious support of the illegal settler state of Israel and its wars against, and occupation of, the Palestinians!

WHY ARE THEY DOING THIS?

Why are the U.S. rulers waging wars without end, as they claim to love peace? In a nutshell, to preserve the world as it is, a world as Raymond Lotta puts it,

of enormous inequalities: the rich countries have 20 percent of the world’s people but 80 percent of its gross domestic product (or income), while the 20 percent living in the poorest countries have 3 percent of world income. This is a world that is stalked by disease, malnutrition, and life-destroying poverty: some 2.6 billion people, about 40 percent of the world’s population, live on less than $2 a day, and 850 million suffer from hunger and malnutrition. This is a world in which thousands of lives can be mangled by a single computer keystroke taken in electronic trading rooms, as globe-straddling investors shift capital from one profit-opportunity to another. ("A Jagged, Unjust, and Obsolete World," Revolution, September 10, 2006)

These vast and unconscionable inequalities are created and driven forward by the workings of global capitalism. This is a system in which every capitalist or bloc of capital is driven to maximize its profits in cutthroat competition with other capitals—or else face ruin. This compulsion finds concentrated expression in the rivalries—and wars—between states for control of markets, resources, trade routes, and whole countries and regions, and preventing rivals from doing likewise. Why is the U.S. still waging wars for oil in the Middle East when it’s more and more “energy independent”? Because if they don’t control the world’s “energy storehouse,” someone else will. And they can’t tolerate that!

Find out more about the revolution         Find out about BA, the leader of the revolution

And doing all that takes vast armies, vast arsenals, vast spy networks, and a ghoulish willingness to rain death and destruction whenever, wherever it’s deemed necessary to maintain the empire. This is why the U.S. spends more than $600 billion a year on its military—nearly as much as the rest of the world combined. Why it has some 800 military bases around the world. And why right now, U.S. “special forces”—who are “special” only in the sense they’ve been trained to be versatile, heartless killers who ask no questions—are operating in 135 of the world’s 196 countries.

What is the real situation here? As Bob Avakian (BA) has put it:

It is not uncommon to hear these days, from government officials and others, that only 1 percent of the population is in the U.S. military but that this 1 percent is fighting for the freedom of the other 99 percent. The truth, however, is this: That 1 percent, in the military, is in reality fighting for the other 1 percent: the big capitalist-imperialists who run this country—who control the economy, the political system, the military, the media, and the other key institutions—and who dominate large parts of the world, wreaking havoc and causing great suffering for literally billions of people. It is the “freedom” of these capitalist-imperialists—their freedom to exploit, oppress, and plunder—that this 1 percent in the military is actually killing and sometimes dying for. (BAsics 1:5)

WHAT MUST WE DO?

People living in the U.S. have a special moral responsibility to oppose these criminal wars. If you don’t, then how are you different from what used to be known as the “good Germans”—those in Nazi Germany who claimed not to know about the extermination of the Jewish people?

But such resistance, while urgently needed, does not settle one’s moral obligation. Pursue your convictions and dig into why the outrages that move you keep happening, and what it’s really going to take to end them. Dig into the answers brought forward by Bob Avakian on the character of the problem and the solution to that problem: revolution. Get into the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America that he wrote, which shows how humanity could actually establish a system moving to eliminate the domination of entire nations and regions of the world, and capitalism-imperialism itself.

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/450/the-deadly-logic-of-the-lesser-evil-en.html

Revolution #452 August 15, 2016

The Deadly Logic of the Lesser Evil

August 1, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

We had to vote for Obama and the Democrats, we were told, to put a stop to the great harm that was being done by George W. Bush and the Republicans. But did voting for Obama, and having Obama as president, prevent the fascism that has increasingly characterized the Republican Party from reaching a dangerously new level with the Trump candidacy? Obviously not. But why not? Because Obama and the Democrats, as well as Trump and the Republicans, are products and representatives of the same system of capitalism-imperialism, and that system has its fundamental dynamics and ways it has to function, which mean that anyone who rises to the top of that system must continually commit crimes against humanity.

Funneling good sentiments and intentions into voting for Democrats, time after time—accepting and “validating” the logic and assumptions of this system, rather than opposing the whole system and its endless crimes, presided over by both Democrats and Republicans—has made people complicit with these crimes and has contributed to the situation we are in, where an overt, undisguised fascist candidacy, embodied in Trump, is contending seriously to assume the leadership of this system, and it is now being insisted that only voting for Clinton, who is guilty of many despicable and monstrous crimes against humanity herself, can stop Trump and what he represents. As for the argument, “Well, yes, Clinton is not what we really want, she is actually quite bad, but she is ‘the lesser evil,’ and there are realistically only two choices—either Clinton or Trump—so if you don’t go for Clinton you are helping elect Trump,” this actually amounts to nothing more than the argument that, “As long as you accept the logic and ‘choices’ dictated by this system, you have to accept the logic and ‘choices’ dictated by this system.” Doesn’t the fact that this system has produced someone like Trump as a “legitimate” candidate, heading one of the two major political parties of this system—doesn’t this powerfully demonstrate the utter illegitimacy of the whole system? And the fact that Clinton and the Democrats will only oppose Trump with arguments that amount to insisting that they are better representatives of this same system, and can do a better job of perpetrating its crimes—doesn’t this powerfully demonstrate the urgent need to break with the logic and assumptions of this system and rise up against it and those who represent it, including Clinton as well as Trump?

 

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/452/defiance-and-protest-since-police-murder-of-paul-oneal-en.html

Revolution #452 August 15, 2016

Defiance and Protest Since the Police Murder of Paul O'Neal

August 15, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

From the Revolution Club, Chicago:

Since the murder of Paul O’Neal by Chicago police on July 27 (“Chicago Police Videos of Paul O’Neal Released: Black Teenager Was Unarmed—‘It was cold-blooded murder’”), there have been repeated outbreaks of protest, including among the youth in the neighborhood where he lived. The Revolution Club has been in the midst of this. This correspondence is to let revcom.us/Revolution readers know what has been happening and how the Revolution Club has been working to connect this with Message from the Central Committee of the RCP, USA, “Time To Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution” and carry out the "three prepares"—prepare the ground, prepare the people and prepare the vanguard—get ready for the time when millions can be led to go for revolution, all-out, with a real chance to win.

Friday Night, July 29:

The day after the murder, youths from the South Shore neighborhood organized a vigil for their friend Paul O’Neal. Close to 100 friends and some relatives gathered on this quiet street of single-family homes. A memorial was erected and candles were laid on the sidewalk.

A couple of us from the Revolution Club went by the spot around midnight. About a dozen of his friends were still there. We expressed our condolences and then got into what became a pretty intense discussion. South Shore has a history of some intense gang conflicts. The Revolution Club had been involved in protests of two police murders of young men in South Shore in 2015. Some of Paul’s friends remembered us from this. They told us that they had been part of blowing whistles with us when the police tried to disrupt the funeral for “JJ.” JJ, Jeffrey Kemp, was a friend of theirs, but the other young man, Alfontish “NuNu” Cockerham, killed only a few blocks from where we sat, belonged to an opposing set (known here as “the Ops”). One young woman was vehement that she would never want Paul’s picture on a banner with one of “the Ops.” Others joined in with her.

We got into this pretty hot and heavy, bringing out the Message (and walking through some of its points as we talked). In particular, we pointed to—“The Problem,” including “This system locks down generations of Black and Brown youth, brutalizing and incarcerating them and even blowing them away—or else setting them up to fight and kill each other, when they should be fighting the REAL enemy.” We went round and round with some of these youths about what is the problem and who is the enemy.

Are the youths on the next block the enemy, even if they have been responsible for the death of one of your friends? Or are they, too, trapped by this nightmare of a system into this hellish “war” of seemingly endless retaliation? Who benefits from this? We argued that the system does. It has no future for the youth and those in power are terrified of these youth becoming conscious revolutionaries. Those in power remember the 1960s and how they came close to losing power and never want to see that happen again. Some of Paul’s friends were listening intently as we struggled with them to “pull the lens back” and look at the larger picture.

Are the police just another “gang” and is the solution to exact revenge? Or are they instead enforcers of this system of capitalism-imperialism? We read BAsics 1:24. We argued that they needed to get with the Revolution Club and that we were serious when we said, “The Revolutionary Communist Party IS ORGANIZING NOW TO OVERTHROW THIS SYSTEM AT THE SOONEST POSSIBLE TIME. Preparing to lead an actual revolution to bring about a radically new and better society: the New Socialist Republic in North America.” We need youths like them to step forward, take up this Message and learn the science of communism and the new synthesis Bob Avakian has brought forward. We left them with copies of the Message and plans to get into all this more, and some signed up to get with the Revolution Club.

Saturday, July 30—the Next Night:

The Revolution Club called on people to gather at the site of the memorial at 8:30 pm. Dozens of Paul’s friends showed up, including the youths we’d met the night before. Blowing whistles the whole time and carrying the Stolen Lives banner, the protest took to the streets. Police SUVs and Tahoes with blue lights flashing were at the front and back, but the police did not get out of their vehicles or attempt to stop the protest, which wound through the streets for over an hour. One of Paul’s friends called out repeatedly over the sound system, this is about “Justice for Paul and Justice for All.” What he said represented a beginning step, calling on the youth from different sets to stand up together. The significance of this was not lost on participants or on the police who know well, and often in fact fuel, the gang conflicts in this area. Cars honked in support and some older people said they were happy to see these youths “into something positive.”

During the next week, Club members went to where these youths hang out, got further into the Message with them and got them bundles to distribute. We showed clips of the leader of the revolution, Bob Avakian, up on revcom.us, including “Bob Avakian Through the Years.” In this, BA talks about how the guards set up prisoners to fight each other in the Corcoran SHU and calls on people to “pull the lens back” and see how they are being played. This is an important concept we dug into with these youths. All through the week the Message and Stolen Lives poster were posted throughout the neighborhood.

Friday Night, August 5:

The horrific videos of Chicago cops gone wild and executing 18-year old Paul O’Neal (“Chicago Police Videos of Paul O’Neal Killing Released: Black Teenager Was Unarmed—‘It was cold-blooded murder’”) were released at 11 am Friday by the city’s cop “review” agency, IPRA. People across the city and country went from shock to outrage. By evening, many young people in South Shore moved to open defiance.

They gathered again at the memorial for him. At first there were 20 or so. One young man argued that people needed to take the streets. People had seen the videos—they were angry and wanted to confront the cops who had shot Paul down, then high-fived each other. There were handmade posters saying “Fuck Da Police” and “Justice for Paul.” Someone from the Revolution Club was there with a large Stolen Lives banner and posters from revcom.us saying “America was NEVER great—we need to overthrow this system!” Youths took up the banner and posters and began to march in the street. A stack of Messages was already at the memorial and people took those with them, too.

