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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
In this Film, Bob Avakian Analyzes the Deep Roots and Driving Forces of Trump/Pence Fascism and What Must Be Done to Stop It.
Watch It Here, and Spread It.
| revcom.us
Be part of bringing the most serious answers to the most urgent questions to tens and hundreds of thousands, and ultimately millions.
This talk from Bob Avakian (BA) provides a scientific understanding of the roots of this fascist regime—in the history of the U.S. and the deeper roots in the system of capitalism-imperialism. He does so with passion, humor, humanity, and a deep sense of history. He cuts into the deepest, most agonizing questions, first in the speech and then in a wide-ranging Questions and Answers.
If more people watched this talk, it could change today’s political equation. But far too few have seen this talk, or even know about it. You are needed to be part of changing this.
Donate towards promotion of this film:
Scroll down for the film trailer, videos of the Q&A session following the speech, and clips from the film
Click to view the full speech.
The film and all video clips are also available for download HERE
For instructions to download this film click HERE
Questions and Answers with Bob Avakian
NEW: Download, share, and watch each Q&A in a separate clip. To download these clips, click the "v" icon on the bottom right of the clip to get to the Vimeo page, and scroll down to the button for "Download"
Q&A: What do you say to the comedians who ridicule Trump/Pence but also run the risk of contributing to normalizing fascism?
Q&A: How can we sustain the massive movement required to drive this regime from power?
Q&A: What strategies are there to break through the mainstream news whiteout of Refuse Fascism?
Q&A: What's the role of students in the movement to drive out the Trump/Pence regime?
Q&A: The Democrats are supposed to be the lesser of two evils, but I don't want to vote for them. I know the system sucks, but what do we do in the interim?
Q&A: As a revolutionary Christian, I believe that we do need this revolution but how can you have religious people not feel alienated?
Q&A: How can we overcome obstacles in reaching out broadly to drive out the Trump/Pence regime?
Q&A: Millions hate what's happening with the Trump/Pence regime, but does that matter if they don’t act?
Trailer and Clips From the Film:
Clip: "Why is it the Democrats can only try to resolve this on the terms of the system?"
Clip: "The 'Unholy Alliance' Between Trump and Fundamentalist Christian Fascists"
Clip: What Has Given Rise to the Situation in Which We Have a Fascist Regime Ruling the U.S.?
Clip: Why Can't We Rely On the Democratic Party to Root Out the Trump/Pence Fascist Regime?
Clip: If We Drive Out Trump, Won't We Just Get Pence? And How Can Mass Action Drive Out Trump, Anyway?
Clip: On What Basis Can Revolutionaries and People Who Are Not Revolutionaries Unite to Drive Out the Regime?
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
What You Can Do Right Now to Build for November 4
October 16, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Here are some key things you can do immediately to be part of building for the massive, sustained nonviolent outpourings to begin on November 4.
1. See—and share—the film of the new talk from Bob Avakian (BA). THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO! In The Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America: A Better World IS Possible.This talk addresses the most urgent question of the day: how to understand, and what to do about, the threat to humanity posed by the Trump/Pence regime. The daily, almost hourly, headlines cry out with urgency. Go here for ways YOU can be part of getting this film out to many, many people right away.
2. Spread the slogan and the date far and wide:
NOVEMBER 4, It Begins...
This Nightmare Must End: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America!
Use posters, stickers, flyers, chalking, light projections, banner drops, radio call-ins, social media, church bulletins, announcements at events, and much, much more. Go here for posters, flyers, banners, and graphics.
3. Be part of spreading the word and distributing thousands of copies of the Call for November 4 to students, religious congregations, professional organizations, and everywhere people gather. Here are a couple of examples of what people are doing: going out to a Democratic Club; connecting with students at a high school.
4. Endorse the call for November 4 and get other individuals and organizations to endorse it and be part of building for it.
5. Donate to and raise funds for November 4. Refuse Fascism says: “From shaking the can out on the street to calling individuals for major donations to house parties and yard sales and other activities, every donation raised strengthens this movement and expands the community of involvement.”
6. Use the Indictments of the Crimes of the Trump/Pence Regime to educate, organize, and stage political protests that provoke people broadly to understand the emergency we face and the extraordinary struggle required to redress it. Every protest should build for November 4.
7. Be part of protests against the outrages of the Trump/Pence regime and spread the word about November 4—like this protest against Trump’s genocidal actions against the people of Puerto Rico.
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
This Nightmare Must End—And Only the People Can, and Must, Help End It! November 4—It Begins!
October 23, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Two weeks ago, the Republican head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said that he worried that Trump had put the world on the road to nuclear war. The Republican head of the committee. Trump meanwhile rejected his own secretary of state’s efforts to negotiate with North Korea, saying that “they only understand one thing” (presumably war), and then he set in motion a chain of events that could break a treaty with Iran and end up with a catastrophe in that part of the world as well. To those who talk about elections: Will there even be a world left in 2018?
This week Trump’s chief of staff, ex-marine general and former warden of the Guantánamo torture chamber, John Kelly, went to bat and defended Trump. But that’s not all: He falsely attacked a congresswoman; he ranted about “the good old days” when the army, religion, and women were “sacred” and where those “sacred” women were not allowed to control their own bodies; and then he refused to take questions from anyone who was not connected to a military family. This is NOT civilian control of the military, this is military dictatorship. And to prove the point, when reporters pointed out to Trump’s press spokesperson that Kelly had lied, she told them it was “inappropriate” to question a four-star marine general! To those who hoped that Kelly and the other generals would prevent Trump from doing anything wrong: Now what?
The reassertion of white supremacy,1 the horrors perpetrated on women2 and on immigrants3 and on gay and transgender people,4 the destruction of the environment,5 the wanton and endless assaults on the very notion of truth... these are almost hourly.
There are millions, tens of millions, who experience this as a nightmare. But way too many of those millions have not heard that there is a way out, there is an answer—that there are mass demonstrations set to begin November 4 to drive this regime OUT... to end the nightmare. YOU NEED TO BE PART OF LETTING THEM KNOW! The stakes right now for humanity are the highest in living memory. Nobody can stand aside.
This weekend took a step toward changing that situation, toward letting people know about this. Supporters of Refuse Fascism got the word out in major cities in a coordinated way and began to impact. This must intensify. Those who hear and resonate to the message must be organized to actively spread the word themselves. The more that people see the materials announcing the 4th show up everywhere, the more that they hear about this on the news (through things like Carl Dix’s confrontation with Jerry Jones over “taking a knee” and more), or through social media... those who right now despair can be won to not just understand the stakes (though that is essential)—they can be shown the way to rise to those stakes. People can get and spread the stickers, the flyers, the brochures of Refuse Fascism; they can learn about and watch the filmed speech of Bob Avakian, THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America. A Better World IS Possible; and they can hook up with Refuse Fascism... they can get organized for November 4 and the days beyond.
1. For example, Trump’s genocidal refusal to provide the level of aid needed by people in Puerto Rico facing a desperate situation in the wake of Hurricane Maria, even as he rates his regime’s relief efforts there as scoring a perfect “10 out of 10”; and his calling NFL players, mostly Black, who are protesting the police murder of people of color “sons of bitches” and calling for them to be fired, even as he calls the Nazi-KKK marchers in Charlottesville “very fine people.” [back]
2. One recent example: the Trump/Pence regime intervened to block a 17-year-old undocumented immigrant from getting an abortion she needed and wanted, after advocates went through extraordinary efforts to help her get permission for the procedure. Read about it here. [back]
3. In an October 20 speech in Texas, Attorney General Sessions confirmed that Trump is forging ahead to build a border wall, praised the anti-sanctuary cities law Texas recently passed, and reaffirmed other extreme anti-immigrant policies of the regime. [back]
4. As revealed in a recent New Yorker article, at a meeting with a legal scholar, when the conversation turned to gay rights, Trump pointed to Vice President Pence, who was in the same room, and “joked,” “Don’t ask that guy—he wants to hang them all!” [back]
5. In early October, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, announced that the Trump/Pence regime will move to end the Clean Power Plan, a set of regulations that put some restrictions on emissions of carbon dioxide—one of the main greenhouse gases contributing to global warming. [back]
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
Trump/Pence Fascists Conspire to Reduce 17-Year-Old Undocumented Girl to an Incubator
NO! We Must REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America!
by Sunsara Taylor
Updated October 25, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Update, October 25, Editors’ note: Today, the 17-year-old undocumented immigrant, Jane Doe, who is imprisoned in a Texas detention camp was finally able to get the abortion she was seeking after a federal appeals court ruling. She and her advocates had been battling the Christian fascists in Texas and elsewhere, the courts, and all the way up to the Trump/Pence regime which had intervened to block her from getting the abortion. A big shout out goes to everyone who demanded that Jane Doe be able to exercise her right to end her pregnancy. But it’s also important for everyone to fully face up to the nightmare that this case portends. The Trump/Pence regime will not stop with this or that setback. They are intent on moving full steam ahead to consolidate their fascist grip, and as a key part of that, impose on women and girls everywhere what they tried to do to Jane Doe—unless they are driven from power through a sustained, mass upsurge demanding: This Nightmare Must End. The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!
A 17-year-old undocumented and unaccompanied minor, Jane Doe, was recently snatched up and imprisoned in a U.S. detention center. Trapped in a foreign land gripped by rising xenophobia, hundreds of miles from anything familiar, driven to flee by desperate conditions, it seemed the nightmare couldn’t get any worse.
Then, she discovered that she is pregnant.
In a just world, a pregnancy would be either a cause for joy or the reason to schedule a routine, perfectly safe and unstigmatized abortion. Fetuses are not babies, and there is absolutely no reason a woman should be prevented or shamed for getting an abortion.
In Trump/Pence America, however, the discovery of a pregnancy immediately plunged this young woman into an even darker rung of hell. A conspiracy of Christian fascist lunatics are exercising the full power of the federal government to reduce this very young woman to the status of an incubator, working relentlessly to force her to have a child against her will—and setting dangerous precedent that imperils the future of women and girls everywhere.
From the moment Jane Doe discovered her pregnancy, she was adamant that she wanted an abortion. Outrageously, in Texas (as in 21 other states), minors need consent from a parent or a judge to get an abortion. With the help of extraordinarily dedicated advocates, Jane Doe received this permission and scheduled an abortion on September 28.
Then, the Trump/Pence Regime blocked her from getting the abortion.
Scott Lloyd is the fanatical anti-abortion Christian fascist that Trump and Pence chose to head up the Office of Refugee Resettlement and thereby exercise the power of the state over the lives of refugees and immigrants detained by the government. Lloyd not only opposes abortion, he opposes birth control and once personally visited a detained young woman to pressure her into continuing an unwanted pregnancy.
