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November 28, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Sunday November 20, Sheriff's Deputies fired water cannons at people in 25° weather. Photo: Twitter/@erinschrode
There is a showdown looming at Standing Rock Indian Reservation in the Dakotas. Thousands of Native American Indians, along with supporters, have been camping out there. They have been protesting the installation of an oil pipeline that gravely threatens the water that Native people and thousands of others in the area depend on, and violates Indian treaty rights. Hundreds have been arrested and hundreds more have stood up to beatings, macings, high-powered water hoses in sub-freezing weather, and unending harassment and insult.
Now the Army of Corps of Engineers has vowed to arrest anyone who remains in the camp past Monday, December 5. Here we see Obama once more extending his “hand of unity” to the fascist Donald Trump—taking upon himself the ugly business of violently repressing this righteous struggle and thereby relieving Trump of getting his own hands bloody.
The Native people cannot be left to face this alone. The environment cannot withstand yet another insult. It is on everyone—every revolutionary, every radical or progressive, everyone with a beating heart and a working conscience—to stand up for the Standing Rock Sioux and the water protectors.
Revolution Clubs should immediately choose representatives and organize solidarity delegations to go to Standing Rock. The Revolution Club members should bring enough XXXL “REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!” T-shirts for the many people who may want to wear them and represent for revolution (you’ll need XXXL to wear over the down coats that you’re gonna need). Once there, Club members should act as a unified force, standing with the people to prevent this towering injustice from going down. Clubs and Party supporters should step up in every city to work with and participate in solidarity demonstrations, especially but not only on the 5th and the days leading up to it. These must extend to religious communities, the campuses, and in the neighborhoods.
The insult of issuing this order on the day after Thanksgiving—a day that commemorates an exchange between Native people and the invading Europeans, and that set off a bloody four-century genocidal trail of tears—was noted by the tribal leader Dave Archambault II.
The truth is this: America Was Never Great! Only a revolution—a genuine communist revolution that aims to institute the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America as its framework—can end the oppression suffered by the Native peoples, as well as other oppressed nationalities, and can end the insane plunder of the environment by the capitalists. Battles like the one in Standing Rock can be and must increasingly be built as part of strengthening the movement to make that revolution. And in the shadow of the looming fascism of Trump, the struggle for the basic justice of the demands of the water protectors in Standing Rock takes on even greater significance.
The whole world will be watching to see what the people of this country are going to do. What happens in Standing Rock will set terms one way or the other going into perilous times. Be part of making sure they are the right terms.
On the Death of Fidel Castro—Four Points of Orientation
November 27, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Re-Colonization in the Name of Normalization
Behind the Re-Establishment of U.S.-Cuba Diplomatic Relations
by Raymond Lotta
With the death of Fidel Castro and the ascension of the fascist Donald Trump to the presidency, U.S.-Cuba relations will be in flux. This article, dealing with Obama's moves to "normalize" those relations, gives a good basic background in why revolution in Cuba was necessary and had to have U.S. imperialist domination as a central target; how and why that revolution did not ultimately succeed in winning liberation from imperialism; and how to understand and see through the self-serving propaganda of U.S. politicians and media on all this and actually get at the truth.
Check out "Three Alternative Worlds," the Supplement to Chapter 2 of BAsics,
from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian.
I.Fidel Castro led a just, genuine, and
popularly backed anti-imperialist revolution
against the United States. The Cuban revolution of
1959 overthrew the oppressive, hated, and corrupt Batista regime, a
cruel enforcer of the interests of U.S. imperialism. The revolution
went on to confiscate the land holdings of U.S. investors and to put
an end to the economic domination of Cuba by the U.S. Right on the
doorstep of United States, a revolution had come to power that stood
bravely against U.S. imperialism and that called on others to follow
its example. Cuba became a source of hope and inspiration for the
oppressed and for radical and revolutionary-minded people throughout
the world, including in the U.S.
II.The U.S. imperialists worked viciously, unrelentingly, and
unconscionably to cripple and destroy the new regime, and to
re-subjugate the Cuban people. The U.S. imposed a
blockade that limited Cuba’s ability to obtain vital goods and
supplies (such as medicine). In 1961, the CIA armed, financed, and
coordinated the Bay of Pigs invasion of mercenaries and thugs that
quickly met defeat. Castro was the target of repeated U.S.
assassination attempts. The U.S. sought through every means to
isolate Cuba diplomatically.
III.In the face of this economic, political, and military pressure,
Fidel Castro opted for policies, a road of development, and an
international orientation that, whatever his initial intentions,
resulted in capitulation to imperialism. Castro
brought Cuba into a dependent relationship with Soviet
social-imperialism—the Soviet Union had ceased being socialist
in the mid-1950s. The Cuban economy remained tied to and distorted by
sugar production. The new society established in Cuba was not one
that was empowering the masses to uproot all exploitation and
oppression. Cuba was not socialist under Fidel Castro... and it is
not socialist today.
IV.Fidel Castro played a reactionary ideological role in the world communist movement, particularly in defending
the revisionist Soviet Union and attacking Mao and revolutionary
China.
*In
the early and mid-1960s, Mao Zedong waged a momentous ideological
struggle against revisionism and the Soviet Union, which was the
global center of modern revisionism. Revisionism guts the
revolutionary heart out of communism and perpetuates capitalism in
the name of Marxism. Mao scientifically showed that the Soviet
Union was not socialist but state capitalist—Fidel Castro
upheld and promoted the Soviet Union as socialist. Mao
revealed that the Soviet Union was a new imperialist power acting to
advance the interests of empire—Fidel Castro aligned with the
Soviet Union and prettified and defended its oppressive international
role and actions.
*Mao
had made the pathbreaking contribution to the cause of communist
revolution: the theory of continuing the revolution under the
dictatorship of the proletariat, of preventing the restoration of
capitalism and carrying forward the revolution towards the goal of a
communist world without exploitation and oppression and the division
of human society into classes. Mao translated this understanding into
the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76—in which tens and hundreds
of millions of people were debating and struggling over questions
bearing decisively on the direction of society and the world
revolution, and which prevented the restoration of capitalism in
China for 10 years. Fidel Castro attacked Mao and the Cultural
Revolution that Mao led, the high point of the first stage of
communist revolution.
Editors' note: The following is an excerpt from the new work by Bob Avakian, THE NEW COMMUNISM. In addition to excerpts already posted on revcom.us, we will be running further excerpts from time to time on both revcom.us and in Revolution newspaper. These excerpts should serve as encouragement and inspiration for people to get into the work as a whole, which is available as a book from Insight Press. A prepublication copy is available on line at revcom.us.
This excerpt comes from the section titled "IV. The Leadership We Need."
Excerpt 1 from the section:
The Decisive Role of Leadership
Let’s start with a very basic point: Leadership is decisive. As Mao put it, where there is oppression there will be resistance: the masses of oppressed people will repeatedly rise up and fight back against their oppression. But where that struggle ends up, and whether it can be taken all the way to an emancipating revolution, a new society and ultimately a new world, without exploitation and oppression and all the suffering and destruction that goes along with that, depends on leadership—on the line, the worldview, the method and approach, the strategy and program of the force which gains the leadership in the struggle against oppression.
Notice that I said “the force which gains the leadership.” Why did I put it this way—and what is the importance of this? Well, one of the things this is emphasizing is that there is always going to be a struggle over who’s in the leading position, and therefore where things are being led. It’s not a matter of things falling into anyone’s lap—unless it’s the ruling class, or other forces that will have spontaneity going for them and will lead things in the wrong direction—but especially if the leadership the masses actually need, to make the revolution they need, is really going to gain the leading position, it’s going to be a process of, yes, complex, and at times very fierce, struggle. Once again, if we think it’s just a matter that eventually the masses will see the need for a revolution and they’ll come seeking us out and ask us to lead them—well, we’ll be in for a very bad surprise! Even to the degree that something like that might happen, we wouldn’t be able to handle it correctly, if that’s our orientation and approach. There has to be a fight—this goes back to the point a little while ago, that much of the struggle we carry out, particularly in the ideological realm, is struggle against other lines and programs which do not directly flow from and represent the ruling class but are more representative of intermediate strata, but which, nonetheless, lead people back into, or keep them chained within, the killing confines and dynamics of this system.
Now, I mentioned earlier the book The Looting Machine. The full title is The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth. The author, Tom Burgis, starts off the first chapter of the book speaking about Chicala, which is a shantytown slum in Luanda, the capital city of Angola; and he talks about how there isn’t much that is in the wall separating Chicala from the rest of the city, other than a lot of sewage, as well as fear. This called to mind something I wrote earlier about the piles of garbage and human waste that little children in Luanda and other parts of Angola are playing amidst, while a few miles away there are tall buildings serving as glittering monuments to the power of the wealthy. You see this now in China, in Shanghai and other cities, but even in Luanda and places like that—these glittering skyscrapers, symbols of this vast wealth in a very few hands. And Angola is a particularly poignant example, because the ruling force now in Angola is what proceeded from the Movement for the Liberation of Angola (the MPLA), which was the nationalist force leading the struggle against Portuguese colonialism, which dominated Angola, and then a civil war against forces backed by apartheid South Africa and the U.S. This was fought out for decades in Angola. The clique now ruling in Angola came directly out of that—the heads of the country now were the leaders of the MPLA, and those who have succeeded them. Burgis makes the point that the daughter of the leader of the MPLA—Isabel dos Santos—is the first female billionaire in Africa. Isn’t that a shining example of “empowerment”?! You can just hear minions and mouthpieces of the system celebrating this—a female billionaire in Africa—while you get this vivid picture of the literal garbage and waste that the masses of people are living in, surrounding these glittering symbols of all this wealth that has, in a real sense, been looted from these countries and from the masses of people.
In reading this, you could think about—and a lot of people would think about—what a tragedy this is, what a horrible situation, what terrible corruption. Some would note the role of multinational corporations in all this, and talk about how the corporations have way too much power, and these days perhaps a few might talk about imperialism, in some general sense. Now, all that might be in the right direction and with the right spirit, but what struck me immediately, as I got into reading this book—and what struck me repeatedly in reading it—is how this screams out the need for an actual socialist transformation of these societies. Again, it’s back to the mode of production point, and the compelling reality that if you don’t have a leadership that bases itself on a scientific understanding of all this, you are going to end up in a terrible situation, despite the struggle and sacrifice of masses of people, including the struggle and sacrifices of the forces leading them. In other words, the leadership in these places like Angola, they end up saying things like, “We learned that money is power—if you don’t have money, you can’t do anything.” So, just like the revisionists in China, who took China back down the capitalist road while still pretending to be communists in some vague sense, these forces in places like Angola go about accumulating wealth through capitalist means, with the claim that this somehow benefits the masses of people. In China they literally had the slogan, “To Get Rich is Glorious”—they replaced the slogan during the time of Mao, “Serve the People,” with the slogan “To Get Rich is Glorious.” I remember hearing a story about one of the party cadre in China after the revisionist coup happened and they put away the slogan of “Serve the People” and the orientation of serving the people by advancing the revolution, and started talking about how everybody should try to get rich, because that would be for the benefit of the country. And one of these Chinese Communist Party cadre, now under this revisionist leadership that was promoting this bourgeois line, actually said to another party cadre: “Well, you know, we used to talk about serve the people; but aren’t I a people?” So you can see how the ideological corruption sets in when the dominant line is changed in this way and is being pumped at people, even people who definitely once knew better. They get caught up in this idea that if we all go out for ourselves, we’ll make a lot of money and then we can do something good for the masses of poor people. So this slogan, “To Get Rich is Glorious,” was supposed to inspire people to make a lot of money, and that would develop the economy and help the people. And in reading The Looting Machine you see this rationalization repeated by the heads of government in these different African countries: Well, if we amass a lot of wealth, then we can do something for the people.
Now, again, many of these people fought under very difficult conditions for decades. They were up against apartheid South Africa, which was a very powerful country at the time, and was being backed up by the U.S., even as the ruling class of the U.S. put up some pretense of opposing apartheid. Going up against that, the MPLA in Angola relied somewhat on the Soviet Union, which was a real problem, but they waged a lot of self-sacrificing struggle. Why did things end up this way? Well, there were major shifts in the world and world relations, including the fact that the Soviet Union as such collapsed and its empire went out of existence in its previous form, with Soviet social-imperialism (socialism in name but imperialism in fact) being replaced by an openly capitalist-imperialist Russia, and China now on the road of capitalism. All this was disorienting, and all the more so because people weren’t scientific enough. Forces like the MPLA were eclectic—their viewpoint was a mishmash of nationalism and some aspects of communism, it was not a consistently scientific communist approach. And so, when these new conditions hit, what did they end up doing? They became nouveau bourgeois exploiters, and at the same time accomplices (and basically appendages) of imperialism, accumulating tremendous wealth for themselves, on the backs of the masses of people.
Here we get back to a point that was made, toward the beginning of this presentation, on the base and the superstructure—the economic system, the mode of production, and how it sets the terms for things in society overall, and how, in turn, the superstructure that arises on that economic base serves to reinforce it. In other words, the political and ideological superstructure—the political system, the laws, the culture, the ideas that dominate in the society—have to be in accordance with that mode of production, or the society can’t function. So if you go down the road of saying we’re gonna use capitalist means to get a lot of wealth, if that’s the mode of production that’s operating, then you have to have a superstructure of laws, political institutions, culture and ideology, and so on, that goes along with and enforces that capitalist system, even if you once had a different set of ideas.
Contents
Publisher's Note
Introduction and Orientation
Foolish Victims of Deceit, and Self-Deceit
Part I. Method and Approach, Communism as a Science
Materialism vs. Idealism Dialectical Materialism
Through Which Mode of Production
The Basic Contradictions and Dynamics of Capitalism
The New Synthesis of Communism
The Basis for Revolution
Epistemology and Morality, Objective Truth and Relativist Nonsense
Self and a “Consumerist” Approach to Ideas
What Is Your Life Going to Be About?—Raising People’s Sights
Part II. Socialism and the Advance to Communism:
A Radically Different Way the World Could Be, A Road to Real Emancipation
The “4 Alls”
Beyond the Narrow Horizon of Bourgeois Right
Socialism as an Economic System and a Political System—And a Transition to Communism
Internationalism
Abundance, Revolution, and the Advance to Communism—A Dialectical Materialist Understanding
The Importance of the “Parachute Point”—Even Now, and Even More With An Actual Revolution
The Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America—
Solid Core with a Lot of Elasticity on the Basis of the Solid Core
Emancipators of Humanity
Part III. The Strategic Approach to An Actual Revolution
One Overall Strategic Approach
Hastening While Awaiting
Forces For Revolution
Separation of the Communist Movement from the Labor Movement, Driving Forces for Revolution
National Liberation and Proletarian Revolution
The Strategic Importance of the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women
The United Front under the Leadership of the Proletariat
Youth, Students and the Intelligentsia
Struggling Against Petit Bourgeois Modes of Thinking, While Maintaining the Correct Strategic Orientation
The “Two Maximizings”
The “5 Stops”
The Two Mainstays
Returning to "On the Possibility of Revolution"
Internationalism—Revolutionary Defeatism
Internationalism and an International Dimension
Internationalism—Bringing Forward Another Way Popularizing the Strategy
Fundamental Orientation
Part IV. The Leadership We Need
The Decisive Role of Leadership
A Leading Core of Intellectuals—and the Contradictions Bound Up with This
Another Kind of “Pyramid”
The Cultural Revolution Within the RCP
The Need for Communists to Be Communists
A Fundamentally Antagonistic Relation—and the Crucial Implications of That
Strengthening the Party—Qualitatively as well as Quantitatively
Forms of Revolutionary Organization, and the “Ohio”
Statesmen, and Strategic Commanders
Methods of Leadership, the Science and the “Art” of Leadership
Working Back from “On the Possibility”—
Another Application of “Solid Core with a Lot of Elasticity on the Basis of the Solid Core”
Appendix 1:
The New Synthesis of Communism:
Fundamental Orientation, Method and Approach,
and Core Elements—An Outline
by Bob Avakian
Appendix 2:
Framework and Guidelines for Study and Discussion
As Trump Puts Together His Fascist Team, The Resistance Must Grow Stronger!
November 21, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
In the first week and a half of his “transition,” Trump has shown how he intends to rule. He has put together a core team of outright fascists—this includes Pence, Bannon, Flynn, Sessions, and Pompeo. To get a sense of who these people are, just look into the accompanying articles on them. Trump has also made clear that he intends to continue to go after the press and those in the arts who dare even the mildest dissent—with his Twitter assaults against the New York Times and the cast of the Broadway show Hamilton. Even if in the weeks to come he now adds some more “moderate” voices, he has made very clear what the core of his rule will be: a leap into fascism.
Fascism is a very serious thing. Fascism foments and relies on xenophobic nationalism, racism, and the aggressive reinstitution of oppressive “traditional values.” Fascism feeds on and encourages the threat and use of violence to build a movement and come to power. Fascism, once in power, essentially eliminates traditional democratic rights. Fascism attacks, jails, and executes its opponents, and launches violent mob attacks on “minorities.” In Nazi Germany in the 1930s and ‘40s, under Hitler, fascism did all these things. They imprisoned millions in concentration camps and exterminated millions of Jews, Roma people (Gypsies), and other “undesirables.” And Hitler did almost all of this through the established institutions and the “rule of law.” This is where this goes. And yes, Hitler himself could “talk graciously” when he felt it would serve his interests and lull his opponents.
While there are some people saying some of this, and certainly many people feeling parts of it in their guts, there is still a need to fight for this understanding of the problem: what is going on now is the imposition of fascism. Trump is not just a collection of horrible attitudes, policies, and appointments: he aims to take a leap to a qualitatively more repressive form of rule and a qualitatively more oppressive society.
The Resistance Must Get Stronger and Go Further
There have also in this past week been important outpourings against this beginning fascism. People are standing up and speaking out in all kinds of ways. Students have walked out of high schools and colleges. People have taken to the streets and come to meetings and even organized their own meetings to deal with this. People have taken stands within professions and workplaces and schools. People have vowed defiance against different policies, and some have reached out to those directly targeted by the Trumpites. There is a sense of urgency in everyday conversation, and people who have not demonstrated in years now are flooding into active political protest and resistance. (See "Protests vs Trump: Walking Out of Schools...Going Up Against Fascists and Racists...Speaking Out in Resistance," “Obama & Clinton Say ‘Get Over It,’ But Tens of Thousands Rebel in the Streets” and “Other Voices on Trump and Resistance.”)
This is extremely important. But this must go further. The still very embryonic acts and actions and sentiments must be pulled together into an active, organized movement to prevent the implementation of this fascist program... and to actually oust this fascist regime before these Trumpites crush, or “neutralize,” any effective opposition. People of all kinds of viewpoints need to work together to forge the answers to how to do this—and there is not that much time. So we want to hear, from readers new and old, your ideas on what this would mean and how this might happen. We want to hear from you on every form of resistance you are undertaking and what you are hearing from others. And we want to figure out with you how to both push forward and give direction so that millions of people can be led to actually rise to this huge challenge.
One big step that everyone can take is to get out the statement “In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America.” We need to get out, at the very least, hundreds of thousands of this statement on campuses, in neighborhoods—all throughout society. As you do so, get that slogan everywhere. One woman who works helping immigrants told us she’s going to put up the front page of last week’s Revolution newspaper in her office, because “it’s telling the truth and people need to see this”; when asked what would happen if those who run the office asked her not to do this, she said simply and fiercely: “I don’t care.”
One important fight to wage is within the movements coming out to oppose Trump in different ways. Some people insist that what we see now is on a continuum with what has been going on. “Yeah, things are gonna get worse under Trump, but they’ve been bad for a long time,” these people say, “and we should keep doing more of what we’ve been doing, and not get people all alarmed about what this will mean.” Some of them are already talking about “the long run”—as if Trump is not going to take things to a different level and put in changes that may not be able to be reversed for some time to come. Sorry, but this kind of normalization is just wishful thinking... and dangerous wishful thinking at that. If Trump is allowed to hammer his regime into place... if he is not prevented from doing that and then driven from office... there will be a huge price to pay and irreparable damage to millions of individuals that humanity cannot afford. Wake the hell up, people; do you think it would have been wise to quarrel over definitions when Hitler came to power? The fact is: the beast is loose.
Stopping Trump and Getting Rid of the System That Produced Him
At the same time as we aim to urgently unite with everyone we can to oppose this onslaught, we want to discuss, and debate, with everyone the source of the problem—and the solution.
To be clear: Trump is the product of a system—the capitalist-imperialist system. For all this “Make America Great Again”—and for all of Hillary Clinton’s “America Is Still Great”—the fact is that this country was founded on genocide and slavery, that it has rampaged and plundered all over the world, and that to this day continues to be the “greatest” criminal on the planet. Right now this system faces extremely difficult problems for which it has no real answers; up against this, those who run this system have reached for and are now uniting around a very extreme program to resolve those contradictions, one which will take those crimes to new levels and go very far in crippling people’s ability to resist them.
On the one hand, the fact that this is a product of the system overall is illustrated by the fact that much of the machinery to launch Trump’s program is in place. Actions taken by the Bush and Obama administrations have set the stage for all the repressive measures Trump will now take. And remember, this is a program that includes ratcheting up to whole new levels the persecution of minorities, the widespread denial of political rights, the unrestrained pillaging and destruction of the environment, the intense ramping up of war against the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa, and elsewhere, the demonization of all Muslims, and the drastic curtailment of press freedoms and rule of law. This machinery needs only to be “adjusted” or “tweaked” for Trump to crush all opposition. This systemic character is also illustrated by how quickly those like Obama and Clinton, who just weeks ago warned that a Trump presidency would be an unprecedented disaster, now support “working with” Trump.
And yet, to underestimate how disastrous Trump’s program would be for the masses would be a very grave error. The bourgeoisie and its politicians may be able to adjust to Trump’s rule—and they all certainly prefer it to masses of people making revolution or even “getting out of hand”—but for many millions here and even more all over the planet this will be a question of life and death and very directly so. This must be stopped.
We Need Revolution
At the same time as we work together with all kinds of people to stop and reverse the disaster of fascism, the revcoms will continue and actually intensify organizing people directly into the revolution. We'll be putting forward two very important reasons why we have to get rid of this whole thing to everyone now flooding into political life. First, because all of what Trump is doing represents a concentration of what goes on every day under capitalism-imperialism. Second, because unless and until we DO get rid of this whole system, then this threat of a massively repressive fascist rule will always be in reserve and ready to be used against the people.
Drawing an analogy to the ways in which Hitler and the Nazis in Germany attacked the Weimar Republic in Germany (that is, the bourgeois-democratic, non-fascist regime which preceded the Nazis), Bob Avakian put it like this:
The answer is not to seek to defend and maintain the “Weimar Republic” (bourgeois democracy—the “democratic form” of capitalist dictatorship) as such. That does not offer a real solution, and certainly not one in the interests of the masses of people and the great majority of humanity. But we should recognize and not be blind to what it means when these fascists put the “Weimar Republic”—by analogy, the liberals in the ruling class—in the camp of enemy, and go so far as to label them traitors, and go after them in that way. What is that preparing the ground for, what are the implications of that? The point, and our objective, once again, is not to defend the Weimar Republic—tailing and upholding the “liberal” section of the imperialist ruling class—but to fully recognize, and oppose in a radically different way and toward radically different ends, the seriousness of these attacks and what this all represents. In previous talks and writings I have spoken to this phenomenon of the unraveling of what for some time has been the “cohering center” of the society and the rule of the bourgeoisie in the U.S.—and how we are already seeing manifestations of that. I have emphasized that all of this will not, by any means, be positive in the short run, and left to itself—and it is not the role of communists, it is not meeting our responsibilities, to simply stand by and celebrate all the unraveling of the existing cohering center and form of capitalist rule and think it is going to mean that something positive is bound to emerge from this and in fact is just going to “fall into our lap.” We have to take up the tremendous challenge of repolarization—repolarization for revolution.