The march grew twice its original size as it continued in the street. Cops drove up in SUVs with flashing blue lights. But they did not try to stop the youths, who draped the Stolen Lives banner over the window of police cars so that they had to confront what they had done. They would surround the police cars putting the picture of Paul on the windows. One youth threw a Message in the face of a police car. They ran alongside buses putting pictures of Paul on the buses. They sat on the bike racks in the front of the buses. They were getting out the Message to cars and buses. One woman stood up in her car and cheered the youths. The young man who had pushed to take the streets got on a bullhorn: “You all saw that video, you saw that video.” And he was challenging people in cars and on the sidewalk that they had to get involved. He agitated about the cop on the video who said, “I’m going to get 30 days of desk duty.”

Finally, the youths from the neighborhood converged on a major intersection in South Shore that includes a Metra commuter train track and stop. They were soon joined by activists against police murders who had held a press conference and die-in at Chicago police headquarters earlier in the evening.

At any given moment, at least 100 people were in the streets and organized themselves to shut down traffic in all directions for several hours. A Metra train approaching the intersection stopped several hundred yards away as the track was blocked by protesters. After over half an hour, the train did not attempt to continue down the track and backed away in the direction it came from. This is a first in Chicago!

Rage rippled through the people on the street and there was a very fluid scene as at times people linked arms to block the street, and other times the intersection was blocked just by the fact of so many people gathering in the middle of the street, chanting in smaller knots of folks.

Police cars were blocking the streets behind the protesters, but though flashing blue lights lit up the night, there had obviously been a political decision by higher authorities to not attack the protesters this time. Any time cops ventured out of their cruisers to approach the crowd, they were surrounded by people going right in their face denouncing their cold-blooded murder of Paul O’Neal. Several times a high-ranking police officer appeared on the street to wave the cops back into their SUVs. Some of the same cops that were in the video were there. One of these swine had the audacity to tell the youth that after the murder, “I slept good.”

A young man from Paul’s neighborhood told Revolution, during the midst of the shutdown, “We’re out here trying to live our lives and they trying to stop us from doin’ what we doin.’ I knew Paul, me and Paul been close and I knew Paul like a brother. Now I can’t call him on the phone and see where he at. It feels sad not to have Paul here. The police killing us for no reason. Like, we can’t go outside, go to the store and stuff, stopping us, searching our pockets, and we get shot, for no kind of reason. So we doin’ it right, right now, getting people to support us more, to stop police from killing us. I want to grow up. Instead of gang killings, we got police killing us one by one. I feel this ain’t right, so we doin’ this right, right now.”

When asked what he thought it would take to stop all this police murder all across the country, he said, “I think we need to come together as one unit, Black, white, I don’t care what color, and support each other. Stop killing us. Come together as one unit and fight.”

Paul’s cousin, a petite young woman, was relentlessly calling out the cops and agitating to the people over a bullhorn: “Paul was only 18! Everybody knew him and liked him! He was shot down for no reason! Everybody needs to unite to fight this! We have to stop killing each other and fight the police—Fuck the police!”

Fighting for unity among the people against the system was a real factor and continuing struggle in this protest. An activist who works with the Revolution Club in South Shore told Revolution that it actually took a lot of work to bring people together for this protest. He said many youths in the neighborhood were scared of the potential for conflict between the young people who are associated with competing sets of youths in South Shore. “We had to fight for this,” he said.

As one club member reported: “As people came up to a street that divides gang turf, some people from the other set came out and there was kind of like this tension. I was struggling with the youth on the bullhorn, we have to chant, ‘Justice for all.’ There was kind of a process that went on. I got on the bullhorn and said, ‘The Ops are the Police and the System. Not other people. Justice for Paul, Justice for JJ AND Justice for NuNu, Justice for All.”

There were people on the sidewalk and there was some taunting between the sets. The closer we got to the dividing line, the more the police presence went away. I was agitating to the youths, pointing out that “they are all over you until you get up here... They want you to be at each other.” And some youths were saying, “Listen to her.” After some hesitation, the crowd crossed the gang divide and marched on a way and then turned back around. It did not develop into a confrontation. Club members felt that within this were some important seeds, embryonic, beginnings, of what needs to and must change. We saw the potential for this, something BA points to when addressing the question of the youth in REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! These youth need to get out of the gang life and get into the revolution.

This potential will not become reality without a fight. The struggle with the youth to break with the oppressor’s way of thinking and acting and fight the real enemy will be sharply contended, over and over... including as we go up against the ways in which the pigs try to foster conflicts as they did on this day. Transforming the thinking of the people is a key part of forging a critical mass of people who bring forward a different way and as they fight the power, show people what the road forward out of this is and fight for them to join the revolution.

The Revolution Club was present the whole time with the Stolen Lives banner. A Club member agitated over a loudspeaker about how this whole system that murdered Paul in Chicago, Alton Sterling in Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Minnesota needs to be taken down, and a new one serving the people put in its place. He told the people that “there is a leadership to do this with Bob Avakian and the Revolutionary Communist Party he leads.” He also picked up on the outrage from Paul’s cousin, telling people that “You go to school together, you go to the same stores as each other, you take the same bus as each other—but you fight each other over bullshit. Don’t tell me you can’t come together to fight this system!” And he led people in the chant “Indict, convict, send those killer cops to jail! The whole damn system is guilty as hell!” A small posse of young people from the neighborhood followed the agitating team as they walked through the intersection to address different knots of people, nodding their heads in approval. Copies of “Time To Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution” were also distributed.

 

Find out more about the revolution         Find out about BA, the leader of the revolution

Sunday, August 8:

There was a protest downtown of hundreds called by high school students who are part of Black Lives Matter. Before it began, the Revolution Club boldly marched through parts of downtown chanting and doing the “mighty, mighty revcoms” chant. When we got to the rally site we caused a stir, many cameras captured our entrance.

The crowd was mainly young and included many high school and college students. It was diverse, with a large representation of white youths. The club felt that the participation of these white youths was of strategic importance. We have been listening to BA’s talk on the importance of being able to “break out of the encirclement” when the actual revolution comes and how our work today must be rooted in that understanding. There was a small group of friends of Paul’s from South Shore at the march also.

The march took the streets and shut down downtown streets for over four hours. At different intersections there were die-ins and sit-ins. The size of the march would ebb and flow as tourists and shoppers joined the march for a block or two. Chants of “No Justice, No Peace” and “Black Lives Matter” rang out as did calling out the names of men and women killed by the police. At times the whole march took up the Revolution Club’s chant, “Indict, convict, send the killer cops to jail, the whole damn system it guilty as hell!” Smaller numbers joined with us as we chanted, “How do we get out of this mess? Revolution, Nothing Less!” Hundreds of copies of the Message “Time To Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution” went out to marchers and people along the sides. Many protesters carried Stolen Lives posters, and “America Was Never Great, We Need to Overthrow This System” picket signs which revcoms had distributed. We got contact information for almost 50 people, some who were very interested in learning more about the Club.

A young white man who was interviewed on the news said he had sat on the sidelines too long and he had joined the march as it passed by because he wanted to be part of the solution. As the march passed Trump tower, the whole crowd chanted, “America was Never Great.”

Wednesday, August 10:

Youths from South Shore called for a midday protest on Lakeshore Drive, a busy thoroughfare. Joined by some Revolution Club members and anti-police brutality activists they gathered, about 20 people total. When there was a break in the traffic, they boldly jumped onto the drive and blocked it at a busy intersection for 30 minutes. They got a mostly favorable response from the drivers forced to wait. When the police finally forced them off, one young man who refused to go was handcuffed but then let go by the police. The crowd then moved to another busy intersection and blocked traffic there for 15 minutes.

Club members are planning recruitment meetings with some of these youths and making plans to show key chapters of BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!

 

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/avakian/science/12ba-science...the-4-alls-en.html

Revolution #452 August 15, 2016

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/452/prisoner-writes-on-science-and-revolution-en.html

Revolution #452 August 15, 2016

Prisoner Writes on Science and Revolution: "I too have developed a habit of constantly pointing out contradictions in everything"

August 15, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

I know it’s been a long while since I’ve written in and shared what I’ve been learning from the material that has been sent to me. Everything has in fact been well received and I apologize for not writing sooner. Real men don’t make excuses, so I’m not gonna offer any... With all of that being said I have a request that I’m hoping you all can forefill. Will someone please tell Ardea Skybreak that I love her and give her a great big bear hug for me. About 3 or 4 days ago I got a copy of Science and Revolution in the mail, and since then, every time I read a few pages I get charged up. This is not my first time experiencing such excitement after reading material sent to me from P.R.L.F. [Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund], this piece Science and Revolution has basically recharged the excitement from past experiences.

It has been almost 4 yrs. since a friend of mine introduced me to the writings of Bob Avakian and his development of Revolutionary Communism. A few weeks back I received a letter in response to a letter that I had written to a different friend (not the same friend who introduced me to B.A.) and his exact words were, “The reason why I dig you is because I love the way you take everything and make it about everything.” I believe I was writing to him about Business Law or Business Management and about how the scientific approach used in those particular disciplines can be applied to all facets of life on the strength that it’s science. It’s not that I personally make “everything about everything,” it’s just that the methods used are applicable to all of reality.

So, just like Ardea Skybreak said of herself during the interview, I too have developed a habit of constantly pointing out contradictions in everything that I see. I am fucking contradiction crazy in here. Ha Ha Ha...

A while back I received a letter from P.R.L.F. asking about my daughter and what she’s been up to since you all last heard from her. Enclosed I am sending a news clipping of her marching in the streets in [a] protest [she organized] against police brutality. This all took place in July... She will be 18 yrs. old next month and she’ll be attending college in the fall. I will definitely be sharing this book Science and Revolution with her. As I develop my understanding of Dialectical Materialism it is of the utmost importance that she grows with me as well. I will write to you again later. Sorry for the delay.

PEACE

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/452/letter-to-the-revolution-clubs-from-the-revolutionary-communist-party-usa-en.html

Revolution #452 August 15, 2016

A Letter to the Revolution Clubs from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA

August 10, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

 

Three months ago the clubs took a bold step into the future—digging into and then getting out the Message from our Central Committee, “Time To Get Organized for an Actual Revolution.” This message lets people know very clearly what the revolution aims to do; how to understand the problem and the solution; who is BA, what he has done and why we follow him; what to do now to prepare for that revolution; and what to live and die for.

The Revolution Clubs stepped in a new way with this Message, and people took notice of what they were saying and how they were saying it. The clubs took the Message mostly to the people who catch hell every day, but also to the commemorations of the Orlando massacre, to Pride events, to other events and to people who were agonizing about how things are and what the future holds. The clubs sponsored very successful July 4 “Imagine a World Without America” picnics, where people broke bread together and got into what the revolution is all about.

As the eyes of the world were on the fascist Republican National Convention in July, Revolution Club volunteers from around the country came to Cleveland to project revolution and fight for a completely different future. Photo: Special to revcom.us

Through it all, the clubs much more became places where people went back and forth in deep and scientific ways over the biggest questions of the revolution: could we really win, and why do we need revolution and not reform, what is BA’s scientific approach to communism and how do you learn to apply it, along with how do we carry out the strategy through all kinds of different challenges.