In this case, the word got out at Jane Doe’s detention center that she was not to be released for her September 28 appointment. Instead, her captors forced her to visit a Christian fundamentalist anti-abortion fake “clinic” where she was forced to view an ultrasound. The detention center also called Jane Doe’s mother in her home country and informed her about the pregnancy despite Doe’s plea that her mother was physically abusive.
Eight states—Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, and South Carolina—all themselves gripped by Christian fascist theocrats, filed papers in court supporting Lloyd’s efforts.
Even after yet another court battle in which a federal judge ruled that Doe’s abortion must be allowed (rescheduled for October 20), the Trump/Pence Regime blocked her again. They refused to release her for her appointment and argued doing so didn’t put an “undue burden” on her constitutional right to abortion because Doe still had the “option” of being deported back her home country! Doe is from Central America—and in most countries in that region, abortion is illegal, including three countries where abortion is not allowed even when the life of the woman is at stake.
As each day Doe’s pregnancy advances ever closer to the unjust 20-week legal cutoff for abortions in Texas, her detention center has been further isolating and punishing Doe. Despite the risks to her emotional and physical health, they have prevented her from participating in any physical activity, for example forcing her to sit on a bench while other detained kids were allowed to play in a park.
As the case stands now, the regime insists that Doe will only be allowed to get an abortion if there is a sponsor appointed to her by October 31. Finding a sponsor for an unaccompanied and undocumented minor is a complicated process that usually involves months of searching and vetting. This is cruel, unnecessary, and untenable, and must not be allowed to stand.
Jane Doe is a vulnerable 17-year-old girl imprisoned and facing an unwanted pregnancy in a hostile land. She is a full human being, yet Christian fascists at the vicious core the Trump/Pence regime are using the full force of the most powerful state in the history of the world to reduce her to the status of an incubator. This is a nightmare that no one should tolerate. People must raise their voices and demand that this young woman be given access to her abortion now.
At the same time, millions need to open their eyes to the even greater nightmare this case portends. What is being done to Jane Doe is the future for women and girls everywhere if this fascist Trump/Pence regime is not very soon deprived of its hold over the state. The only way that can happen and lead to anything good for women, for immigrants, and for all of humanity is for thousands and soon millions to take to the streets in massive, sustained, nonviolent political protest that does not stop until one nonnegotiable demand is met: This Nightmare Must End: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go! There are many who would like to see this happen. There is one organization and movement, RefuseFascism.org, that is working and reaching out to people from all walks of life to involve them in making this happen—join with this movement today. November 4, take to the streets. In the name of humanity, we must refuse to accept this fascist America.
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
Spreading the Word and Building for November 4 and Beyond
Updated October 28, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Threats of nuclear war; reassertion of white supremacy; putrid abuse and hatred of women; attacks on immigrants and Muslims; attacking the rights of LGBTQ people; gleeful destruction of the environment in pursuit of profit—millions of people recognize this as a living nightmare. On the weekend of October 20-23, coast to coast, people went to green markets, to football games, to zombie festivals; people went on trains and public transportation, through middle class neighborhoods and into ghettos and barrios, bringing the message that THIS NIGHTMARE MUST END: THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO!
This was a stride toward letting some of those millions know there is a way out. And it needs to intensify in the days before November 4. People who hear about November 4 must themselves organize and get the word out to millions more. The future of humanity, the future of the planet really is at stake. There is no one else—the nightmare must end, and only the people can, and must, end it.
Some of the sights and sounds from the building towards November 4 are below. Also see “October 22, 2017—National Day of Protest Against Police Brutality ... Protesting Police Murder, Standing with NFL Players, and Organizing for Nov 4—Trump/Pence Must Go!”
Students
California
Brown Berets call for walkouts building up to Nov 4. Video from RefuseFascism.org
NYC, October 25
Revolution Club at Columbia University in NYC showing the trailer for the film "THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO! In The Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America: A Better World IS Possible" A Talk by Bob Avakian
#Columbia student. When order is that of fascism, we must step out of comfort zone. Full film from Bob Avakianhttps://t.co/K8spsCzvJU #nov4 pic.twitter.com/KuSvn6ydLX
— NYC Revolution Club (@NYCRevClub) October 25, 2017
UCLA, October 24
UCLA student calls on people to be in the streets #Nov4ItBegins #TrumpPenceMustGo pic.twitter.com/yoLoYNk6Kb
— #Nov4ItBegins (@RefuseFascismLA) October 24, 2017
Posted on The Daily Bruin, a student newspaper at UCLA, October 24, 2017:
Submission: Intolerant policies warrant nonviolent protests, not civil discourse
In the context of a fascist regime in power, you cannot have “civil discourse” with fascists...
To advocate for civil discourse at a time when these ideas have the backing of the state – such as through threatening tweets from the president in support of these speakers – serves to fan the flames of fascism...
Chicago
Thursday, October 19, at Kenwood Academy High School, Chicago police swarmed Kenwood students after school, using force and intimidation tactics to attempt to stop the students from talking with organizers about the November 4 protests to drive out the Trump/Pence regime.
The Revolution Club went right back out to Kenwood High School the day after the police tried to literally drown out their interactions with the students. This time the police stayed away while the school security messed with the organizers and students, but they couldn't stop the students from signing the banner and getting organized for November 4th...
Chicago high school students speak out #trumppencemustgo #Nov4ItBegins @refusefascism https://t.co/kbWYqJN7Uf pic.twitter.com/FERLzPdcIH
— RefuseFascismChi (@RefuseFascismCH) October 22, 2017
New York City
One of the best things you'll watch today. NYC high schooler talks about why Trump regime must go #Nov4ItBegins pic.twitter.com/rahck9sxTu
— #NoFascistUSA (@RefuseFascism) October 20, 2017
UC Berkeley
.@UCBerkeley sts call on YOU to join them #Nov4ItBegins
— #NoFascistUSA (@RefuseFascism) October 21, 2017
Tweet yr own video & tag @RefuseFascism today!
The Trump-Pence regime must go b/c... pic.twitter.com/SvaGV9Bgj3
Seattle
Outside @mrcarmack @Neumos in #Seattle. #TrumpPenceMustGo #Nov4ItBegins City Hall 12pm. They'll be there, you should be too! @RefuseFascism pic.twitter.com/8dTbvf6XO3
— Margo Heights (@eyes2future) October 21, 2017
“The Snake”
Donald Trump has used the lyrics to “The Snake” many times in speeches to demonize immigrants. He is twisting the song, and turning the message upside down! The words and music are by the legendary Oscar Brown Jr, father of Maggie & Africa. They have been outraged at Trump's misuse and distortion of the meaning of Oscar's words. Video from RefuseFascism.org
.@RealDLHughley with https://t.co/qryOLprBx2
— #NoFascistUSA (@RefuseFascism) October 21, 2017
This nightmare must end: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go.
Nov 4: Protests Begin.#Nov4ItBegins pic.twitter.com/zZGzF3iCau
Detroit
“Just want to thank the Refuse Fascism national office for your advice to focus this 4-day weekend on solving 2 problems:
“1) People are agonizing about all the sharpening ways this regime is advancing, and they don't know about Nov 4 and the plans for protests day after day and night after night—AND their decisive role in this; and
“2) We must make significant advances in organizing new people to become organizers for Nov 4, bringing in many more of those who are agonizing and looking for a way to act.
“There were only two of us yesterday from the Detroit chapter. We went to the Eastern Market, and went over that advice before we started...
You're not the only one that feels like this! If we stick together we can change things. This is our world... pic.twitter.com/LlCrdm35m5
— #NoFascistUSA (@RefuseFascism) October 22, 2017
A message from D-Town / Detroit pic.twitter.com/Mc3dW78Lnu
— #NoFascistUSA (@RefuseFascism) October 22, 2017
New York City
“I asked myself, how could I spread the word? I spend a lot of time driving, so I painted it on.”
Houston, October 21: Zombie Festival Street Party
We went to a zombie festival street party. One person dressed up as a zombie, carrying a sign that read, this nightmare must end, the trump/pence regime must go. Nov 4th it begins. Ppl came up and said, yes this nightmare must end, and we told them, then you need to be part of making this happen-nov 4th. As others got out cards and pamphlets, once again challenging people to get actively organize for going to austin for nov 4th. Where will you be nov 4th?...
Afro beat band Anitbalas takes the November 4 Pledge
Chicago
These two brothers, 12 and 11 years old, were assaulted by police for selling candy. #TakeAKneeNFL #Nov4ItBegins https://t.co/kbWYqJN7Uf pic.twitter.com/ntiXdBalk0
— RefuseFascismChi (@RefuseFascismCH) October 23, 2017
This nightmare must end#Nov4ItBegins #trumppencemustgo #nofascistusa Get organized to drive out this fascist regime! @RefuseFascism pic.twitter.com/NCz2uORSEY
— revolution club chi (@revclubchi) October 21, 2017
Posters Up in 90 Stores – Enlisting People As We Went
Our team of 2, plus another friend who joined midway, just finished a trip down a couple miles of a major street in our city. We got almost 90 posters for November 4 out, mostly up, in stores, restaurants and street vendor carts. It was probably the most positive and heartfelt response we've gotten in a long time or ever. This area is a fast-gentrifying stretch that runs thru a large college campus, many small smoke shops, bodegas, wine shops, nail salons, laundries and restaurants which are being encroached on by chain stores in past 5-10 years.
New York City
Challenging people in New York City at Union Square on why people need to throw in for #Nov4ItBegins pic.twitter.com/v7JPbglUnp
— #NoFascistUSA (@RefuseFascism) October 21, 2017
Challenging people in New York City at Union Square on why people need to throw in for #Nov4ItBegins
A military veteran with Refuse Fascism
A military veteran with Refuse Fascism responds to John Kelly
— #NoFascistUSA (@RefuseFascism) October 21, 2017
"There's nothing 'sacred' about World War III"#Nov4ItBegins #JohnKelly pic.twitter.com/LCQ7Uh0geU
Seattle, October 21
The Comet. Capitol Hill. #Nov4ItBegins This nightmare must end! #Seattle pic.twitter.com/Ob1s6isT1E
— Susan (@RadRevSusan) October 21, 2017
Los Angeles
Refuse Fascism Booth outside the Taste Of Soul. Organizing the thousands of people at the Festival. People took "Organizers Kit" and took up the call to bring this message to their Churches, One person said "I Don't go to church on Sundays, I go to the Casino" He took stacks of the Call for Nov 4, to his Casino.
Refuse Fascism out at a busy Metro station in Koreatown, Reaching hundreds of people and chalking the message of November 4th.
Oakland, CA, October 22
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
“Great Hope” General Kelly
Goes Full Fascist, On All Fronts
October 23, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Millions of liberals and progressive-minded people who detest Trump have been hoping, indeed counting on, Trump’s chief of staff, General John Kelly, along with other generals in the administration (McMaster and Mattis) to be “the adults in the room”— the decent, disciplined and (somehow!) war-averse military men who were going to restrain the fascist Trump and protect the world from his vicious white supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia and reckless nuclear warmongering.