The “Weimar Republic” does need to be replaced, and superseded. The bourgeois republic—the rule of capitalism and imperialism, in its bourgeois-democratic form—is in fact a repressive system of rule, rooted in a whole network and process of exploitation and oppression, which brings untold, and unnecessary, suffering to millions, and literally billions, of people, throughout the world, including within the republic itself. It needs to be replaced and superseded, however, not by an even more grotesque and more openly murderous form of the same system, but by a radically new society, and a radically different kind of state, that will open the way and lead finally to the abolition of all forms of oppressive and repressive rule and all relations of domination and exploitation, throughout the world.
From that standpoint, and with an acute sense of the dangers that Trump poses, we extend the hand to every single person who wants to stop this fascist juggernaut dead in its tracks.
• SEND US PHOTOS & VIDEOS of high school walkouts, street protests, and other forms of mass protest by people refusing to accept Trump and a fascist America!
Let
them not fool you—with Obama’s soothing and comforting
talk of all of them being on the “same team” and the
election being merely but an “intramural scrimmage,” some
saying Trump is “softening” on his hatred and hated
policies, and that he does not really intend carrying them through,
and yet others saying “let’s give him a chance.”
NO!
Miles Solay of revolutionary rock band Outernational reading the important statement from www.revcom.us: "In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America."
Seattle, November 20: 500 people rally and march in “#DumpTheTrump #NotMyPresident” protest. Photo: Special to revcom.us
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, November 16. (Credit: Devyn Giannetti/Twitter)
A diverse crowd of about 300 people marched from Wright Park, Tacoma, Washington, down a major avenue blocking all four lanes of traffic, November 19.
New York City, Jimmy Van Bramer, a member of the city council, led a march from Queens across the Queensboro Bridge to Trump Tower in Manhattan. Photo: Special to revcom.us
Los Angeles, November 12.
Protests Continue Against the Election of Fascist Trump
Updated December 5, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Updates Through December 4
2,000 Protest in Hollywood, CA - Seeking A Way Forward to Stop Trump and His Fascist Regime
Photo: Special to revcom.us
From a reader: On Sunday, December 4, 2,000 people marched down Hollywood Blvd. and rallied at the CNN headquarters in opposition to Trump. The event attracted a cross section of middle strata people, many of them electoral progressives, "third party" Greens and democratic socialists. The event was coined "Bernie's Unity March" and "Our Political Revolution, Phase Two." Many hundreds carried the posters with the slogan “In The Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America.” We had a plan to distribute Revolution newspaper to everyone at the event, and people were greatly appreciative as well as challenged. We got over $500 in donations for the 700 Revolution newspapers, 325 posters and 600 flyers that were distributed.
At CNN, the Revolution Club led hundreds in pledging “In the name of humanity, we REFUSE to accept a fascist America.” One of the main slogans of the march was "Love Trumps Hate, That's What Makes America Great," but that conclusion was being challenged by what the Club was exposing about “America Was NEVER Great,” the reality of the foundation of the country being genocide and slavery and America's continuing crimes. At the end of their speech, the Revolution Club clearly spelled why there was a need for revolution and that there is leadership for this revolution, concentrated in Bob Avakian.
Queens, New York City: Rally and March to Call for a Hate-Free Zone
Photo: Special to revcom.us
From a reader: On December 3, the South Asian immigrant group DRUM, with 42 organizations as co-sponsors and 26 organizations as endorsers, led an action in the Sunnyside and Jackson Heights neighborhoods of Queens to demand New York City be a hate-free zone. More than 300 people came out and it was a very diverse and determined group—a large number were South Asian and Arab and Muslim immigrants. There was a significant presence of Latin American immigrants, LGBT immigrant groups, and many white people there to express their strong opposition to the attacks and demonization of immigrants, Muslims, and gay people. There were people with homemade signs like “Organize, Not Normalize” and “Here to Stay, Here to Fight” and many against hate and for sanctuary for immigrants. Our crew got out the print issue of Revolution newspaper and the statement “In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America,” which was warmly received by the vast majority of the people there.
Banner in front of the Episcopal Church of Our Saviour in Silver Springs, Maryland, that replaced the one defaced by fascists. Photo: Robert Harvey/Facebook
Seattle Women March Against Hate
From a reader: On Saturday, December 3, about 5,000 people rallied and marched in a protest called Seattle Women March Against Hate. They gathered at Volunteer Park in an upscale neighborhood and from there marched to Cal Anderson Park in a student, LGBT, and youth neighborhood. The crowd was largely but not exclusively white and middle class, mostly women but also many men. One sector was older middle class women, and there were also many young women there. Overall there was a deep receptivity to the statement “In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America!” Revcom.us supporters got out about 1,500 copies of the statement and 170 of the latest print issue of Revolution newspaper. This march of thousands was important, but the resistance needs to go to a whole other level to prevent the consolidation of fascism.
Updates Through November 25
“Black Friday” Protests
On “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving, there were protests around the country against Trump, supporting the Standing Rock struggle against modern-day genocide of Native Americans and environmental destruction, denouncing murders by police, and opposing exploitation of minimum-wage workers. We received this snapshot from a reader on the protest in Seattle:
“November 25: Over 1,000 people marched and blocked the main streets and intersections of the downtown shopping core on Black Friday, declaring it ‘Black Lives Matter!’ Friday and chanting ‘No Trump, No KKK, No Racist USA.’ Over 1,500 copies of the statement ‘In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America’ were distributed along with Revolution newspaper.
“The response of shoppers and tourists was highly polarized, with some people crossing police lines and reaching over barricades to grab the statement, while a smaller but more vocal minority angrily shouted ‘No!’ and ‘Get over it’ or got offended that others would call Trump a fascist and refuse to accept his victory.”
Day Before Thanksgiving
The night before Thanksgiving, November 23, 200 people marched through the streets of Minneapolis. They chanted, in Spanish and English, against Trump’s threats to immediately deport millions of immigrants and his whipping up of open racism, and called for cities to become sanctuaries for immigrants.
Earlier in the day, at Towson University near Baltimore, 100 students mobilized to oppose a campus rally called by Trump supporters. Among the few who showed up for the pro-Trump rally was one wearing a “Nazi-esque arm band with a T in the place of a swastika.”
“Fuck Donald Trump” Show
On Thanksgiving Day, Portland’s Roseland Theater was the venue for two sold-out shows by the Compton rapper YG and his crew, who are on their Fuck Donald Trump tour. YG, along with Nipsey Hussle, had released a song and video titled “FDT (Fuck Donald Trump)” in the summer. According to Billboard.com, “During the evening performance, the artists didn’t water down their message, taking the opportunity in each of their sets to start ‘F—k Donald Trump’ chants. Sad Boy, perhaps best known for describing the discrimination Hispanics face in L.A. on YG’s song ‘Blacks & Browns,’ exercised his freedom of speech by having his hype man wave Mexico’s flag as a signal of pride. It felt like a direct middle finger to Trump and his stance on immigration.”
Going Up Against Emboldened Fascists
Trump has energized and emboldened fascists, racists, and reactionaries of all kinds. And people are taking this on in various ways from their viewpoints. These are some recent examples:
» Silver Springs, Maryland: In the Thanksgiving Day parade here, a number of people carried a banner saying “Silver Springs Loves and Welcomes Immigrants!” The story behind this banner involves people coming together to make a stand against Trump-inspired fascist attacks on immigrants. The Episcopal Church of Our Saviour has a congregation that is mainly made up of immigrants, from 50 different countries. A few days after the election, the church’s pastor found that a banner in Spanish that usually hangs outside the church was defaced with an ugly message saying “Trump Nation. Whites Only.” The same words were also painted on the church’s brick walls. When the pastor, Robert Harvey, was leaving the church a few days later, he found that someone had put a new banner up outside a church with a very different message—this was the banner carried in the Thanksgiving Day parade, and which received cheers from the crowds lining the parade route. The banner was the work of a middle school teacher who said that at first she was overwhelmed by “a feeling of hopelessness and impotence” after Trump’s election—but when she heard about the fascist graffiti on the church, she decided she must act and raised the money for the banner. Other people also came to the church with flowers and messages of support for immigrants.
» Burlington, North Carolina: A group that declares they are for preserving “Southern rights” announced a rally at the municipal building on Saturday, November 26. Immediately, people opposed to these reactionaries mobilized a counter-protest, including religious people speaking out against those using the Bible as justification for their poison. Rev. Holly Lux-Sullivan, an organizer of the action, said about the group promoting “Southern rights”: “The things their website says and things their founders say sound very much to me like thinly veiled racism, homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny, and so we wanted to be here to speak for love and justice for all. We are here about love and peace, and not exclusion of forgetting that part of Southern heritage was a horrific time of slavery, and we don’t want to go back to the ‘way things were.’”
» Albuquerque, New Mexico: On November 23, at a Smith’s grocery store, a woman began harassing another shopper who wore a hijab, yelling things like “You’re a terrorist, get out of here.” One witness posted on Facebook: “The entire store banded together and yelled at the Nazi to get out. Smith’s employees dragged the racist out. They later escorted the woman to her car past the screaming Nazi.”
Rally at Adam Yauch Park in Brooklyn, NY, November 20. Photo: @DanielSquadron/Twitter
» Brooklyn, NY: On November 20, hundreds of people gathered at Adam Yauch Park to make their voices heard against fascist graffiti, including swastikas and the words “Go Trump,” that had appeared in the park after the election. Adam Yauch, who died in 2012, was a founding member of the rap group the Beastie Boys. Yauch spoke out against racism, including on national TV at the MTV Music Awards in 1998 when he denounced “racism that comes from the United States toward Muslim people and towards Arabic people.” The rally included Jewish and Muslim religious leaders. According to a tweet from the Beastie Boys, the action was meant to “denounce hate and intimidation in Brooklyn and across the country.”
~~~~~~~~~~
In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America! at the Doo Dah Parade in Pasadena, CA
From a reader:
November 20—The Pasadena Doo Dah Parade is a popular farcical and flamboyant parade held in Pasadena, California, each year. Absurd and unique participants such as the Shopping Cart Drill Team, the Bastard Sons of Lee Marvin, and the Men of Leisure Synchronized Nap Team form contingents, and thousands of people line the streets to watch and have fun.
On Monday night, November 21, people from a number of environmental groups used a high-powered projector to project huge images and text onto the front of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters to protest Trump’s stand on climate change. Trump appointed Myron Ebell—who denies that human-caused climate change is happening, and is close to the coal industry—to head the transition at the EPA and who may be named its head. (See “Trump’s Victory—A Disaster for the Environment Requiring Massive Resistance,” at revcom.us) Messages projected onto the EPA building included “Don’t Let a Climate Denier Take Over the EPA” and could be clearly seen from the building across the street—the Trump Hotel.
As protests have continued around the country this week, one thing to note is the fact that people are taking it to the streets not only in larger cities but smaller areas as well, like Bozeman, Montana, where hundreds marched last Sunday; Providence, Rhode Island; Columbus, Ohio; Gainesville, Wilton Manors, and Palm Beach, Florida, where people marched around Trump’s estate; Newport News, Virginia; Palm Springs, California; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Charlotte, North Carolina; Springfield, Missouri; and Northampton, Massachusetts. A revcom.us reader who is helping this site cover the nationwide protests observed, “I personally believe that some of these protests in smaller towns and smaller cities, and in spread out parts of the country (like Bozeman, Montana) are ... important indicators of the moment we’re in.”
On Tuesday, November 22, the group IfNotNow, a U.S. Jewish organization that opposes Israel’s occupation of Palestine, protested outside Pennsylvania Republican Senator Pat Toomey’s office to demand that he denounce Steve Bannon, the virulently white supremacist fascist Trump chose as his chief strategist. A first year rabbinical college student, who said her grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, said: “We have seen this before, and we know the most dangerous thing we could possibly do right now is to wait it out and see what happens.” Many people carried white roses—the symbol of a group of students and professors in Germany who resisted Hitler and the Nazis.
The statement “In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America” is getting out in some of these protests—and it urgently needs to spread much, much more broadly, into the hands of hundreds of thousands in the protests, through social media, and other ways. On Sunday night, November 20, there was a “#DumpTheTrump #NotMyPresident” rally and march of 500 people in Seattle. A reader wrote about an important part of this scene: “TV news coverage included a revcom.us supporter reading out the statement ‘In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America’ on the mic. After she did, she then asked people to join her in making a pledge: She then ‘mic checked’ the full title of the statement. Stacks of the statement were passed into the crowd to distribute and also take back to people’s communities. About 1,000 copies total were got out during the whole event.”
Updates through November 20:
As
Trump and the incoming fascist regime forge ahead toward taking over
the White House, protests have continued across the country—on
the campuses and in the streets and with a broad range of people
raising their voices in different ways.
Throughout
the week of November 14, thousands of high school and college
students walked out, rallied, and marched, taking the lead in
protesting Trump. On Monday, more than 1,000 high school students
from at least a dozen highs schools in Oakland, California, marched
out of classes. At the rally downtown, an Asian student got repeated
cheers when he said, “We are in protest against regressive
policy, regarding religion, abortion—who is to say you can’t
do what you want with your own body? We are not here just to protest Trump, we are here to protest Pence—the man who as part of the Republican Party opposes gay marriage, abortion... We are here to organize. We are here to say to the system, fuck you!"
In
Silver Springs, Maryland, a suburb north of Washington, DC, 500
youths from five high schools joined together—chanting “we
reject the president-elect” and blocking downtown traffic.
Hundreds of students marched on the state capitol in Denver,
Colorado, and on city hall in Portland, Oregon. In Los Angeles, 4,000
students from at least a dozen high schools—many expressing
fear and anger that friends and relatives who are undocumented are
now under even greater threat of deportation—walked out. The
next day, November 15, more than 1,000 middle and high school
students walked out in DC and protested outside Trump International
Hotel. Among the other student protests that day, hundreds of high
school and college students joined together in New York City and
marched down busy 5th Avenue in cold, rainy weather. The high school
walkouts continued through the week.
Anti-Trump Jewish Protesters Occupy Trump Transition HQ in Washington, DC, Shut Down Bannon in New York
On November 17, anti-Trump Jewish protesters occupied Trump’s transition headquarters in Washington, DC.
On Sunday night November 20, in New York City, hundreds of Jewish people and others, including Muslim people, staged a loud protest for hours outside a conference of the Zionist Organization of America where Trump's Senior Counselor Steve Bannon was supposed to speak. They defied repeated threats by the NYPD to arrest them. Some protesters emphasized unity with Muslims targeted by Trump. Many signs invoked the legacy of the Holocaust, Hitler's genocide against Jews and others in Nazi Germany. Mainstream news is reporting that Bannon did not show up for the event.
Oakland, CA, November 14, more than 1,000 high school students from at least a dozen highs schools marched out of classes. Photos: Special to revcom.us
Portland, Oregon, November 16, Protesters chant before approximately 100 students march through the streets. Photo: AP
Jackson, Mississippi, November 16. Students protest at Millsaps College. Photo: AP
Brown University, November 16. Hundreds of students walked out of their classrooms and activities at 3 p.m.
November 16, Yale University students to join together and declare Yale as a "Sanctuary Campus" protecting undocumented immigrant college students. Photo: Eino Sierpe
Rutgers, NJ, November 16. Hundreds of Rutgers University students block College Ave. in New Brunswick. Photo: AP
Wichita Falls, Texas, November 16. Students from Midwestern State University march in protest. Photo: AP
The
high point of protests on college campuses during the week was on
Wednesday, November 16, when thousands of students walked out of
classes, held rallies, and marched around campuses and through city
streets demanding that their schools become sanctuaries—places
of protection for undocumented immigrants, LGBT people, and others
who Trump has targeted for increased repression. Students were called
to action via social media hashtag #SanctuaryCampus. Walkouts
reportedly took place in more than 100 campuses, including NYU and
Columbia in New York City; Ivy League universities like Yale,
Harvard, Princeton, and Brown; Notre Dame; Stanford; University of
Southern California; Oregon State University at Corvallis; University
of Memphis; Rutgers in New Jersey; University of Michigan; Oberlin in
Ohio; and Middlebury College in Vermont
Other
marches and various kinds of protests took place in cities across the
country, including demos of hundreds in smaller cities like Tacoma,
Washington, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. In Seattle, 5,000 people,
mainly white and middle class, held hands to create a 2.8-mile human
chain around Green Lake.; One participant said, “We just want
to come together and let everybody know we will protect you, we are
here to fight for you. We will not stop.”
There
were a number of actions where people went directly up against
fascists and white supremacists. There were several such protests on
Saturday, November 19. In Austin, Texas, several hundred people
confronted a racist group calling themselves “White Lives
Matter,” some of them armed, who were protesting a new monument
recognizing contributions of Black people to the state.
In downtown
Washington, DC, several hundred people protested outside the Ronald
Reagan Building and International Trade Center, where the National
Policy Institute, a white supremacist group, was celebrating Trump’s
victory. New York City, Jimmy Van Bramer, a member of the city
council, led a march from Queens across the Queensboro Bridge to
Trump Tower in Manhattan—Van Bramer had received a threatening
email after announcing the march, saying in part, “Rest of the
people from Queens do not agree with your homosexual lifestyle, so
get the fuck out of this country, you fucking traitor...Execution is
the penalty for a traitor...”
People
with voices of influence, including in the arts and entertainment
communities, have been speaking out. Fashion designer Sophie
Theallet, who has designed dresses for Michelle Obama, declared
publicly that she refuses to have anything to do with designing for
Melania Trump, saying, “The rhetoric of racism, sexism, and
xenophobia unleashed by her husband’s presidential campaign are
incompatible with the shared values we live by... I encourage my
fellow designers to do the same.” Singer John Legend said,
“Trump is saying Hitler-level things in public... And I feel
like it’s dangerous for us to be complacent.” Read other
voices of conscience here.
The
protests and different expressions of resistance that have been
happening are significant—and need to not only continue but
grow and become even more determined and broad. In the midst of this,
it is very important that the revcom.us statement “In the Name
of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America” has been
getting out and taken up by all kinds of people. (For example, see a
report
from the Revolution Club, Los Angeles about school walkouts in that
city.) The statement needs to spread much more widely throughout
society.
Students Across the U.S. Protest to Demand Campuses Become Sanctuaries for Immigrants
As part of his fascist program, Trump has vowed to build a border wall, throw out Obama’s policy of deferring deportations for some undocumented youth, and immediately deport millions of immigrants. Members of his circle have talked about instituting a “registry” of Muslims in the U.S., even making comparisons with the rounding up of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry in the U.S. into concentration camps during World War 2. In the face of this, on Wednesday, November 16, thousands of college and university students across the U.S. walked out of classes, rallied, and marched to demand that their campuses become sanctuaries for immigrants.
Columbia University, New York City, November 16. Photo: Special to revcom.us
Students were called to action with the social media hashtag #SanctuaryCampus, and walkouts reportedly took place in more than 100 campuses, including NYU and Columbia in New York City; Ivy League university like Yale, Harvard, and Brown; Notre Dame; Stanford; University of Southern California; Oregon State University at Corvallis; University of Memphis; Rutgers in New Jersey; University of Michigan; Oberlin in Ohio; and Middlebury College in Vermont.
A student involved in organizing the protest at NYU told the NY Post: “'We as students are walking out today because we recognize undocumented students are among the most vulnerable on our campus and so we are rallying to say that, as citizens or students with privilege, we will put our bodies on the line between them and a Trump presidency.”
At the University of Memphis, where about 100 students took part, chants included "Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here" and "No racists, no KKK, no fascist USA.” That “...no fascist USA” chant was heard on different campuses, including at Rutgers, where more than 1,000 students, teachers, and staff marched on the campus and took to the streets.
The protests on the campuses need to continue, spread, and become even more determined, as crucial part of the overall resistance against fascist America. As we said in “To ALL Revolutionaries, Students, Professors, and Others on Campuses! With the election of Trump, we confront a FASCIST America, No Less!” [link]: “Establish Trump-free and fascist-free zones! We need teach-ins and sit-ins! We need massive multifaceted resistance to the whole program represented by Trump, any acts of white supremacy and misogyny, any attacks on immigrants and Muslims, and other manifestations of fascism.”
Anti-Trump Protests Continue for a 6th and 7th Straight Day Around the Country
Students took the lead in carrying forward protests against Trump for a sixth and seventh straight day. Hundreds of high school students around the country organized walkouts.
Monday, November 14
Students walked out of schools in California, Colorado, Maryland, Washington and other states. In Los Angeles, more than 1,000 students marched out of classes. Many said they have relatives and friends in the country illegally who they fear will be deported. The United Teachers Los Angeles union applauded the walkouts, saying the union "stands proudly" with the students.
Los Angeles: High school students protest in front of Los Angeles City Hall, November 14. Photo: AP
In Oakland, a citywide protest drew more than 1,000 students from at least a dozen high schools. In Denver, 200 middle and high school students walked out of two charter schools to march to the state capitol. In Silver Spring, Maryland, a northern suburb of Washington, DC, youth from five high schools all walked out and marched together, 500 strong, chanting "we reject the president-elect" and blocking traffic on a busy downtown street. In Portland, Oregon, hundreds of students from at least three schools walked out and marched to City Hall.
Thousands of students from high schools all over Los Angeles walked out to protest the election of Donald Trump. In some schools, they did this in real defiance against school administrators trying to prevent students from walking out. In one school, they had a large sign in front of the school that said, “Don’t Walk Out, WALK IN.” Other schools sent home letters to parents so that the parents could stop the youth who wanted to walk out. One school in particular made an announcement that said, “Students should remain on campus where they’re safe. Ignorance can often lead to violence: please understand that the greatest way to overcome ignorance is through education.” Despite these efforts of the administrators in different schools, over 4,000 students from different high schools walked out and marched to City Hall. Read a report from the Los Angeles Revolution Club
LA Revolution Club on Election Night at UCLA
Election Day: We went out to an event at UCLA on election night where they were showing the election results and got out “How We Can Win.” There were hundreds of students there, most of whom were rooting for Hillary (we could tell because they yelled in approbation every time Hillary won a state). We misassesed the potential for something to erupt there and we left early, but then heard that this event turned into a protest. It went through Westwood where someone set fire to a Trump piñata and it ended up at the dorm area, where I and another comrade caught up with it. It was dying down by this point but there were still a couple hundred students sitting together chanting, “Love Trumps Hate.” We pulled out the American rag, stepped on it and did some agitation, saying that America was never great! Trump is an open fascist, and we need to resist him and what he stands for, and get organized for an actual revolution. I called on people to take a pamphlet from us and to join the Revolution Club. Many people were listening intently. Read more
Tuesday, November 15
Washington, D.C., more than 1,000 middle school and high school students staged a walkout and protested outside of Trump International Hotel, holding signs that read "Boycott Bigotry" and "Stronger Together." The demonstrations were organized by Wilson High School students.