The club was doing that and, on that basis, it was in the streets, joining and mobilizing and leading people to fight the power. When the pigs who murdered Freddie Gray were found not guilty in Baltimore, the Revolution Club was there, raising revolution and fighting back. When masses rose up in Baton Rouge and then Minnesota over the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile—and then rose up in cities all over—the club was there, raising revolution and fighting back. Fighting the Power, and Transforming the People, FOR Revolution. When the enemy tried to put people on the defensive over incidents where police were killed, the club was there: showing people how to pull the lens back and scientifically look at the larger reality, doing so as they led people back onto the offensive. When the Republi-fascists nominated Trump and all too many people stayed away from that hate-fest when they needed to be in Cleveland protesting, the Revolution Club was there—and not just there, but going right up in the face of these fascists and burning the American rag. News of this shot around the world—in newspapers, on the Internet and on TV, inspiring and giving heart to people all over the country and all over the world.

More than that—the club was bringing people the solution in the middle of all this, revolution. The club was wearing both the BA image and the BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! T-shirts, and showing the clips of his talks on the streets. The club was getting into Revolution—Nothing Less! with people who wanted to learn what this was all about... and wrangling over it ourselves. Taking people to revcom.us. Through all this the club brought out more deeply the source of the problems humanity faces in the capitalist-imperialist system... the possibility of solving that problem and getting to a whole new world through an actual revolution... and the leadership, in BA and the Party he leads, that we have to realize that possibility.

Through all this, hundreds of thousands and maybe millions heard about the club for the first time, some people began to check it out, and some people took copies or posters of the “Message” and began to get it out, and others made sure they stayed up on the walls. Through all this, some new people began to join the club, and some people came deeper into it. This matters—a lot.

These are very important first steps. You worked and fought very hard to do this, you changed things, and you need to know that. But there is a world to win, a revolution to urgently prepare for. Things this fall are going to get very intense, with a possibility of things breaking open in ways not seen before. But unless there is revolutionary leadership to wrench opportunity out of madness, that won’t go anywhere good. So what must be done, now, to go forward?

First, the Message—“Time To Get Organized for an Actual Revolution”—has to go out much further, much broader and much deeper. We have to take this out to the high schools and campuses, stirring things up, challenging people, going to events, and really sitting down and going deeply with people. We have to go back into the ’hoods where we’ve been and go to the ones where we haven’t. In all of these places, we have to forge new ways to involve the people themselves in taking up this message and getting it out, bringing home to them that this revolution is of them and for them—to become emancipators not only of themselves but of all humanity—and the more that they become part of this, the more forcefully its message will hit home to people. They have a role in all this. We need to talk in the club about what we’ve learned on how to unleash this role, and what more we could do or try in order to do better.

As we do this, we need to take up the fight to Drop the Charges against Joey Johnson and RNC 16. Burning the American flag was righteous and necessary to counter the Make American Great Again fascist mantra coming from the RNC. The authorities must not be allowed to get away with circumventing, distorting, punishing, and criminalizing this defining act of protest.

The revolution actually advances through battling back against counter-revolutionary attacks like these charges. You take the case and the stakes of it to the people, you draw the lines, and through this people come to support the revolution. This has to happen today, and these kinds of things will be crucial when the all-out struggle for power comes on the agenda. So the call demanding that the charges be dropped needs to go out and be taken up by all kinds of people... money must be raised... and more and more people must be won to close ranks with those comrades facing charges, and to make this whole outrageous attack politically boomerang against the enemy. We need to strategize over how to do this—who to reach, and how to reach them, and how to involve them. Those comrades who caught cases need to be backed up and helped in fighting through in the legal arena itself.

Now is also an important time to really get way deeper into what revolution and communism are all about. There should be time for focused study and discussion of Bob Avakian’s The New Communism, and the Six Resolutions of the Party from January 1 of this year. Revolution Clubs in different cities should strive to find a few days before the fall to really immerse in these works, if possible. We need to be using BAsics among ourselves all the time, and we need to be taking this out to the people we meet, bringing out relevant quotes when we’re talking to them and selling them the book so that they can dig into things in a very “basic” way. And we should be thinking about, and talking about, ways to make The New Communism in particular hit really big when it comes out in the fall.

This will be a time when the clubs will have to be even more at the forefront of the sharp struggles that jump off, or can be jumped off, around the genocidal program of police terror and mass incarceration; against the demonization and repression of immigrants; the oppression and degradation of women; the capitalist plunder of the environment; and the wars of empire that these imperialists are constantly waging, openly and through other forces who do their dirty work. What have we learned in these struggles—about how to wage them? Why should we do this? How do they fit into what is said in BAsics about strategy?

Then there are the elections. We are proposing to the clubs that there be a tour in late September and early October that goes right up against this deadly trap with the slogan “We Need to Overthrow, Not Vote For, This System.” There are millions of people being drawn into political life by these elections, but on all the wrong terms. It is up to us to change all that, and we can—and this can be, and must be, part of preparing for an actual revolution. We’ll be coming out with a more worked-out proposal soon. But even still—there is plenty right now to sum up about what was learned through the conventions, what are people saying all around us, how do we help people see through this? How do we make these tours a real deal, especially in the communities and the campuses?

And, no doubt, there’ll be more! Which is just how we need it, and how we want it... to really go for revolution, and nothing less.

Through all this, we’re going to need to create a culture where people are living in the way that is put forward in our “Points of Attention.” We need to create a welcoming place where people can get deeper into what the revolution and communism are all about and work through their questions. And all the time, among ourselves, we need to create a culture where we’re asking: how is this getting us closer to revolution? What more do we need to understand, and to do, to push things further? How do we hasten the development of things so that, at the earliest possible time, millions can be led to go all-out for revolution, with a real chance at winning?

We’d like you to talk about this, and wrangle with it, and let us know what you think. Let’s get a process going now where we analyze what we’re up against, make big plans to transform all that, and organize people around all that!

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/452/humanity-needs-revolution-and-new-synthesis-of-communism-event-en.html

Revolution #452 August 15, 2016

"Humanity Needs Revolution and the New Synthesis of Communism"
Event in Mexico with Talk and Discussion

August 15, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

In the context of the appearance and discussion of the important document “Six Resolutions of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA,” the Organización Comunista Revolucionaria, México (OCR,M) summed up the need to put the new synthesis of Bob Avakian’s at the head of all our revolutionary work, to take a leap to arm everyone involved in the movement for revolution with this qualitative development of the science of communism, and greater dissemination and presence of the new synthesis in society. For years the OCR,M took up this new synthesis, recognizing it as an essential development that puts communism more consistently on a scientific basis: the study, dissemination and struggle to apply it to make revolution in Mexico and in the world (including the theoretical struggle against erroneous lines that reject it or distort it). We have learned that it is a question of a continuous process of struggle to take up this method and approach more fully while wielding it to transform the world.

As part of this, the OCR,M called for a by-invitation talk and discussion in May this year, off of the publication of the aforementioned “Six Resolutions of the CC of the RCP.” A diverse group of about 25 people gathered, from a university research academic to a peasant bricklayer, veterans of the ’60s and ’70s, women fighters against the oppression of women and girls who are coming with an edge into the fight for a radically different and much better world. For everyone it was an important opportunity to dig into, together, the new synthesis of communism developed by Bob Avakian (BA). The talk, “Humanity needs revolution and the new synthesis of communism,” given by a compañero of the Movimiento Popular Revolucionario, established the framework for the lively exchange of ideas among participants. Furthermore, “How the world got this way,” from the DVD Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About, a film of a talk by Bob Avakian, was shown. And some compañeros presented two rap songs, one composed for this event, as part of promoting a new culture. All this helped create an atmosphere of hope and lively and serious exchange about the new synthesis of communism and the urgent need for revolution today.

In the weeks before the event, teams of revolutionaries and communists broadly took out the literature of the new synthesis, focusing on: the interview with Ardea Skybreak titled SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION: On the Importance of Science and the Application of Science to Society, the New Synthesis of Communism and the Leadership of Bob Avakian; “The New Synthesis of Communism: Fundamental Orientation, Method and Approach, and Core Elements—An Outline,” by Bob Avakian; “Six Resolutions of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA;” and Communism or Nationalism? from the journal Aurora Roja No. 18, voice of the OCR,M. We went to demonstrations for May Day, for justice for Ayotzinapa, in the teachers’ movement fighting against the “counter education reform” and courageously facing the brutal repression of the state, as well as in neighborhoods and universities. We approached people with the basic point that: The new synthesis of communism developed by Bob Avakian lays the foundation for a new stage of communist revolution to end the current system with all its horrors, create a society in which we all would want to live in and finally emancipate all of humanity. If you really want to change the world, you have to get into this, and we listened to what people thought of all this. The importance of reading these materials was also addressed, and thus it was possible that almost everyone who was invited to the event bought materials. With those who were interested, it was not merely a question of inviting them, but first a process of addressing and talking about the importance of attending the event and getting people to start reading these materials. The specific goal of the event was to get more people won over to study and discuss the new synthesis of Bob Avakian and they were drawn into working together to apply it for making revolution.

With some people, when talking to them in this fashion, the discussion that was carried out to win them over to attend was important, and they were part of a collectivity grappling with the new synthesis of communism and the cardinal questions of the revolution. To mention just one example, a compañera put forward that “We aren’t going to attend... we’ve been in the fight and we have not pulled back. We have remained steadfast and we will move forward, because we know that the transformation of society is going to happen, we know all this, and so we have continued fighting.” We raised with her that it is important that they have fought and are still in the struggle with the determination to go forward, but if they do not get into this new theory to really have a scientific understanding of what the problem is and what the solution is, then there can never be the revolution that is needed and the construction of a new society that is radically different from the society that we live in today. Regardless of the intentions of anyone, if you are not getting into this, what is being guaranteed is that all these horrors and their worsening will continue against the people. But this must not continue, there is now the possibility of ending it and that is why it is important to attend. The compañera changed her position and said, “We will try to be there,” and yes, they were, which was very positive.

In the event, the participation of people showed the impact that reading the interview with Ardea Skybreak has had on them. This was clear in comments such as: “Ardea Skybreak says there is good science and bad science... She (and also BA) say that the new synthesis is not something that is over with. There are different sciences, and social science... if we can analyze past societies, then we can also analyze future societies, although they do not yet exist, and the comrades up there [RCP, USA], they are already doing this with a draft proposal of the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America. This is another weapon that arms us... so it’s important that we have this new science and we have to circulate it more, get it to more people who are interested.” “Yes, [the new synthesis] is scientific... and as Ardea Skybreak says, everyone can become scientists, everyone can understand, and break with the idea that it’s just gonna be for a small group. In other words, this is going to unite more people.”

In the main part of the event, discussion broke out focused on two points: (1) the importance of really knowing reality as it is with the application of the scientific method and approach of the new synthesis of communism, as opposed to wanting reality to be like you would like it, or wanting the fight to be easier; and (2) if we work on the contradictions in society as they are, on that basis there is the possibility of hastening the revolution, versus the idea that there is no basis for revolution or that it will happen spontaneously. By leading the discussion, people grappled to consciously apply the “solid core with elasticity, based on the solid core,” a key aspect of the method and approach of the new synthesis, which it is necessary to fight to apply in order to understand and transform the world.