On October 19, those hopes were exposed as illusion—and self-delusion—when Gen. Kelly stepped before the microphones at a White House press conference to try to squelch the uproar over Trump’s callous and flippant phone call to the family of La David Johnson, a Black soldier killed in a secret U.S. war in Niger.
Kelly eagerly and willingly went full-Trump fascist on all fronts. (Read the transcript here.)
He fully backed Trump’s actions, cynically invoked the death of his own son in combat as political capital, and launched into a racist, lie-filled attack on a Black congresswoman from Florida. Then Kelly, this so-called “man of integrity” dove into a grotesque and maudlin celebration of that era when he “was a kid growing up”—the 1950s and early ’60s—when “women,” “religion,” “dignity of life” and, of course, service in the U.S. military, were “sacred.”
You remember those “good old days,” don’t you? The days when the U.S. military leveled the whole of North Korea, killing millions. The days when young Black men like Emmett Till were brutally tortured and lynched for alleged violations of the racist code that governed the lives of all Black people, and the murderers were acquitted by all-white juries. The days when civil rights workers like Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner, and James Chaney were abducted, tortured and murdered by the KKK, with the aid of the police. (And these were just three among two dozen brutal racist murders carried out in Mississippi in that period.) The days when a woman wasn’t allowed to open a bank account without her husband’s permission and men were legally allowed to rape their wives. The days when anyone who wasn’t a heterosexual, god-fearing white Christian could have their “dignity of life” and maybe their life itself, snatched away at a moment’s notice by any asshole, mob, Klansman or cop that felt like “having a little fun.”
This is what Kelly yearns for. This (and much worse) is what the regime he willingly serves wants to violently reimpose, under even more barbaric fascist rule.
In service of this agenda, Kelly’s central theme was the worship, sanctity, and sanctification of the U.S. military—a core element of the Trump/Pence fascist regime. Kelly exalted military service as “sacred.” He praised the soldiers who carry out war crimes from one end of the earth to the other, as “the best 1 percent this country produces,” and “the best men on Earth.” Why? Because they are “doing their nation’s bidding all around the world.” “They go where we send them ... Sometimes they go in large numbers to invade Afghanistan and Iraq,” or to any of the dozens of other U.S. outposts—building and manning drone bases, training local reactionary forces, propping up brutal dictatorships, and other “missions” in service of the world’s greatest empire of enslavement and oppression. [Emphasis added]
This coming from the general who, as head of the U.S. Southern Command, carried out an “aggressive oversight” of detainees at the torture chamber known as Guantánamo, including “punitive force-feeding, solitary confinement, and rubber bullets,” according to the Center for Constitutional Rights.
And how do these “best men” on earth, treat women? With an epidemic of rape—of the women in the countries they occupy, as well as female GIs, who report being afraid to go to the bathroom at night lest they be attacked by their “brothers-in-arms.”
Kelly refused to take questions from any reporter unless they claimed a personal connection to a U.S. soldier killed in action, (and reporters felt compelled to preface their questions by thanking Kelly for his military service). White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders followed up a day later by warning reporters who pointed out Kelly’s lies that it was “highly inappropriate” to “debate ... a four-star Marine general.”
In other words, this sacred military has the right to deny questioning by anyone who is not a veteran or family of someone killed in one of the U.S. invasions of the world—or questioned at all, even when caught in bald-faced lies! All reminiscent of open military juntas where “insulting” the military is a severely punished criminal offense. As Masha Gessen noted in The New Yorker, Kelly’s press briefing “could serve as a preview of what a military coup in this country would look like...”
So, dear liberals:
THIS is who you were hoping would restrain Trump? This pig who has more than once come to Trump’s rescue in just this fashion, and has now come fully out of his fascist bag? A “choice” between military dictatorship and fascist lunacy—when you’ll probably end up with both? The time for these hopes is long past. The time to actually face reality—that this is ONLY going to get worse, as it does in some egregious form or other seemingly every week or even every day—is long since past. And the time to do the ONLY thing that can be done—getting this regime out—is HERE. November 4: It begins.
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
Trump Gives Himself a Perfect "10 out of 10" for Hurricane Relief in Puerto Rico
A Perfect Example of a Genocidal Liar in Top Form
October 21, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
In Puerto Rico (and in the other nearby colony, the U.S. Virgin Islands), one full month after Hurricane Maria, the situation for millions of people remains dire. Just 22 percent of Puerto Ricans have electricity, more than one in four has no access to drinkable water, and the majority of cellphone towers are down. People are forced to drink from dangerously polluted wells and streams. The economy is at a standstill, and doctors use terms like "post-apocalyptic" to describe the state of healthcare, warning that thousands are in danger and many dying "preventable deaths."
At the recent funeral of a man who slowly suffocated for five days because there was no power for his oxygen pump, his body lay decomposing in the casket at a funeral home with no refrigeration. A mourner declared, "You can't even die. In this country you can't even die."
But at an October 19 meeting with the Puerto Rico's Governor Rossello, when asked to rate the job his administration had done in providing relief on a scale of one to ten, Trump gave himself a perfect score—"a ten" for what he claimed was the "great job" they were doing.
At this meeting, Trump spoke not of aid but of debt, indicating that Puerto Rico, already over $70 billion in debt, and facing an imminent government shutdown, would have to borrow more money to repair the devastated infrastructure on which the lives of millions depend. And this exactly one week after Trump again threatened, "At some point, FEMA has to leave, first responders have to leave and the people have to take over."
After over a century of colonial domination, plunder and exploitation, Puerto Rico is now suffering from purposeful, murderous, and racist neglect at the hands of the Trump/Pence fascists.
Is this an overstatement?
Look at the facts—Puerto Rico, mainly Spanish-speaking and dark-skinned, gets a pitiful fraction of the support received by areas in the continental U.S. that suffered less devastation:
- After Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, 5,300 repair workers from around the U.S. were rushed to the area—in fact, the highways coming into Houston were choked with utility repair trucks. When Irma hit Florida, 18,000 workers were dispatched to restore power.
- Trump bragged about getting a total of 10,000 FEMA and other federal employees to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. But there were over 37,000 FEMA and other federal aid workers in Texas within six days of Hurricane Harvey.
- When the storms hit Texas and Florida, the Trump regime immediately waived the Jones Act (requiring U.S.-owned ships handle all cargo, greatly increasing relief costs) for a month. In Puerto Rico the regime first refused to waive it at all, and then issued a 10-day waiver, which has now ended.
- Trump blames Puerto Ricans for the island's $74 billion debt (which is actually a result of U.S. domination to begin with), and points to that as the main obstacle to reconstruction. But rather than offer debt relief to assist in this emergency, Trump proposed a further (and meager) $4.9 billion loan for hurricane relief.
But in Texas, hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses were built in known flood zones, construction that was encouraged and subsidized by the Federal Flood Insurance Program, which issued policies no private company would. Now that this program is (predictably) billions of dollars in debt, Trump requested $16 billion in cash (not a loan) to bail it out.
In Puerto Rico, after four weeks, most repair work is being done by 900 local workers, lacking sufficient trucks, poles, and lines, and going home after long days of grueling work to sleep in suffocating heat, without clean water.
In a nutshell, the Trump regime's program for Puerto Rico is to blame Puerto Ricans for the disaster, go through the motions of providing emergency relief while letting hundreds of thousands suffer and many die, and then "offer" to entrench the island even more deeply in debt if they ever want to get electricity and running water. The effect of this has been and will be to drive tens of thousands from the island and make life an unsafe and unhealthy hell for those who remain.
And in declaring the relief effort "a 10," and constantly demanding that Puerto Rican political leaders publicly praise it, Trump is making clear that in his eyes, "inferior peoples" should be grateful for any crumbs they get from their masters, and stop complaining about the needless misery and death.
So yes, Trump deserves "a perfect score"—in his genocidal assault on the Puerto Rican people.
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
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.
October 22: The National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation!
Take a Knee Against White Supremacy and Get Ready to Stand Up on November 4 to Drive Out the Trump/Pence Regime
by Carl Dix
October 19, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Police continue to brutalize and murder people—Patrick Harmon in Utah and David Jones in Philadelphia, Black men shot in the back by cops; Justine Ruszczyk killed by police in Minneapolis after she called 911, Kiwi Herring, a transgender woman in St. Louis killed by police. Juries continue to allow cops to get away with murder by exonerating killer cops even when there are videos of their murderous deeds. Police are on track to kill as many people this year as in 2016. And the victims of the police continue to disproportionately be Black people and other people of color. Hundreds of thousands of Black and Brown people continue to be warehoused in prisons across the U.S.
This police terror and mass incarceration is the spearhead of an overall assault this system is inflicting on Black people that amounts to a slow genocide. This slow genocide is built into the very way this capitalist-imperialist system works, and it will take revolution, nothing less to end it and all the brutality and misery this system enforces on humanity, once and for all.
And now comes Trump, accelerating this slow genocide and intensifying other horrors people suffer in this country and around the world.
Trump and his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, have called for taking the gloves off the police. At a gathering of police in Long Island, NY, Trump said police should stop being too nice to the people they arrest. Sessions has re-instated mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related crimes—sentences that played a big part in the growth of mass incarceration. Deportations, which hit record highs under Obama, have been intensified by Trump. Trump has called for professional football players who protest how police get away with murder to be fired. As far as he is concerned these players are nothing more than well-paid gladiators who should beat each other’s brains out in the arenas—football stadiums—and never speak out about injustice.
This is part of an overall program that includes restricting a woman’s right to have an abortion or access to birth control, a Muslim travel ban, taking newly won rights from LGBTQ people, attacking freedom of the press and the right to protest, and threatening to destroy North Korea. If we don’t stop this regime before it’s too late, the Trump/Pence regime will consolidate fascist rule in this country, and it will be far more difficult to do anything about any of the horrors being enforced on humanity.
It is crucially important that people stand up in resistance to these intensified attacks. And October 22 is a day to do that. Family members with Stolen Lives banners, students and youth who refuse to accept growing up in a society that has put bull's eyes on their backs, formerly incarcerated people, Black Lives Matter activists, professional people who don’t want to live in a world where the color of a person’s skin can determine whether they live or how they live—everybody—needs to be out in the streets, out at NFL games, everywhere taking a knee against police terror and white supremacy and delivering a message that police terror must stop.
And as we do this, we must be gathering strength for taking to the streets on November 4 in cities across the country. As the Call issued by Refuse Fascism for November 4 says: We will gather in the streets and public squares of cities and towns across this country, at first many thousands declaring that this whole regime is illegitimate and that we will not stop until our single demand is met: This Nightmare Must End: the Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!