Just outside of D.C. in Beltsville, Maryland, students walked out of High Point High School and held a sit-in, blocking major roads for more than half an hour. Students held an anti-Trump protest at Ohio State.
Hundreds of high school and college students in New York City came out in cold, rainy weather and took to the streets again, marching down 5th Avenue.
Sunday, November 13:
Youth, together with the Revolution Club in Los Angeles, protest Trump at CNN building in Hollywood.
Saturday, November 12:
Tens of thousands marched in cities from coast to coast. This
day saw the largest protests since Tuesday’s election—with
over 10,000 in Los Angeles and more than 10,000 in New York City. For
the fifth night, in Portland, Oregon, protesters went up against the
police who attacked and arrested demonstrators.
One demonstrator in Los
Angeles was quoted in the press, expressing the sentiment of many in
the crowd: “If you’re gay, if you’re LGBT, if
you’re Muslim, if you’re Latin, if you’re special
needs, if you’re female, it’s a much unsafer place now.
What is happening today [protests] is going to be the normal for a
while, because we’re not going to just sit back and watch our
rights being taken away, our health care being taken away.”
In Cincinnati,
anti-Trump demonstrators were joined by hundreds of people protesting
the hung jury in the murder trial of a University of Cincinnati cop
who shot and killed Sam DuBose, a Black man, in July 2015.
There were protests
with thousands of people in other big cities, like Chicago, Miami,
and Atlanta, as well as demonstrations of hundreds in smaller cities
like Detroit; Minneapolis; Kansas City, Missouri; Olympia,
Washington; Worcester, Massachusetts; Iowa City, Iowa; Dayton, Ohio;
Oklahoma City; Salt Lake City; Providence, Rhode Island;
and Las Vegas.
Friday, November 11:
On Friday, for a fourth night in a row, thousands took to the
street across the country in protests against Trump—some
disrupting traffic and blocking interstate highways, some going into
the early morning hours of Saturday. Cities included: New York; Los
Angeles; Miami; Chicago; Portland, Oregon; Atlanta; Miami; Iowa City; Washington, DC; New Haven, Connecticut; Orlando; Boston;
Asheville, North Carolina; Nashville; Columbus, Ohio; San Diego;
Denver; Kansas City, Missouri; Norfolk, Virginia; Philadelphia; and
Detroit
The New York Times
reported that demonstrators in Atlanta rushed over a bridge to block
a highway, and in front of the Georgia State Capitol, a U.S. flag was
set on fire as protesters “revising Mr. Trump’s campaign
slogan, chanted, ‘America was never great.’”
In Los Angeles, a
protest of 3,000 people who blocked the 101 Freeway and marched
through downtown went into early Saturday; and police arrested around
200 people. Thousands marched in Miami, surrounding cars and blocking
both lanes of Interstate 395 and then went through downtown.
In Iowa City, hundreds of demonstrators marched through downtown and shut down
Interstate 80; earlier in the day, 200 high school students walked
out of class and marched through downtown. At the protest in Dallas,
people dragged and kicked a Trump piñata through the streets.
Chicago, November 12. Photo: Special to revcom.us
Cincinnati, OH, November 12. Anti-Trump demonstrators were joined by hundreds of people protesting
the hung jury in the murder trial of a University of Cincinnati cop
who shot and killed Sam DuBose, a Black man, in July 2015. Photo: @DariceChapel
Los Angeles, November 10. Photo: twitter/@SophiaArmen
Columbus, OH, November 10. Photo: twitter/@_miabarnes
Minneapolis, November 10. Photo: twitter@bengarvin
American University, Washington DC, burning the U.S. flag. November 9. Photo: twitter/@kneeczarr
Thursday,
November 10
For
a third night after the election, protests spread across the country
in response to the Trump election. CNN reported that “Tens
of thousands filled the streets in at least 25 U.S. cities
overnight.” Thousands rallied in front of Trump Tower in
Manhattan. Hundreds marched in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Los
Angeles; there were protests in Madison and Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, and Dallas, Houston, and Austin, Texas. Protests took
place in Columbus, Ohio; Greensboro, North Carolina; Salt Lake City,
Utah; Louisville, Kentucky; Indianapolis; Athens Georgia; and Tampa,
Florida.
Thousands of protesters stepped into the streets in Portland, Oregon with determination, not backing down in the face of the riot police that attacked with pepper spray and rubber bullets—and going up against vilification by the media and officials for their righteous resistance.
High
school students in the Bay Area, from San Francisco to the East Bay
to surrounding suburbs, walked out of school in their thousands.
Thousands occupied the streets of Oakland, and there were fires and
clashes with police.
Protests
continued in college and university campuses all over, from large
schools to small—from Michigan State University to Texas State
University and elsewhere. One correspondent wrote, “Two
dozen students at Antelope Valley College [in southern California]
organized a rally at library plaza. We chanted ‘racist sexist
anti-gay Republican fascist go away” and shouted calls for
people to fight in defense of immigrants, the gay and lesbian
community, Muslims and women! At one point students took up the chant
‘always so full of hate, America was NEVER great.’”
According
to the AP, “A
Louisiana University football coach disciplined four players in
response to a locker room video showing members of the team dancing
and singing the lyrics of the a rap song by YG and Nipsey Hussle called FDT ‘Fuck Donald Trump’
and the video was made sometime shortly before Tuesday’s
election in which Trump was elected president.”
Protesters
represented a wide range of perspectives. Many of the signs and
chants included defiant outrage at Trump’s attacks on
immigrants (“I will not live in fear,” “Fight back,
stand up,” “¡Si se puede!”). A Trump effigy
was set on fire outside Los Angeles City Hall. Lady Gaga, Mark Ruffalo, and Cher were among
the thousands protesting outside Trump Tower in NYC late on election
night.
A
correspondent in Seattle, where 5,000 people were in the streets on
Tuesday night, reported: The
feeling was that of the despair and shock hanging in the air being
transformed into activity and brave resistance. A backdrop to this
was a massive array of armed pigs in riot gear, on bicycles, on
motorcycles, and in cars...”
We
continue to receive reports from protests and will update this page
as we hear more.
November 9, Day After Election
Protests vs. Trump Spread in Streets and Campuses Across the Country
Protests spread—November 9, 2016
On the day after the election of fascist Trump as president, protests continued and spread in cities and on campuses across the U.S.
In the morning, protesters were out in front of the Massachusetts State House in Boston, and later in the day thousands of college students and youth rallied downtown and marched through the streets.
In the evening, thousands of people took to the busy Manhattan streets in New York City. In Chicago, according to a correspondent, “Thousands of angry young protesters of all nationalities swarmed the area around Trump Tower. They marched back and forth over major streets around the Trump Tower, including taking over all six lanes of Michigan Avenue on the Magnificent Mile. At one point crowds broke through the police lines guarding Trump Tower.” The protesters then shut down Lakeshore Drive, a major multi-lane thoroughfare. People were out in the streets Oakland and San Jose, California; Tempe, Arizona; Portland, Oregon; and various other cities.
New York City (Photo Revolution/revcom.us)
Sit-in at Trump Tower, Chicago (Photo:@ShararehDrury/Twitter)
In Austin, Texas, as reported by one correspondent, “Hundreds of University of Texas students gathered on the campus Wednesday and set off on a powerful march through downtown Austin. ‘Out of your jobs and into the streets,’ ‘Hey, hey, ho, ho, Donald Trump has got to go,’ ‘Si se puede,’ and other chants rang out as protesters temporarily blocked Austin’s busy Congress Avenue bridge. Many protesters carried homemade signs, including one that read ‘America was Never Great.’”
Students from Fisk University, a historically Black school in Nashville, Tennessee, marched to the state capitol and blocked an on-ramp to a freeway. At the American University in Washington, D.C., hundreds of students protested in front of the campus center, and several U.S. flags were burned—while other pro-Trump protesters tried to stop the flag burning and shouted “USA, USA.”
Albany High School students at Sather Gate, UC Berkeley. (Photo: Special to revcom.us/Revolution)
There were walkouts at high schools in different cities, sometimes joining with college students and others. A correspondent in the San Francisco Bay Area reported, “Berkeley High School students and Albany High School students broke out of school today and marched to UC Berkeley.” In Colorado Springs, known as a “military town” with a major Air Force base nearby, students from the University of Colorado campus and Palmer High School joined together to march through downtown.
Protests erupted immediately after the election results were announced:
On college campuses and in cities around the country, furious, defiant protesters took to the streets expressing outrage and resistance in immediate response to the Trump election. And outrage took expression in the Twitter feed: #notmypresident.
As Donald Trump took the stage to deliver his presidential acceptance speech early Wednesday morning, protesters took to the streets of Manhattan. Other street protests broke out in Oakland, Portland, and downtown Los Angeles. Protesters outside the White House chanted "Fuck Donald Trump!"
In Berkeley, a correspondent reports: As the election returns were coming in, at least 5,000 UC Berkeley students gathered to watch, before a giant screen set up in the center of the campus. As it became clear Trump was winning, revolutionaries marched through the crowd, “1,2,3,4, slavery genocide and war, 5,6,7,8, America was never great!” “It’s time, to get organized, for an actual revolution!” rang through the crowd, getting out flyers with the memes “People say ‘don’t you have to accept Majority Rule?’ The majority for a long time in the US favored slavery. Should people have confined themselves to ‘working within the system?’ HELL NO.” After Clinton’s campaign announced she would make a statement in the morning, and the giant screen was shut down, hundreds started marching off the campus, to the streets, towards Oakland—chanting “not our president”, and “Fuck Donald Trump.” Protesters stormed onto a freeway and shut it down.
Protests broke out at other University of California campuses, including Santa Cruz, Davis, and San Diego. Hundreds rallied at San Francisco State.
At the University of Oregon campus in Eugene, hundreds of University of Oregon students marched and gathered in an anti-Trump protest in response to the presidential election results. Students rallied on campus and spoke out against Trump.
Social media has reports of protests at other schools coast-to-coast including Columbia in NYC, Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles, and the University of Pittsburg.
From a former prisoner who is now an emancipator of humanity:
For individual orders: at Revolution Books NYC, Revolution Books Berkeley, and Insight Press
Will be available soon at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent bookstores
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Right now more than ever, as society is roiling at the prospect of a new fascist era, it is necessary to get THE NEW COMMUNISM by Bob Avakian out everywhere, everywhere people are rising up and looking for the way forward. This includes among the people who have caught the most hell under this system whether a Democrat or a Republican has been in the White House but whose oppression can take a dangerous, genocidal leap with murdering pigs and racist mobs being further encouraged and unleashed by the election of Donald J. Trump.
Many at the bottom of this society, who have the incredible potential to change the course of history, have continued to fight and kill each other even as a “final solution” team is being put together by their real enemy. We don’t have to accept this and just hope for the best. They can and must be a backbone force for a revolution, a real and necessary all-out revolution that aims for nothing less than the liberation of all of humanity—and we can’t shy away from our responsibility to fight for them, and with them, to be that force that they have to be. They’ve counted for nothing to those who have run this system and they will be counted for even less with fascism’s rise to power, but these are our people and even with all the fucked up shit that they’re caught up in, the potential for them to be emancipators of all of humanity is right there just beneath the surface—it’s in the understanding, the method and approach that they have the ability to grasp right there in the pages of this book. People who seriously grapple with everything that is concentrated in THE NEW COMMUNISM can come out the other end as the fiercest most committed fighters for a whole new world. This book brings to life the need and the possibility to radically change human society not just because it moves you to be outraged at the horrors of this world, but because in this book you will find the method and approach for digging deep to unearth the reasons for those horrors and how to uproot the shit that’s causing them.
Gangbangers, prisoners, basic youths selling dope to get by, all those who feel that the only thing they got going for themselves is the fear that other people have for them can be inspired to transform by getting into this book, not because it wags a finger at them and condescendingly tells them “you’ve done wrong” but because it shows them that the world doesn’t have to be this way, that there is a way out, that they are capable of much greater things than the shit they’re caught up in, and that they have the leadership we all need in Bob Avakian and the Revolutionary Communist Party, taking the risk and the responsibility to play the vanguard role that is needed now more than ever.
I have a deep understanding that this is possible because I myself have been caught up in all the dangerous, life-stealing shit that goes on among Black and Brown people and continues even after having been captured and thrown behind prison walls. Internalized all the bad things that were said about people like me, I did the harmful things that makes people fearful of us down here. I changed because I engaged Bob Avakian. I changed because rather than fear or feel sorry for people like me, BA saw our revolutionary potential and has been fighting to get us to rise to meet that potential, and I changed because people donated money to help get the works of BA into my hands. If you want to see the people this system has no future for other than prison or an early death come forward in the fight to remake the world, then you have to help get THE NEW COMMUNISM into their hands.
The truth is that win or lose, the struggle ahead will involve a tremendous amount of sacrifice and humanity’s best chance of survival will largely depend on whether or not a critical mass of frontline forces is steeped in revolutionary theory, scientific theory they can understand, grab ahold of and wield, theory that they can get from THE NEW COMMUNISM. People from all walks of life and different sections of society have to contribute in any way possible to make that happen.
Donating funds is an incredibly important way to contribute right now because getting this out in the biggest way possible is one of the most urgent needs immediately before us. People who need this revolution the most, more often than not, cannot even afford to buy a book, even when that book contains the way out of the miserable conditions they find themselves in. And frankly, we can’t pay for these books out of thin air, it’s going to take massive funding. If you have the means, reach deep into your conscience and deep into your heart and give as much as you can to make it possible for those that this system treats as human garbage to get their hands on THE NEW COMMUNISM by Bob Avakian. We have the ability to change the way we think and treat each other, to be the people of tomorrow as we fight the reactionary forces of today.
You don’t have to live through it to be able to see that people who are currently shooting each other and living from one crime to the next can transform themselves, and you don’t have to live through it to be able to help bring about that transformation. Right now, you can help forge the force that is needed not only to resist fascism, but to get rid of the whole goddamn system from which it arose by donating as generously as possible to get THE NEW COMMUNISM into their hands.
In the face of Donald Trump’s election, revcom.us put out a call to “REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America,” saying, “Don’t Conciliate... Don’t Accommodate... Don’t Collaborate.”
Let’s break these terms down, and look at some history:
Definition: “Conciliating” means trying to pacify an antagonist by glossing over crucial differences and seeking “common ground.” Nowadays it goes like this: one after another, Democratic politicians—Bernie too!—declare their willingness to “work with Trump where we have common ground,” like rebuilding the U.S. infrastructure and creating jobs.
Some history: After Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party came to power in Germany in 1933, they organized major road-building and other public works projects, and later employed even more people by cranking up military production. Some celebrated this as “The German Economic Miracle.” But this was part of Hitler consolidating his political power and popularity, and getting ready for World War 2. It was not separate from his persecution and extermination of the Jews, Roma, and others, nor from unleashing his war machine on neighboring countries, killing tens of millions—it was completely bound up with that.
Those who “found common ground” helped legitimize one of the most murderous regimes in human history. And those who seek common ground with Trump are legitimizing his whole package of persecution of Muslims, mass deportations, violence against women, destruction of the environment and much more, regardless of any “criticisms” they may make of this (if they dare).
Lesson: Don’t Conciliate—Don’t delude yourself or others with talk about “common ground.” Recognize and call out this fascist onslaught for what it is and fight them hard, now, before they have a chance to completely lock society down.
Read, Sign & Distribute The New Updated Refuse Fascism Call to Action:
Definition: “Accommodating” means accepting and adapting yourself to the new situation. “Go along to get along, don’t take any risks, learn to live with it... and maybe you can do something positive along the way.”
Some history: When the Nazis took power, most influential Germans went on with their “normal” lives. Many formerly avant-garde or “leftist” artists “kept working”—even if it meant producing art for Nazi-themed-and-organized shows. Professors were silent as their Jewish colleagues were driven out of the universities, and then into concentration camps. A once-liberal cleric wrote “guidelines” targeting and isolating Christian pastors of Jewish descent. After the war he tried to justify this kind of behavior, saying “it was sometimes unavoidable first to emphasize that one was in agreement with the major goals of the state in order to gain any kind of hearing for what one was really aiming for.”
In reality, these people betrayed whatever “good things” they thought they were “really aiming for,” and set a horrible example for the broader population. Historian Robert Ericksen later asked whether the “ordinary Germans who became killers for the Nazi state felt that they had received permission from their churches or from their universities.”
Lesson: Don’t Accommodate—People must continue to organize and act with ever greater determination, defiance, and effectiveness to STOP Trump and his gang, taking bold measures, putting careers and bodies on the line to do that.
Definition: “Collaboration.” The logic of conciliation and accommodation leads directly to collaboration—actively working with the regime to carry out its objectives, sometimes out of sheer self-interest, sometimes with the deluded idea that you can “change things from within,” or at least “do a little bit of good.”
Some history: Under Nazi rule, all Jews were forced into crowded, walled-in ghettos with little food or sanitation... and then the regime began shipping people out from there to concentration camps, where they were worked to death or murdered.
The Nazi authorities worked with the Judenrat—councils of better-off Jewish people who acted as the “civil authority” inside the ghetto, and kept things running smoothly, including by selecting and putting people on the death trains. Some of the Judenrat thought that by doing this they would be in a position to “reason” with the Nazis so that, for instance, they would “only” murder criminal, or lower-class uneducated Jews and would spare the professionals who were more “valuable” to the German economy. Others thought they would at least save their own skins. What kind of logic is this?!? And the irony is that in both cases they were proved wrong—the Nazi death machine swept up and murdered every Jewish person it could, including finally the Judenrat themselves.
Lesson: Don’t collaborate, and don’t tolerate collaboration. Those who assist the regime in carrying out crimes against the people should be exposed, denounced, and ostracized.
* * *
Looking back on the bitter experience of conciliation, accommodation, and collaboration in Germany during the Nazi era, Martin Niemöller (a religious leader who at first went along with Hitler, then opposed him and was sent to a concentration camp) summed up:
“[We make] the excuse that ‘it would have cost me my head if I had spoken out.’ We preferred to keep silent.... I ask myself again and again, what would have happened, if in the year 1933 or 1934, 14,000 Protestant pastors and all Protestant communities in Germany had defended the truth until their deaths? If we had said back then, ‘It is not right when Hermann Göring simply puts 100,000 communists in concentration camps in order to let them die.’ I can imagine that perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 Protestant Christians would have had their heads cut off, but I can also imagine we would have rescued 30 to 40 million people, because that is what it [cost us].”
November 28, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On Tuesday, November 22, Donald Trump sat down for an interview with editors, columnists, and reporters at the New York Times, a newspaper which had been sharply critical of Trump during the election campaign.
Afterward, the Times ran an article headlined “Trump, In Interview, Moderates Views but Defies Conventions.” The article claimed that Trump was “dropping his vow to jail Hillary Clinton.” It stated he had “changed his mind about the value of waterboarding.” It assured readers that Trump is “pledging to have an open mind about climate change.” We were also informed that Trump had “vigorously denounced” the Nazi “alt-right” conference in Washington, DC, two days prior to the interview. And we were given Trump’s unchallenged assertion that his chief of strategy, notorious white supremacist Steve Bannon, was “a decent guy” and not “a racist.”
Other media followed with headlines like “Donald Trump changes his mind on climate change, Clinton, the press in meeting with The New York Times.”
To understand the roots and the dynamics of Trump's election, get into these two pieces by Bob Avakian:
The clear message: Trump was moderating his views now that the campaign was over and he was facing the challenges of actually governing. In short, Trump was moving toward the mainstream of U.S. establishment thinking.
But what the Times reported is not what Trump said during the meeting. The transcript of the meeting paints a totally different picture: it shows that Trump did not moderate his views. Instead, it shows that the Times had moderated its reporting on Trump, editing and mischaracterizing his comments to make him look less extreme, and more acceptable.
This is utter bullshit, intended to disarm and pacify people. Coming from the New York Times, it is a major step in the normalization of fascism. It covers up the reality that his fascist regime will be, if allowed to consolidate power, a catastrophe for humanity, writing that reality out of its coverage. This kind of accommodation and conciliation is totally outrageous and must be opposed!
These right-wing politicians (generally grouped within the Republican Party) can, will, and do actively mobilize this essentially fascist social base...yet, on the other side, the sections of the ruling class that are more generally represented by the Democratic Party are very reluctant to, and in fact resistant to, mobilizing...the base of people whose votes and support in the bourgeois political arena the Democrats seek to gain. This (Democratic Party) side of the ruling class generally is not desirous of—and in fact recoils at the idea of—calling that base into the streets, mobilizing them either to take on the opposing forces in the ruling class and their social base or in general to struggle for the programs that the Democratic Party itself claims to represent and actually in some measure does seek to implement....
As an amplification of the basic point here, it is important to recognize this: Within the framework of the capitalist-imperialist system, and with the underlying dynamics of this system, which fundamentally set the terms, and the confines, of “official” and “acceptable” politics, fascism—that is, the imposition of a form of dictatorship which openly relies on violence and terror to maintain the rule and the imperatives of the capitalist-imperialist system—is one possible resolution of the contradictions that this system is facing—a resolution that could, at a certain point, more or less correspond to the compelling needs of this system and its ruling class—while revolution and real socialism, aiming toward the final goal of communism, throughout the world, is also a possible resolution of these contradictions, but one that would most definitely not be acceptable to the capitalist-imperialist ruling class nor compatible with the imperatives of this system!
Bob Avakian, BAsics 3:11
What Did Donald Trump ACTUALLY Say to the NewYorkTimes?
* Trump NEVER said that he would not prosecute Hillary Clinton, never said it was wrong to threaten to prosecute her, or that a president doesn’t have the legal right to decide who gets prosecuted. What he said was that there are reports he wasn’t “enthused about” prosecuting Clinton, that he wanted to move forward and he didn’t mean the Clintons any harm. But he did not rule out further investigations or prosecutions, so this threat still hangs over Clinton and the Democrats, and how “interested” Trump is in pursuing Clinton could change.
* Trump NEVER said that he had changed his position on climate change (Trump has claimed that climate change is a “hoax” drummed up by China to hurt the U.S. economically, and has vowed to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords). Thomas Friedman of the New York Times introduced this issue, saying it was “very near and dear to my heart,” while noting that Trump should be concerned too because “You own some of the most beautiful links golf courses in the world.”
Trump responded with almost every bit of idiocy the extreme right uses to deny climate change: “the hottest day ever was in 1890,” “we’ve always had storms,” and “some very smart people” disagree that climate change is real. He joked that if the seas do rise (which would drive hundreds of millions of people from their homes), his Doral Resort might even be more valuable because it is a bit inland... and New YorkTimes staff laughed at this.
When asked directly if he was changing his position on the link between climate change and human activity, Trump claimed to “have an open mind,” and that there was “some connectivity.” But then he went on to talk extensively about how uncompetitive U.S. companies are, and how at the end of the day, his stance on climate change would depend on “how much it’s going to cost our companies” and affect their “competitiveness.”