Find out more about the revolution         Find out about BA, the leader of the revolution

The voices of those who spoke expressed very important points of what it means to learn about and get into the new synthesis, serious and inspiring reflections. We cannot speak to all of them but let us mention the following:

A young compañera said, “Every time you get more into the theory of scientific communism, you have two options: one, and this is what is happening to me, is that I can no longer turn my back on the people, on the millions of people who are oppressed daily. You could also look at this and say like, ‘Well, yeah, thank you very much, I already knew that, but I want to continue with my life.’ If we understand or we begin to understand how society functions and the possibility that exists to transform it, it would be very cynical of us to say, ‘OK, thank you very much’... The injustices are everywhere, oppression is felt everywhere, every day we women live the horror of being women. This is a constant slap in the face every day that tells you that this has to change, and this has to be transformed and this must be done in a conscious way. It is valuable to get deeper into the new synthesis, defend it and bring it to the masses.” And the compañera added, “We have to get organized. We cannot see ourselves as isolated individuals... Those of us who are dealing with this scientific theory... cannot stop getting together since we are part of the transformation... We cannot say, ‘Oh, OK, the party is made with abstract people’ and not see ourselves as part of the people who can come to make the party and hasten the revolution.”

Another compañera said, “When I started to understand a bit more about this, it was like I had grabbed myself and had said, ‘This is what I have to do’... It’s not enough for a person to stand in front of you and give you a lecture about an issue. You also have to wrangle with it, face it head on, learn about it, accept it, reject it... because in the end I think we are with this revolution, we are going to a certain point and to get this chain off of us, this oppression that affects everyone so much. Because I used to say, ‘What do I care? Nothing’s going on’... I don’t want my children, my nieces and nephews, and the children of my children to have opportunities closed off to them... How they were closed off in my case, or a threat from this government against them, like sometimes is still happening for me now.”

A compañero said, “What we do consciously will be decisive, and to take this new science... to arm ourselves with the new science, of what is true and what is not, and go out into the streets, knock on doors, go to the ejidos [collective peasant landholdings], into the factories, into the student movement... We are gonna talk about this, to criticize this, question this, we are gonna put it up for debate... I believe that this is the way, we are organizing the party, we are building the revolution.”

Another compañero said, “A self-criticism: Also in the movements where we have gone or where we have been, a lot of the time the passion of directly duking it out with the police has won out over us, instead of being tribunes of the people, instead of doing direct agitation among the people and winning them over. A lot of the time the passion of being with the people duking it out with the police was what won out over us. And instead of winning us over politically, we were being won over more by compañeros in the struggle, whoever landed more punches. I recognize this mistake. What has been missing... is being these tribunes of the people, political agitators to spread the new synthesis more broadly so more people learn about it. Many compañeros have stayed at that stage, just staying in the fight, in the fight, in the fight, and then there is a limit, it becomes a barrier, and what is needed is the theory to go further on.”

You can see how deep that the study and discussion of this important theory penetrates in transformation through struggle of the people’s consciousness and their role in the revolution.

Following the event, some of those who attended told us what it was like to be there and be part of this talk and debate. For reasons of space, we will only mention one example of a compañera who said, “I was really impressed. I was impressed by both the issues and by the compañeros who were there. Everyone weighed in focused on the issues that were raised. It was a positive event that I think met expectations.” In other comments, this was a common point: “It was very good, the points made were interesting, and everyone focused on the points.” The fact that they felt they were part of that collectivity really shows that they are not just isolated individuals out there in society who think about revolution, but they are and can be part of a collectivity, of an organized movement for revolution with the guidance of the new synthesis of Bob Avakian that has to grow.

The attendees also had a chance to learn about two important statements that are raising and calling to get into, study and apply the new synthesis of communism. These statements appeared on the occasion of May Day: “Declaration of Grupo Comunista Revolucionario de Colombia, May 1, 2016: Urgently needed: Take up the new synthesis of communism of Bob Avakian, the new framework required for a new stage of revolution!”, and from the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist), May Day 2016: “This Is an Emergency May Day Call! No Time to Waste! A Radically Different World Is Possible! Only If We Take Up the New Synthesis of Communism!” We encourage everyone to study these two important declarations, available at aurora-roja.blogspot.com or at www.revcom.us.

This event and the broad dissemination and discussion of the new synthesis that accompanied it was a good start to make greater leaps in the fight to make the new synthesis of communism become a powerful material force to make revolution and emancipate humanity. Collective study, more events like this in other parts of Mexico, and other new ways are being organized to make this theory and the leadership of Bob Avakian known more broadly and echo throughout the world.

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/451/press-release-revelations-show-false-charges-en.html

Revolution #452 August 15, 2016

We received this press release from the Revolution Club.

646 450 4701
revclubmedia@gmail.com

8 August 2016 Contact:
For immediate release

Flag-burner Gregory Johnson: "Revelations show the state's charges from RNC protest are false and must be dropped immediately"

August 8, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Gregory “Joey” Johnson—whose successful battle in the Supreme Court case Texas v. Johnson established that burning a U.S. flag in protest is protected speech—says allegations he assaulted two “news reporters” when he burned a flag outside the Republican National Convention on July 20, 2016 are false. Johnson said that Kimberly Barnett, the Acting Chief Assistant Prosecutor, Criminal Division, has no choice but to withdraw the charges of assault filed against him.

Johnson with the support of the Revolution Club burned the American flag outside the Republican National Convention to protest the toxic chauvinism and reactionary ideas of all stripes surrounding Trump’s nomination. Cleveland police and other law enforcement agencies immediately assaulted the flag-burning, putting Johnson in a chokehold and then brutally arresting 16 others who were staging a peaceful protest.

Johnson stated that prosecutors are concocting a justification, after the fact, for the police assault against himself and other protesters during this flag-burning, because as established by Texas v. Johnson they could not be lawfully arrested or criminally charged for burning the flag.

The prosecution is claiming that Johnson assaulted two reporters who were allegedly burned by the flag embers. It has been confirmed from police reports, that these two “reporters” were not journalists at all, but Trump supporters who intended to prevent the flag burning because it was “un-American.”

In a video posted July 20, 2016 by Infowars, a website run by Alex Jones, the “reporters” brag about assaulting Johnson in a violent effort to stop him from burning the flag: “We ripped the guy’s [Gregory Johnson] shirt off and just punched him and kicked him man...we just did everything we could.”

All this shows that the charges against Johnson are without factual foundation. The charges stem from allegations by people who by their own admission set out to prevent what is supposed to be legally protected speech, which is an illegal act on their part. On top of which they brag about committing assault and battery on Johnson, another illegal act. Yet it is Johnson who is charged with assaulting these two!

Now, Johnson and the RNC16 (overwhelmingly Revolution Club members arrested at the flag burning) are facing serious charges. Johnson and his supporters are demanding that the charges against him and the RNC 16 be dismissed immediately.

Johnson’s arrest for another flag-burning protest, at the 1984 Republican National Convention, led to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court Texas v. Johnson decision in 1989, when the Court ruled that burning the flag in protest constitutes speech protected by the First Amendment. It is well established legally that someone who disagrees with the content of such speech cannot lawfully prevent this speech.

Supporters are circulating a statement calling on Cleveland authorities to drop the charges on Johnson and the RNC 16.

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/451/update-grand-jury-indicts-2-of-the-rnc16-en.html

Revolution #452 August 15, 2016

Update: Grand Jury Indicts 2 of the RNC16—Totally Unacceptable!

August 8, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

From a Revolution Club member:

There is an outrageous development in the case of 16 people (overwhelmingly Revolution Club members) who were illegally arrested and hit with serious charges for peaceful protest in support of the burning of the American flag by Joey Johnson on July 20 outside the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. On August 4, two of the 16 (the RNC16) were indicted by a grand jury—and even more charges were added to the already flagrant repression against this action and the individuals involved.

Joey Johnson—whose Supreme Court case Texas vs Johnson established flag burning as protected speech—and the Revolution Club were making a statement to the world that American lives are NOT more important than other people’s lives, in condemnation of the crimes of this system against the people of the world and in overall defiance of U.S. imperialism. (See “Drop the Charges on Notorious Flag Burner Joey Johnson and the RNC16!” for more on this action and the charges against them.)

The powers that be apparently can’t pull together a grand jury worth shit when it comes to indicting murderous police officers, as we have seen too often in recent years. But when truth-tellers like Joey Johnson and the Revolution Club exposed the real history and current reality of this country (in the midst of the raw celebration of U.S. domination, white supremacy, and misogyny that was the RNC) and burned the symbol of empire—the powers threw the book at them. That is because their authority is ARBITRARY and ILLEGITIMATE. And that is what people everywhere should understand, and mobilize to fight and defeat.

The charges against one defendant now include two counts of felony “assaulting an officer” (aka being assaulted by an officer). Both defendants indicted by the grand jury had two misdemeanor charges added, including “resisting arrest” (aka being violently arrested by hordes of police—piles of them on each individual). This represents a serious escalation and shows the prosecutors’ intent to punish people for their powerful, peaceful political statement that day. All of the original charges, against Johnson and the rest of them, should have been dismissed on the spot. Instead, the courts are “upping the ante.”

ALL THIS MUST BE ACTIVELY OPPOSED! People everywhere who are concerned about justice need to take a stand NOW against this outrageous political repression. And all those who care about the people of the world, and about ending all the unnecessary oppression and exploitation worldwide, should learn more about the Revolution Club and the actual revolution that they are building for.

1. Sign your name to the call demanding ALL these bogus charges be dropped, donate what you can to help with legal fees, contribute your time and your ideas to spreading this story and gaining more support to defeat these charges. The next court hearing for these two defendants is August 18 in Cleveland. Anyone in the area should be there to show their support. Go to revbookscle.org for details about the court hearing.
2. Go to www.revcom.us to dig into what it will take to overthrow this system, and be part of getting humanity out from under the boot of this repressive, illegitimate, rotten system once and for all.

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/449/drop-the-charges-against-notorious-flag-burner-joey-johnson-and-the-RNC16-en.html

Revolution #452 August 15, 2016

Drop the Charges Against Notorious Flag Burner Joey Johnson and the RNC16!

July 25, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

On Wednesday, July 20, in the face of the toxic chauvinism and reactionary ideas of all stripes coming out of the Republican National Convention, and surrounded by scores of cops and a whole zoo’s worth of fascist lunatics, some of them openly brandishing weapons, something fresh and positive happened. Joey Johnson, backed up by members of the Revolution Club, set aflame the American flag.

The Revolution Club had announced earlier Joey’s intent to do this as the only fitting response to the madness going on inside the convention hall. In response, hundreds of cops and reactionaries gathered to stop it.