If you’re one of those who say you would’ve resisted the horrors of slavery, or Nazi rule in Germany, or the savage oppression Black people suffered during Jim Crow segregation and lynch mob terror—you need to stand up NOW and engage in massive non-violent resistance.
STOP POLICE BRUTALITY, REPRESSION AND THE CRIMINALIZATION OF A GENERATION!
TAKE A KNEE AGAINST WHITE SUPREMACY!
TAKE TO THE STREETS ON NOVEMBER 4 AND STAY IN THE STREETS UNTIL THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME IS DRIVEN FROM OFFICE!
New and revised poster ** DOWNLOAD PDF ** DOWNLOAD JPG **
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
October 22, 2017 – National Day of Protest Against Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation
Protesting Police Murder, Standing with NFL Players, and Organizing for Nov 4—Trump/Pence Must Go!
October 23, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
CHICAGO: Taking A Knee – On the Flag - at the Bears-Panthers Football Game
On October 22nd, the National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation, the waves of fans from all parts of Chicago and beyond came to Soldier Field set on seeing the Bears play the Panthers and were faced with something different.
Taking a knee against white supremacy, police brutality and the fascist onslaught of the Trump/Pence regime. “This Nightmare Must End. Trump/Pence Regime Must GO. Nov. 4—It Begins” was the challenge. If you’re not about Donald Trump, you need to be about driving him out!
We had enlargements of the Nov 4 Refuse Fascism poster, we made “#Nov4ItBegins” hard-back signs for people to remember it and so it could not be missed in pictures. There was a large banner of over 40 pictures of people murdered by the police. We got into the nightmare Trump/Pence represents to humanity and the planet, including the unleashing of white supremacy and police terror, and why it was righteous for Kaepernick and other pro athletes to take a knee against this, and what people need to do to end this whole nightmare and working now to prepare for Nov 4.
When the anthem started up, we took a knee and called on people to join in against forced patriotism. A 12-year-old joined us after we took a knee and stayed with us for some time, and another youth with him joined us too.
Throughout this whole time and especially once we took a knee, there were all kinds of responses. Some sped by to avoid having to make their position known. Many people, even the typical football crowd of white people, gave thumbs up or raised their fists to salute us, and took pictures of the demonstration. For others, this drew out some of the snarling white supremacy and the “America #1 Love it or Leave it” chauvinism.
Another group, Chicago Animal Saves, joined in this action (and had been taking similar #takeaknee actions) and brought their own (all-black) flag to hold upside down. People spoke from the heart from different positions on why they take a knee and support others doing so against injustice. A couple of women came and spoke on their disgust of racism and the double standard applied to those murdered by the police, by trying to downplay the loss of their lives because it was a thug with a badge and a gun that murdered them. Different people spoke about why they support Nov 4 and challenged others to be part of it, including the president of the Two-Spirit Society (a Native American LGBTQ group) who also spoke of the long history of genocide against the Native peoples and the police attacks on LGBTQ people. Many spoke of the danger Trump/Pence pose to many different groups of people, nationalities, women, LGBTQ.
Overall we planted a pole of standing up to the Trump/Pence regime; calling out the murder of so many every year by the police, and supporting athletes that have taken a stand to shine the spotlight on white supremacy and police murder of Black people; and bringing to people the message of Nov 4th to DRIVE THIS REGIME OUT!
LOS ANGELES: Marching Downtown, Remembering Brother Africa, Heading to ICE Detention Center
As we write, 65 people are at the October 22 National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation rally and march in Los Angeles. The event started on Skid Row in downtown LA, home to thousands of everyday people who live on the streets. As the march traveled through downtown, the event meaningfully stopped at the site of the murder of Brother Africa, who was shot down by the LAPD in 2015. We are now marching to the Metropolitan Detention Center, which houses and deports immigrants targeted by ICE, and then we’re marching to East LA. Several family members who have lost their loved ones to murder by police are in attendance. Refuse Fascism is sharing the Call for Nov 4 for people to take to the streets to demand the Trump/Pence regime be driven from power....
SF BAY AREA: Taking a Knee, Outing Trump as Modern-Day Slavemaster at 49ers-Cowboys Game
On Sunday, October 22, the National Day to Stop Police Brutality, Refuse Fascism went to the entrance to the San Francisco 49ers vs Dallas Cowboys football game to Take A Knee Against White Supremacy & Stand Up to End the Nightmare. November 4: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go! Refuse Fascism did street theater portraying Donald Trump—who is threatening to force players to stand for the national anthem—as a modern day slaveowner, and called on the huge flood of fans entering the game to take up the fight against the Trump/Pence regime and join in Nov. 4—and to take a knee, right on the spot, in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick and all the NFL players protesting police murder of Black and Brown people.
Many people took pictures of the street theater—too many to count, and many will be posted on social media. Dozens of fans stepped up and took the knee right in front of the street theater, both 49er fans and Cowboys fans, of all nationalities. Those who took the knee were taking a public stand on the side of Kaepernick and the players, standing against white supremacy and forced patriotism and in defiance of Trump—and of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones who threatened to fire any Cowboy players who took the knee. And while there were plenty of fans who supported Trump, on this day those who were in opposition to the fascist regime definitely had the initiative. Many, many people took palm cards calling on them to take up Nov. 4 and take to the streets, and to stay in the streets, not stopping until Trump and the fascist regime are out of power.
New York: Family Members of Police Murder Victims and Others Take a Knee, Speak Out for Nov 4
On October 22 in NYC, family members of police murder victims and mothers of wrongly incarcerated people rallied in downtown Brooklyn. They were joined by New York State Assemblyman Charles Barron, activists from Refuse Fascism, and others. Some family members spoke of how their loved ones had been murdered by those who were sworn to protect and serve. Others spoke about how their children were consigned to the system's dungeons for crimes they didn't commit. All spoke to the need to continue the fight against this injustice, and several of them called on people to join them in taking to the streets on November 4 to drive out the Trump/Pence regime.
Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party and the co-founder of the October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation, and a co-initiator of Refuse Fascism, wound up the rally. Carl said the police terror that the Oct. 22nd Coalition was initiated to fight is built into the fabric of this capitalist-imperialist system, so it will take revolution, nothing less, to end it and all the other horrors this system inflicts on humanity once and for all.
Carl spoke to how Trump is intensifying the abuses this system heaps on people, vowing to take the gloves off the police who brutalize and murder Black and Brown people with impunity. He’s telling the NFL players they have no right to protest against police getting away with murder. The Trump/Pence regime is escalating the immigration raids that tear families apart and disappear people and more.
Carl said it was crucial this regime be driven out before it consolidates fascism, and that Refuse Fascism is calling on people to do just that by taking to the streets on November 4. Carl finished the rally by leading people in taking a knee against white supremacy and calling on everybody there to stand up on November 4 to drive the Trump/Pence regime from power.
Newark, New Jersey
This action was organized/pulled together by the New Jersey organization People's Organization for Progress (POP). Approximately 75 people came out, including a number of families who have had loved ones murdered by police in New Jersey, along with a number of Black Lives Matter and other activists against police brutality, a group of Green Party activists, some union activists and others. The family members were extremely moving in their own accounts, while at the same time, organizers read out the names and honored dozens of others, like Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Michael Brown and more.
At the end of the rally, the chairman of POP, Larry Hamm, spoke to how police brutality and murder are a product of the capitalist-imperialist system, but with the particularity that in this imperialist country, the country was founded on slavery, and that here the police are playing the role that the slave catchers played under slavery to enforce the oppression. Then he addressed how all this has taken a leap with the election of Trump, exposing the open white supremacy, and the measures that the Justice Department is taking to eliminate consent degrees, and more, and concluding that Trump must go—by impeachment or mass protests or a combination of both.
There was considerable interest in Refuse Fascism's Call for November 4.
Chicago
Right now at #CARvsCHI Game
— #NoFascistUSA (@RefuseFascism) October 22, 2017
@Noche_RC moves a 12 year old to take a knee through his agitation. #takethekneeNFL
pic.twitter.com/DqReLDzq5Q
Los Angeles
San Francisco
49ers & Cowboys fans take a knee against white supremacy, #Nov4itBegins #TakeAKnee #trumppencemustgo @KTVU @pdjegal @nbcbayarea pic.twitter.com/1ZfyT4lMxz
— RefuseFascismSF (@SFRefuseFascism) October 22, 2017
New York City
Newark, NJ
Atlanta, GA
"After they shot my son 76 times, they handcuffed him & dragged him down flight of stairs" Mother (Monteria) of Jamarion Robinson #O22ATL pic.twitter.com/CiQKpkSHvm
— ChuckModi (@ChuckModi1) October 21, 2017
"After they shot my son 76 times, they handcuffed him dragged him down flight of stairs" Mother (Monteria) of Jamarion Robinson #O22ATL
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
St. Louis: The Struggle for Justice for Anthony Lamar Smith Continues!
October 23, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Protesters have been in the streets of St. Louis nearly every day since September 15, the day a judge’s verdict let another murdering pig walk free. They are demanding justice for Anthony Lamar Smith and an end to the cold-blooding killings of Blacks, Latinos, and other oppressed nationalities by the police. Hundreds and hundreds of protesters took to the streets day and night for days following the verdict, refusing to back down even in the face of ugly brutality by the police.
Two cops had chased Anthony Lamar Smith in their car after accusing him of a drug deal, one of them recorded as saying, “I’m going to kill this motherfucker.” Less than one minute later the pig fired five bullets into Anthony, who never got out of his car. Anthony was not carrying a gun, so the pig went back to his own car and pulled out a “throw-down gun” to plant next to his body. When the gun was checked for fingerprints later, the only ones found belonged to the cop. But when a pig murders a Black man, facts don’t matter—the judge let him off.
While the number of protesters has diminished in the weeks since then, an organized core of 50 or so people have continued to protest in the streets of St. Louis and surrounding communities almost every night. One 27-year-old Black protester said, “We haven’t seen any real, tangible, systemic change at all… But we’re not done.”
A reporter for the New York Times, John Eligon, recently wrote about the significant impact these continued protests are having (“In St. Louis, Protests Over Police Violence Disrupt Economy, and Win Attention,” October 20, 2017). The protesters have gone into white neighborhoods and shopping malls to cause economic disruption—just the rumor of demonstrators on their way has made stores and malls temporarily close. According to the Times report, the leaders of these protests were involved in the 2014 protests in Ferguson, just ten miles away, and have learned the importance of being well organized in order to have a significant impact on society. They have been able to catch the police off guard by creatively organizing through social media, including live-streaming demonstrations online.
The determination of these protesters is influencing and challenging people to come to their side. A reverend, who is co-chair of a commission formed after the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, told the Times reporter that “if nothing else, the persistent protests should alert cities nationwide that people will not be satisfied by endless commissions and policy proposals that do not result in action.”