The Times staff let all this go without challenge, and Friedman ended that part of the discussion with a feeble joke: “I’d hate to see the Royal Aberdeen [a famous golf course located near a Trump resort] underwater.” And then the Times summed all this up as Trump “moderating” his position!
* Trump NEVER said he won’t follow through on his threat to bring back waterboarding and even worse torture. When asked, he responded that he’d talked to a general who told him that he “never found it to be useful.” Then Trump quickly added, “I’m not saying that I’ve changed my mind.” He then went on to repeat his let’s torture campaign talking points: “Look, we have people that are chopping off heads and drowning people in steel cages and we’re not allowed to waterboard.” Then he explicitly left the door wide open to this vicious torture: “If it’s so important to the American people, I would go for it. I would be guided by that.”
* Trump’s repudiation of the alt-right was not “vigorous,” it was empty, and completely contradicted by his defense of Steve Bannon. Just three days earlier, the alt-right held a celebration of Trump’s election complete with racist, anti-Semitic, and genocidal speeches and people doing Nazi salutes while shouting “Heil Trump.” Trump lamely said “I disavow” and claimed he had “no idea” why these fascists were Seig Heiling his fascist regime. Then he defended Steve Bannon as a “great guy.” But Steve Bannon openly bragged in July that his Breitbart News is “the platform for the alt-right,” and has never backed away from that at all.
* On top of this, the Times did not even bother to ask Trump about his plans to immediately deport four million Mexican immigrants. The issue of banning people from Muslim countries from entering the U.S. never came up. Neither did Trump’s talk of instituting a Muslim registry, or the statement from General Michael Flynn—Trump’s pick for national security advisor—that “fear of Islam is rational.” The New York Times never asked Trump about his public bragging about sexually assaulting women. The editors and reporters didn’t utter a word about Trump’s central role in creating a lynch mob atmosphere in New York City against the Central Park 5, or about many other statements by Trump that pose life-and-death threats to millions.
After Criticizing Trump During the Campaign, Why Is the NewYorkTimes Now Whitewashing His Comments?
Prior to Trump’s election, the NewYorkTimes editorial board titled a major editorial: “The Sleaziness of Donald Trump.” Prominent Times columnist Thomas Friedman ended a column on Trump with “Electing such a man would be insanity.” Columnist Paul Krugman denounced “Donald Trump the anti-American.” Ross Douthat argued that Trump threatened “the systemic durability of the American-led order” and that defeating him was “a matter of life and death—for Americans and for human beings the world over.”
Even while these attacks stayed within the limits of arguing that Clinton would be a better leader for the U.S. empire, they stung and angered Trump. They cast an air of illegitimacy around his presidency. And they were part of the atmosphere in which tens of thousands of people took to the streets and far larger numbers embraced the hashtag #NotMyPresident. In that sense the opposition of the Times and similar forces potentially represented a serious obstacle for Trump and his crew in “normalizing” and consolidating their fascist takeover in the face of the hostility of large sections of the population, including the angry and anxious readership of the Times.
Trump’s Meeting: Setting New Terms for the Press—New York Times Accommodates
After being elected, Trump met with the NewYorkTimes to set terms for how the newspaper would cover his presidency. In particular, Trump insists the Times treat his transition to the presidency as normal, while covering over the fact that he is actually attempting to impose and consolidate a fascist regime.
The meeting transcript also makes clear that the Times seems to have willingly, and at times even enthusiastically, accommodated Trump’s objectives. From the opening words of publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the meeting was filled with slavish expressions of “gratitude” and “thanks,” punctuated by frequent friendly small talk and laughter. It was marked by an almost complete refusal by Times journalists to challenge any of Trump’s bald-faced lies, or even to defend a New YorkTimes columnist who Trump attacked during the interview. The tone throughout the interview was that of a love fest—the Times editors fawning on Trump, Trump calling the Times “a great American jewel.”
A fraternal—ruling class—cordiality was being forged. The terms: accepting the legitimacy of the Trump presidency, even as he continues to advocate a fascist program (softened only by some vague promises to “keep an open mind,” etc.).
It is important to note that not all Times reporters and columnists went along with this. At least one, Charles Blow, wrote in his column (“No, Trump, We Can’t Just Get Along”) that was soon trending on Twitter, “I will say proudly and happily that I was not at this meeting”—this is an example of refusing to be complicit that others need to learn from and build on.
But behind the camaraderie and the smiles are very high stakes, and sharp struggle within the U.S. ruling class. Before the election, fascist bullying and threatening the media had been a centerpiece of the Trump campaign for 15 months. Reporters were mocked and sexually degraded, denied access if they asked “challenging” questions, kept in pens at Trump rallies while crowds were whipped up into a frenzy against “the lying news media.” Individual reporters—particularly women, like MSNBC’s Katy Tur and others—were publicly singled out and denounced at rallies, to the point where the Secret Service had to provide Tur with protection. Reporters were assaulted, and many have said that they were in physical fear at Trump rallies. Those who wrote “critical” pieces were targeted by the pro-Trump troll army with extremely vile, violent, racist, and anti-Semitic online attacks.
The day before this interview, Trump met with broadcast media and ranted about what liars they were; the very morning of the interview he threatened to cancel it and referred to “the failing New YorkTimes.” During this interview, Trump was essentially telling the Times, “We can do this the nice way, or we can do it the hard way, but either way, you are going to go along with what I am doing or you are going to get run over.”
So why, after repeatedly criticizing Trump during the election, did the NewYorkTimes fawn over him, and whitewash what he actually said?
The NewYorkTimes is one of the major voices of the liberal or Democratic Party wing of the U.S. ruling class. During the election campaign, they felt that a Trump presidency would harm the interests of U.S. imperialism and undermine the social cohesion of U.S. society.
But now that Trump has been elected, the Times leadership and their key staff have been won over that the larger interests of the ruling class demand that they toe the line here, and they are more than willing to not just dial down their attacks, but, it seems, to bend over backward to normalize and legitimize Trump’s rule. Again, their key interest is in maintaining the legitimacy and stability of U.S. imperialism overall, and they are far more fearful of the kind of social upheaval and political instability that it would take to drive Trump out than of what Trump will do. The NewYorkTimes is also very aware that legitimating the “peaceful transfer of power through elections” is something the bourgeoisie upholds and promotes as one of the linchpins of the legitimacy of their rule.
At the same time, as Trump pursues his fascist agenda, and to the degree that generates opposition or runs into obstacles, the NewYorkTimes may again come to oppose Trump in various ways. Such opposition could lead the Trump fascists to attempt to take down or destroy the NewYorkTimes (and other institutions like it). At that point, defending a bourgeois institution like the NewYorkTimes may become a significant part of the struggle against Trump’s fascism and to defend the rights of the people, as part of preparing for an actual revolution to overthrow this entire system.
At this moment, however, the Times has closed ranks with Trump. This is criminal. Its efforts to normalize Trump, to calm the very justified anger and fear of its readership, must be exposed and repudiated. This is part of refusing to normalize Trump and building the struggle to prevent the consolidation and imposition of his fascist regime.
Reality Check:
Trump Is NOT "Being Reasonable," His Fascism Is Being Normalized
November 28, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Some people, especially people high up in the Democratic Party (and those who trail their wake) who formerly said that Trump was “unfit to be president” and “dangerous,” now say that Trump is starting to “see reason” and that he’s going back on what he said in the campaign. No! Trump has assembled a core team of straight-out fascists and bloodthirsty militarists, he protects the Nazi-lover Bannon, and every day he moves forward with his actual program. Trump may deceive people with his ability to talk out of two sides of his mouth—and people deceive themselves with their own wishful thinking; but truth is truth. And the truth is that Trump must NOT be allowed to consolidate his fascist regime and agenda.
Don’t “Normalize” Fascism. In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America!
Reality Check:
Trump Will Mean HELL for Black People
November 28, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Don’t fall for, or repeat, the line that “Black people have made it through everything else, we’ll make it through Trump.” First of all, what will Trump mean for humanity here and all over the world—waging war, destroying the environment, persecuting immigrants and Muslims, and violently degrading women? Is any of that remotely acceptable? Who is the “we” that we ALL need to be concerned with?
But in fact be clear on this as well: Trump intends to violently reassert white supremacy. Check out the article in the American Crime series on what happened after Reconstruction was betrayed and then “rolled back” to get a sense of what this could look like (see “The Colfax Massacre of 1873...”). Or seriously check out Trump himself: his history with the Central Park Five (see “No, Trump, the Central Park Five Were Innocent All Along...“); or the screams and chants of “Law and Order” and “Blue Lives Matter” during his campaign. If Trump is not prevented from consolidating this madness, there will be hell to pay.
Don’t “Normalize” Fascism. In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America.
Reality Check:
No, the Trump Voters Did Not Have "Just Grievances"
November 28, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Some people claim that the fact that some white people who voted for Trump also say that they voted for Obama in 2008 or 2012 shows that the Trump vote “was not mainly racist.”
First off, a lot of these people voted for Obama both because they thought he would change their lot for the better AND because they were led to think that voting for Obama would mean an end to the fight against the oppression of Black people, and that if after Obama was elected Black people were still in conditions of oppression, privation, and misery, then that would be their own fault. Obama himself encouraged this, in part by denouncing the speech of his former minister Jeremiah Wright—a speech which called out some of the historic oppression of Black people in America in basically accurate terms; and in part through Obama’s periodic “pull up your pants, brothers” speeches to young Black men. So those Trump voters who actually did vote for Obama were led to vote for a Black man, ironic though it seems, on essentially racist and populist grounds. And when Black people and others began to question and then rise up in powerful struggle against the murders by police and vigilantes, and the mass incarceration of Black people and other people of color—uprisings at which Obama mainly shook his finger while going through a few motions at “understanding” and “reform”—some of these white Obama voters then felt that Obama had “betrayed” them.
Beyond that, there is the gross fact that even if someone believed the lies of Trump about “bringing the jobs back,” they knew full well that voting for this went along with mass deportations for immigrants, persecution of Muslims, stepped-up threats and actual attacks on other countries, no rights for Black people, and the degradation of women that Trump clearly represents. “Not racial”—give us a break!
Besides all that: nobody has been hit harder by economic inequality and decay than Black, Latino, and Native American people, and nobody has suffered worse in the past eight years in particular—yet you didn’t see THEM vote for Trump! So, no, this was not mainly “a vote on the economy” by “white working class people who were suffering”; this was a vote by a majority of white people to reinforce and intensify white supremacy (which has never gone away!!), no matter what their economic station (and by the way—Trump won a majority of ALL white voters and did best among those voters making more than $50,000 a year!).
Don’t “Normalize” Fascism! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America!
Obama Turns Immigrants Over to Trump for Deportation
November 28, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Donald Trump threatened to “cancel unconstitutional executive orders and enforce all immigration laws. We will immediately terminate President Obama’s two illegal executive amnesties...” when he becomes president.
If Trump is able to carry out his threats after he is inaugurated in January, it will tear apart the lives of millions of people trying to live, work, go to school. It will cause intensified misery and impoverishment among millions in the U.S., as well as in Mexico and Central America. It will be mean legions of armed enforcers in the Border Patrol and various police and military agencies staging raids on factories, schools, farms, office buildings. It will embolden mobs of howling racists to attack immigrants and those they think are immigrants, or who defend immigrants.
This shit needs to be stopped before it gets off the ground.
Two measures signed by Obama provided “deferred action” to some immigrants. These measures temporarily removed the possibility of deportation from some people who arrived in the U.S. as children, and some who have children born in the U.S. The programs potentially include 4.4 million people directly. Millions more depend on and are in families with these people.
One of these programs lured more than 700,000 youths “out of the shadows” and onto the computer databases of the government. A youth writing in the Washington Post described how this meant he had to provide the “U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services with every detail of my personal information.” Now he feels sick knowing that he has endangered himself and his family by presenting all his continually updated information to the government. Multiply that by 700,000.
Bob Avakian, "Why do people come here from all over the world?"
If you think Obama and the Democrats will act to stop this, wake up and face reality. Obama could immediately order the records destroyed to protect these people who came out of the shadows. Instead, all Obama has done is to ask Trump to “think long and hard” before he signs the orders ending the two programs. This would be a joke if the results were not so cruel and wrenching to millions. Trump is poised to deport millions; Obama is doing nothing to prevent that.
These are the times we live in. Millions of people who have worked for years in the shittiest jobs capitalism has to offer are targeted for mass roundups. Youths full of hope and struggling to “do the right thing” have been deceitfully and maliciously enticed to put themselves in harm’s way.
Rounding up and deporting millions because of their nationality—this is a hallmark of fascism, and it must not stand.
Everyone must resist these acts, must offer sanctuary and aid to immigrants under attack, and most of all must act now, working and planning with others to prevent Trump from consolidating this fascist regime.
Betsy DeVos heads The American Federation for Children. This is an organization that describes itself as “the leading national advocacy organization promoting school choice, with a specific focus on advocating for school vouchers, scholarship tax credit programs and Education Savings Accounts.” (emphasis added)
Translation:
School choice: Allowing white parents to avoid sending their children to integrated public schools. This strips public schools of funding. It leaves them with a high number of special-needs students and without resources to provide a decent education to children.
School vouchers: A tool for channeling state funding into private, religious (overwhelmingly Christian) schools. And thus having the government fund Christian schools, even though that is supposed to be unconstitutional. Parents get vouchers and can use them to pay tuition for segregated, Christian schools.
Betsy DeVos and her family control billions of dollars. They spend tens of millions on a whole range of reactionary missions ranging from attacking unions to imposing religion in schools. Her family fortune includes billions from Amway, which her husband’s father founded. Her brother, Erik Prince, founded the massive Blackwater mercenary organization (renamed Xi). In the book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, author Jeremy Scahill wrote, “Erik Prince has been in the thick of this right-wing effort to unite conservative Catholics, evangelicals, and neoconservatives in a common theoconservative holy war—with Blackwater serving as a sort of armed wing of the movement.”
What does all this add up to? We will document here how very powerful networks funded by Betsy DeVos and her family see school vouchers as a step towards their openly avowed aim of eliminatingpublic schools altogether, with the objective of replacing public schools with government-funded Christian schools. And, beyond that, in the words of an author who has studied this movement, to “mould the public sphere into the image of a fundamentalist theocratic state.”
Now Betsy DeVos is on her way to becoming the top government official in the Trump regime in charge of education in the United States.
Betsy DeVos and the War on Public Schools
The Science of Evolution
and the Myth of Creationism
Knowing What's Real
and Why It Matters
Organizations DeVos heads have gone to great pains to brand vouchers as a way to improve education for inner city children. Inner city schools are terribly under-funded, segregated, and failing. But vouchers are not an answer. Education blogger Diane Ravitch has analyzed school test scores in inner cities like Milwaukee, Detroit, and Washington, DC. She has compared the results of students in private or religious schools funded by vouchers with public schools. She concludes vouchers provide families with the “opportunity” to take their child from a public school, where he or she has low test scores, to a private or religious school, where he or she will also have low test scores,” because, she concludes, “choice does not address the causes of low test scores: poverty and segregation.” (See Vouchers Don’t Work: Evidence from Milwaukee, March 29, 2013.)
Vouchers don’t improve education in the inner cities. But vouchers are an instrument for segregating schools. School vouchers emerged out of white racist rebellion against school integration in the South in the 1950s and ’60s. White parents yanked their children out of public schools and put them in (mostly) Christian and all-white private schools. Vouchers were a form through which state (and increasingly federal) government programs provided parents with financial aid to do that.
And as a matter of fact, the DeVos family strongly backs moves to end affirmative action. Affirmative action programs came out of the battles against segregation, and for equality, in the 1960s and ’70s. These programs opened up some limited opportunities in education and professions for Black people and other people subjected to systematic discrimination. Affirmative action programs have been under attack ever since they started, including from the DeVos family. In 2001, Betsy DeVos and her husband funded a lengthy legal fight against the University of Michigan’s affirmative action programs. The result was new court-imposed restrictions on affirmative action.
For decades, pro-voucher forces have made significant inroads. They have also bumped up against resistance, including from parents and teachers. Rachel Tabachnick, who tracks this movement, writes: “Since 1966, 24 of 25 voucher initiatives have been defeated by voters, most by huge margins. Nevertheless, the pro-privatization battle continues.... At the helm of this interconnected network is Betsy DeVos, the four-star general of the pro-voucher movement.” (“The DeVos Family: Meet the Super-Wealthy Right-Wingers Working With the Religious Right to Kill Public Education,” by Rachel Tabachnick, Alternet).
Black, Latino, Native American, and poor students in America are locked down in dilapidated, grossly under-funded schools. These schools function as conveyers to prison, to minimum-wage jobs for some, or into a military that marauds around the world enforcing exploitation and oppression. And as bad as these schools are, they are under attack from extreme reactionaries who want to shut them down altogether and replace them with religious private schools.
A woman at the center of that attack is slated to be the next Secretary of Education.
Imposing Dark Ages Fundamentalism in Schools...
Who Needs Schools for the Poor? Child Labor Set “The Foundation of a Flourishing Nation”
One of the many projects funded by the DeVos family fortune is the Acton Institute. Joseph Sunde is a writer, project director, and ideologue for the Acton Institute and a whole range of reactionary organizations fighting for unbridled, leaner-and-meaner capitalism as fulfilling “God’s will.”
Sunde wrote an article at the Acton website titled, “Bring Back Child Labor.” Channeling the slave-driving child labor bosses of Charles Dickens’ novels of late 1800s England, Sunde bemoans that “work has largely vanished from modern childhood, with parents constantly stressing over the values of study and practice and ‘social interaction.’”
Sunde then goes after a Washington Post photo essay titled “20 haunting portraits of child laborers in 1900s America.” That essay documents 10-year-old girls slaving in garment sweatshops and 14-year-old boys working in coal mines. These conditions exist around the world for millions of child laborers, even if they have been largely eliminated in the U.S. They surely represent conditions no decent human being could defend, much less call for restoring in the United States.
But Sunde does call for that. He specifically insists that children should be subjected to dangerous work. He insists that while the photos in the Washington Post essay “point to times of extreme lack, of stress and pain ... they also represent the faces of those who are actively building enterprises and cities, using their gifts to serve their communities, and setting the foundation of a flourishing nation, in turn.” (emphasis added)
And in case anyone thinks this obscene glorification of child labor is “just” an ideological defense of child labor in the past, or in the abstract, Sunde insists that “current economic avenues for unskilled labor are actually prime territory for introducing our children to risk and service.”
In response to outrage over this article, the author changed the headline to “Work is a gift our kids can handle,” a move emblematic of the approach of these free-market fundamentalists to package their draconian agenda for education as “providing choices” for children in the inner cities.
Underlying this grotesque agenda is a view that in today’s world, poor and inner city children are not going to get an education anyway and that they can be best used by this system as viciously super-exploited child laborers, as part of the “foundation of a flourishing nation.” And this agenda is part of the package of a truly horrific vision of society backed by foundations sponsored by Trump’s nominee to be Secretary of Education.
One major arm of the DeVos-funded network is the Acton Institute. The Acton Institute plays a pivotal role in coalescing the most reactionary libertarian opponents of public education with Christian fascist theocrats who oppose secular education. Within that mix, it is the Christian fascists who form the cutting edge of attacks on public schools.
The DeVos family has funded campaigns against same-sex marriage. They have campaigned for teaching so-called “intelligent design” in schools, which is a form of anti-scientific attack on the theory of evolution. (For an understanding of why the theory of evolution is true, and why it is so important to understand, see The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism: Knowing What’s Real and Why It Matters by Ardea Skybreak.)
The Acton Institute sponsors a group called the Cornwall Alliance, which is currently marketing a DVD titled “Resisting the Green Dragon.” This pseudo-documentary describes global warming as a hoax and claims environmentalism is a cult attacking Christianity. (See “The DeVos Family: Meet the Super-Wealthy Right-Wingers Working With the Religious Right to Kill Public Education.”)
In Service of a Fundamentalist Theocratic State
The Acton Institute sponsors Gary North, a Christian fascist who openly declares, “So let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.”
In an article titled “Darwinism, Badges, and Guns,” North insists that the replacement of church-based education in the United States by public education in the 1880s was an “example of how bad ethics, coupled with government coercion, produces bad results.” North wants to end teaching Darwin’s scientific theory of evolution because it does not “allow” god to “shape history, including cosmic history, in terms of His purposes.”
North ends this article with “Auction off the public schools, one by one, before the next presidential election. High bids win.” He’s not joking. North demands society return to the norm of the 1880s, before the institutionalization of secular public schools. And that is not simply the rantings of a dark-ages theocrat. It represents powerful forces soon to be in control of the White House who aim to not just blur but erase the line between church and state in education.
In the book Faith in America: Changes, Challenges, New Directions, Charles H. Lippy outlines how these forces have been gaining strength in top institutions of government, and making major inroads through Supreme Court decisions, with the aim of dispensing with the form of vouchers and moving to open government funding for Christian fundamentalist schools.
And Lippy identifies the “voucher” agenda as part of a larger, and even darker and more ominous, program. He writes, “For North and many others on the Christian Right, school voucher programs and faith-based initiatives are but strategies for building the rank and file of their movement, a movement that ultimately seeks to mould the public sphere into the image of a fundamentalist theocratic state.” (emphasis added) Lippy identifies reversing gains in gay rights and banning abortion as key and first steps in the agenda of those bent on imposing that “fundamentalist theocratic state.”
STOP THEM NOW!
Betsy DeVos is an attack dog in the all-out assault on public education.
Betsy DeVos sponsors movements to impose theocratic religious oppression and madness through schools.
And the incoming Trump regime has slotted her to be Secretary of Education!
That regime has NO claim to legitimacy!
It must be STOPPED NOW before this white supremacist, Dark Ages agenda becomes reality.
What Does Trump’s Vitriol Against Hamilton and His Silence About the Alt-Right Tell You?
As I have said a number of times: These reactionaries should not even be allowed to use "conservative" to describe themselves. We should say, "Conservative, my ass, these people are Nazis."
Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:26
Right after Vice President-elect Mike Pence was very mildly admonished by the cast of the play Hamilton and booed by the audience, Donald Trump took to Twitter with a vengeance, condemning this modest protest: “The Theater must always be a safe and special place.” He tweeted that Pence had been “harassed last night at the theater by the cast of Hamilton, cameras blazing,” adding ominously, “This should not happen!”
That was Friday night, November 18. How did Trump react on Saturday, when neo-Nazis were openly giving him Seig Heil salutes and praising him by name, while spewing racist, white-supremacist, and threatening fascist garbage?
Silence. When he finally said something during his meeting with the NewYorkTimes on Tuesday, November 21, Trump acted like he’d never heard of these people: “It’s not a group I want to energize, and if they are energized, I want to look into it and find out why.”
Look into it and find out? Just ask your chief counselor and strategist and alt-right-promoting neo-Nazi, Steve Bannon. But Trump was too busy defending Bannon—forcefully. He’s a “decent guy,” not a “racist,” Trump claimed, whining that any exposure of Bannon’s deep connections to the neo-Nazi alt-right means he’s being treated “unfairly.”
Vitriol toward Hamilton, silence and weasel words about the neo-Nazi alt-right. How many more examples do we need? Donald Trump is a fascist—nothing less, and we need to act accordingly!