They did not succeed. Suddenly, the Revolution Club seemed to materialize out of nowhere, a large circle—a safe space—formed, and Joey got up in the middle to speak:

”1, 2, 3, 4—Slavery, Genocide, and War! 5, 6, 7, 8—America Was NEVER Great! We’re here today to stand with people of the world! We’re taking a stand against this imperialist Republican National Convention. Donald Trump is an open fascist. Hillary Clinton is a proven war criminal. We’re not following either one of their leaders. Donald Trump’s message of ‘America first’ is a fascist message of control over people of the world to wage unending war, to exploit people all over the planet. America No. 1? America first? It always has been first: at genocide, at slavery, at exploitation, of destruction of the environment, of torture, of coup d’etats, of invasions. We’re standing here with the people of the world today... Donald Trump says America first...”

Suddenly, the flag went up in flames.

Pigs Strike Back

And just as suddenly, a mob of police assaulted the protective perimeter of Revolution Club members, attempting to extinguish the flames with water and spraying chemical flame retardant in people’s eyes. Half a dozen of these pigs piled on top of Joey, and then brought him to the ground in a chokehold.

At least 17 people were arrested, including Johnson and 15 other members of the Revolution Club. They were charged with multiple misdemeanors and two with outrageous felonies. The pigs quickly called a press conference to claim that Joey had burned himself and they were trying to save him—a lie that has now been exposed, but formed the pretext for the whole attack.

Even as this outrageous assault went on, Revolution Club members defiantly chanted “1, 2, 3, 4—Slavery, Genocide, and War! 5, 6, 7, 8—America Was NEVER Great!” and “What’s the problem? The whole damn system! What’s the solution? Revolution! Who’s our leader? Bob Avakian!” People held up posters—”Overthrow, Don’t Vote For, This System!” and images of Bob Avakian. After their comrades had been seized, the remaining members of the Revolution Club and others regrouped and continued to march, agitating about the need for revolution.

The police then proceeded to hold 15 of the comrades for more than the legally allowable 24 hours until late the next day, claiming all sorts of excuses, and kept two more until the day after. Note that the Cleveland pigs had claimed the ability to handle thousands of arrests a day, and had tons of personnel there doing nothing until 11 pm that night, and even promised the National Lawyers Guild that they would release people by 1 pm the next day—and then continued to do nothing and held them till that evening! Further, the authorities put people in solitary for singing, withheld medicines from people, and did not feed one woman the whole time she was in there. The outrageous and openly repressive character of this was described in an article in The Nation (see “Why Are People Arrested at the RNC Still in Jail?“). Despite this and through all this, spirits were high, with people continuing to chant and sing almost the entire time, and then they marched out with heads high into the night when they were finally released. When Revolution Club members rallied Friday in the projects, people had heard all about it and were highly supportive.

High Stakes

This fight is far from over. The defendants have vowed to fight the charges, and a great deal is at stake.

First, burning the flag at the Republican National Convention was extremely timely and necessary. The speeches and chants at this convention, reaching a peak with Trump’s speech on Thursday night, were nothing if not Hitlerian. Yet here he is, treated by the media and by the Democrats themselves, as a legitimate candidate. To treat Trump as legitimate, to give him billions of dollars’ worth of free publicity and allow him to set the terms of debate, means that this system itself is ILlegitimate. Yet where were the political forces ready to say how extreme this was and put something on the line to sound the alarm? The Revolution Club stepped up to fill this need.

Second, the assault on and arrest of Joey Johnson and the Revolution Club members, as well as a bystander, were themselves evidence of the repression that is here and bound to intensify if it is not resisted. The right to burn a flag in protest is a right ironically won by Johnson himself, from a conviction and one-year sentence stemming from the 1984 Republican National Convention. Well, if you can’t burn the flag in protest at THIS Republican convention, and in a setting where the locked arms of supporters gathered around prevented any possible accident, then this right is meaningless. And if in suppressing this right, as the police did, brutality is used and people are denied rights and put in preventive detention until nearly the end of the convention, this is all the more outrageous. These injustices and this repression have to be brought to light, fought, and defeated.

Third, and ultimately most important, Joey and the Revolution Club were there in Cleveland fighting for a whole different future. Everywhere they went, they distributed the Message from the Central Committee of the RCP, USA, “Time To Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution,” clearly posing the need for revolution; the problems humanity faces and the solution to those problems; the leadership for that revolution in Bob Avakian; and what people need to do now to make that happen. Everywhere they went—including in the Public Square of Cleveland that Wednesday—they modeled a conscious and disciplined force, a force made courageous by their understanding of what was needed and the morality that grounds the Club (which is also put forth in the RCP Central Committee Message they distributed). Everywhere they went, they put forward the stand: America Was NEVER Great, We Need to Overthrow This System. Everywhere they went—including last Wednesday as the flag went up in flames—they fought for the stand put forth by BA: “American Lives Are Not More Important Than Other People’s Lives.”

These revolutionaries must be defended. We’ll be covering this fight and giving readers ways to support this. (To contribute urgently needed funds for the bail and legal expenses for Joey and the Cleveland 17 and to support the work of the Revolution Club at the Republican National Convention and at the Democratic National Convention protests this week, click here.)

DROP THE CHARGES AGAINST JOEY JOHNSON AND THERNC16!

 

 

Find out more about the revolution         Find out about BA, the leader of the revolution

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/450/fact-sheet-drop-the-charges-en.html

Revolution #452 August 15, 2016

Fact sheet

Drop the Charges On Flag-burner Gregory "Joey" Johnson and the RNC 16

Updated August 15, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

On Wednesday, July 20, outside the Republican National Convention, Gregory “Joey” Johnson, backed up by members of the Revolution Club, set aflame the American flag. Johnson and 16 others were arrested (15 from the Revolution Club) and now face serious charges.

A great deal is at stake in the fight to force the state to drop ALL CHARGES IMMEDIATELY.

Burning the flag at the RNC was extremely timely and necessary. The speeches and chants at this convention were nothing if not Hitlerian. Yet Trump was being treated by the media and the Democrats themselves as a legitimate candidate—which shows the ILLEGITIMACY of the system itself. There was a great need for a political force to say how extreme this was and sound the alarm—and the Revolution Club stepped up to fill this need.

The assault on and arrest of Gregory “Joey” Johnson and the Revolution Club members is evidence of the repression that is bound to intensify if it is not resisted. The right to burn a flag in protest is a right ironically won by Johnson himself—in a Supreme Court case ruling on a conviction stemming from a protest at the 1984 Republican National Convention. If at THIS Republican convention you can’t burn a flag, in a setting where supporters lock arms to prevent any possible accident, then this right is meaningless. And if in suppressing this right, as the police did, brutality is used and people are denied rights and put in preventive detention, this is all the more outrageous. These injustices and this repression have to be brought to light, fought, and defeated.

Gregory “Joey” Johnson and the Revolution Club were in Cleveland fighting for a whole different future. They widely distributed the Message from the Central Committee of the RCP, USA, “Time To Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution,” clearly posing the need for revolution; the problems humanity faces and the solution to those problems; the leadership for that revolution in Bob Avakian; and what people need to do now to make that happen. They modeled a conscious and disciplined force, a force made courageous by their understanding of what was needed and the morality that grounds the Club (also put forth in the RCP Central Committee Message). And they put forward the stand: America Was NEVER Great, We Need to Overthrow This System! Everywhere they went—including as the flag went up in flames—they fought for the stand put forth by BA: “American Lives Are Not More Important Than Other People’s Lives.”

The following is a FACT SHEET being widely distributed to build support for Gregory “Joey” Johnson and the RNC 16:

* * * * *

On Wednesday, July 20, outside the Republican National Convention, Gregory “Joey” Johnson, backed up by members of the Revolution Club, set aflame the American flag. Johnson and 16 others were arrested (15 from the Revolution Club) and now face serious charges. A journalist from Australia was arrested, reportedly for asking why the police protected Christian fascists from the Westboro Baptist Church, but attacked the revolutionaries.

On August 4, two of the 16 (the RNC16) were indicted by a grand jury—and even more charges were added to the already flagrant repression against this action and the individuals involved. The charges against one defendant now include two counts of felony “assaulting an officer.” Both defendants indicted by the grand jury had two misdemeanor charges added, including “resisting arrest.” This represents a serious escalation and shows the prosecutors’ intent to punish people for their powerful, peaceful political statement that day.

Given the egregious suppression of political rights involved, Johnson has vowed to not only continue to burn the flag as a point of political principle, but he and the Revolution Club plan to fight this case in court and to seek legal redress against the city of Cleveland, the Cleveland police and other associated government agencies that may well have been part of this suppression.

Johnson made clear in advance why he planned to burn the flag—to make a statement about the ugly American chauvinism being whipped up inside the RNC, where the theme that day was “make America #1 again.” Over a bullhorn, literally surrounded by hundreds of police and pro-Trump reactionaries, Joey boldly said, “America No. 1? America first? It always has been first: at genocide... at slavery... at exploitation... of destruction of the environment... of torture... of coup d’états... of invasions. We’re standing here with the people of the world today.” Then he lit the flag on fire.

1. Revolution Club members physically formed a large circle by linking arms while facing outward to create a safe space for Johnson to burn the flag. The whole point was to enable Johnson to make the potent political statement conveyed by burning the American flag. Club members asked the media and onlookers to “please move back” as they effectively established a solid safety perimeter. Pictures and video taken at the beginning of Johnson speaking and burning the flag show this very clearly.
2. Before burning the flag, Johnson, over a sound system, led chants and gave a short speech challenging the theme of the RNC that day to make America No. 1. Johnson had to cut his speech short because the police were pressing in. As one Revolution Club member put it, “rushing and pushing through the safety circle.” The police actions both compressed the circle and then broke up the circle. Police sprayed fire retardant, including into the face of an octogenarian. Police immediately assaulted Johnson after he lit the American flag on fire, grabbing his shirt and putting him in a chokehold to drag him to the ground.
3. Contrary to Cleveland Police Chief Williams’ claim, Johnson did not set himself or anyone around him on fire. The mayor and the police chief persisted in this lie, spreading it in the media while Johnson was being physically detained and unable to set the record straight. If anything, the police’s physical assault on the protesters was what created a dangerous situation for Johnson and others.
4. The prosecution claims Johnson assaulted two reporters who were allegedly burned by the flag embers. Police reports confirm these two were in fact not “reporters” but Trump supporters who intended to prevent the flag burning because it was “un-American.” In a video posted July 20, 2016 by Infowars, a website run by Alex Jones, the “reporters” brag about assaulting Johnson in a violent effort to stop him from burning the flag: “We ripped the guy’s [Gregory Johnson] shirt off and just punched him and kicked him...” These charges stem from allegations by people who by their own admission set out to prevent what is supposed to be legally protected speech, which is an illegal act on their part. On top of which they brag about committing assault and battery on Johnson, another illegal act. Yet it is Johnson who is charged with assaulting these two! (www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-08-10/rnc-flag-burning-case-gets-messy-as-victims-identified)
5. No permit was needed for this event. Protests and press conferences had been held in the area of 4th and Prospect in downtown Cleveland, including by the Revolution Club in the two days prior. None of these protests had permits. Johnson determined that this was the best location to make his statement, in juxtaposition to the toxic American chauvinism spewing out of the RNC. No other location in Cleveland would have had as much meaning as this one. The planned flag burning was well publicized for days in advance.
6. There was no order to disperse that was audible to the crowd either before or after the flag burning. The National Lawyers Guild, Amnesty International observers, and legal observers who were present issued statements. Contrary to initial news reports, none of the RNC16 were charged with failure to disperse. This was probably due to the fact that there was no order to disperse that measured up to protocols that the Cleveland Police Department had agreed to in handling political protests. (www.thenation.com/article/why-are-detained-rnc-protestors-still-in-jail)
7. A single police officer can be heard on video saying “you are on fire” as the police assaulted people. This was a pretext for stopping Johnson’s protected speech. The authorities knew that burning the flag is protected speech. Chief Williams acknowledges this in his statements. A faux safety concern (to wit: Johnson endangering himself) was the only way to circumvent the Supreme Court decision. By analogy, many people have seen videos of police yelling “stop resisting” to justify their actions when the arrestee is clearly not resisting.
8. After Johnson was arrested, with many police piled on him, why did the police proceed to arrest many others over a whole period of time in the wake of the flag burning? All but two of those arrested wore the black T-shirts that are the uniform of the Revolution Club. The T-shirts read: “BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!” In addition to Johnson and the 15 people associated with the Revolution Club, there was an Australian reporter who was arrested literally right after asking police why they were going after the revolutionary communists but protecting the hateful speech of the Westboro Baptist Church attacking gay people and condemning them to hell.