Around the country people have been stepping forward in similar ways, like the movement inspired by Colin Kaepernick among NFL players to take a knee during the national anthem, in protest of the murder of Black, Latino, and other people of color and against social injustices overall.
Shortly after the protests in St. Louis began, revcom.us received a correspondence from a member of the Revolution Club on the ground there. The conclusion of the correspondence continues to be important in relation to the need and basis for people like the protesters in St. Louis to become a part of the movement that begins November 4 to drive out the Trump/Pence regime:
There is a need to struggle for people to more deeply see the links of the outrage here to the whole fascist agenda—and this means that we have to draw out the links between the ongoing and horrific murder of Black and Brown people by this white supremacist system that is bred into the bone of this country, and Trump, Pence, and Sessions putting that on steroids with their egging on of the police, like Trump did in Long Island. At the same time, it is very important—and a good example for all—that people in St. Louis are defying the brutalizing and arrogant pigs—these pigs actually have been chanting “Whose Streets? Our Streets,” which when they do it is basically saying “fuck the rule of law, we do what we want”—by going out every day; this should be learned from by the whole movement and prefigures in microcosm what needs to happen on November 4.
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
Carl Dix, Refuse Fascism Confront Dallas Cowboys’ Owner Jerry Jones: “People need to take a knee against white supremacy and drive out this whole regime”
Updated October 23, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Carl Dix confronts Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones who said "Any player who doesn't stand for the anthem will not play." People need to take a stand against white supremacy and stand up against the entire Trump regime, and it begins November 4.
On Tuesday, October 17, as part of building for the November 4 protests to drive the fascist Trump/Pence regime from power, Carl Dix and Linda Solotaire of Refuse Fascism confronted Dallas Cowboys owner and Trump-supporter Jerry Jones before a National Football League (NFL) owners meeting in downtown Manhattan. “You want to treat players like 40 million dollar slaves, well-paid gladiators who beat each others’ brains out for your enjoyment and profit but have to keep their mouths shut when talking about injustice,” Dix told Jones, who was standing a few feet away. A week earlier Jones warned Dallas players if they didn’t stand for the national anthem they wouldn’t play. “Look at the videos of the police getting away with murder and tell me that the players are wrong to protest it and that they have no right do to that!” Dix said to Jones. “People need to take a knee against white supremacy and people need to stand up against you and your buddy Donald Trump and drive his whole regime out, and it begins November 4.” This protest struck a nerve—one Instagram video of the confrontation has been viewed over 500,000 times—and it was widely covered in the media, including The New York Times, The New York Post, and other publications. An article on The Root, drawn from a short online video, declared, “Jerry Jones had his Southern-fried ass handed to him by a lone protester as the Dallas Cowboys owner walked through what looked to be a hotel lobby.” Carl was interviewed in Al Jazeera and on sports-oriented BSO Live with Robert Littal. Carl’s article on The Huffington Post, “Why I Confronted Dallas Cowboys Owner Jerry Jones,” walks the reader through the confrontation and why organizing for November 4 is so crucial.
Standing up for taking a knee – calling for Nov 4 at the NFL owners meeting
From the NY Daily News coverage:
“Jerry Jones was confronted by two protesters for his national anthem stance Tuesday while on his way into the NFL fall owners meetings in a Battery Park City hotel.
“The Cowboys owner said nine days ago that any Dallas player who does not stand for the anthem will not play. He had previously locked arms and taken a knee with his team, before the anthem was played, after President Donald Trump called protesting players a “son of a b—h.”
“Carl Dix, an African-American man, and Linda Solotaire, a white woman, were in the Conrad New York lobby when they spotted Jones with his son Stephen and daughter Charlotte, both Cowboys executives. Dix and Solotaire represent a group called RefuseFascism.org.
“After confronting Jones, Dix spoke out against the Trump-Pence administration and announced his group is organizing a Nov. 4 event. According to a card they were handing out, ‘We will take to the streets across this country and stay there — day after day, night after night — not stopping until our demand is met: this Nightmare Must End! The Trump/Pence Regime must go! No! In the name of humanity we refuse to accept a Fascist America.’...”
Everyone who sees the danger of the Trump/Pence regime and the complicity of those like Jerry Jones who carry out Trump’s white supremacist fascistic orders, needs to stand up and act now, recognizing that is OUR responsibility to drive the Trump/Pence Regime from power and ORGANIZE to bring people into the streets on NOV 4 and everyday after until the regime is gone.
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
From Revolution Club Chicago:
Police Blare Sirens to Drown Out Word of November 4 Outside High School
Updated October 22, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Update October 22: The Revolution Club went right back out to Kenwood High School the day after the police tried to literally drown out their interactions with the students. This time the police stayed away while the school security messed with the organizers and students, but they couldn't stop the students from signing the banner and getting organized for November 4th.
Thursday, October 19, at Kenwood Academy High School, Chicago police swarmed Kenwood students after school, using force and intimidation tactics to attempt to stop the students from talking with organizers about the November 4 protests to drive out the Trump/Pence regime. Police pulled up with three marked SUVs, driving one of them onto the sidewalk of the school, which was crowded with students, and turned the siren on for several minutes to drown out the message. They snatched flyers and stickers out of the hands of students and used their authority to tell students they had to leave the front of the school. The Revolution Club was promoting the film of a new talk by Bob Avakian on www.revcom.us, THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America—A Better World IS Possible, and held a banner that students were reading and adding their own messages to, “Hey Trump, from those you like to demonize: You and your GANG in the White House are the real thugs and threat to humanity. In the name of humanity, WE WILL DRIVE YOUR ASS OUT!” Students talked about their anger at Trump/Pence for targeting Mexicans, ripping apart Muslim families, insulting and dehumanizing Black people, and threatening nuclear war.
It is unacceptable that police be allowed to politically repress high school students. This would be unacceptable at any time, but especially in the current situation where these students are being demonized by a regime that openly extols white supremacy, male supremacy, and American supremacy; jokes about hanging LGBT people and threatens humanity with nuclear war; and when “free speech” is being rewritten to enforce neo-Nazi speech while those who protest these injustices are unjustly repressed by police and repeatedly attacked by Trump thugs.
Students have the right to know about the RefuseFascism.org call for protests beginning November 4, continuing and growing every day and night until the demand is met: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go! Students have a right to express their political positions and to be part of protests against a fascist regime. And students have a right to hear about and get organized with the movement for revolution and the radical revolutionary leader, Bob Avakian.
Stand with the Kenwood students and the movement to drive out the Trump/Pence Regime. Call the principal at Kenwood Academy High School at 773-535-1350 and the commander at Chicago Police Department District 21 at 312-747-8340, to demand school authorities and police keep their hands off students and organizers for expressing themselves against the Trump/Pence regime and for the November 4 protests.
Revolution Club Organizing Center
1857 E 71st Street (near Jeffries in South Shore) Chicago, Illinois. Open noon to 9 pm every day till November 4
312-804-9121 • Revclub.chi@gmail.com
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
A Letter to the Revolution Clubs
Thoughts on the Battle to Drive Out the Trump/Pence Fascist Regime
October 16, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
We're now heading to November 4, the first day of massive, nonviolent, sustained, and determined actions to drive out the fascist regime of Trump and Pence. This letter isn't going to repeat everything in Bob Avakian's new speech or the many documents from Refuse Fascism or articles on this site about WHY this is so urgent. It's gonna focus instead on what the clubs should be doing, based on that understanding.
One key part of this movement must be a section of the basic people who catch hell every day, especially the youth. This section of the people, with revolution at their core, can provide a political backbone to the movement and a moral challenge to the rest of society. Something like this was done by the Black Panther Party in relation to the antiwar movement back in the '60s.
There are plenty of people in places like Chicago, or LA, who on some level get the nature of the threat posed by Trump and there are broad masses who just plain hate him. There are youth who want a better world and who need to be brought into motion on this. There are immigrant youth up against the threat of deportation; Black youth being demonized and worse; and all kinds of youth of all nationalities who just can't stand this nightmare.
The understanding of the Revolution Club is this: We are for revolution, all-the-way revolution, to get rid of this capitalist-imperialist, white supremacist society. We have the science, the leadership, the vision of the new society, and the strategy to make that happen. Right now, that revolution has to go through the stage of getting rid of Trump. This is urgent—this is urgent for the masses and for whether we are even going to be able to mount a larger struggle.
The clubs can take that understanding to the people. The most critical way will be "leading with BA" and especially the new filmed talk, THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO! In The Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America: A Better World IS Possible. The clubs should be showing it all over—in classrooms, community centers, and on the street. The clubs should be about leading people to help make this film big on social media. Plus there's the indictments, which are really important because most people don't know the full scope of what this regime is doing. And there is the basic call, which must be postered all over. NO! shirts must become the thing.
We MUST draw out the youth—the students in high school and college, and the basic youth who are in the life, or drifting. This means a LOT of mass work in these next few weeks in the base. And that has to mean giving people a mission: a mission to play a critical role in driving out this regime. Everybody we meet who is in the least supportive should walk away with something to do—from setting up a showing to getting their friends together to putting on the NO! shirt or taking cards or stickers to distribute... and a way to report back. The club should be raising money as it goes, all the time, and other people raising money too can be one big way that they contribute to the whole thing happening. If there's an office, older folks can run it and be there to keep track of things politically and give people stuff to get out. And there can be daily meetings of an hour or two to sum up what's been done and what needs to be done, and to go more deeply into questions.
Let the clubs be all over in the next few weeks. Let them go boldly onto the campuses—both the universities (including community colleges) AND DEFINITELY the high schools; let them do pop-up rallies in key neighborhoods, focused on open-air showings of the talk; let them reach out to people we know who are links into the youth (people who work with victimized women, or "at risk" young people, or with the gangs, etc.) to make the case to the youth they work with (and to others like them who do similar work). Let the clubs reach out to all kinds of forces (student groups, DACA and other immigrant groupings, forces around Black Lives Matter or similar groups, NGO forces, religious youth groups, truce activists, etc.). This is not about "our group" or "your group"—this is about an emergency.
The club should dream big and aim high, but fight to forge the ties and organize to make things happen. Think about—and fight for—walkouts from high schools and even jobs, leaving the corners, demos on campuses and leaving classes... moving to massive and growing outpourings in the late afternoon and evenings through the week of November 6 and beyond...
In regard to Chicago in particular, think of the potential national and international impact if there were an element of defying the regime's attempt to constantly demonize the youth of Chicago. Instead of the world constantly seeing Trump and them using the conflicts among the masses to justify their genocidal plans, how about the world hearing that "we here in Chicago, including the ones of us cast out on the bottom, are bringing forward something in opposition to this madness, and for a whole better world."