These right-wing politicians (generally grouped within the Republican Party) can, will, and do actively mobilize this essentially fascist social base...yet, on the other side, the sections of the ruling class that are more generally represented by the Democratic Party are very reluctant to, and in fact resistant to, mobilizing...the base of people whose votes and support in the bourgeois political arena the Democrats seek to gain. This (Democratic Party) side of the ruling class generally is not desirous of—and in fact recoils at the idea of—calling that base into the streets, mobilizing them either to take on the opposing forces in the ruling class and their social base or in general to struggle for the programs that the Democratic Party itself claims to represent and actually in some measure does seek to implement....
As an amplification of the basic point here, it is important to recognize this: Within the framework of the capitalist-imperialist system, and with the underlying dynamics of this system, which fundamentally set the terms, and the confines, of “official” and “acceptable” politics, fascism—that is, the imposition of a form of dictatorship which openly relies on violence and terror to maintain the rule and the imperatives of the capitalist-imperialist system—is one possible resolution of the contradictions that this system is facing—a resolution that could, at a certain point, more or less correspond to the compelling needs of this system and its ruling class—while revolution and real socialism, aiming toward the final goal of communism, throughout the world, is also a possible resolution of these contradictions, but one that would most definitely not be acceptable to the capitalist-imperialist ruling class nor compatible with the imperatives of this system!
Bob Avakian, BAsics 3:11
If Donald Trump is allowed to take office, an outright neo-Nazi will direct a lot of what happens in the White House. That’s right. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s campaign manager and now his chief strategist and senior counselor, is a neo-Nazi. Bannon is the owner and hands-on force behind the website Breitbart News Network. Three months ago, Bannon bragged he had turned Breitbart into “the platform of the alt-right movement.”
What is the “alt-right”? Richard Spencer, a leader of the alt-right movement, openly told you and the world what they are all about on Saturday, November 19, at their conference in Washington, DC.
Genocidal Neo-Nazism—Straight Up
Spencer was basking in Trump’s victory. He gloated. And he spewed out racist, anti-Semitic, misogynist, Nazi shit—sometimes in the original German.
“To be white is to be a striver, a crusader, an explorer and a conqueror,” he declared. “We build. We produce. We go upward ... We don’t exploit other groups. We—we don’t gain anything from their presence. They need us, and not the other way around ... America was, until this past generation, a white country, designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”
Spencer attacked the “mainstream media,” then paused and said, “Perhaps we should refer to them in the original German?” The audience immediately screamed back, “Lügenpresse,” reviving a Nazi-era word that means “lying press.” He wondered aloud if Jews “are people at all.”
The crowd chanted “Heil Trump! Heil our people! Heil victory!”
Spencer told Mother Jones magazine that his goal was explicitly an all white United States. (“Meet the White Nationalist Trying to Ride the Trump Train to Lasting Power”) He called it “‘a renewed Roman Empire,’ a dictatorship where only white people could be citizens. ‘You cannot view another white person as your enemy,’ he remarked. His goal is a white ethnostate.” (Also see sidebar on this page: “Sick, Moronic, and Disgusting Racist Shit from Bannon’s Neo-Nazi Boy Spencer.”)
This isn’t “conservatism.” This isn’t just racism or “white nationalism.” This is genocidal fascism. Its logic and actual program is the imposition of an open dictatorship which relies on terror and violence. A fascist dictatorship aiming to violently enforce vicious subjugation, oppression, and if necessary genocide of Black people, Latinos, women, immigrants, Jews, thinking people, and many more.
Bannon Brought the Alt-Right to Prominence
Bannon now mumbles he’s not a racist, a white nationalist, or part of the alt-right. This isn’t just a lie, it’s a Nazi-Trump big lie.
When Bannon was running the Breitbart website, Richard Spencer was promoted on the site. He was called one of the leading intellectuals of the alt-right movement. Breitbart reported, “In 2010, Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com, which would become a center of alt-right thought.” An expert on the neo-Nazi movement states that Bannon facilitated “the entry of alt-right into more of the mainstream through Breitbart News.”
Trumpf—Trafficker in Nazi Themes
Is all this unbeknown to Donald Trump? No! This is precisely why Bannon is his chief strategist and counselor. Trump’s whole campaign has been fascistic. And Trump has trafficked in Nazi “dog whistle”—should we say “Nazi whistle”—politics and themes. (“Dog whistle” means conveying racist or other reactionary messages in coded language understood by the intended audience, but not in explicit, undeniable language.)
One example. Trump’s final campaign ad had his voice in the background saying there were global powers and interests who “work for people who don’t care about you.” Then four faces flashed across the screen—Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Janet Yellen, and Lloyd Blankfein. Yellen heads the Federal Reserve Bank. Soros is a global finance capitalist. Blankfein is head of the investment bank Goldman Sachs. All (but Clinton) are Jewish people. This is classic Nazi anti-Semitism, straight out of the Hitler-Goebbels playbook.
No wonder Richard Spencer says of the Nazi alt-right, “I do think we have a psychic connection, or you can say a deeper connection, with Donald Trump in a way that we simply do not have with most Republicans.”
Trump Must Be Stopped!
Trump recently met with NewYorkTimes editors and reporters and said a few mild words distancing himself from the alt-right. But this does nothing! Trump defended Bannon as a “decent” guy, and Trump is still planning to install Bannon as his chief strategist and senior counselor in the White House.
What does that TELL you? How FAR does this have to go before you call this out for what it is—and ACT accordingly?
Trump must be stopped through massive political resistance in many forms from taking office and consolidating his neo-Nazi regime. Anything less will result in staggering, genocidal horrors.
Sick, Moronic, and Disgusting Racist Shit from Bannon's Neo-Nazi Boy Spencer
Here is just some of what Richard Spencer said at the alt-right conference, as reported in the New York Times, November 21):
He railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.”
As he finished, several audience members had their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute. When Mr. Spencer, or perhaps another person standing near him at the front of the room—it was not clear who—shouted, “Heil the people! Heil victory,” the room shouted it back.
“America was, until this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity,” Mr. Spencer thundered. “It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.” But the white race, he added, is “a race that travels forever on an upward path.”
“To be white is to be a creator, an explorer, a conqueror,” he said.
More members of the audience were on their feet as Mr. Spencer described the choice facing white people as to “conquer or die.”
Of other races, Mr. Spencer said: “We don’t exploit other groups, we don’t gain anything from their presence. They need us, and not the other way around.”
Mr. Spencer’s after-dinner speech began with a polemic against the “mainstream media,” before he briefly paused. “Perhaps we should refer to them in the original German?” he said. The audience immediately screamed back, “Lügenpresse,” reviving a Nazi-era word that means “lying press.”
Mr. Spencer suggested that the news media had been critical of Mr. Trump throughout the campaign in order to protect Jewish interests. He mused about the political commentators who gave Mr. Trump little chance of winning. “One wonders if these people are people at all, or instead soulless golem,” he said, referring to a Jewish fable about the golem, a clay giant that a rabbi brings to life to protect the Jews.
As protests continue in the streets and on campuses across the country, there is intense and deep questioning among broad numbers of people, and seeds of resistance in many different ways. We're beginning to hear from our readers on what they're learning about this, including what effect the statement "In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America" is having. This week we're posting several of these reader letters—and we want to hear much more.
Taking the Statement "We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America"... Everywhere I Go
From a reader:
I attended a work meeting of different service providers earlier today that I couldn’t stay for, but just stopped by to say what I said. We are all from government, university, nonprofit, or social service agencies that serve an immigrant and refugee community made up mostly of public housing. At this meeting, after everyone had gone around the table introducing themselves and talking about the agency they’re with and what they do, it was my turn last.
I don’t remember all of what I said, but I said something very close to this: “I just want to acknowledge that with the elections the whole context in which we do our work has fundamentally changed. I was just watching the news, and Trump’s adviser on immigration and possible head of the Department of Homeland Security, Kris Kobach, was just on there. He was asked where the three million immigrants that Trump vowed to deport immediately were going to come from. And Kobach was saying in this calm, reasonable sounding tone that they would be the 'criminals'—not only criminals who’ve been convicted, but any immigrant who has been arrested.
“Kobach has said previously that all these gang members and drug dealers were held back from getting deported because the Democrats said they didn’t have the capacity to put them through the legal process. But now, he says, they’re going to deport the immigrants who get arrested or repeatedly arrested, no trial, no conviction. This will be anyone they say it is. They arrest people for nothing all the time.
“This isn’t the rule of law. This is a fascist roundup. This can’t be allowed to stand. This is not just a job to me. I care about this community, and I know you all do too, about these children and these families. And I’m just putting myself out there. I’m not speaking for [my institution] when I say this, but I’m putting myself out there as someone who will not go along with this—because it’s wrong.
“I hope these meetings are a place that we can speak frankly about all of this, because the sooner we all confront the full reality of what this means for our community and the whole country, the better off everybody will be. That’s all I wanted to say.”
People were really listening, with serious expressions but also with nods of support as I was talking. Afterwards, people clapped and then the person leading the meeting smiled politely and segued into lunch saying, “On that note, let’s break bread together.” I had to go, unfortunately, but was able to talk briefly with a few people who came up to thank me and say they wanted to talk more later. I don’t know who all was in the room, so chose not to distribute the statement “In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America” to everyone, but I will follow up by getting it to the people I know.
One of the people I work most closely with is an immigrant from an
African country herself, who has been in the U.S. for some time now.
She said that she was so glad I said what I said. She’s very worried
and feels that this situation is serious. She said, “When I was in my
country, in a similar situation when they were coming for people, some
of the Christians hid the Muslims in their homes and we gave them our
Christian names so that they wouldn’t get taken."
In hindsight, I wish I would’ve brought in more from the statement in terms of the collaboration point, because these are people who, if this goes where it looks like it’s going, will be asked to not just stand aside, but aid in crimes against the people—but I can still do that.
And we need to let people know: the important thing is to get the statement and other materials out to people and encourage them to go to revcom.us and get into BA to really learn more about this... that people don’t have to try to explain it all themselves, just point people to it.
****
We went to the open mic vigil last night where the framework was around talking to people about how the elections personally affected them. Was mainly middle strata white people. At first I wasn’t sure if it would be good, but it became really interesting and powerful and I learned a lot. People right now are trying to process and reckon with what’s happening, in terms of a fascist transition that’s taken place.
People were reading the statement on the spot. There is some complexity in this, desire for people to come together and not hate each other, talking about more love. In the beginning people were talking a lot about how they were feeling, fears of the atmosphere that’s being whipped up. People were reading the statement while others spoke. Some things that were said:
—“My son went to school crying because he is afraid his dad who is Polynesian is going to be deported.”
—Woman who was victim of domestic violence says that she is terrified that there are no longer going to be laws to protect her.
Then I read just the headline of the statement, and it changed the tone from people just going on about what they felt personally. It was the first thing said that drew some applause.
One woman said, “I often wondered if I lived in Nazi Germany what would I do; well, now I have to make that decision.”
Another woman said, “I want all my LGBTQ friends to know that THEY WILL NOT HAVE TO GO BACK IN THE CLOSET.”
Another person talked about wearing safety pins (reminded me of the World Can’t Wait “Declare It Now” campaign), wearing them as a sign that you are a “safe place” for people who are being threatened. “It’s a pledge that I am with you and I will protect you.”
One young man asked what “Don’t Collaborate” in the statement meant.
A woman: “I don’t want laws to be overturned that take away my right to choice.”
Another young man said, “We can’t wait four years, the planet can’t wait four years.” He is a science major and proceeded to lay out the science behind why the planet can’t wait four years if nothing is done on climate change.
Some people, after reading the statement, were referencing parts of it back to us, the part about Trump being treated as legitimate and this is American fascism.
****
Went to a meeting of Coalition of Anti-Racist Whites, about 800 people there, which is very unusual. New faces, not regular movement people and broad masses of people. A number of white Jewish people.
I got out all the materials and posters that I had—which every time I go out, never seems to be enough (even when I plan to bring a lot!). I went with someone who had disagreed with me about voting and was blaming people who didn’t vote and third parties as being responsible but has changed as a result of the objective situation and via engaging the statement.
She talked about her Muslim friends being angry and terrified, and there are reports on social media of people feeling suicidal. She told a Trump supporter that they need to have a little compassion, and he threatened to beat her in the teeth with a baseball bat until her face bled.
When we pulled up to the church, there was a large line of people outside and waiting to get in, and she started crying because she was so moved that so many people care.
Other people in the meeting also were crying. There is an optimism and surprise in the amount of white people who are rejecting this. At the same time, people are trying to grapple with the current polarization and what it means, including some very dangerous ideas being put out about the need to find “common ground” with Trump supporters...
Notes from Thanksgiving
From a reader:
Walking in to the restaurant where our family has gathered for many years, I said to my partner, well, if any of the people here decide not to talk to me for a few years, so be it, I’m gonna say what needs to be said. I didn’t expect that, but just thought I had to establish that—fascist regimes (and revolutions) do divide families. I had practiced and prepared to read “In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America” out loud. So, after everyone ordered I said I had something everyone needed to hear and read it loudly. People at other tables stopped talking to listen too, which I think had an impact on our party.
The first person to respond, after some silence, was a millennial who had taken time off from his job to canvass for Hillary Clinton in a swing state. He said, “Well, that pretty much sums up the situation.” It did occur to me that this was addressing the situation but not necessarily what the implications were in terms of what we should do. But he meant it. Another student, older and influenced by the movement, said that during the campaign he dismissed Trump as just another ruling class politician who was pandering to white racism to get votes, but what shook him up was his appointees. People were aware of them and their backgrounds, although not Bannon’s whole “résumé.”
I don’t think we fell into “recriminations or explanations for Trump’s rise that are within the confines of the current political system and cast the blame on anything else but on that system.” But there was sober reflection over the state of white people in particular. The millennial was somewhat taken aback at the level of alienation among people. And he cited a recent article in the New York Times about how Black people in Milwaukee saw nothing to vote for in Clinton. That could, obviously, go into how to make the Democrats something they are not and will never be and in doing so become what you now oppose. But it did pose what kind of world do we need.
Authored by Bob Avakian,
and adopted by the
Central Committee of the RCP
Here’s something interesting: As print copies of Revolution got passed down the table, I noticed several people paying particular interest to the ad for the Constitution for The New Socialist Republic in North America on the back cover. That wasn’t the only thing in the print edition folks were stopping to look it, but it was a bit of a pattern.
I asked, what are we going to do? One person told a story of a couple of emboldened poor white people who came into the social service agency where they work as an administrator. They were loudly complaining about how come people of color get to be at the front of the line all the time. She told them if they didn’t stop talking like that they weren’t welcome, and eventually kicked them out. A student talked about a friend of hers who has taken off her hijab in fear of being attacked. And this was in a big, cosmopolitan city in a bright “blue” state.
People were kicking around the effectiveness of the safety pin thing, but it seemed too weak. A few people at the meal were Jewish, and everyone was very encouraged by protests of Jewish groups against Steve Bannon. A couple of people who had been involved in them pointed out this is going to really sharpen up conflicts within the Jewish community. The essential reactionary nature of supporting everything Israel does will really be out there. They felt Jews have a special role to play.
Someone said that if the government tries to register all the Muslims (they might have said “when”), we should all go down there and say, “take us first.” That seemed like the right spirit, but then people were thinking, uh, they might just say “fine.” Someone said we should do something like what they did in Denmark with the yellow stars. Someone else asked one of the '60s generation people at the dinner, “How do we do something like what your generation did with burning draft cards?” And people were kicking around how can we bring to life the slogan circulating on the Internet now: “First they came for the Muslims AND WE SAID NOT THIS TIME MOTHERFUCKERS!”
I know most of these people. They are very disturbed and upset about Trump. But I think it was critical that the statement “In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America” was read out loud with the right defiant spirit. That helped bring out the best and strongest in everyone.
Finding Out What People Are Thinking—and Getting Them the Statement and THE NEW COMMUNISM
From a Reader:
A friend from another country, enlightened, educated, wanted to talk after the election. There was a real sense of horror and being terror stricken. He is a thoughtful and radical person, and he wanted to hear what I had to say. He wanted to make sense of why and how this could have happened here. He has lived in this country for some time. He asked, who is supporting Trump? He has a family member who supported Trump on the basis of supposed benefits to immigrants because of his hard work. My friend asked how this could be reversed, what power do people have to do that. He could only envision the existing institutions, like the Congress, blocking Trump’s initiatives through the channels of power. He wondered if there would be eddies of opposition within the two political parties that would make it difficult to make this a stampede. He was very happy to get a text from my wife and to hear that she was at a demo, and if there is something big, to let him know.
***
A relative had gotten the “In the Name of Humanity...” statement and liked it and agreed with it. She agreed that the election of Trump is fascism, and drawing the analogies with Hitler. About 10-15 years ago, she had gotten out of some backward thinking. In recent years, she has been coming to things like coming to Revolution Books and donating. She sees this as fascism, and she is tracing out worst-case scenarios: they could round people up, suspend civil liberties. I asked, what should people do? She thought people have to be in the streets and that she had signed up to go to the Million Women March that’s going to be in DC in January.
***
Someone from a writing program at a nearby university: Her defining political moment and identity is the Black Lives Matter movement. In her thinking, the Trump attacks bled into general attacks of police assaults and, in the university system, the evisceration of education. She sees Trump is intensifying this. She said there are a lot of immigrants on campus, and mentioned some campus-wide organization where people are trying to respond. She has gotten Bob Avakian’s book THE NEW COMMUNISM. I asked her if she had read it. She said yes, and she takes it seriously. What I said was that there is a party taking responsibility for leading, and BA is leading the party.
***
A white lower middle class person who works with people from the middle class Trump base and lives in semi-rural area: Her husband has been laid off for a while. She liked some of Trump’s ideas around jobs leaving the country but not the racism, so she was a Bernie supporter and then voted for Hillary. We had been talking back and forth, and she read and liked the statement. She would not have understood that this is fascism without having read the statement. Some others in the family are more progressive and this is also an influence on her. She works at a job with lots of very backward stuff and lots of Trump supporters. She does not like the racist shit at work and will not respond to that when she’s invited to be part of it (but I don’t think she really shuts it down or is in their face either). She treats everyone as she would want to, and the immigrant people she works with like her and treat her as part of their family. She’s pulled in different directions and could be in a totally wrong place—but she’s willing to listen, and she took the statement and liked it and showed it around to her family.
People really don’t understand why jobs leave, and why Trump is not going to undo globalization. There is a need to speak very broadly to an audience who can be pulled one way or the other. Also to the dividing line for many around racism and chauvinism.
In the wake of the victory of Donald Trump, the campaign to organize thousands of new people into the movement for an actual revolution is all the more urgent and high stakes.
In our time in Chicago and Cleveland, the National Tour has taken out the pamphlet "HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution"very broadly—particularly to the ghettoes where many Black youths are caught up in fighting and killing each other. We've learned much more deeply about what attracts many to this revolution, but also about the obstacles—practically as well as ideologically—that must be overcome as we've worked to organize people into this revolution. We've gained strength by going right up in the face of the Trumpites in Cleveland. And, in an even more intense way, in Mt. Greenwood Chicago where hundreds of white residents had gathered in a modern-day lynch mob to celebrate the police murder of Joshua Beal. We got out in the streets with those rising up to say #NotMyPresident and dug into this revolution with students on the campuses.
This December, as Revolution Clubs across the country step up their efforts in this Organizing Campaign, the National Tour will be focusing our efforts in New York City. We will work with the NYC Revolution Club to spread "HOW WE CAN WIN" and "In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America," and to organize people into this revolution from the hardest streets as well as from the most elite campuses. We will stand with everyone rising up against Trump, representing as we do for the real revolution. We'll boldly promote the leadership and work of Bob Avakian and THE NEW COMMUNISM and dig into this more deeply with each other and those we are meeting. We'll spread revolution in the city's vibrant artistic and cultural scenes, and help make Revolution Books the place where people from all of these scenes come to wrangle over big ideas and to connect with the movement for revolution. We will bring alive—in our agitation, in how we conduct ourselves, and in what we actively promote and recruit others into—the six Points of Attention for the Revolution that embody revolutionary morality and authority.
Through this all, we will continue to report on the lessons and advances as well as the challenges we are confronting in the pages of this website. We urge everyone who wants to see this revolution grow to donate generously to these efforts here and to write to us with your ideas and your desire to participate here: getintotherevolution@gmail.com.
Statement from Carl Dix:
James Means and Will Sims—Black Men Lynched by White Racists!
November 28, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
James Means
James Means, a Black 15-year-old, was shot dead by William Pulliam, a 62-year-old white man, near a Dollar General Store in Charleston, West Virginia. The two had exchanged words when Means bumped into Pulliam as he was entering the store. After Pulliam left the store, he encountered Means and exchanged words again, and that's when Pulliam pulled out a revolver and shot Means twice in the stomach.
After the shooting, Pulliam went home, ate dinner, and hung out with a friend. When the police arrested him, Pulliam told them Means was “just another piece of trash.”
A 15-year-old boy, described by family and friends as someone able to “light up a room, even on the darkest of days,” is dead at the hands of a white man who saw him as just a piece of trash.
This reminds me of what Roy Bryant and J.W. Milan, two white men, did to 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955, in Money, Mississippi—lynch him because they felt he didn’t know and stay in his place—but this lynching happened on November 21, 2016, not the 1950s—back when Jim Crow segregation was in effect and enforced by lynch mob terror!
Will Sims
This wasn’t the only lynching of a Black man this month. Will Sims, a 28-year-old Black man who was an accomplished musician, was targeted by three white men who beat, robbed, then shot him and left him to die on the streets of El Sobrante, California, just north of San Francisco, on November 12. One of the perpetrators of this murder has been arrested, and police say they believe Sims was targeted because he was Black.
In his talk Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About, Bob Avakian spoke of how the lynchings of Black men in the South back then meant that a death sentence hung over every Black person, one that might or might not be carried out but was always there. He went on to say that today, the killings of Black people at the hands of the police meant that there was still a death sentence hanging over every Black person, one that might or might not be carried out by some killer cop but was always there. The lynchings of James Means and Will Sims point to an ugly development—that, increasingly, white racists are joining the police as the potential enforcers of the death sentences hanging over the heads of every Black person in this country.
Horrors like these happen all the damn time in this country. They stem from the white supremacy that courses thru this country’s veins. I remember Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis being killed by racists. And I remember Tyre King, Paul O’Neal, and many other Black people killed by police in 2016 alone. All of these modern-day lynchings are unacceptable. They must be called out for what they are, and they must be STOPPED!
And these two murders happened in the age of Trump, together with the many, many attacks on Muslim women who wear hijabs (religious scarves covering their heads); the students chanting “white power” and “build the wall” as they marched through the halls of their high schools; and the white mob that threatened people protesting the police murder of Joshua Beal in Chicago. They point to what it means to “Make America Great Again.” White supremacy, unbridled and on steroids.These attacks, together with the team Trump is assembling—white nationalists, immigrant bashers, and Muslim haters—underline the need to build a powerful fight against all the reactionary shit that has been/is being pumped up and normalized through the ascendancy of Trump.