9. Johnson and the other protesters charged with misdemeanors were held for more than 24 hours in what amounted to preventive detention to keep people off the streets during the RNC. The National Lawyers Guild and NAACP lawyers on the scene spoke out forcefully against this. The ACLU of Ohio issued strongly worded statements about it. The city had bragged that court dockets had been cleared so that it could process hundreds of arrestees if necessary, and yet it could not handle these 17 arrestees in a timely way. All were subsequently released on personal bond (no bail).
10. Three people who had been part of the flag burning had to be seen at a hospital in the wake of the incident for injuries sustained when the police attacked the protesters. One protester was not given anything to eat for over 24 hours. A concerted effort had to be made over many hours by attorneys and health professionals to get a protester vital medicine that was not being provided.
11. In pre-trial court appearances for misdemeanors, some defendants are being forced to appear in spite of their attorney’s efforts to appear on their behalf. This is purely punitive, forcing people to fly in from far away for a routine status hearing.

In summary, the confrontation began with and unfolded out of an unlawful, unconstitutional attack on and arrest of people by the police, which involved physical violence on the part of the police; and since it was unlawful and unconstitutional, it constituted an assault BY POLICE ON THE PROTESTERS. What was involved in these arrests/assaults on people carrying out what has been clearly established as constitutionally protected political activity—with the very same person involved as in the defining legal case—constitutes false arrest, assault pursuant to that false arrest, and violation of clearly established civil liberties and rights.

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/452/los-angeles-police-murder-of-richard-risher-jr-en.html

Revolution #452 August 15, 2016

Los Angeles: Standing up Against the Police Murder of Richard Risher, Jr.

August 15, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

From the Revolution Club, Los Angeles

Richard Risher, Jr., 18 years old and full of life and fun, was murdered by LAPD on July 25—shot and killed while running away from them. His family and friends gathered for a vigil the next day, remembering Richard and sharing their pain. His mother, Lisa Simpson, decided she had to act to publicly call out this crime and refuse to go along with it. Together with the Revolution Club, on July 29, Richard's family and friends got into the streets of Watts, marching from Nickerson Gardens to Southeast police station.

About 30 people either marched or drove directly to the police station for the speak-out, including Richard's girlfriend and other young women friends and relatives. Some of his relatives brought beautiful signs they made with pictures of Richard and messages of love. At the beginning, as people gathered, the Revolution Club showed some video clips of Bob Avakian and talked with people about why the police keep getting away with murdering Black people and the need to stand up as part of preparing for an actual revolution to overthrow this system at the soonest possible time. We encouraged people to speak out themselves over the bullhorn and we spoke about the leadership of Bob Avakian, the science and strategy developed for making and winning a revolution and leading a whole new society, and called on people to become part of the Revolution Club and getting organized for revolution. The first to speak was Richard's seven-year-old brother, who simply said quietly, "Why did the system kill my brother?" Richard's father also spoke very movingly, pointed to the faces on the Stolen Lives poster and called out the police as the real terrorists.

In front of the police station, Richard's relatives spoke out and his mother demanded answers. One person who had come to march was trying to get people to talk with the police, and the cops had their own "community" cops acting the part of "concerned well-intentioned officers trying to help." In Nickerson Gardens, LAPD has for some time been using "community-based policing" to try to build up a base of snitches and collaborators and create the kind of political terrain where police have free rein to carry out brutality and murder. The Revolution Club called this out over the bullhorn, ridiculing the idea of community police there to serve and protect while in reality they are getting you to go along with the terror they keep carrying out.

Some of this was illustrated well by the scene in front of the pig station. A line of police standing in front blocking the entrance, some gathering behind with riot gear, and a line of police on the rooftop, while a "community" cop comes out to apologetically say he doesn't know anything. People spoke out emotionally in front of the police station. Richard's seven-year-old brother again spoke. This time he said quietly into the bullhorn, "My brother never took me to the park to go play and now he's gone," and he broke down crying. His aunt screamed out over and over again, "Why did you kill my nephew?!" And his father again got on the bullhorn, "You guys are the terrorists. You're killing us and shooting us down every day. So why are you coming out here in riot gear for women and children?"

Several days later, Richard's mother organized a second march, this time in downtown L.A. to the LAPD headquarters. Friends and relatives of Richard who had not come to the first march but heard about it decided they had to come to this one, and overall the march had a tone of more determination and defiance. Again the Revolution Club helped to lead the march and put forward the need, strategy, and leadership for actual revolution and the challenge to get organized for revolution. When the march arrived at LAPD headquarters, the family decided to stay in the intersection demanding the police chief come out and tell them why the police killed their son. Together, we all blocked the intersection for about an hour while higher-level pig after higher-level pig came out to talk to Lisa and all said they didn't have anything to tell her. At the same time, police lined up in tactical gear on one edge of the intersection.

Cars were stopped, and a relative of Richard sat down in front of a semi and then later jumped on top of a van waving a shirt with Richard's picture so all could see. Some people nearby stayed to listen to the agitation. At one point, there was controversy about whether the Revolution Club was "endangering the lives of Black people" by standing in the street with the family. The reality is this system kills Black people every day, and when people stand up against that they should be backed up and supported.

Throughout the occupation of the intersection, people who were part of it were strengthened and emboldened. The Revolution Club repeatedly spoke over the bullhorn to expose the crimes of the police and the workings of the system that are the cause of it to all listening, calling out the non-answers of the police, their lies and justifications, the way they always need to "investigate" when any other person who shot someone would be in jail immediately, and the way they tell you to "let the system work" when this is the system working, pointing to the need and possibility for revolution, what a new revolutionary power would look like and the role of the police in a new society. Friends and family of Richard also repeatedly came up and spoke.

The march back after leaving the police station was even louder and more boisterous as a car full of young women accompanied the march, bumping the Ceebo the Rapper song "Fuck Tha Police," hanging out the window and singing along with the chorus.

Richard's funeral is this Thursday and his family is collecting donations for funeral expenses at https://www.gofundme.com/2gsue38.

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/452/awtwns-the-chilcot-report-en.html

Revolution #452 August 15, 2016

From A World to Win News Service:

UK: The Chilcot Report—a cover-up of how the invasion of Iraq triggered today's horrors

August 15, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

August 8, 2016. A World to Win News Service. The Chilcot report on Britain’s role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the result of an inquiry started in 2009 under the chairmanship of the high-level retired civil servant John Chilcot, was finally published in July this year. Given the extent of opposition to the Iraq war among the ruling class and the people, and also the disaster that followed that invasion, many people were keen to see what the inquiry had to say.

In 2003, the U.S. imperialists under the George W. Bush administration, with the full cooperation of the British imperialists under the regime of Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, attacked, invaded and occupied Iraq. This unjust war was launched under the false accusation—the lie—that the Iraqi regime possessed “weapons of mass destruction” and that it posed a threat to life and safety in Western countries.

The aggressors succeeded in toppling Saddam Hussein in a matter of a month. The outcome of the war has been catastrophic—it was the seedbed from which Daesh (ISIS) sprouted. The killing of an estimated half a million Iraqis during the occupation, the displacement of five million more, the invaders’ infamous policy that all homes, all families and all Iraqis were fair targets for its soldiers and air power, their indiscriminate roundups to fill camps characterized by barbarous conditions and systematic torture, such as the infamous torture centre Abu Ghraib (the initial nucleus of Daesh came together in such prisons)—and their installation of a Shia sectarian government that carried out systematic violent ethnic cleansing—all set the tone and triggered the violent spiral that followed.

While the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is a complex phenomenon and did not begin with that war, the extent and intensity of the horrors felt by the peoples of the Middle East are a direct result of that invasion, in the way that it shattered existing social, political and moral structures and turned what was in some cases religious coexistence and in others sectarian tensions into genocidal warfare. Few human actions have had as disastrous an impact as the decision taken by Bush and Blair, with the complicity of many leading politicians (including U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton) and other authorities and opinion-makers in both countries. The war unleashed hell in Iraq in hopes of reasserting the domination of the region by the U.S. and its British partners, that in turn is a key element in their top-dog place in the imperialist world system.

This act of aggression outraged the people of the world and in particular the people in the region, and the results even more so. The Chilcot inquiry was undertaken with the explicit mission of “healing the wounds”—not the real wounds and enormous suffering of millions of Iraqis but the fracture in British people’s trust of their state and its representatives, especially because the British ruling class itself was deeply divided over if and how to join the American imperialists in a war against Iraq.

The contents of the report do not even get close to the reality about the war, its true purpose and the crimes committed by the British government and troops. It does slap some of the UK’s most hated ruling class figures, such as the then Labour Prime Minster Blair. Some people expected this and were satisfied with it. Two earlier parliamentary investigations justified everyone and everything about the war, so they could not help unite the ruling class and win back some of the trust they lost among the people.

What Was Said in the Report?

The report is 2.6 million words long, totalling 12 volumes. The overwhelming bulk of it consists of thousands of supporting documents and references, but it also features a 145-page summary that includes the overall report’s key elements and conclusions.

The inquiry concluded that the UK joined the invasion before “peaceful” options to force Saddam into an agreement with the Western powers had been exhausted. The military option was not the last resort at the time. It goes on to say, “There was no imminent threat from Saddam Hussein and he should have been contained” for some time. However, it doesn’t rule out military action at that time and in fact suggests that an attack on Iraq might have been necessary and better grounded in law at a later time, possibly after obtaining the consent of the UN Security Council. In fact, the inquiry concludes that it was wrong to go to war under the particular circumstance of that time, but could have been right if the U.S. and UK had waited a little longer.