Communists in the club need to be bringing out how all this fits into a strategy—that the revolution has to go through this stage right now, and how this stage fits into the revolution, and even more—what that revolution is all about. Communists should be giving people running with the club a sense that we are applying the two maximizings 1 and that this is part of the strategy to "break the encirclement" (the political encirclement in this period) and has relevance as well to how we conceive of state power.
Even more, communists need to bring out the whole picture of communism, as they are meeting people and running with them and focusing things on driving out the Trump/Pence regime. REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!; THE NEW COMMUNISM; Science and Revolution, the interview with Ardea Skybreak; and the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America... as well as BAsics... all this should be wielded by club members. The Points of Attention should still be going up everywhere, with people in the club living by that morality. The REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! T-shirts should be worn and gotten out, and the club should still post up when the police come down. But there has to be something different too—that we are doing all this with the immediate aim of politically driving out this Trump/Pence regime, and that this is the principal task and focus of club activity for the next period.
The point is this: we must mobilize a crucial section of masses to play their full part in changing the course of history, in the interests of humanity.
1. In his 2006 talk Bringing Forward Another Way, Bob Avakian says about the "two maximizings":
Moving ahead then from that foundation, I want to talk a little bit about the "two maximizings" and the decisive role overall of the first. To very quickly paraphrase here, this ("two maximizings") refers to developing a politicized atmosphere and a revolutionary current—and in particular a growing pole of people partisan to communism and to the Party—among the proletariat and basic masses; and developing essentially the same thing among the middle strata. And then there is the need to develop the "positive synergy" between these "two maximizings"; or, to put it another way (in more "classical communist terms"), the dialectical relation—the mutual interaction and reinforcement—between the two, in a positive way. [back]
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
Revolution Club—
Frequently Asked Questions
Updated November 4, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
1. “Why are you wearing the BA SPEAKS: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! T-shirt?”
This T-shirt represents people getting free. Putting on this shirt means I’m no longer standing on the sidelines watching with no hope for the future or of getting free. I’m making a statement to be on the side of the people and getting ready for a time when there is a basis to go all out for revolution and end the nightmare that humanity has been trapped in for way too long.
Why aren’t YOU wearing the shirt?
2. “Why should I follow BA if he is white? How can I trust BA as a leader if I haven’t met him?”
No one should follow a leader because they’re white. Or Black. Or male. Or female. Or any other identity. People should follow Bob Avakian because he has answers on how we get free. He has answers for how we can make revolution to overthrow this system of nightmarish oppression, and how we can lead a new society on the road to real emancipation. BA is not leading any one group of people to try to get ahead of others. BA is leading a revolution to end all oppression and emancipate all of humanity. And if that’s not the leadership you’re looking for, what’s the point?
There are plenty of leaders you can meet who aren’t worth following to the grocery store. You can meet Farrakhan. He’s not even trying to lead a revolution! He’s so eager to get a piece of the capitalist-imperialist pie he even said he’ll make deals with the most powerful white supremacist in the world today, Donald Trump! You can meet with plenty of other forked tongue politicians and others who will stroke your ego, tell you what you wanna hear, and promise you a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. That’s not what BA is about. BA tells you the truth, whether you like it or not. BA will struggle with you over where things need to go and what you can and need to do about it. BA has made a breakthrough in the science of human emancipation that provides us the tools to understand and radically change the world. And BA is leading the revolution with a deep connection to what people are actually going through and why it is so unnecessary. We’ve never had a leader like BA. And he needs to be defended and protected by the revolutionary people from a vicious enemy that would like nothing more than taking him out.
What people can do, and should do, is get to know this leader and his work. Great efforts are made to make this available at revcom.us, where you can get his writings and audio talks, including his memoir; the film of him dialoguing with Cornel West, REVOLUTION AND RELIGION; as well as the film of him talking straight up, BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!
3. “The revolutionaries don’t believe in God?”
“Let’s call this what it is—it is a slave mentality, with which people are being indoctrinated. All this ‘thank you Jesus!’ is a slave mentality.” (BAsics 4:18) Whose interests does it serve for people who are being fucked over and oppressed to accept this way of life as the will of a god who is punishing them or testing them with the promise of something better when they are dead? Who benefits from that? Think of what religion has been used to justify just in the history of this country: the pillaging and mass murder of the native peoples; enslaving, raping and selling African people; legalizing the beating and raping of women by their husbands.
We need to get beyond ALL lords and masters, and beyond all the oppressive economic and social relations, and traditional ideas, on which they rest. And to do that we have to confront reality as it really is. The truth is there is no god. And that is a great thing! It means we ourselves can understand the world using science and we ourselves can change it. It means we don’t have to be chained by books like the Bible that teaches that women should be killed if they are not virgins when they get married, children who rebel against their parents should be killed, gay people should be killed, and people who displease god or believe in other religions should be killed, including children (and if you bring us your Bible we can show you where it says that). We can get free of this kind of hate and this way of people treating each other.
At the same time, to join the Revolution Club you don’t have to agree that there is no god. Many good people, including revolutionaries, are motivated by their belief in a loving god that drives them to fight for justice. To make revolution, many, many of these kinds of “believers” are needed. To join the Revolution Club, you have to agree to the Points of Attention for the Revolution and while it is not a requirement to give up belief in a god, it is a requirement that we base ourselves on what we understand to be true and be open to discussing and debating what is true. Point of Attention #5 says this: “We search for and fight for the truth no matter how unpopular, even as we listen to and learn from the observations, insights and criticisms of others.”
4. “I heard BA’s a cult leader.”
This is the farthest thing from the truth and would be laughable if it wasn’t so harmful. Ironically, when people tell you this they are trying to get you to stop asking questions and stop thinking for yourself (which is what real cults do!). And even more ironically, what most characterizes BA’s leadership is that he leads people to think critically, which is the exact opposite of a cult leader!
So, we could all just laugh this off as ridiculous and idiotic. But it is actually harmful for people to be going around saying BA’s a cult leader—because it attempts to put a wall in between the people and their revolutionary leadership. It attempts to keep people disconnected from the leader they have who is on their side for real and leading them to rise to the challenge of freeing themselves and all humanity. BA has developed a new communism, an advance in science to understand human society and the world and how to change it, a toolkit that can be used to work through and fight through all the problems that stand in the way of getting all of humanity free of all oppression. He is also providing incredibly high-level leadership right now to the process of making revolution in the most monstrous empire on the planet. And he is hated and threatened by the powers that be and their followers and enforcers. What we need, what humanity needs, is A LOT MORE FOLLOWERS of BA. People taking up that toolkit and becoming leaders for this revolution. NOT RELIGIOUS WORSHIPERS OF BA. SCIENTIFIC FOLLOWERS. And a movement for revolution that will defend and protect this precious leadership.
5. “What’s in it for me?” / “I have to take care of me and mine first.”
What’s in it for you is losing those damn chains that got people held down! Getting PAST all that. Also while you’re “taking care of yours,” others are being murdered, rounded up, demonized, facing horror after horror on a daily basis. Quite frankly, it isn’t about you. It’s about the masses of people here and around the world putting a stop to this the only way it can be done—revolution, nothing less.
And we have a saying: “for whom and for what,” why are we doing this? We’re not doing this because it personally makes us feel good. No, it’s bringing forward another way outta this madness and we have that WAY. So break with that outmoded way of thinking and start living for humanity.
6. “You can’t win.”
How do you know? Have you studied past revolutions? Have you studied the strengths and weaknesses of this system? Have you studied how imperialist armies fight and how revolutionary armies fight and how “insurgent forces” fight? The Revolutionary Communist Party has done this work and a lot more. It has developed a strategy for revolution and a doctrine for how to fight with a real chance of winning, once a revolutionary people in the millions, and the necessary conditions for revolution, have been brought into being. The outline of this is laid out in the statement, “HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution.” We should dig into that statement together.
One thing it says in HOW WE CAN WIN is: "To make this revolution, we need to be serious, and scientific. We need to take into account the actual strengths of this system, but more than that its strategic weaknesses, based in its deep and defining contradictions. We need to build this revolution among those who most desperately need a radical change, but among others as well who refuse to live in a world where this system spews forth endless horrors, and this is continually 'justified' and even glorified as 'greatness.'"
The problem: this capitalist system of oppression and exploitation of millions of people here and around the world, along with the plunder of the environment. The solution is revolution.
Revolution requires millions of people who see or can be won to see the illegitimacy of this system and those who rule. The Revolution Club is organizing, NOW, for revolution to overthrow this system at the soonest possible time with a real chance to win. We are Preparing the Ground, Preparing the People, Preparing the Vanguard for Revolution. What is needed is YOU!
7. “You’re going to get people killed.” / “The police are going to come down harder on me if I get involved in the revolution.”
What is actually worth living and dying and risking something for? This system kills and destroys people every single day, and gets people to take up its dog-eat-dog mentality and destroy each other. Why not put your life to something worthwhile? Getting rid of this system and emancipating humanity from this hell.
Yeah, if you step out of the life and get into the revolution, the police are going to hate it. They are going to fuck with you. We know all the dirty shit they are capable of—setups and murders and a whole court system backing them up. The police and the system they enforce would much prefer that you stay in your place, fighting over drug territory, taking revenge on other people in the same situation as you, going in and out of their prisons, always on probation or parole, always trying to stay low, on the run... and not causing any trouble for their system which keeps grinding you up and grinding up people all over the world. Children blown to pieces in wars for empire or washing up dead on beaches as their families try to escape war and poverty. Women killed in sweatshops that catch fire, or murdered for trying to go to school, or beaten and raped by men who consider them objects and property. Black and Latino people in the U.S. murdered by police, Rohingya people in Myanmar slaughtered...
So. What are you going to do inside this slave system? Bow your head and be an obedient slave? Or learn how to end the whole system of slavery and become a leader for the revolution to do that?
When you step into the revolution, you will not be alone. Every time the police try to take revenge on you for joining the revolution, you will have the movement for revolution at your back. We must mobilize people to support each other, mobilize lawyers to defend revolutionaries, raise money to fight cases, and most importantly bring forward more forces for revolution as we do all this. You stepping into the revolution now, putting on the T-shirt, living by and fighting for the Points of Attention for the Revolution—yes with all of the risks—inspires and gives strength to others to do the same.
8. “Black people will never get together.” / “White people are too fucked up.”
In saying that you are taking up the way the system wants you to think. Let’s look at this scientifically. It is the system that creates the conditions in which people are divided and not a predetermined human nature that says people are doomed to fight each other and exploit and oppress others. There are examples throughout history, even very recent history, where people from all walks of life have come together to fight the outrages of this system. People in times of acute crisis in society can have their thinking transformed and have their sights set higher and unite with others against the real enemy... this capitalist imperialist system and those who rule over it. Stop thinking the way the system wants you to think and step into the revolution.
9. “I have a responsibility to take revenge for my loved ones or I’m not a man...”