Carl Dix is a courageous freedom fighter from the 1960s who went on to become a revolutionary fighter and a communist. Dix spent two years in military prison for refusing to fight in the unjust Vietnam War. He emerged unrepentant and went on to become a founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), USA, dedicating his life to the emancipation of all humanity. Today, Carl is a follower of and advocate for Bob Avakian, his leadership and his visionary new synthesis of communism. Carl Dix and Cornel West co-founded the Stop Mass Incarceration Network (SMIN), and Rise Up October that brought thousands into the streets in New York City demanding a stop to police terror.
Trump Time:
Black Youth MURDERED for Bumping Into White Man
November 28, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Life is already a horror for Black people in America. Now a sick, horrific example of how that could become murderously worse under a Trump regime went down in Charleston, West Virginia, on Monday, November 21.
James Means
James Means, a 15-year-old Black youth whose family said “could put a smile on anybody’s face, no matter the situation,” was gunned down by 62-year-old William Ronald Pulliam, in Charleston, West Virginia.
What was James Means’ “crime”? He accidentally bumped into Pulliam, a white man. James and Pulliam exchanged words.
Then James and a couple of friends—one of them 13 years old—went to the nearby home of a relative and hung out on the porch. Pulliam came by later, more words were exchanged. Though James was unarmed and a child, Pulliam drew a .380 caliber revolver and shot James twice in the abdomen.
James Means died in the hospital a little later. William Pulliam went to dinner and then hung out at the home of a female friend. After being arrested, cops said that he showed “no remorse,” saying: “The way I see it, that’s another piece of trash off the street.”
Pulliam is the kind of violent, racist reactionary that America has always produced—and protected—who represents a whole segment of this sick, racist society. In 2013 he pleaded guilty to punching his pregnant daughter in the face several times and kicking her in the stomach. He’s harassed, threatened, and hurled racist insults at Latinos.
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.
Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:24
Whether or not William Pulliam was himself a Trump supporter, America’s Pulliams—and there are millions—have been whipped up by Trump’s call that it’s time for them to “take back America” from immigrants, Muslims, Black people, and disobedient women.
They’ve been emboldened by Trump’s victory, and right now America’s James Pulliams sense that white supremacy and even genocide are fully in command in the new government, and that they have the wind at their back.
This IS what will be in command if Trump is allowed to take office on January 20, and it will be further institutionalized, promoted, and backed by the full power of the state. These racists and white supremacists clearly see this. Now it’s way past time for the oppressed and the millions of others who hate racism, bigotry, intolerance, and ignorance to clearly see this too. And act accordingly to stop it!
Let the foul murder of James Means serve as a warning, and a wake-up call, to stop Trump.
Unjustifiable Murder: 19-Year-Old Kajuan Raye, Shot in the Back by Chicago Police
November 28, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From the Revolution Club, Chicago:
Kajuan Raye
On the eve of Thanksgiving, 19-year-old Kajuan Raye called his mother and told her he was on his way over to her house for dinner. They traditionally hold the holiday dinner on Wednesday and he was expected. But while Kajuan was waiting at the bus stop in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago with a friend, a Chicago police pig jumped out on him because "he fit the description." Kajuan was chased and shot down by a sergeant—shot in the back and murdered!
The pig who murdered Kajuan told the typical lies, saying that Kajuan had "turned and pointed a gun" at him. But almost immediately the cop's lies began to fall apart. After 24 hours of extensive searching, no gun was found! And the cop said that he shot Kajuan in the stomach but the medical examiner showed Kajuan had been shot in the back!
There has been exposure after exposure on every level in Chicago of cover-up and apology for murdering pigs. There is a Justice Department investigation of Chicago police "patterns and practices." And still, just like pigs across the country, they continue to murder Black people and get away with it! Just in Chicago, since the exposure of the Laquan McDonald murder and cover-up—Bettie Jones and Quintonio LeGrier murdered by pigs, Pierre Loury murdered by pigs, Paul O'Neal murdered by pigs, Joshua Beal and more, all murdered by pigs! And now 19-year-old Kajuan Raye murdered by CPD pigs!
This latest cold-blooded killing has many people seething and staring at the fact that this system's police can't stop killing Black youths. It is part of their job as an occupying army in the communities of the oppressed, enforcing the oppression of this system!
On Friday, November 25, more than 100 people—family and friends as well as people and organizations working to end police murder and brutality, gathered to mourn the loss of and demand justice for Kajuan Raye. A crowd filled the sidewalk and people kept coming, filling the street.
Members of the family told of Kajuan's life. How he lifted you up when he came into the room. Of a love for animals that led him to want to be a veterinarian, of his stature on the basketball court. The size of the crowd at the vigil testified to how many were touched by the life of Kajuan.
Family members exposed and condemned the attempts to de-humanize Kajuan—efforts aimed at somehow justifying the unjustifiable murder. And they stood strong on the demand for justice!
The Revolution Club was there, uniting with the outrage and determination to fight for justice, talking with family and friends, and providing literature that shows how this resistance needs to be part of getting organized for an actual revolution to put an end to these murders and the many crimes of the system once and for all. The Club was getting out Revolution newspaper, the statement "In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America," and the pamphlet "HOW WE CAN WIN, How We Can Really Make Revolution."
Chicago has put body cameras on some cops to quiet criticism of their brutality. But not in the area where Kajuan was murdered, despite the fact that this area of Englewood, Chicago's Seventh District, has one of the highest rates of murder by police in the city.
Kajuan's murder took place on the anniversary of the release of the video showing a cop gunning down Laquan McDonald. Hundreds of protesters were in the street shutting down stores on Chicago's Magnificent Mile shopping district over issues of police brutality on the day of the vigil for Kajuan. And the newscasters are already saying that this case will be a test for Kim Foxx—the state's attorney (lead prosecutor) who was elected to replace the state's attorney who covered up the murder of Laquan.
The new pig superintendent, Eddie Johnson, replaced the superintendent associated with the Laquan murder cover-up. One of his first statements on taking the job was that in 20 years of being a cop, he had never seen police brutality! Yet this pig who "had never seen police brutality" has been forced to take a rare step intended to head off the legitimate and widespread outrage at the murder of Kajuan Raye. Johnson has not merely put the murdering cop on desk duty, but has stripped him of his "police powers." The cop will continue to be paid.
There is still struggle over why after all the changes in personnel, the body cameras, the investigations and commissions—the police continue to kill and get away with it. Everyone needs to get clear on the point made by Bob Avakian:
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)
Justice for Kajuan!
Indict, Convict, Send the Killer Cop to Jail—the Whole Damn System is Guilty as Hell!
It's Time to Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution!
Case #71: The Colfax Massacre of 1873... and the Supreme Court Stamp of Approval for Racist Terror
November 28, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Bob Avakian recently wrote that one of three things that has "to happen in order for there to be real and lasting change for the better: People have to fully confront the actual history of this country and its role in the world up to today, and the terrible consequences of this." (See "3 Things that have to happen in order for there to be real and lasting change for the better.")
In that light, and in that spirit, "American Crime" is a regular feature of revcom.us. Each installment will focus on one of the 100 worst crimes committed by the U.S. rulers—out of countless bloody crimes they have carried out against people around the world, from the founding of the U.S. to the present day.
In 1873, Black people demanding their right to vote in Colfax County, Louisiana were attacked by armed white supremacist mobs. There was a courageous attempt by Blacks to defend themselves but they were massacred. Above, a magazine in New York reported on the crime.
On April 13, 1873, Easter Sunday, a mass slaughter of Black people occurred in Colfax, Louisiana. Over 300 heavily armed white men, most of them former officers and soldiers in the Confederate Army, shot, stabbed, burned, and maimed Black people seeking shelter in a courthouse. Many were killed as they tried to surrender. Historian Eric Foner described the Colfax massacre as the “bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era.”
Reconstruction was a brief, more or less 12-year period after the end of the U.S. Civil War. As Bob Avakian wrote:
[D]uring the brief period of Reconstruction, while the full promise of these rights was never realized, there were significant changes and improvements in the lives of Black people in the South. The right to vote and to hold office, and some of the other Constitutional rights that are supposed to apply to the citizens of the U.S., were partly, if not fully, realized by former slaves during Reconstruction. And in fact some Black people were elected to high office, though never the highest office of governor, in a number of southern states.
This was very sharply contradictory. The armed force of the state, as embodied in the federal army, was never consistently applied to guarantee these rights, and in fact it was often used to suppress popular struggles aimed at realizing these rights. But there was a kind of a bourgeois-democratic upsurge in the South during this period, and it not only involved the masses of Black people but also many poor white people and even some middle class white people in the South. During these ten years of Reconstruction, with all the sharp contradictions involved, there was a real upsurge and sort of flowering of bourgeois-democratic reforms. This was not the proletarian revolution, but at that time it was very significant. (From “How This System Has Betrayed Black People: Crucial Turning Points,” on revcom.us as part of a series of excerpts from Bob Avakian’s writings on the Black national question.)
THE CRIME: From the beginning, these developments were assailed with convulsions of mass terror and violence across the entire area of the former Confederacy. White supremacists were determined to reinstitute a system in which gains Black people had made were violently snatched away, and Black people were ruthlessly repressed. Schools were burned, entire communities destroyed. The Ku Klux Klan was founded and grew dramatically in these years, carrying out lynchings, night raids, and terroristic assaults upon newly freed Black people across the South.
This violence permeated every aspect of society and was intended to enforce a culture of white supremacy. Historian Eric Foner wrote, “...(V)iolence was directed at... ‘impudent negroes’—those who no longer adhered to patterns of behavior demanded under slavery. A North Carolina freedman related how, after he was whipped, his Klan assailants ‘told me the law. That whenever I met a white person, no matter who he was, whether he was poor or rich, I was to take off my hat.’” Robert Smalls, a former slave who became a U.S. Congressman from South Carolina until 1887, said when he left office that “fifty-three thousand African Americans had been murdered, mostly in the South, in the years since emancipation,” according to historian Douglas R. Egerton.
Louisiana was a particularly violent inferno of racist mob violence against newly enfranchised Black people. In September 1868 over 200 people were murdered in three days in St. Landry Parish. Later that month, hundreds of whites unleashed a bloodbath in Bossier Parish, and by October, 168 Black people there were dead.
In Colfax, federal investigators arrived two days after the massacre. They found too many mutilated corpses on the courthouse grounds for them to count. Most had been horribly tortured and shot in the back of the head at close range. Historian Charles Lane described some of what the investigators literally stumbled over: “One lay dead with his throat slashed. Another, stripped to the waist, had been so badly beaten that no facial features were recognizable; next to him lay the broken stock of a double-barreled shotgun. All that remained of the courthouse were its singed brick walls, reeking of smoke. In the ruins, the officials found a human skeleton.” The number of dead is unknown; most estimates say at least 150 people were murdered that day.
No state charges were brought against any of the murderers. Federal charges were brought against dozens of members of the white-supremacist mob. They were not charged with murder, only with violating federal laws against interfering with people’s “right and privilege peaceably to assemble together.” In federal trials, only three men were convicted of any crime at all. The convictions were appealed, and set aside in federal district court. Federal prosecutors appealed that decision to the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case U.S. v. Cruikshank (William J. Cruikshank was one of the three men convicted of violating Federal civil rights law).
A drawing from Harper's Weekly depicting Black people collecting the bodies of the murdered after the massacre.
The Supreme Court heard the case in 1875. By that time, federal troops to enforce Reconstruction remained in only three Southern states—Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida. The other states had been, in the language of white supremacy, “redeemed”: white supremacy had begun to be restored in all the laws and institutions, and the odious system of Jim Crow was becoming entrenched.
The Court overturned the guilty verdicts on the three racist killers. The essence of the ruling was that federal law cannot protect Black people from violations of their civil rights (or from mass murder!) committed by mobs, only violations of those rights by government agencies.
The legacy of Colfax and the Cruikshank ruling stood for over a century. Only in 2005—yes, 2005—did the U.S. government in any way acknowledge its endorsement of the murder and terror against Black people, when the Senate passed a resolution expressing its “remorse” for never having passed an anti-lynching bill.
In 1877 the U.S. withdrew the remaining federal troops from Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida. This withdrawal, and the Supreme Court decisions, put an end to Reconstruction.
As Bob Avakian wrote:
[H]ere was a situation involving a major turning point in U.S. history where the question was posed very decisively: Can Black people and will Black people actually be “absorbed,” or integrated, or assimilated into this society on a basis of equality? Will not only slavery, but the after-effects of slavery, be systematically addressed, attacked and uprooted...or not? And the answer came thunderously through—NO!—this will not be done. And there was a material reason for that: it could not be done by the bourgeoisie without tearing to shreds their whole system.
Instead they re-chained Black people—not in literal chains, but in economic chains of debt and other forms of economic exploitation and chains of both legal and extra-legal oppression and terror. So this was one major turning point where the system fundamentally failed and betrayed Black people.
The Criminals
* The entire racist mob of unrepentant Confederate soldiers who committed the mass murder.
* The organizers and leaders of the lynch mob, Alphonse Cazabat and Christopher Columbus Nash, former Confederate officers who claimed to be the elected judge and sheriff of Grant Parish, where Colfax was located. William Cruikshank, a wealthy former slave plantation owner who participated in and helped organize the lynch mob.
* The U.S. Supreme Court. The Cruikshank ruling was a stamp of approval for the KKK and racist mobs to carry out terror and lynching. And the Supreme Court made the point again a few years later, invoking the Cruikshank ruling in another case concerning a lynch mob in Tennessee. The Court ruled that “Lynching was found not to be a federal matter, because the mob consisted only of private individuals.”
These rulings gave a green light to 100 years of lynch mob terror in the South. In the words of W.E.B. DuBois, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”
Criminal Past
Many of the participants in the mass murder had owned other human beings of African descent. They had participated in driving them brutally on highly profitable slave plantations, whipping them, hunting them down. Some of them made fortunes buying, selling, and exploiting enslaved Black people. Most of them fought in a war to preserve the slave system. After they lost that war, all of them fought for years to restore and entrench white supremacy.
The Alibi
The white mob claimed they attacked Black people who were seeking shelter in the Grant Parish courthouse because they were about to kill and rape white people. They also claimed Black people were “stealing” an election so they could carry out further murder and rape. One participant in the lynch mob said, “the Negroes at Colfax shouted daily... that they intended killing every white man and boy, keeping only the young women to raise from them a new breed. On their part, if successful, you may safely expect that neither age, nor sex, nor helpless infancy will be spared.”
The Actual Motive
The small army that assaulted the Colfax courthouse had the explicit aim of restoring unquestioned white supremacy.
[T]he true interests of the northern capitalists [in the Civil War] came out with their betrayal of Reconstruction. During this all too brief period of Reconstruction, in the 10 years or so after the end of the Civil War, the U.S. government had kept some of its promises and stationed troops in the South. These troops were there to prevent wholesale slaughters of Black people, and poor whites, who were striving to gain land and exercise political rights promised to them. But the capitalist class which now dominated the national government did this in large part in order to fully subordinate the former plantation owners; and when the ex-slaves and their allies fought “too hard” for their rights these same troops would be used against them.
Above all the northern capitalists wanted order and stability to carry out the further consolidation of their rule, as well as further expansion on the North American continent and internationally. The ferment and upheaval that would have gone along with everything that would have been involved in the former slaves playing a significant role in the political process or even exercising basic rights might have “sent the wrong message” to other oppressed people within the U.S.; and in fact, when in 1877 the U.S. troops were pulled out of the South, signaling the end of Reconstruction, they were immediately sent west—to fully crush the resistance of the Indians—and into the cities of the North—to violently suppress revolts of immigrant workers. Further, real freedom for the former slaves would have enabled them to resist the severe exploitation that was visited upon them, and thus would have made the re-integration of the southern economy into the larger society much less profitable for the ruling capitalists. So the Ku Klux Klan was unleashed in full force and played a brutal role in defeating and subjugating the freed slaves and progressive whites, often in bloody battles.
Ongoing Crimes
Louisiana converted its largest slave plantation, not far from the site of the Colfax massacre, into the notorious Angola prison camp. Louisiana now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world; its prison population is overwhelmingly Black men.
In 1950, the state of Louisiana put up a highway marker near the site of the Colfax massacre that perpetuated the justification, deceit, and cover-up of the mass slaughter of Black people there. It read, “On this site occurred the Colfax Riot, in which three white men and 150 negroes were slain. This event on April 13, 1873, marked the end of carpetbag [i.e., Northern anti-slavery] misrule in the South.”
Sources
“How This System Has Betrayed Black People: Crucial Turning Points,” on revcom as part of a series of excerpts from Bob Avakian’s writings on the Black national question.
Edward Snowden Must Be Pardoned
Exposing Great Crimes Is Not a Crime!
November 28, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Edward Snowden courageously exposed massive, illegal, and illegitimate surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). This spying operation has gathered information, on a historically unprecedented scale, on the intimate details of the lives of literally billions of people around the planet. Threatened with prosecution, death threats, and being called a traitor by officials of the country with the biggest military and repressive apparatus in history, Snowden has refused to back down. The U.S. forced him to go into exile in Russia, from where he continues to expose the dangers such surveillance poses.
Oliver Stone’s movie Snowden tells his story. Right around the time of the movie’s release this fall, three leading human rights groups in the U.S.—Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, and Amnesty International—launched a campaign demanding that President Obama pardon Snowden before he leaves office. An online petition to the White House demanding Snowden’s pardon has gathered more than 167,000 signatures. Many prominent people, including Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple; actors Martin Sheen and Susan Sarandon; writers Cheryl Strayed and Joyce Carol Oates; Vietnam War era whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg; former government officials, and many others have backed this demand.
The Obama administration has refused to pardon Snowden and has continued to call for his return to the U.S. to face charges. In early November, Obama claimed he can’t pardon Snowden because he hasn’t yet been tried. This is a claim experts have shown to be false on legal grounds (see, for example, “Obama, Mistaken on Point re Pardon Power,” a blog post by P.S. Ruckman, political science professor). And Trump’s nominee for CIA chief, Mike Pompeo, says Snowden is a “traitor” who should be brought back from Russia to be given “due process”—and then declares the proper result of this “due process” would be Snowden’s execution! Never mind the rule of law and the principle of “innocent until proven guilty.”
Snowden’s revelations put a spotlight on the criminal deeds of the U.S. spy apparatus for the whole world to see. Why does the U.S. deem it necessary to try to gather information on the patterns of movement, communication, and details of the personal lives of most of world humanity? That’s not a government that is “protecting people’s safety.” These are the actions of a global criminal enterprise defending a system of sweatshops, slums, prisons, and mass murder. And whistleblowers like Snowden who bring the crimes of the U.S. to light must be defended.
All people of conscience must oppose the U.S. persecution of Edward Snowden. The call for his pardon is a just demand, and it is part of the overall fight against this whole oppressive system.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Moves to Evict Water Protectors Encampment by December 5
November 26, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
by Travis Morales:
Sunday, November 20 Sheriff's Deputies fired water cannons at people in 25° weather. Photo: Twitter/@erinschrode
In a letter to Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault II, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced the eviction of the Oceti Sakowin encampment just north of the Cannonball River. Thousands of Water Protectors have been camping there to oppose and stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. The Corps of Engineers threatened, “To be clear, this means that no member of the general public, to include Dakota Access pipeline protestors, can be on these Corps’ lands. ... Any person found to be on the Corps’ lands north of the Cannonball River after December 5, 2016, will be considered trespassing and may be subject to prosecution under federal, state, and local laws.”
This threat came just five days after Morton County Sheriff’s Deputies unleashed a vicious attack on 400 Water Protectors on the Highway 1806 bridge just north of the encampment, where police unleashed water cannons in 25° temperatures, rubber bullets, mace, tear gas, and concussion grenades. Sophia Wilansky had her arm nearly torn off as a result of a concussion grenade and faces possible amputation.
This eviction notice is a threat to use this vicious repression against the Native people and others who have put their bodies on the line to STOP this genocidal pipeline. It needs to be a rallying call for many more to step up and step into this struggle NOW!
Thousands at Alcatraz Sunrise Gathering Mark Indigenous Resistance and Struggle at Standing Rock
November 28, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From readers:
Alcatraz Island out in the San Francisco Bay was the site of a takeover and occupation by the American Indian Movement (AIM) from 1969 to 1971. Every year since 1975, there has been a very UNthanksgiving “Indigenous Peoples Day Sunrise Gathering” at Alcatraz. This year’s event was to commemorate “524 years of Indigenous resistance, honoring our ancestors and future generations.”
Indigenous Peoples Annual Thanksgiving Sunrise Gathering, November 24, 2016, Alcatraz island. Photo: Special to revcom.us
Every year the Alcatraz Sunrise Gathering gets bigger. This year it was reported that 5,000 came, with people lining up at 2:30 in the morning to get on the first ferry at 4:30 am. Members of Native American tribes from around California and the West were well represented, but there were Indigenous people from other parts of the U.S. and the Americas as well. This gathering has always been diverse, with people and families of all colors and ethnicities, young and old, coming from nearby and far away. This year was no exception. And this year, all were in proud support of the courageous and determined struggle of the Native people in Standing Rock, North Dakota, against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL).
In the speeches and performances and dances there was celebration of Native people’s resistance. Among those speaking were people who had been part of the struggle at Standing Rock and others who were headed there. People spoke of how the struggle at Standing Rock has brought Native peoples together in a way they have never seen before. Some said they were leaving soon with food, warm clothing, and other supplies for the brave resisters at Standing Rock.
The San Francisco Chronicle quoted Andrea Carmen of the Yaqui Nation who spoke at the beginning of ceremony: “There are dark days ahead. I won’t say his name here.” A resounding boo went up at her reference to President-elect Donald Trump. “But we’re in a fight right now, and it’s only going to continue.”
Some of the participants in the Indigenous People's Day celebration at Alcatraz showed solidarity with the struggle to stop the DAPL pipeline in North Dakota. Credit: Native News Online photo by Christopher Burquez
There were speakers demanding the release of Leonard Peltier, Native American political prisoner who has been locked up for more than 40 years. In 1975, Peltier was at an AIM camp at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota that helped people at the reservation defend themselves against a campaign of terror by the U.S. government that led to the deaths of 64 AIM members and supporters. He was framed for the killing of two FBI agents who attacked the camp.
It was cold out on Alcatraz Island before sunrise, but we all knew this was nothing compared to Standing Rock, where the pigs have used water cannons and rubber bullets against the “No DAPL” resisters in 26 degree weather!
We distributed thousands of copies of the revcom.us statement, “In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America” to people on the island and as people arrived back at the docks. At one point, we put the “Mein Trumpf” graphic from revcom.us on the ground, and lots of people stepped and stomped on it as they passed by. And many, many people took bundles of flyers of the statement and Revolution newspapers to distribute in their communities.
Revcom.us Interview with Standing Rock Youth on November 20 Police Attack:
"They emptied two canisters of mace on me and counting"
November 28, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On November 20, North Dakota police attacked peaceful protesters at Standing Rock with rubber bullets, concussion grenades, tear gas, and continuous blasts from water cannons in 25-degree weather. There are reports of serious injuries. The protesters were attempting to clear the bridge so that emergency vehicles and people could get through. Those lands are under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who, according to an article in the LA Times, called in the police attack.
Donate to Support revcom.us Correspondents at Standing Rock
Revcom.us correspondents at Standing Rock—Travis Morales and, from the Revolution Club, NYC, Riley Ruiz—are standing with the struggle, reporting on developments, learning from people, and engaging people with the new communism and the work and leadership of Bob Avakian. Click here now to make urgently needed donations to support them.