The inquiry also debunks Blair’s claim that the Iraqi regime represented an imminent danger internationally. It accuses Blair of having “deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.” What is the most revealing about Blair in the Chilcot report is the note he sent to Bush in September 2002, six months before the invasion of Iraq, in which he promised the U.S. president, “I will be with you, whatever.” This might seem to confirm the popular wisdom that Blair was Bush’s poodle. More basically, however, the note not only served as a blank cheque to the Bush administration but also revealed that Blair and British imperialism’s main political leaders had already decided to go to war, regardless of any Security Council resolution or any intelligence gathering or other evidence about Iraqi weapons, including the expected report of the UN chief inspector. This revelation is a slap in the face to Blair and his cronies and those who were determined to start a war.

The report also slaps the heads of Britain’s intelligence agencies, especially John Scarlett, the chair of the Joint Committee of MI5 (the British domestic intelligence service) and MI6 (foreign intelligence), and MI6 head Richard Dearlove. It blames them for producing and defending “flawed information” about Saddam’s weapons. The report states that Iraq’s possession of what were called “weapons of mass destruction” (a deliberately ambiguous term) was presented with a “certainty that was not justified”, and that intelligence had “not established beyond doubt” that Hussein had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons. The report concludes that the Iraq invasion was made on “the basis of flawed intelligence” that was not challenged and “should have been.”

Since the invasion was opposed not only by many UN member countries but also France, Russia and China, all permanent members of the UN Security Council with the right to veto any resolution that could provide a legal basis for the war, the U.S. and UK needed to find some other legal justification for their unprovoked invasion. Bush and Blair had to concoct a legal basis based on the opinion of their own appointed officials. But even so, the report says, the Britain attorney general at the time thought this war had no legal basis until seven days before the invasion, when he was sent to the U.S. to be convinced by American legal advisers. The report concludes that while the Blair government was claiming to act on behalf of “the international community”, the UK’s action “undermined the authority of the United Nations Security Council.”

Analysing the aftermath of the attack on Iraq, the report says that the British military were ill-equipped for the task and that Blair had ignored explicit warnings by various experts on what would happen in Iraq after an invasion. This included a warning by the head of MI5 at the time, Eliza Manningham-Buller. The report also refers to the casualties and mass displacement produced by the invasion as an indication that the government failed to achieve the stated objectives.

One reason Blair and others gave for the UK’s participation in the Iraq invasion was the “special relationship” between the U.S. and UK, and the necessity to keep in step with the U.S. The Chilcot report says, “The UK-US relation would not have been harmed if the UK had stayed out of the war” and “The UK’s relationship with the US does not require unconditional support.” This is an objection to the Blair approach during his premiership and especially during the Iraq war. Clearly there were sharp disagreements among the UK ruling class about how to handle their relations with the other imperialist powers, including the U.S., as it still seems to be the case with Brexit, but the Chilcot report casts little light on the real issues involved or the depth of the splits.

Even regarding the Iraq war itself, there are many important facts that the report very carefully avoids.

Find out more about the revolution         Find out about BA, the leader of the revolution

What the Report Doesn’t Say

The report doesn’t say that Blair was a liar, only that he exaggerated the threat from Saddam. This amounts to mollycoddling the man many people called “B-liar.” The report refers to “flawed intelligence”, which itself is a deliberately misleading term for claims fabricated to justify going to war. The report also clears Blair of lying to parliament. These formulations are extremely important. The report was carefully crafted to say that Blair did not commit any crimes under British or international law. Since everyone knows today that Blair lied, the real political question is whether he can be brought to justice. Many people, including families of British soldiers killed in Iraq, have demanded that he be brought before an international court to be tried for war crimes. Sarah O’Conner, the sister of one of those soldiers, said in response to the Chilcot report, “There is one terrorist in this world that the world needs to be aware of, and his name is Tony Blair, the world’s worst terrorist,” as other relatives cheered.

This report confirms that while Blair’s opponents among the country’s rulers and politicians want to discredit him once and for all, justice is the last thing on their minds. As for the international courts, they are not intended to try Western imperialist rulers and representatives, but to punish those who refuse to obey them or present problems for them.

Those who wanted a war in Iraq were not limited to Blair and a few individuals in the intelligence services who supported him by fabricating evidence to provide political cover for the invasion. The majority of the Labour government cabinet at the time, including senior members such as Jack Straw (the foreign minister), Chancellor Gordon Brown and many others went along with the war. Only one senior Labour cabinet member, Robin Cook, and a few other ministers resigned in protest. The majority of Parliament members voted for the war. Overwhelmingly, the Conservative party also enthusiastically supported the war. That includes the last Prime Minister, David Cameron, the new PM Theresa May, Duncan Smith, William Hague and other Conservative luminaries.

The military as a whole not only did not object to the war, they went ahead and invaded Iraq, murdered massive numbers of people and demolished the country’s infrastructure. The head of MI5 warned Blair that the war would significantly swell the ranks of Islamist jihadi groups in the UK, U.S. and the Middle East, but did nothing to oppose the war. Blair is certainly one of the UK and the world’s most hated imperialist figures, but he was not alone. He was supported by the majority of the British imperialist political establishment because they thought his actions were in the UK’s interests—that by invading Iraq at the side of the U.S., the UK could improve its position among the colluding and often contending imperialist gangs who dominate the world economically and whose politics and military are in the service of that domination.

Unlike Blair and the intelligence chiefs named in the report, some people who wanted to stop the impending war suffered the consequences. Dr. David Kelly, a weapons expert at the Ministry of Defence, was found dead two days after giving testimony to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and expressing his doubts about the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

There is another important point the report is very careful not to get into: neither the U.S. nor Britain nor any other imperialist power has the right to invade and occupy another country. Earlier, when the Western powers thought Saddam’s rule suited their regional geopolitical interests, they armed his regime—including with the chemical weapons Saddam used against the Kurds and Iran. That fact alone should shed light on the utterly reactionary imperialist interests behind the U.S./UK invasion. The report doesn’t mention that. It also fails to mention that Western imperialist intervention and other crimes and domination of other nations were feeding the rise of Islamic fundamentalism even before this war.

On the contrary, the report justifies the war itself, if not its timing. What the report objects to most is that the Blair government went to war when the UK military was “ill-equipped for the task”. In fact, if it had been better equipped and had more helicopters and more sophisticated weapons, they would have been able to kill more people. The Chilcot report has no legal or moral objection to this murder. If Bush and Blair had waited until the exhaustion of “peaceful options” (which means more deadly austerity in Iraq, where as many as a half a million children had already died as a result of economic sanctions), then, the report implies, the war would have been justified. The Chilcot report is very careful not to say explicitly or implicitly that the war against Iraq was a war of aggression, a crime that shouldn’t have been allowed under any circumstances.

Why the British Imperialists Saw It Necessary to Hold This inquiry

While the British ruling class as a whole made it possible to carry out this war of aggression, that doesn’t mean that the ruling class was united around it. In fact, the issue severely divided the British ruling class and the parties representing it. It is true that the Conservative party was overwhelmingly in favour of the war, but there were some prominent party members such as ex-Home Secretary Ken Clark who voted against it. Liberal Democrats, the third biggest party in the UK, unanimously voted against the war. The then governing Labour Party was so deeply divided that it has still not been able to get over it since then. The political damage of those divisions that brought millions of people into the streets against the war and damaged the legitimacy of the UK’s whole political set-up is still haunting the British ruling class 13 years later. This is especially the case because the war did not go well for their interests and the consequences have been a nightmare for the imperialists, although not nearly the nightmare they have been for the people of the region and the world.

Despite now cloaking their objections to the war in legal questions, and even worse, disapproving of the timing of the war rather than the war itself, an important section of the British ruling class was against the war because they had partly anticipated the outcome and did not see it in their interests. So the report was partly meant to help settle the issue among the UK’s rulers, as well as to fool the people.

The division and debate among the ruling class helped draw millions of people into political life and opposition. Between one and two million people from all walks of life took part in protests on the eve of the invasion, bringing central London to a halt. Similar protests were held in other major and medium-sized cities in England and Scotland. But they could not prevent the war, not only because Blair had promised Bush “I will be with you, whatever”, but more fundamentally because the bulk of the political representatives of the UK capitalist ruling class were determined to go ahead no matter what the people thought, and even those who thought the war was a bad idea for British imperialist interests, feared the further mobilisation of the people as even more dangerous to those interests, and united behind the war once it was launched.

The report’s purpose is not to prevent a continuation of such war crimes, but to draw political lessons for how to better handle the kind of complicated and difficult situation that Blair and other British leaders in charge handled so badly: how to deploy the military force necessary to ensure the UK’s position in the world with less political cost.

The war in Iraq was only one in a continuing chain of military actions and wars in the interests of British and other imperialists. While they may seek to adjust tactics, they simply cannot do without such wars because war is one of the most important paths to imposing their interests on a global scale. The current wars in Libya and Syria are further examples that no matter how many Chilcot reports come out and no matter how many politicians like Blair might be damned or even prosecuted, such wars continue until the imperialist system whose interests they serve is overthrown and dismantled.

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/452/wisconsin-governor-calls-out-national-guard-milwaukee-youth-refuse-to-back-down-en.html

Revolution #452 August 15, 2016

Wisconsin Governor Calls Out National Guard—Milwaukee Youth Refuse to Back Down

August 15, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

From a reader:

On Saturday, August 13, 2016, Sylville Smith, 23 years old, was gunned down by police in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the neighborhood around Sherman Park. Residents told Revolution what happened when the neighborhood erupted in righteous anger: Sylville was shot around 2 pm in broad daylight and people began to amass spontaneously in protest at the site. A woman who heard the shots and went over there said, “The police was hostile—told us to disperse—so that’s when we went to the BP [gas] station.” It turns out that there was a long history of antagonism with this particular gas station, culminating last month with an employee there firing his gun in the air to terrorize people and there were protests over this. “Things escalated from there,” the woman said, and before long the police had come in with their “riot crew.” She said that the initial crowd of people protesting the murder included “family and friends of Sylville, young, and old from the neighborhood, and everywhere.”

A youth organizer from the area talked about the attitudes of the youth: “They have a distrust of the system. They’ve been demonized and targeted. They are fearless, angry, ostracized, and nobody wants to deal with them. They feel ‘it’s us against everybody,’” and he made clear that “everybody” included adult Black people. He compared the incident to the murder of Freddie Gray, in that he had talked to family and found out that they had a lawsuit against the police, and that Sylville had been stopped and chased for no apparent reason.

Milwaukee erupted like Ferguson and Baltimore. A part of the city went up in flames as the masses made it clear that they were fed up and not taking it anymore. In response, the governor called out the National Guard and went all-out to get community and church leaders to suppress the youth.