You are being played by this system that set up your loved ones to be killed in the first place and got you going after people who are just like you that this system rules over and oppresses. Give the lives of your loved ones some REAL MEANING by taking up the fight to get rid of this system that is really responsible. And when you start talking about being a "man" and not being a "bitch," this system has you played twice—now it has you trying to make your life count by dominating over and devaluing women.
Lift your sights and change what you are fighting for. Get out of that revenge shit that is just another form of “me and mine first” that is the way of life under this capitalist-imperialist system. Get out of that “man up” shit that keeps women enslaved and holds all of humanity back. Become an emancipator of humanity. Join the Revolution Club.
10. What does it mean to join the Revolution Club?
When you join the Revolution Club you join an organized group of people who are preparing for revolution—preparing the ground, preparing the people, and preparing the vanguard leadership, getting ready for the time when millions can be led to fight, all-out, with a real chance to win. In the Revolution Club you get trained to become a leader for this revolution.
In the Revolution Club you live by a different morality. You live by and fight for the Points of Attention for the Revolution. You are fighting for a morality that stands for a world in which there is no more exploitation of the many by the few and no more oppression of one group of people by another.
In the Revolution Club you learn how to lead people to stand up against the injustices of this system and learn how to come together and fight together against the system and all the ways in which it comes down on people. You learn about and do that in a way that contributes to and builds up the forces we need for a real revolution. This means learn how to fight the power, and transform the people, for revolution.
In the Revolution Club you learn about science—what it is and how to apply it to everything, including making revolution. This means learning about Bob Avakian’s new communism—and spreading this everywhere. You transform your own thinking and lead people to transform their thinking to start thinking about the interests of humanity first instead of “me and mine first” and to lose their fear of fighting to change the world. You struggle with people to break free of the system’s way of thinking. You learn—and learn to apply—the strategy for an actual revolution to overthrow the capitalist-imperialist system. You get into the vision and plan for the new society in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America authored by Bob Avakian (BA)—a society on the road to wiping out all forms of exploitation, oppression, and destructive conflicts among the people.
When you join the Revolution Club, you learn about and follow the leadership of Bob Avakian (BA) and the Revolutionary Communist Party. The most precious thing the masses of people have in their fight to get free is their vanguard party, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), which leads the Revolution Club and the whole movement for revolution. In the Revolution Club you learn about the Party and how you can make the leap to becoming a communist leader and prepare to join the RCP.
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
Setting the Record Straight on Communism and Socialist Revolution
REFUTING THE BIGGEST LIES AGAINST COMMUNISM
October 23, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
LIE #2. Because Socialism-Communism Goes Against Human Nature, It Resorts to State Violence and Mass Killing to Enforce Its Ideals
A major line of attack against communism—and one of the biggest lies about communism—is that millions and millions of people have been persecuted and killed by communist states, notably in the former Soviet Union and Maoist China (1949-1976). A whole industry of anticommunist books and articles pumps out staggering and horrifying death tolls. These claims are repeated endlessly... and then presented as established, un-debatable fact. All this is for the purpose of convincing people that communism may have noble ideals... but leads to nightmare.
Why They Lie About Communism... and Who Is Lying
There is a basic reason that the capitalist-imperialist system churns out all kinds of lies and misrepresentations of communism. Because communism is completely opposed to the savage exploitation, oppression, and inequalities that the capitalist system is rooted in, thrives on, and extends and deepens all over the world.
Further: this memo on the "horrors of communism" is coming from the most barbaric economic-social system in human history. A system whose mother's milk was the transatlantic slave trade, with millions upon millions torn from Africa and enslaved in the "New World" of the Americas to produce the wealth vital to the development of world capitalism—suffering constant, unspeakable terror and brutality for generations. This narrative about "communism as unrestrained state violence" is coming from a system that has functioned through systematic and grisly state violence—including two world wars in the 20th century that led to more than 100 million deaths.
Point 1: Communist Revolutions Saved and Enriched Lives... and Imperialism Set Out to Strangle These Revolutions
You Don't Know What You Think You "Know" About...
The Communist Revolution and the REAL Path to Emancipation:
Its History and Our Future
Interview with Raymond Lotta
Read entire Interview—and more—here
The eBook is available from Insight Press and other vendors.
As to the charge of mass loss of life under communism, the truth is that these revolutions saved lives.
The victorious 1917 October Revolution in Russia immediately withdrew Russia from World War 1—in which millions of ordinary people engaged in mutual slaughter in the interests of the imperialists, including Russia's tsar (autocratic royal ruler), who ruled using secret police, jails, and surveillance. Under its program of "land, bread, and peace," the Bolshevik revolution (the revolutionary communists in Russia were known as "the Bolsheviks") led people to change the dire condition of society—the brutal poverty and persecution of workers in the cities, the crushing traditions, enforced ignorance and superstition weighing down the majority peasantry. The humanity and liberation of bitterly oppressed women and minority nationalities were put front and center in society—through measures such as access to safe and legal abortion and full social-political rights, through outlawing and campaigning against patriarchal violence, like wife beatings; and an end to vigilante violence (e.g., pogroms—persecution and massacres common against Jewish people in the old Russia).
But revolution does not take place in a vacuum. No sooner had the Russian revolution come to power than the imperialists moved against it—arming and assisting counter-revolutionary forces in Russia, leading to the brutal civil war of 1918-20 that resulted in massive deaths, disease, and near economic collapse. And the imperialists never let up, with Germany invading the Soviet Union in 1941, leading to the loss of over 25 million Soviet lives.
China before the 1949 revolution was a society wracked by famines in the countryside, with desperate poverty and deprivation in the cities too; in Shanghai, 25,000 bodies were picked up off the streets each year—a country of 500 million with only 12,000 doctors trained in modern medicine. The killing of girl babies was widespread, as was the practice of women being forced into arranged marriages. The communist revolution led by Mao Zedong ended these and countless other nightmares. "Women hold up half the sky" became society's orientation and their full participation in society was fought for.
From 1949 to 1976, when China was socialist, life expectancy rose from 32 to 65 years. Resources were developed and channeled to serve the great majority. A universal health care system, the world's most egalitarian, was created with the active participation of masses of people. Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, calculated that if capitalist India had the same health care system as China did under Mao, then four million fewer people would have died in India in a given year. That works out to some 100 million needless deaths in India from 1947 to 1979.
Point 2: Slaves Have a Right to Rebel
THE NEW COMMUNISM
by Bob Avakian
The science, the strategy, the leadership for an actual revolution, and a radically new society on the road to real emancipation
ABOUT THE BOOK, ORDER HERE
See excerpts HERE
Updated pre-publication PDF of this major work—now including the appendices—available HERE
Insight Press has announced that in addition to the print book, THE NEW COMMUNISM is now available as an eBook at Amazon, iBooks, Barnes and Noble and other retail and library websites.
Bob Avakian provides a basic point of orientation in his essay "A Question Sharply Posed: NAT TURNER OR THOMAS JEFFERSON?":
Slave rebellion or slave master? Do you support the oppressed rising up against the oppressive system and seeking a radically different way, even with certain errors and excesses—or do you support the oppressors, and the leaders and guardians of an outmoded oppressive order, who may talk about "inalienable rights" but bring down wanton brutality and very real terror, on masses of people, to enforce and perpetuate their system of oppression?
Yes, in the Russian and Chinese revolutions, there was death and destruction—and excesses, even grievous ones, occurred. But all this was in the context of the oppressed and exploited fighting to get free and creating the world's first socialist societies... while facing internal and external threat, and having very little experience to learn from.
But we are not in the same place. With the new communism developed by Bob Avakian, there is the scientific framework to understand the great achievements and the mistakes of these revolutions... and the scientific framework to go further and do better in a new stage of even more emancipatory communist revolution.
Point 3: "History by Body Count" Is Unscientific
SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION
On the Importance of Science and the Application of Science to Society, the New Synthesis of Communism, and the Leadership of Bob Avakian
An Interview with Ardea Skybreak
READ THE ENTIRE INTERVIEW HERE
ORDER THE BOOK HERE
See excerpts HERE.
Suppose you were told that 650,000 people died during the American Civil War of 1861-65 (equal to 7.5 million deaths in today's U.S. population). Incredibly high, and true. But then you are told: Abraham Lincoln was a "mass murderer," having stubbornly presided over the slaughter of hundreds of thousands. That is not a scientific statement. The body count doesn't tell you what the causes and clashing objectives of the Civil War were—what it was fought over—that slavery was the central question.
So, too, with the Russian and Chinese revolutions. You can't start with "body counts." And you can't start "in the middle of the movie"—like the battles of the American Civil War. What were the socio-economic and political situations of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, the threats and real imperialist invasions, the counter-revolutions and civil wars, epic natural disasters, and the oppressive and exploitative societies that gave rise to these revolutions and the millions who literally cried out for emancipation? And how did the revolutionary leadership respond to challenges and obstacles, and what mistakes were made in dealing with these challenges?
To get to what's objectively true requires historical and all-sided analysis, including of the forces in collision.
Point 4: The Imperialists Are World-Class Liars. They Systematically Lie About Particular Episodes in the History of Communism
When the U.S. massively escalated the war in Vietnam in 1964, it manufactured a lie about an attack on a U.S. warship. That lie was repeated by the media to justify a war that ultimately killed three million Vietnamese. When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, it manufactured a lie, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, to justify the war—and hundreds of thousands died and millions were displaced.
In terms of communism, the bourgeois method is to twist and distort particular events and movements in the history of communism—especially those that involved great turmoil and great upheaval, and great struggle and transformation. Like the collectivization of agriculture in Russia in the late 1920s, or the Cultural Revolution in China of 1966-76. The actual aims of these movements are distorted, and then the "death toll" machine goes to work—inflating body counts to serve an official story line of communism's supposed "indifference to human life."
One example of this is the Great Leap Forward that took place in socialist China in 1958-1960. We will say more in upcoming "Refutations" about the tremendously liberating character of this movement and struggle to establish food security, to revolutionize economic and social life in China's countryside, and to overcome inequalities, including longstanding patriarchal barriers facing women.
This gets ignored, and what gets pumped out by mainstream media and by ideologues of the capitalist system is that during the Great Leap Forward, 65 million people starved to death because the revolutionary leader Mao Zedong was so hell-bent on keeping to his radical economic and social policies. The story continues, that this led to a famine—and since Mao didn't care about human life, tens of millions died. This is a complete and scandalous lie.
What is the truth? In 1959-1960, there were food shortages and deaths from famine. But this was mainly caused by unprecedented weather conditions—terrible drought and flooding, natural disasters that were common in China's history. In response, famine relief measures were taken, and resources mobilized, by the socialist government to deal with the disaster and meet the needs of the people. The charge that 65 million died is based on unreliable data and statistical manipulation to attack socialism in China from 1949-1976. You can find out more about this and other ways that "death tolls" are inflated at the Set the Record website. But just because something is widely repeated and popularly believed does not make it true.