After this attack Revcoms Travis Morales and Riley Ruiz, who are reporting from Standing Rock, interviewed one of the Standing Rock youth who had been injured in the police assault and had to go to the hospital.
Revcom: So what happened at the hospital?
Youth: All right, well I got there, they took me into one of the rooms, could still barely see, still barely breathe, could still barely stand, still freezing. They took my temperature, charged me about $600 and told me to leave. That wasn’t even for the ambulance ride—the ambulance ride, they said was free.
When I got out into the lobby, there was a whole bunch of untreated people: open wounds, like split open fingers, a man got hit in the head with a percussion grenade... He didn’t receive any treatment. They put a hoodie over his head and wheeled him out. One of the other people that was in there told me that they [some hospital personnel] were telling the rest of them that they didn’t support us at all, [but] they’re still going to treat us like any other patient—which they didn’t do... Yeah, they pretty much put us out on the street. I didn’t have any shoes, I didn’t have any clothes for the winter, at all. They’re perfectly prepared to let me sleep outside at night.
Revcom: And this was a night that was below freezing.
Youth: Yes.
Revcom: And your clothes were soaked.
Youth: And I already had hypothermia.
Revcom: Why don’t you repeat what they did to you on the bridge, as you were sitting down.
Youth: I sat down, they emptied two canisters of mace on me and counting. And then they started firing at our feet, walked up to me at point-blank range and held a shotgun and an assault rifle in our faces (there were two of us sitting down at the time). Then a man came and sat down in front of us... Eventually I couldn’t walk any more—they still kept macing us. A medic came down and dragged me off the field.
Revcom: What were they shooting people with? What were they shooting at people’s feet?
Youth: They were shooting cans, they were shooting small triangular rubber bullets, and they were shooting the large foam rubber bullets, all of them.
Revcom: Is there anything else?
Youth: Well, the police lied about using tear gas. I counted at least 15 cans of tear gas just where I was at, that’s what I was exposed to. They said they didn’t use a firehose, but that’s obviously not true.
Revcom: They admitted in the Bismarck Tribune this morning that they were using fire hoses, that they brought the fire hoses to supposedly put out fires, and then turned them on the crowd.
Youth: There was no fires when they brought them out. When they brought them out, there wasn’t a single fire at all. They mounted the firehose on a police vehicle and started spraying us. So we built a small barricade to try and protect ourselves from the water.
Revcom: And then once people were frozen, after the police had done all this, including starting fires, then the people set up safe fires, small fires to stay warm, right?
Youth: Correct. We were trying to start small fires. The police kept putting them out and soaking the people who were trying to start ‘em. Those people were generally already almost hypothermic. Then, after we were all soaking, they started shooting us.
Revcom: And including when people were trying to put out the fires started by police, right?
Youth: Correct.
Revcom: What did you say earlier about a woman being shot in the head?
Youth: There was a woman who was putting blankets around people who were hypothermic and sitting around the fire; she was trying to treat them. They shot her in the head, she fell back and hit her head on the concrete.
Revcom: Do you know how she turned out?
Youth: The last I saw, they were wheeling her into surgery.
Revcom: Jesus Christ!
Youth: Also, I’m pretty sure the police were spiking the mace with something, because 24 hours after exposure to it I started hyperventilating and couldn’t breathe. Everything started burning again. I started to pass out, couldn’t move. And allegedly, according to the emergency medical technician that they had come check me out—that has been happening to people all day yesterday.
Revcom: What else? Is there anything else you want to say? Is this what you wanted to tell me when you saw me in the lobby?
In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America! at the Doo Dah Parade in Pasadena, CA
November 25, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader:
The Pasadena Doo Dah Parade, November 20. Photos: Special to revcom.us
November 20—The Pasadena Doo Dah Parade is a popular farcical and flamboyant parade held in Pasadena, California, each year. Absurd and unique participants such as the Shopping Cart Drill Team, the Bastard Sons of Lee Marvin, and the Men of Leisure Synchronized Nap Team form contingents, and thousands of people line the streets to watch and have fun.
This year’s wild celebration featured a contingent named “In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America!” We were there to reach the crowd with the “In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America!” statement, posters, and a huge banner, and to distribute Revolution newspaper, the current issue of which also features “HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution.”
As soon as we unfurled the large banner right before the parade started—the main organizer of the Doo Dah Parade insisted we be front and center in the parade. We were a team of four to start, but had stacked up 6,000 statements, 500 posters, 325 Revolution newspapers, and a contribution bucket onto a decorated convertible “hand truck to platform,” easily maneuverable by one person (this is important—and something to learn from—as the “convertible hand truck to platform” enabled a small team to be mobile with large amounts of flyers, posters, and newspapers).
There was an overwhelming response to “In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America!” Right away, two young guys with anti-Trump T-shirts took over holding the banner in the parade. Thousands of people reached for the statement as our contingent rolled through the parade. People young and old also reached for the posters, which were held up by hundreds along the entire length and breadth of the parade. It was truly an extraordinary response—the two banner holders telling us “these people weren’t passive... they wanted the materials and they were looking for a way to act.”
We distributed 4,500 statements (including many bundles to individuals) and 500 posters, and 165 Revolution newspapers toward the end of the parade. We took up fundraising and raised $145 toward the statements and posters, and $100 for Revolution newspapers. This all took place within the span of about 90 minutes, with the “In the Name of Humanity...” statement reaching not only thousands in the crowd and those participating in contingents and floats, but many more than that through the television and media coverage of the Doo Dah parade.
Behind the Re-Establishment of U.S.-Cuba Diplomatic Relations
Editor's note, 11/27/16: With the death of Fidel Castro and the ascension of the fascist Donald Trump to the presidency, U.S.-Cuba relations will be in flux. This article, dealing with Obama's moves to "normalize" those relations, gives a good basic background in why revolution in Cuba was necessary and had to have U.S. imperialist domination as a central target; how and why that revolution did not ultimately succeed in winning liberation from imperialism; and how to understand and see through the self-serving propaganda of U.S. politicians and media on all this and actually get at the truth.
by Raymond Lotta | December 29, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On December 17, the United States and Cuba announced the restoration of full diplomatic relations. President Obama also announced that the U.S. will ease restrictions on travel, on the amount of cash that can be sent to individuals in Cuba, on the export of telecommunications equipment, and on certain banking activity.
The U.S. had no right to isolate and punish Cuba. Its economic blockade of Cuba was an act of imperialist extortion. But the terms of normalization that the U.S. is imposing are not in the interests of the Cuban people.
U.S. Imperialism and Cuba
I encourage readers to study Bob Avakian’s essay “Three Alternative Worlds” to get a concise scientific grounding in what real socialism is and how it is different than what exists in countries like Cuba or North Korea (“Three Alternative Worlds,“ December 3, 2006). Bob Avakian has developed the framework, the viable vision and strategy, for a radically new and liberatory society and world. “Three Alternative Worlds” is also a supplement in BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian. To learn more, go to revcom.us/avakian.
For more than 100 years, the United States has caused incalculable misery and suffering for the Cuban people. Cuba came under the domination of U.S. imperialism as a result of the Spanish-American War of 1898. The Cuban people had been fighting for their independence from Spain, but the U.S. seized on the situation to bring Cuba under its control. The so-called Platt Amendment passed by the U.S. Congress in 1901, which was incorporated into the Cuban constitution, set the terms for U.S. interference in Cuba’s domestic affairs.
The U.S. landed marines in Cuba four times in the early 20th century. It established a military colony—the Guantánamo naval base—which has been used as a concentration camp and torture chamber in the post-9/11 U.S. war on the world.
By the 1950s, the U.S. controlled 80 percent of Cuba’s utilities, 90 percent of its mines, close to 100 percent of the country’s oil refineries, 90 percent of its cattle ranches, and 40 percent of its sugar industry. Sugar plantation workers faced incredibly oppressive conditions—slave-like labor punctuated by periods of unemployment. Cuba also became an investor's paradise for U.S. gambling syndicates, real estate operators, hotel owners, and mobsters. U.S. businessmen and travelers would frequent Havana, the capital of Cuba, as a sex tourism center. There were some 100,000 prostitutes in the country! The U.S. gave economic and military backing to one hated regime after another to enforce these political, economic, and social relations.
These horrors were the backdrop for the Cuban revolution that came to power in 1959. This horror show is what has been extolled by Cuban exiles in Miami and the U.S. propaganda machine as the “lost Cuba.”
The Cuban revolution was a just and popular uprising against U.S. imperialism. It did not go on to break the stranglehold of world capitalism-imperialism, nor did it launch a genuine libratory social revolution aimed at uprooting all oppression including patriarchy. Nonetheless, the U.S. imperialists never reconciled themselves to defeat. In 1961, the U.S. carried out the Bay of Pigs invasion, which the Cuban people defeated. The CIA tried several times, employing the Mafia in some cases, to assassinate Fidel Castro. The U.S. imposed an unjust and immoral embargo that still exists—blocking Cuba’s ability to have normal trade with Western countries, to obtain needed medicines and agricultural and industrial goods.
Behind the Shift in Course: Imperialist Economics and Geopolitics
For the last 50 years, ten U.S. presidential administrations have tried to achieve regime change in Cuba by economic strangulation, political destabilization, and active attempts to overthrow the Cuban government. Have the U.S. imperialists given up on the goal of restoring a subordinate, client regime in Cuba? Have they decided to respect the national sovereignty of Cuba? Hardly. The U.S. has indeed shifted course...but what is happening is a change in tactics not in goal.
A decisive section of the U.S. ruling class, with Obama taking the lead, has concluded that the previous tack of diplomatic and economic isolation of Cuba and direct and indirect efforts to topple the Castro regime no longer serves the strategic interests of imperialism. Instead, the U.S. imperialists are aiming to use normalization of relations to achieve regime change from within—to create the conditions to turn Cuba, once again, into a neo-colony of U.S. imperialism. This is the reality that lies beneath the rhetoric of Obama’s “brave” and “bold” stroke to “break with the past.”
The Cuban economy is in serious crisis. The old-line leadership of Raul Castro and Fidel Castro is looking desperately for new props of economic support, and is willing to wheel and deal with the U.S. imperialists. And over the last five years, economic ties, trade, and financial flows, between the U.S. and Cuba have been growing. In these conditions, the U.S. imperialists are making a major move—and they have the upper hand. The Cuban leadership, for its part, is trying to use normalization and opening up to the U.S. as a way to hold on to power as the economic situation deteriorates.
Normalization is very much about U.S. capital sinking its fangs into Cuba—to extract super-profits from the labor of the Cuban people, to tap into its trained professional strata, and to plunder the resources of the island. The financial press is reporting on investment plans and proposals being drawn up by the likes of the agribusiness giant Cargill and Fanjul Corp (owned by a Cuban exile) that controls Domino Sugar. General Motors and Caterpillar have hailed Obama’s announcement.
But there are bigger strategic issues involved. The U.S.’s new stance towards Cuba serves broader geopolitical objectives: to reassert and tighten U.S. dominance over Latin America—what they have historically and arrogantly considered their “back yard.”
In waging their “war on terror,” their war on the world, since 9/11, the U.S. imperialists have not paid as much attention to Latin America as they have to the Middle East and Central Asia. In these circumstances, Venezuela, under Hugo Chavez and now Nicholas Maduro, was able to stake out more independent positions from the U.S. It has become Cuba’s most important source of economic support—and a thorn in the side of U.S. imperialism.
At the same time, capitalist China has emerged as a major economic rival to the U.S. in Latin America. China is now the second largest investor (behind the U.S.) in Latin America. It is the largest trading partner of several Latin American countries, including Brazil, which is the largest economy in Latin America. China has negotiated an agreement with Nicaragua to finance and construct a canal that will be longer and deeper than the Panama Canal.
All of this is of concern to the U.S. imperialists. Their change in course towards Cuba, to bring Cuba back into its imperial network through normalization of ties, is part of maneuvering to reassert U.S. hegemony in the Western hemisphere.
Clarity About Cuban Society: It Is Not Socialist
The Cuban leadership uses Marxist phrases. The Cuban economy has certain formal features that make it appear to be socialist: state-owned enterprises and extensive state-financed social programs. But this is not the essence of socialism, and Cuba is not a socialist society. Socialism is the momentous revolutionary leap away from capitalism towards communism. The socialist revolution is about putting an end to all exploitation and oppression. It is about empowering the masses of people, through the creation of a radically new and different state power, to increasingly take responsibility for running society, to ever more consciously change the world and change themselves—with the goal of creating a world community of humanity, where there are no longer class divisions and social inequalities, no longer social antagonism.
The achievement of communism requires visionary vanguard leadership basing itself on a scientific understanding of reality and how society and the world can be transformed in the interests of emancipating all of humanity. This is not Cuba. The revolution that Fidel Castro led did not break Cuba out of the bounds of bourgeois economic, political, and social relations.
Before 1959, Cuba had been a “monoculture”: an economy based on sugar production for the world market, dominated by U.S. imperialism. Castro did not lead and mobilize the Cuban people to radically restructure this economic legacy. Instead, the Cuban leadership sought a “quick fix.” Sugar would remain king of the Cuban economy, and the Cuban economy would remain hostage to the world market. But in place of the United States, Castro looked to the social-imperialist Soviet Union as its market for sugar and its chief source of credit. (The Soviet Union had ceased being a socialist society in the mid-1950s.)
The Cuban economy remained dependent and distorted. It was unable to provide for its own food requirements. Most importantly, the labor and energies of the Cuban people were not being applied to the all-around transformation of society and advance of world revolution but rather to the reproduction of relations of dependency and exploitation. Cuba became a kind of repressive welfare state in which the masses are kept powerless and economically chained to the logic of world capitalism. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Cuban leadership has looked for new fixes. Tourism was expanded on a large scale. Prostitution reappeared as a social phenomenon. Foreign investment was welcomed in to exploit natural resources. Venezuela provided Cuba with cheap oil—and this has helped keep the economy afloat. But the collapse of world oil prices is sending the Venezuelan economy into a tailspin—and putting new pressures on the Cuban economy. This is not socialism.
Clarity About Bullshit: “U.S.-Style Freedoms”
A narrative is pumped out by imperial ideologues and the media about the great benefits that “U.S.-style freedoms” will supposedly bring to the Cuban people. It is obscene:
Open and free access to information through the web and social media? Yes, the United States offers “internet freedom”—while the NSA surveils and spies on citizens on a scale unmatched by any society in the world or in history.
The “rule of law” instead of “Castro’s repressive police state.” Tell that to a generation of Black and Latino youth for whom the justice system is legalized police brutality and murder and mass incarceration. Talk about the U.S’s respect for the “sanctity of human rights” to the prisoners at Guantánamo—held indefinitely without trial, water boarded, sleep-deprived, and force fed.
The market as an “empowering tool” unleashing the “entrepreneurial spirit”? Go to Haiti, and see how local subsistence agriculture, rice and pig production, was undermined and destroyed by U.S. political and economic power. Go to Honduras, to Guatemala, or Bangladesh and ask the women workers about the great benefits of sweatshop exploitation—factories run like prison compounds that are death traps.
Real Revolution
The Cuban people have suffered from direct domination by U.S. imperialism from 1898 until 1959, and then 50 years of U.S. economic blockade, military invasion and threat, and interference. The U.S. has no right to diplomatically and economic isolate Cuba. But the resumption of relations between Cuba and the U.S. on the terms being dictated by U.S. imperialism does not represent anything positive for the Cuban people.
What is needed in Cuba and the whole world is genuine revolution.—an emancipatory revolution that aims to uproot all exploitation and oppression, all oppressive relations and ideas, where intellectual ferment and dissent are fostered, where the conditions are being created for human beings to truly flourish. This revolution is a monumental and complex challenge in today’s world. But it is the only alternative to the madness of this system. And it is possible.
We discussed the article, people talked about their thoughts on Standing Rock and how that is related to the overall fight that is in front of us, including around Trump, and the importance of what people do now to not allow the encampment to be kicked out.
Two members of the Revolution Club immediately volunteered to go [to Standing Rock] as representatives, and the rest of the Club will be part of building a Solidarity Delegation which aims to include people from the neighborhoods of the oppressed together with students and others.
We thought through some people in and around the Club that we will read the article with, and talk about going with the delegation. We came up with a plan that includes making a banner that says "South Central LA and Watts Stands with Standing Rock" which will be taken out to neighborhoods in South LA and Watts for people to write statements of support for Standing Rock.
We also intend on challenging people in these neighborhoods to stop the violence amongst each other and start fighting the real enemy—the system of capitalism/imperialism. We developed plans for the next days of outreach by getting Revolution newspaper and the statement "In the Name of Humanity,
We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America" and the RCP Central Committee pamphlet "HOW WE CAN WIN—How We, Can Really Make Revolution" to people at train stations near Watts and other places during the week.
We will be at rapper YG's concert (who does the song “FDT—Fuck Donald Trump” and is on a Fuck Donald Trump tour) on Tuesday night to distribute Revolution newspapers and fliers and call on people to stand with Standing Rock. During the day on Tuesday we will be at UCLA also with a banner to get it signed by students and others on campus and getting the word out about this revolution and the particularity of Standing Rock to students to unite with, contribute and join in the car caravans that will be traveling from LA to North Dakota by December 3.
We plan on raising money for all this among all people throughout society, including students, professors and people who live in the poor neighborhoods. And we will also be uniting with efforts of other organizations and individuals working towards building support and solidarity with Standing Rock including joining and participating in local actions and protests. People should be struggled with over how significant this fight at Standing Rock is at a time when the system produced and allowed to come to power an outright fascist who was handed the baton by the Democrats and will be president. This speaks to the utter illegitimacy of the system.
ALERT! North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple Signs Executive Order for Mandatory Evacuation of Oceti Sakowin Camp at Standing Rock, Effective Immediately!
RESPONSE: We Aren't Going Anywhere!
November 28, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From revcom.us correspondents at Standing Rock:
In a further escalation of the outrageous eviction of water protectors from Oceti Sakowin camp, the main camp here at Standing Rock, North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple just gave an executive order, effective immediately, to evacuate the camp, under threat of arrest. Dalrymple cites the reason behind this order to be 'public safety concerns'.
The Governor of North Dakota, who gave the green light to Morton County Sheriff's department spraying water cannons at water protectors in below freezing temperatures, is now concerned with public safety?
Just let that sink in for a minute...
This order is so THICK with gross hypocrisy, it is hard to even know where to start.
First of all, if Dalrymple had ANY concern for the safety of the public, he would not be letting the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) go through, as it an actual danger to the health and safety of the Native people, and to millions more who depend on the Missouri River as their main water source.
He would not be unleashing his pigs to brutalize people, set their dogs on people, shoot rubber bullets at people, spray freezing cold water at people in freezing temperatures, seriously injure people with concussion grenades, spray people in the face point blank with mace and pepper spray.
In the order, Dalrymple states:
"Any action or inaction taken by any party which encourages persons to enter, reenter, or remain in the evacuation area will be subject to penalties as defined in law."
In other words, free speech has just been criminalized and any call for people to stand with the Standing Rock Sioux, to stand up against DAPL, and to oppose this outrageous escalation in this struggle will be subject to "penalties as defined in law." And in addition to this, notice the wording, "or inaction taken." This could very well lead to tribal leaders coming under attack for not actively leading people to comply with this order.
He also states:
"I direct state agencies, emergency service officials, and nongovernmental organizations to reduce threats to public safety by not guaranteeing the provision of emergency and other governmental and nongovernmental services in the evacuation area, unless otherwise approved on a case by case basis by the Morton County Sheriff or Superintendent of the Highway Patrol."
This amounts to a big FUCK YOU to the water protectors, whom he has just deemed “criminals” with the swipe of a pen, and he is saying: unless and until you vacate this land, you will not be allowed any emergency services. Hundreds of water protectors have been injured at the hands of the Sheriff's deputies and state police. Dalrymple is saying when his thugs, now, brutalize people as they did when they almost blew off the arm of Sophia Wilansky with a concussion grenade, they will be denied medical emergency aid by the very police that brutalized them!
Hey Dalrymple...
If you are reading this, it seems to me like YOU are the threat to public safety in this case. YOU are the one calling for this escalation, not the water protectors. You have no idea how determined the people are, and how capable we are of getting through this brutal winter. And do you want to know why? Because the Native Americans and everyone who has come to stand up here are the ones who are actually concerned with the health and safety of the public, not just here at Standing Rock, but throughout the country, and the planet as a whole. We are protecting the water from people like you, who viciously resort to brutal and deadly force to enforce a system that can do no other than destroy the environment and continue to commit genocide against Native and other oppressed peoples. You don't give a damn about humanity or the environment.
Revcom.us received this press release, dated November 29:
Joey Johnson, Notorious Flag Burner:
Burning the Flag at the RNC Was Right and Necessary
Donald Trump's Threats Cannot Be Allowed
November 29, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
This morning @RealDonaldTrump tweeted that “nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag,” and that those who do should face loss of citizenship or a year in jail.
Joey Johnson and the Revolution Club at the Republican Convention, July 20, 2016.
Photo: special to revcom.us
Joey Johnson of the Revolution Club said, "This is another move towards outright fascism and it cannot be allowed! Trump advocates torture and has utter contempt for the rule of law. He is openly trying to muzzle dissent and enforce patriotism."
Raphael Kadaris said, "Joey Johnson and the RNC16 had a right to do what we did at the RNC and it was right. Even before the flag was lit, a mob of police and fascist Infowars supporters—Trump operatives—assaulted the protective perimeter of Revolution Club members. The police violently arrested Joey Johnson and at least 16 others."
The victims of this assault, the RNC16, still face multiple misdemeanors and felonies. The state of Ohio has dropped no charges.
Johnson said, "These charges are unjust. We're calling on people to join the fight to get the charges dropped, and to resist, defy and defeat this attempt to impose a fascist America on the world. Right now: everyone everywhere who hates what Donald Trump is fighting for should defy this threat and display the American flag in the only way it should be: on fire."
Obama Won't Protect Dreamers, or Pardon Snowden...
But He WILL Hand Trump Expanded War Powers
Updated December 5, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Obama has refused to take action to protect the immigrants and Dreamers who came out of the shadows thanks to Obama's promises of a path to citizenship, even though Trump has explicitly threatened mass deportations and ripping families apart.
Last Friday, November 25, Obama indicated he would not take action to pardon heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden, who courageously exposed illegal spying and massive violations of people's rights. This, even though Trump's choice to head the CIA, Mike Pompeo, has called Snowden a "traitor" who should be executed.
On all these fronts, Obama refuses to act, as if it was bad form or would break tradition for a sitting president to take preemptive action before a new administration took over.
But there's one front where Obama has shown no such hesitation: giving Trump greatly expanded war powers. The NewYorkTimes (November 28) reports that the Obama administration has quietly decided to "expand the legal scope" of the so-called war on terror to include the Islamist group Shabab in Somalia. This, according to the Times, is intended to "shore up" the legal basis for "an intensifying campaign of airstrikes and other counterterrorism operations" on forces in Somalia. (In recent months, the Obama administration has quietly expanded such "authorizations" for the use of force in Afghanistan and Libya as well.)