As Carl Dix said in his statement, “Milwaukee Explodes in Righteous Rebellion as Police Kill Again!”:

"This rebellion is right on time. Despite police wearing body cameras, despite Department of Justice reports that expose the racism and abuse in police departments across the country, despite commission meetings and talk of reforms, police continue to kill people again and again. And the whole system continues to exonerate the killer cops when their murderous deeds get dragged into the light of day. People in Milwaukee have refused to accept this state-sponsored murder in silence, and they are right to do so. And everyone who stands for justice must have their backs."

Revolutionaries from Chicago arrived on Sunday, the day after the rebellion, in time to join a protest at the police precinct a few blocks down the street from the burned out BP gas station and now ground zero for continuing protests. The Stolen Lives banner came out, along with the Message from the Central Committee of the RCP, “Time To Get Organized for an Actual Revolution” (now reflected on the banner itself.) Also distributed were Carl Dix’s statement and copies of Revolution newspaper, and many Stolen Lives posters.

In preparation for the arrival of the Revolution Club, in the evening, a crew saturated with these materials, posted large versions of the Message and the poster “America Was Never Great—We Need to Overthrow, Not Vote For, This System” in key locations. The small Stolen Lives posters were so popular you couldn’t keep them in your hands as people gave donations for them. All the Revolution newspapers and Carl’s statement got out.
 
A vigil for Sylville was held starting at 7 pm at the site of the murder. Here the consistent message from ministers, “responsible leaders” and even a few family members was that OK, you’ve made your statement, “we already showed them what we can do,” but now is the time to get peaceful, go to the town hall meeting next Tuesday, get right with God, start behaving responsibly in general and get our own house in order, and demand answers through proper channels. The crowd around these speakers grew smaller and smaller as the youth in particular heard this blaming and shaming and dissing of their standing up in righteous rebellion the night before.

By this time the Revolution Club arrived, with their BA Speaks: Revolution—Nothing Less! t-shirts, and a big Stolen Lives banner with the words “Stop Murder and Terror by the Police” and “We Need to get organized for an ACTUAL Revolution.” As a quiet march to Sherman Park was being led by the Nation of Islam (NOI), the Revolution Club began chanting, “Indict, Convict, Send the Killer Cops to Jail, the whole damn system is guilty as hell!” Other marchers also began chants. The march grew and by the time it reached a fountain area in the park it had grown to over 200 people. Here, the NOI put out a message that “God is present. The God of Justice brings forth justice—even if the Department of Justice doesn’t,” and they urged people to leave the park and go home. 

As this too began to disperse... the youth looking disconsolate... the Revolution Club stepped up. A club member started to agitate: “I salute the youth! I salute what you did! You shook they ass up! The country heard you, the world heard you!” This marked the beginning of a different evening! The faces of many youth began to brighten, and they gravitated to the agitation. “I’m not trying to sugar coat a damn thing. We need to get rid of this system from the bottom up. Not one brick here and one brick there. You need to get with BA, Bob Avakian. He’s got a scientific approach—not this lollygagging BS!”

The “responsible officials” felt the need to squelch this revolutionary breath of fresh air from going further. Instead, the Revolution Club once again began marching and agitating followed by many youth.

At the corner the crowd took over a lane of traffic on this four-lane road. The Revolution Club held a speak out. The speaker from the Revolution Club continued to speak from the heart: “Justice is blind as hell—I’ve never seen any. (Police) shoot a 7-year-old baby in the head!” “This is a murderous state—Vietnam, Iraq—the U.S. is a killer!” Quoting Philando Castile’s mother, the speaker from the Club said, “‘He lived by the law and the law killed him’... What type of system does all this—and then allows the cops to go free? Get with the Revolutionary Communist Party, I’m with the Revolution Club...”

This drew forth and opened the door to masses to really speak their minds. A woman grabbed the mic—“We’re not taking this anymore! Fuck You! Slavery is over Motherfuckers!” A young man followed, expressing the exact opposite of what the speakers at the vigil and the NOI were trying to impose: “We done prayin’ We done beggin’!” and then went on to expose the hypocrisy of the system blaming the people for violence while condoning the gas station employee firing his gun in front of children. The police, meanwhile, were lurking nearby but not directly intervening. The authorities did, however, send about six fire trucks with lights and sirens blaring up to the vigil and then down the road a block, sending a message to the people.

Photo: Special to revcom.us

The Revolution Club then helped organize people to march back to the police precinct. Angry people faced off against the police who were guarding the precinct. Many other youth hung back on the corners and side streets nearby. But they could hear the agitation from the Revolution Club, and this drew them forward, across the street into the protest. The protest then spilled out into a nearby three-way intersection. Several young women began to yell at the top of their lungs, “Yeahhh!” The triangle in the middle of the intersection was taken over by at least 75 people, with many more all over, cars driving by in a steady stream, 99 percent of them taking the Message from the RCP, many people taking up the Message to distribute in bundles, walking down the middle of the street handing them out to cars, people holding up the Message, plastering it up against the windows of their cars. A fancied-up car with huge rims came up and blocked the street in front of the intersection. Supportive Black motorcyclists began to show up in numbers. A couple of times the crowd left the intersection and started to march, but then went back to the intersection yelling, “Shut it down!” The Revolution Club, the Stolen Lives banner, and their agitation were in the mix of all this, with a growing periphery of revolutionaries and masses getting out the message. Well over a thousand Messages were gotten out through the day, many in bundles.

Still the size and intensity of the march and protest grew as we took off down the street back to the BP station a few blocks away. People started turning up their radios, hanging out of windows and through their moon roofs dancing and calling out. One revolutionary who was handing out the Message to people in their cars heard someone call out, “White boy! Hey White boy—don’t be so shy, don’t be scared—give me those!” and off he went with a large bundle of fliers. It had the real feel of a festival of the oppressed.

As the group of marchers and cars again approached ground zero, the mood changed again. Dead serious. Women in particular yelling out their open car door, or right up the face of the police waiting in their riot gear at the station, “Fuck the Police!” “Fuck you!”

The police brought out all their shit—several armored vehicles, dozens of squads from several jurisdictions, robo cop gear and automatic weapons, busses, paddy wagons, assault wagons, etc., etc. They announced an “unlawful assembly,” ordered dispersal on pain of arrest, and then used a phalanx of riot-clad and shielded cops to push the protesters a block south of the main intersection. As has been widely reported, the masses, the youth in particular, bravely stood their ground and did not let the police intimidate them. At least 14 people were arrested.

In retaliation, that chief OINKER of the sheriff’s, David Clarke, announced on Monday, August 15 that Sherman Park, where the youth gather, will be closed to the public at 6 pm.

The city and the Milwaukee police announced a curfew for teenagers of 10 pm. The mayor and the police chief went on the news and whined that the whole problem was caused by outside agitators from the Revolutionary Communist Party (where have we heard that before!). News flash to pigs—only the defiant youth in the community were on the ground on Saturday! Revolutionaries plead guilty to supporting the defiant ones who rise up against murdering police and centuries of oppression rained down on Black people.

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/452/carl-dix-responds-to-milwaukee-police-chief-flynn-over-police-murder-en.html

Revolution #452 August 15, 2016

August 15:

Carl Dix Responds to Milwaukee Police Chief Flynn over Police Murder

August 15, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Milwaukee Police Chief Flynn has blamed people associated with the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) for violence against police Sunday night. No, pig chief Flynn—people in Milwaukee rose in rebellion after a cop killed Sylville Smith because they were enraged at the harassment, brutality and even murder inflicted on Black people there. And they are right to stand up and say NO MORE to this state sponsored violence.

We in the RCP stand with the people who are fighting the power today to STOP the terror police inflict on Black people, and we work to transform the people for revolution, which is what's needed to end this and all the other horrors this system enforces on people in this country and around the world.

Pig Chief Flynn also tells us that the cop who killed Sylville Smith acted “within lawful bounds.” This system has also told us that the cop who murdered Dontre Hamilton acted within “lawful bounds”; that the cop who murdered Tamir Rice in Cleveland acted within “lawful bounds”; that the cops who murdered Freddie Gray in Baltimore acted within “lawful bounds”; and I could go on and on listing murdering cops who have been exonerated by this system.

A system that gives its stamp of approval to wanton police terror is absolutely illegitimate. It's been around too long and needs to be gotten rid of through revolution. In a revolutionary society, as Bob Avakian, the leader of the RCP, has said, “...[W]e would sooner have one of our own people’s police killed than go wantonly murder one of the masses.”

We in the RCP are organizing right now for an actual revolution to get rid of this system and bring into being the kind of society where the kind of state sponsored brutality being inflicted today would be no more.

See also:
August 14, 2016 Statement from Carl Dix: “Milwaukee Explodes in Righteous Rebellion as Police Kill Again!”

 

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/452/cleveland-hearing-on-felony-assault-charges-en.html

Revolution #452 August 15, 2016

We received this press release from the Revolution Club.

Thursday August 18 Cleveland hearing on Felony Assault Charges
Joey Johnson & RNC Flag Burners Say Drop Unjust Charges;
Supporters Protest Their Punishment for Political Speech

August 17, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

What: Press Conference
When: Thursday August 18 8:00 am
Where: Justice Center, Lakeside Entrance between Ontario & West 3rd Streets, Cleveland OH

Gregory “Joey” Johnson will meet with press Thursday before a hearing for two men indicted on felonies after their arrest with Johnson and 14 others. He and the “RNC16” burned a U.S. flag on July 20, outside the Republican Convention.

Johnson is a supporter of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which is led by Bob Avakian. Most of the others arrested are members of the Revolution Club, which is affiliated.

Johnson said today, “I am proud we burned the American flag outside the RNC because, as Bob Avakian says, 'American Lives are NOT More Important than Other People's Lives.' Trump says wants to 'Make America Great Again' but America was NEVER great – not during slavery, Jim Crow, the Iraq invasion, the Vietnam War, the internment of Japanese, or today's era of mass incarceration and war crimes.”

Johnson and the other defendants are calling for all the charges against them to be dropped. They cite the Supreme Court case Texas v. Johnson (1989), which ruled that flag-burning is protected political speech. Ironically, it was this same Gregory “Joey” Johnson who won that case after burning the U.S. flag outside the Republican National Convention in Dallas in 1984.

Johnson insists that their arrests were illegal. He argues that the arrests only underline the need for the kind of protest he waged, “Think about it: Cleveland couldn't get a grand jury to indict the two police who murdered 12-year-old Tamir Rice, but they got a grand jury to pile illegitimate charges onto us for peaceful and supposedly protected political protest. One more indication that America is NOT great!”

This case comes at a time when Cleveland is under a federal Consent Decree, by request of its own mayor, for a pattern of excessive force that violates the U.S. Constitution and state laws. Previously, supporters of the Revolutionary Communist Party exposed how the Cleveland police lied repeatedly to justify their illegal arrests of Johnson and others.

Johnson says he is actively investigating all legal courses of action the defendants have to protect their rights and the rights of protesters in Cleveland.

Revcom.us, the website of the Revolutionary Communist Party, has posted a “Fact Sheet” on the charges.

Supporters are circulating a statement calling on Cleveland authorities to drop the charges on Johnson and the RNC16.