For starters, this is totally illegitimate. The "war on terror" has always actually been a war of imperialism and empire. Its legal justification was the authorization, granted after September 11, 2001, to wage war on those who carried out those attacks. But that authorization has since been used to justify all manner of U.S. aggression, including now in Somalia. Somalia had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11, and Somalia's Shabab didn't even exist until 2007.
The expansion of war powers is also barbaric and criminal. Trump and his new appointees are promising a bloodthirsty expansion of torture and the "war on terror," without even the pretense of regard for civilian casualties, the laws of war, or whole populations who are being targeted. Now, according to an expert cited by the New York Times, "this administration leaves the Trump administration with tremendously expanded capabilities and authorities" to carry out their savage plans.
Lessons: One, both the Democrats and Republicans are ruling class parties that act to further the interests of U.S. capitalism-imperialism and its global empire.
Two, their differences are over how to maintain their rule and their empire, not over how best to serve the people.
Three, the imposition of fascism through Trump will represent a leap in the horror—and this shows that people cannot count on Obama and the Democrats to seriously oppose, much less stop, the Trump gang from attempting to consolidate a fascist regime. That is up to us!,
On November 29, Donald Trump threatened: “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag—if they do, there must be consequences—perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!” Make no mistake: This is part of a whole fascist assault on people’s rights, and the rule of law, shredding established constitutional rights, and imposing open violent repression against dissent.
Joey Johnson and the RNC 16 did the right thing when they burned the American flag in Cleveland outside the arena where Trump was being nominated. Joey Johnson and other flag-burners were violently assaulted by pro-Trump thugs associated with Alex Jones and InfoWars, and police. Now Joey Johnson and others—the RNC 16—face serious criminal charges. Others who have burned the flag did the right thing as well, including students at University of Pittsburgh, at Hampshire College, and protesters outside the White House when Trump was elected.
Burning the American flag is constitutionally protected free speech. In 1984, Joey Johnson burned the American flag outside the Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas as Ronald Reagan was being renominated for a second term. He was arrested for “desecration of a venerated object,” jailed, tried, convicted, sentenced to a year in jail and a $2,000 fine. Joey Johnson appealed the conviction and fought for five years to the U.S. Supreme Court. And he fought in the court of public opinion against forced patriotism. The support built outside the court, combined with the legal strategy of his legal team (including William Kunstler) led to a Supreme Court decision that burning the American flag is constitutionally protected free speech.
But now the president-elect of the United States, the next commander in chief, just decreed—without any legal justification—that this act of dissent and free speech should result in people going to jail, or even becoming stateless people without citizenship, without any legal protections at all. Trump’s threat smacks of the Nazi legislation—and the Nazi mentality—that made it a crime to “profane” the swastika. This is deadly serious. It is a hint, along with so many other outrages, of the kind of fascist regime that Trump intends to impose. It is yet another reason why people cannot normalize this, but must actually undertake unprecedented resistance to prevent Trump from consolidating his regime.
In response to Trump’s threat, the Revolution Club, NYC burned the American flag outside Trump’s hotel, and challenged others to do the same.
People SHOULD TAKE UP THAT CHALLENGE!
Because the United States was founded on slavery, Black people still have no rights this white supremacist system is bound to respect, and there is an epidemic of unpunished murder by police.
Because the U.S.A. was built on and continues to carry out genocide of the native peoples.
Because America was created by stealing half of Mexico’s land in a war of conquest, rape and plunder in 1846-48.
Because in America a woman is raped every two minutes and a woman is battered every nine seconds—violence fueled by a culture of porn and patriarchy.
Because the U.S. massacred over 200,000 innocent civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, with nuclear bombs and is the only country that’s ever used them.
Because the U.S. murdered three million people during the Vietnam War and has killed over 1.3 million in the Middle East since 9/11.
Because America imprisons two million people, mostly Black and Latino—more than any country on earth.
Because the U.S. terrorizes and demonizes immigrants, deporting 1.7 million in the last five years alone.
Because America’s wealth comes from exploiting and enslaving millions of people here and around the world, including children, from Mexico to China to Congo to Bangladesh.
Because America has done more to destroy the planet’s environment than any other country on earth—the U.S. military is the single greatest institutional polluter in the world.
For all those reasons and a million more, and because people need to stand up to and defy Trump’s move to impose fascism...
And because if Trump gets away with silencing and intimidating people with this threat, coming on the heels of appointing fascists to his cabinet, that will be one more big step in imposing fascist terror against all dissent...
And here’s the most important thing: The world does NOT have to be this way. And because of the work, and leadership of Bob Avakian, there really is a viable vision and strategy for a radically new, and much better, society and world, and there is the crucial leadership that is needed to carry forward the struggle toward that goal.
So right now, there is an urgent need for people to do two things. First, to confront the threat on so many fronts posed by Trump’s fascism and carry out unprecedented resistance to prevent him from consolidating this. Second, to dig deeply the nature of this system, what it does to people here and around the world, and to dig into and get with the movement for revolution that is organizing to overthrow this system at the soonest possible time.
"The Potential for Humanity to Come Together Around a Totally Different Way"...
November 30, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Revcom.us interviewed Travis Morales and a young member of the Revolution Club who have been out at Standing Rock for over a month now. The following is an excerpt, edited for publication.
Revcom.us: Both of you went there with the understanding that the system is the problem and that communist revolution—the new communism is the answer. From that perspective and with that understanding, what insights and thoughts do you have about how the world doesn’t need to be this way, how society doesn’t need to be this way—what it might look like to have a whole different kind of society that’s in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America that would end the oppression suffered by the Native Peoples, for like you say 400 years? And that would begin to address the environmental emergency from a whole different perspective?
Revolution Club Member [RCM]: I mean here you have a situation where thousands of people from all over the country and all over the world have come together to fill a really great need and that is to put their bodies and put their lives on the line to stop this pipeline—which would have huge disastrous implications for humanity if it goes through in terms of the Missouri River and the remaining people in this region of the country, the poisoning this river that effects millions of more people. So you have people coming together on that basis, to stop this pipeline...
Revcom.us: I just want to interject the other dimension to it is the violation of the treaty rights and sovereignty of the Standing Rock Sioux...
RCM: That is an extremely important dimension of things for sure. What’s happening here is incredibly inspiring and shows the potential for humanity to come together around a totally different—coming together to actually—like under communism, coming together and people contributing what they can and getting back what they need. This is really what is happening here. There are people coming here who have things and many more who come who don’t have skills—but contributing what they can and sharing. Same thing goes for the food here. People who have some more skills to be able to make very large batches of food for people and then there are people who don’t have a clue but they are learning and contributing. Anyone who comes here has that spirit to contribute as much as they can towards this effort and there is no shortage of need here and especially as we approach this very brutal winter. And again you have thousands of people here who are determined to do whatever they can to make sure to see this all the way through.
Travis Morales: There are people who live off the grid, people who are professional people who have medical skills, who do construction. People have been unleashed; this is something that matters to people... These are people who are standing with the Native Peoples against the genocide, against the poisoning of the water, and you do see the potential here for—as we have discussed with many people, it’s going to take a revolution to actually put into practice a lot of the ideas and the things that people are doing here—on a mass scale, for people to work cooperatively together.
And there is a huge question, a huge challenge—which side are you on? Are you coming to stand with these oppressors under orders from the highest levels of government who are out here brutalizing and coming close to murdering some people to ram through this pipeline? Or are you going to stand with the people who have suffered this genocide for 400 years, who are taking this stand that we’re not going to let this pipeline go through and we’re not going to let them poison this water? This is a question of “which side are you on”? And I think—almost two and a half months from now a fascist is going to be declared president of this country. And what’s going on here could be a challenge to this whole fascist regime that is about to go into power, becoming a real flash point. People coming together to stand up to the pipeline and quite frankly the U.S. capitalists who are trying to ram this through and this could be quite a crisis for the Trump regime that is coming in.
And I think we see some potential here... It’s going to take communist leadership to make revolution and within that you can see how all kinds of people can be drawn into political life very quickly from different perspectives, who come into resistance to the status quo. The revolutionary communist line actually [brings this out] that this is quite possible.
Revcom.us: That seems like a good note to end on.
RCM: I just wanted to add this question of sacrifice because when people look at what’s happening here—people look at how it’s fun and all this kind of stuff—but at the same time there has been a lot of sacrifices to be here. It’s not easy to be here to face these kinds of conditions, this brutal winter that’s coming. There is the potential for people to sacrifice, their jobs, their families, their jobs that they’ve left. People making incredible sacrifices. And the way people have stood up against these vicious police.
That’s not easy, that’s not fun to get shot point blank at by rubber bullets, to get maced. But it matters a great deal and when you ask people who have been through this, been brutalized, is it worth it, they say, of course, of course it’s worth it. All these sacrifices are worth it because it matters to stand up against this modern day genocide and so all these sacrifices that people are making are for that and people are willing to make these sacrifices for that.
Revolution Club in Cleveland, July 19. Photo: Special to revcom.us
Financially support the trip to Standing Rock here—earmark it for Revolution Club, Chicago.
The Chicago Revolution Club is planning to send a car caravan to Standing Rock in answer to the call at revcom.us. Last night we met to discuss the importance of Standing Rock and our being there. The discussion was robust and addressed many questions, including: What does our going there have to do with fighting to bring into a being a revolutionary situation? How does the Trump victory make what is happening at Standing Rock even more urgent? Why is it important that basic masses from Chicago go there? What about the risks involved and why is taking them worth it? And more. We also talked some about the history of Native Americans and how this struggle is part of opposing the genocide directed at them as well as its connection to the whole question of the environment.
Inspired by the example of the Revolution Club in LA that they wrote about in "Heading to Standing Rock" (the beauty of sharing experience at revcom.us), we made a banner to take out to the neighborhoods of the oppressed to be signed and brought to the people of Standing Rock. The banner said, "The Streets of Chicago Stand with Standing Rock." We took it out to Englewood, a South Side neighborhood where a youth, Kajuan Raye, was just killed by the police. This is also an area where the violence among the youth is intense and where we have been taking out our call, "Stop Killing Each Other, Start Fighting the Real Enemy, Get Into the Revolution."
We went into a neighborhood as an elementary school was letting out and put the banner on the side of our van. We discovered that only one person out of several dozen there knew anything about Standing Rock. Several people told us that they watch the news but never saw anything about this struggle. So as we were challenging people to sign the banner, we were telling them about the battle at Standing Rock. The outrage among the basic people was fierce in support of the Native Americans' struggle when they learned about what people have been going up against in this fight to protect their lands, burial grounds, and water and the great concern for the safety of the planet with these fossil fuels, as well as knowing a little bit about the whole history of killing off Native Americans. A couple of people pledged donations for the Revolution Club car caravan to Standing Rock.
Native Americans Fight Modern-Day Genocide:
Standing Up at Standing Rock
The Club talked about getting people who stayed behind to post up graphics and articles about Standing Rock to bring the understanding to an even broader audience in these areas where we are setting out to also impact the people to stop fighting each other and start fighting the real enemy as part of gathering the needed forces for an actual revolution.
So far, several core members of the Club are committed to go. And we have a meeting in the morning with four people, not yet in the Club, who have expressed a desire to go with the Club. There is also a car coming down from Cleveland of Revolution Club members. We are heading out early Friday morning in a caravan of 2-3 cars.
We will stay in touch and share our experience with others at revcom.us.
Hundreds at Harvard University Denounce Trump's Fascist Advisor Steve Bannon
November 30, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
November 30—In pouring rain, hundreds of people marched in the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts and protested outside a building on the Harvard University campus where Steve Bannon—the fascist white supremacist who is Trump’s chief strategist—had been scheduled to take part in a conference. (Bannon cancelled his appearance.) The call for the protest said, "Trump brought racist ideologues into the mainstream. By treating this situation as normal, Harvard is normalizing what Bannon stands for. We do not accept hate and bigotry as normal or legitimate. Come peacefully protest. Then help us organize." One banner said, “Jews and Muslims United. We Refuse to Normalize Fascism. WE WILL RESIST!”
Keith Lamont Scott: Once Again, the System "Justifies" Murder by Police
November 30, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
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.
Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:24
POLICE MURDER – ON VIDEO – OVER AND OVER
July 2014, police murder Eric Garner, an unarmed Black man, for allegedly selling loose cigarettes on Staten Island, NYC. The murder is caught on video. The videographer was sent to jail. The murdering police were never charged with anything.
August 2014, St. Louis police gun down Kajieme Powell, who was holding a knife but posing no threat to police, within 30 seconds of arriving on the scene. Video tore holes in the police lies about what happened. No cop was charged.
October 2014, a Chicago cop jumps out of his car and pumps 16 bullets into Laquan McDonald, 15 of them as Laquan lay dying in the street. Five other cops claimed Laquan was charging at them with a knife, but video showed he was more than 10 feet away and walking away from them. Two years later, the cop who killed him is charged with murder but yet to go to trial.
November 2014, 12-year-old Tamir Rice, playing in a park in Cleveland, is shot by police within seconds of rolling up on him. Captured on video, but no charges against the police.
February 2015, three cops in Pasco, Washington chase down and fire 17 bullets at Antonio Zambrano-Montes, a Mexican man, killing him because they said he was throwing rocks. No cops were charged.
March 2015, Dallas cops gun down Jason Harrison in front of his mother after she explains to them that he is mentally ill. The cops say Harrison “lunged” at them with a small screwdriver he was holding; video showed that he was holding it idly in his hands, threatening no one. Thetwo murderers were not indicted.
April 2015, North Charleston, South Carolina, a cop shoots unarmed Walter Scott in the back five times as Scott runs away after a traffic stop. Only after video is revealed exposing police lies about “self-defense” is the cop charged with murder; his trial is now underway.
July 2015, a University of Cincinnati cop shoots unarmed Sam Dubose point blank in the head during a traffic stop. The cop claimed Dubose tried to run him over; video proved this was a lie, yet the cops trial for manslaughter recently ended in a mistrial.
December 2015, five San Francisco cops fire a barrage of 20 bullets into Mario Woods as he attempted to walk away from them while holding a kitchen knife. Video showed he posed no threat to police. No charges were filed.
July 2016, Alton Sterling is executed point-blank, with a shot to the head as he was helplessly pinned on the ground in Baton Rouge. The murder is captured on video. The police were cleared by their department for use of excessive force.
The next day the wife of Philando Castile films her husband being murdered by police in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota. She streams it live on Facebook. After sustained protest, one cop is charged with manslaughter.
September 2016, despite the pleas and attempt to intervene by his wife who films the execution, police murder Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte.
When you see this happen, over and over and over again... When you see police get away with this over and over again. Even when they are caught on video... That tells you that when the PIGS murder innocent Black and Brown people for nothing at all, on video, and get away with it over and over, THEY ARE DOING THEIR JOB.
On Tuesday, September 20, Keith Lamont Scott—a Black man—sat in his parked truck in a small parking lot, waiting to pick up his son as he got off the school bus. Keith Lamont Scott was known to neighbors in the mostly white neighborhood as the man who read while he waited for his son every day.
But on this day, police rolled up on the scene. Video taken by Keith Lamont Scott's wife, Rakeyia Scott, shows police banging on the windows of Keith's pick-up truck, screaming “drop the gun.” It shows her screaming: “He doesn't have a gun! Don't shoot him... He has a TBI [traumatic brain injury]. He's not going to do anything to you guys. He just took his medicine.” Shots rang out – bam! Bam! Bam! Bam...
Rakeyia Scott shouts at the police:
Did you shoot him!?
Did you shoot him!?
He better not be fucking dead!
But the police did shoot Keith Lamont Scott. And then left him to die on the ground. Police dashboard camera video shows pigs handcuffing a helpless Keith Lamont Scott, and chatting with each other without any regard for his life, while he bleeds to death on the ground.
Protests, including defiant blockades of downtown streets and freeways, broke out in Charlotte, demanding justice. Only after days of protest did police release their dashcam video showing their utter disdain for the life of Keith Lamont Scott after they shot him.
Today, the North Carolina State District Attorney declared that no charges of any kind would be brought against any of the murderers. The District Attorney released a “report” that purported to be an objective investigation. It is a bald cover up.
The prosecutor's report ignores the reality revealed by the video courageously taken by Keith Lamont Scott's wife, Rakeyia Scott. Police have no interest in Rakeyia's attempts to intervene, to defuse the situation, to explain her husband's serious medical condition that impairs his ability to react to the kind of terror the police are instigating. Rakeyia Scott's video and the pigs’ own dash-cam show trigger-happy police, itching to shoot a Black man, coming up on Scott's truck and blasting away.
The fact that police shouted “drop the gun”—with their dashboard camera recording that—doesn't in any way prove Keith Lamont Scott had a gun, was pointing a gun at them, or posed a threat to anyone. It does prove police were invoking standard police procedure of yelling “stop resisting,” as they beat on someone. Or “put your hands where we can see them,” when they shoot someone. Or, “drop the gun....” to justify murdering people of color.
And the pigs utter disdain for the life of Keith Lamont Scott is further documented in their own video which shows them kneeling on him, chatting about what they're going to do next, while he lies dying. Without doing anything to make a pretense of trying to save his life.
The prosecutor's report dismisses substantial evidence from non-police witnesses. For example, statements by at least two witnesses—damning indictments of the police—are dismissed in part because these witnesses say Keith Lamont Scott was reading a book when the pigs started banging on his window. The prosecutor's report claims their statements are “inconsistent with the believable evidence” because a book “was never recovered.” But the prosecutor's own report says: “a purple composition notebook” was found on the front seat of the car, next to where Keith Lamont Scott was sitting, “wedged between the center console and the front passenger seat.” This kind of contempt and ridicule of credible statements by courageous witnesses runs through the prosecutor's report.
And the report justifies the police killing of Keith Lamont Scott because police claim he was smoking marijuana, had an unconcealed weapon in a state where that is legal, and looked at a pig with a “blank stare.” And that this murder by police was “self-defense.”
The report says Scott was in possession of an unconcealed gun. That is contested by witnesses. But in any event, it is not illegal in North Carolina. It says he was in possession of “a partially smoked blunt” as if that is a justifying factor in police killing someone. And it says a cop feared for his life because Scott looked at him with a “blank stare.”
All to justify the police murder of a Black man who was doing nothing but sitting in his truck, minding his own business, waiting to pick up his son from school.
As we go to press, people are in the streets protesting. There are reports that at least four people have been arrested in protests outside the Charlotte Police Headquarters.
Protesters gather outside Charlotte Police Headquarters on hearing the news that the police who murdered Keith Lamont Scott will not be indicted. Photo: @JustineIMiller/Twitter
A Letter to All of the Veterans Standing for Standing Rock
From Carl Dix
December 1, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Carl Dix is a courageous freedom fighter from the 1960s who went on to become a revolutionary fighter and a communist. Dix spent two years in military prison for refusing to fight in the unjust Vietnam War. He emerged unrepentant and went on to become a founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), USA, dedicating his life to the emancipation of all humanity. Today, Carl is a follower of and advocate for Bob Avakian, his leadership and his visionary new synthesis of communism. Carl Dix and Cornel West co-founded the Stop Mass Incarceration Network (SMIN), and Rise Up October that brought thousands into the streets in New York City demanding a stop to police terror.
The battle to stop the Dakota Access Pipe Line is nearing a crucial juncture. The authorities have already viciously attacked the Water Protectors of the Standing Rock Reservation and their supporters. They have unleashed security guards and law enforcement officers with attack dogs, mace, sound cannons, rubber bullets, tasers and more on the people fighting to stop the pipeline. They have arrested children, elders and others, marked them with numbers and kept them in dog kennels. They used water cannons on people in freezing temperatures and launched concussion grenades at protesters. This is outrageous—and it recalls the whole horrible history of how this country and system has treated Native Americans.
Now the Army Corps of Engineers has issued an order to evacuate “federal lands” by Monday, December 5, and threatened to arrest anyone who doesn't comply with this order. The Governor of North Dakota has piled onto this attack by issuing his own evacuation order—effective immediately. The Water Protectors have defiantly responded to these threats by declaring, “We aren't going anywhere.”
Shortly before this order was issued, a group of veterans began organizing to come to Standing Rock to support the Water Protectors. The organizers of this mobilization feel that as veterans they have a special role to play in stopping this injustice. While I’m not part of that contingent, I too am a veteran of the U.S. military. In 1970, they ordered me to go to Vietnam. But I was able to find out that this war was being fought to crush other oppressed people, to drown the liberation struggle of the Vietnamese people in blood. So, along with five other soldiers, known as the Fort Lewis 6, I refused these orders. I was sent to Leavenworth Military Penitentiary for two years for taking this stand.
The way I see it, Veterans Standing for Standing Rock could flip the script on the history of savagery the U.S. military has inflicted on Native people in this country. But there is a problem if we see this as “part of the great tradition” of the U.S. military. We need to be clear: the tradition of this military is a bloody, genocidal one, beginning with the way it nearly wiped out the Native peoples of this land! The U.S. military carried out massacres in which whole villages were wiped out, and men, women and children were slaughtered. The U.S. military drove Native people on the Trails of Tears, the long forced marches when tribes were forced from their land to distant areas, with many people dying en route. Every time the government violated a treaty with a tribal group, the U.S. military enforced that violation. And then that same U.S. military, once it had done all this shameful genocidal stuff to the Native American Indians, was sent all over the world to do it to other oppressed people.
Ask yourself this: Who and what have we been sent to fight for over and over again?
The revolutionary leader Bob Avakian has said:
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, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian, 1:5)
So why should any of us feel proud of having fought for that “1 percent”—the capitalist-imperialists who run this country? Why should we uphold any part of that? While doing time in Leavenworth for refusing to go to Vietnam, I learned what the real nature of this system was and the actual role the military plays in keeping all that in effect. So I decided to fight, alright—but for the oppressed people, to bring about a whole better world... and to fight AGAINST that system that tried to force me to kill other people who were fighting for liberation. I joined protests with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and I became a revolutionary, eventually becoming a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, led by Bob Avakian.
To the veterans who are coming to Standing Rock to play a different role: I will stand side by side with you and everyone else who is coming together to stop the attack on the rights of Native people and on the environment. Together, we will support these Water Protectors heart and soul.
While we do, let’s talk about the REAL nature of this system and its armed forces. And let’s talk about a truly liberating future where we can get out of this madness. Bob Avakian has written a blueprint for a radically better society—the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America. We’ve developed the strategy to actually win a revolution and to work for it today. And we’ve got the leadership for doing this in Bob Avakian and the party he leads.
Coming to Standing Rock, you are taking an important step. As we fight shoulder to shoulder here, let the next step be beginning the dialogue, the debate, and the organizing for the fight for the future—the emancipation of all humanity.
Download PDF of entire work
November 20—The Pasadena Doo Dah Parade is a popular farcical and flamboyant parade held in Pasadena, California, each year. Absurd and unique participants such as the Shopping Cart Drill Team, the Bastard Sons of Lee Marvin, and the Men of Leisure Synchronized Nap Team form contingents, and thousands of people line the streets to watch and have fun.
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New York City (Photo Revolution/revcom.us) 
Sit-in at Trump Tower, Chicago (Photo:@ShararehDrury/Twitter)
The Pasadena Doo Dah Parade, November 20. Photos: Special to revcom.us