Point 5: How Dare the Capitalists Point Their Blood-Dripping Fingers
Again: the historical reality is that no system has been as barbaric as capitalism—not only in numbers of needless and continuous deaths and human suffering, but in the crushing of the human spirit. Capitalism rules by an inherent and fundamental logic of ruthless competition and profit-driven expansion. Capitalism is based on a handful privately appropriating that which is produced through the interconnected efforts of hundreds of millions worldwide in socialized production. It operates on the basis of exploitation and the most vicious oppression.
Capitalism worldwide brought exterminations and enslavement of indigenous/aboriginal populations. What of the colonial expansion and colonial wars such as Belgium's conquest of the Congo that slashed the population by 10 million, or the four million and more killed in the recent civil wars in Congo fueled by imperial grab for resources?
The "triumph" and maintenance of Western imperialist control in Asia, Africa, and Central and South America have "required" military conquest, invasions, coups, death squads, and drone wars. It has "required" the killing of three million during the Korean War... chemical and biological weapons in Vietnam... the slaughter of 500,000 to a million communists and sympathizers in Indonesia in 1965.
Then there are the countless "routine" deaths caused by this system: women dying because of lack of access to safe abortion; the 16,000 children, mainly in the poor countries of the Third World, who die each and every day from preventable disease and malnutrition. And we now face, under Trump, the real and growing danger of nuclear war against North Korea that could spiral into global devastation.
But we are fed the lie that this is the best and only of all possible worlds.
~~~~~~~~
Sources
* "A Question Sharply Posed," by Bob Avakian, April 14, 2013
* You Don't Know What You Think You 'Know' About...The Communist Revolution and the REAL Path to Emancipation: Its History and Our Future, interview with Raymond Lotta, 2014
* BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!, film of a talk by Bob Avakian, 2012; see chapter "Which System: Capitalism or Communism, Is the Nightmare for Humanity?"
* Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible and What It's All About, film of a talk by Bob Avakian, 2003
* Teaching Resources and Historical Controversies, www.thisiscommunism.org
* "Six Ways They Try to Bamboozle You About the Cultural Revolution in China and One Big Reason You Need to Dig Deeper and Get the Truth", www.revcom.us
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
Case #57: The 1973 CIA Coup In Chile
October 22, 2017 | 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.
September 11, 1973, the Chilean military, with political guidance and secret backing from the U.S., carried out a military coup, dropping bombs on La Moneda, the Chilean presidential palace, murdering President Salvador Allende.
The Crime: Beginning in the early morning hours of September 11, 1973, the Chilean military, with political guidance and secret backing from the U.S., carried out a military coup against the government of Chilean president Salvador Allende. With U.S. Navy ships offshore and U.S. spy planes overhead as backup, the Chilean Air Force and tanks and soldiers from the Chilean Army dropped bombs and launched artillery and small-arms fire in a furious, coordinated assault on La Moneda palace, the central government building in Chile’s capital, Santiago. Allende, a social democrat elected on a platform of social reform three years previously, was killed along with a small group of defenders.
Meanwhile, the Chilean military seized control of the radio and TV stations and key institutions of the country, bringing to power a ruthless military junta led by General Augusto Pinochet. The new regime enjoyed the widespread support of Chile’s top military leadership. But more crucially, it had the full support of the U.S. government at its highest levels. It was the culmination of years of U.S. covert intervention against the Allende government. It was, in every sense, a U.S.-manufactured coup.
The CIA had collected “arrest lists” and “key government installations which need to be taken over,” according to a 1975 U.S. Senate investigation. In the hours, days and weeks that followed the coup, tens of thousands of officials of Allende’s government and the Unidad Popular governing coalition, along with workers, union leaders, activists, students, progressive intellectuals, artists and people who just happened to be on the streets on the morning of September 11, were rounded up, then held in Santiago’s National and Chile stadiums and in military installations and facilities converted to concentration camps in locations around the country. They were subjected to brutal physical and psychological torture, or just outright murdered.
Among the thousands brutalized and murdered in Santiago stadiums was Victor Jara, a well-known and much-loved singer, song writer and supporter of the popular movement. Jara was beaten and tortured, his hands broken, before he was murdered. His body was sent to a morgue to be buried in an unmarked grave. Only the intervention of a mortuary worker who risked his life to tip off Jara’s wife kept him from being among the many who “disappeared” this way.
Over 140,000 people were rounded up during the coup and in the few years that followed. A 1991 Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation reported that many of those detainees were held in military prisons and special camps, and that sadistic forms of torture were the norm. Rape and other forms of sexual violence against women arrestees were nearly universal. A special Chilean death squad that came to be known as the “Caravan of Death” was transported by military helicopter to various military garrisons where they carried out horrific executions. Descriptions by survivors of their imprisonment by the U.S. armed and trained Chilean military rival in sadistic brutality the stories from Nazi concentration camps.
As many as one million people out of Chile’s population of 11 million were forced into exile. Some of those who fled were hunted down in other countries by death squads organized by the Chilean military.
Upon taking power, the military government of Augusto Pinochet dissolved Chile’s Congress, dismantled democratic institutions, abolished elections, made strikes illegal and broke up Chile’s largest union, the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores. The government imposed strict censorship of books, the press and school curriculum. Entire university departments were shut down.
Covert CIA operations against Allende and his movement had been going on since 1958. In September 1970, Allende was elected president. He promised to break the stranglehold of U.S. corporations on Chile’s economy by nationalizing foreign copper and other companies and using the proceeds to improve the conditions of Chile’s impoverished masses, half of whom were malnourished. Land taken from a handful of wealthy landowners would go to landless farmers.
Planning for the 1973 coup began in mid-October, 1970. The CIA was unable to prevent Allende’s election but was determined to block Allende from becoming president even though he had won the vote. A CIA deputy director sent a secret cable to the CIA station chief in Santiago conveying orders from President Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger: “It is firm and continuing policy that Allende (Chile’s president elect) be overthrown by a coup... It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG [U.S. government] and American hand be well hidden.”
The CIA set in motion a coup effort by a group of right-wing Chilean military officers. They assassinated Chile’s army commander in chief General René Schneider, who stood against the coup, with machine guns secretly supplied by the CIA. But their plan failed, and Allende assumed the presidency on November 3 after the Chilean parliament overwhelmingly ratified his election.
In the three years that Allende served as Chile’s president and leader of the governing coalition, Unidad Popular, the U.S. maneuvered to undermine the Chilean economy and create political divisions to, in Kissinger’s words, “help prevent the consolidation of his [Allende’s] regime.” U.S. bank credit and government economic aid to Chile were frozen. The World Bank and other U.S.-controlled international financial institutions shut off loans. A committee of U.S. corporations worked out an anti-Allende strategy in consultation with the Nixon administration. CIA operatives were sent to organize sabotage of the Chilean economy. In one operation, the CIA organized and bankrolled a strike by truck owners that paralyzed the country’s transportation system. They also carried out acts of sabotage in factories and against railroads, highways, bridges, pipelines, schools and hospitals.
Meanwhile, the U.S. orchestrated a massive anti-Allende propaganda campaign through many forms of media, including subsidizing wire services, magazines and right-wing newspapers.
The U.S. increased its arming and training of the Chilean military, while developing a network of CIA “assets” in all its branches, and pushed forward preparations for a military coup. Yet, even as these moves were being made, there were political groups in Chile, including the pro-Soviet Communist Party (a revisionist, non-revolutionary party that was “communist” in name only), which widely promoted the idea that Allende’s government represented a “peaceful road to socialism” through elections, and that the Chilean military, or at least key parts of it, could be won over to the side of the people or, at least, somehow “neutralized.” When a general who proved to be unfavorable to U.S. coup plans was forced out as the commander in chief of the armed forces, Allende appointed General Pinochet in his place. Illusions about the nature of the Chilean military and its loyalty to the Chilean Constitution left people tragically unprepared for the U.S.-instigated blood bath that followed.
The Criminals: U.S. president Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger were the main U.S. authorities behind the September 11, 1973 coup. Both made clear they would welcome Allende’s assassination. In 1970 Kissinger told other officials, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.”
CIA Director Richard Helms, Attorney General John Mitchell and Secretary of State William Rogers were members of the so-called “40 Committee” chaired by Kissinger and made up of various U.S. military and intelligence operatives in charge of reviewing covert operations.
The CIA was the main organization that prepared for and carried out the coup.
The U.S. military helped arm and train the Chilean military, and stationed ships and planes nearby.
Anaconda Copper, Ford Motor Company, First National City Bank, Bank of America, Ralston Purina and ITT were among the U.S. corporations that directly conspired with the Nixon regime to economically strangle the Chilean economy in the lead-up to the coup.
The military leader of the coup was Augusto Pinochet.1 The military leaders of Chile’s army, navy and air force were active participants in the coup.
The Alibi: Opponents of Allende claimed that the Popular Unity government, in an attempt to impose “socialism,” mismanaged Chile’s economy and caused such disruption and chaos that the military had no choice but to step in and impose order.
The U.S. immediately denied it had any hand in the coup. A year later, President Gerald Ford claimed the U.S. had acted to help preserve opposition newspapers and political parties.
The Real Motive: The 1973 coup was the culmination of U.S. efforts to undermine, then crush, the nationalist, reform movement that coalesced around Salvador Allende. That reform movement, the Unidad Popular, arose in opposition to U.S. economic and political domination of Chile and was part of a worldwide struggle against colonialism and imperialism in the 1960s and 1970s.
The coup was also motivated by the growing rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In the mid-1950s, those leading the Soviet Union had abandoned revolution, socialism and communism; and by the 1970s, they had become the main rival to the U.S. imperialists. Posing as a friend to the nations and peoples exploited and dominated by the U.S. and other colonial powers, the Soviet Union was making inroads in areas the U.S. had long dominated, including Cuba and other countries in Latin America. The growing influence of Chilean parties friendly to the Soviet Union fed U.S. imperialist fear of further Soviet inroads into what they considered their “back yard.” A secret 1970 CIA memo warned that Allende’s victory could lead to “tangible economic losses” for U.S. capital, and, more importantly, big “political costs” to U.S.-dominated “Hemispheric cohesion” and a “psychological set-back” and “advantage for the Marxist idea.” All this made the brutal and bloody destruction of the Allende government an urgent matter for the U.S. rulers.
Upon seizing power, the Pinochet government dismantled the nationalization of foreign-owned enterprises; reversed the land redistribution to landless farmers and other social welfare measures; privatized Chile’s economy; and restored direct U.S. domination.
1. In 1998 Pinochet was indicted for human rights violations by a Spanish magistrate. He was later arrested in London and held for a year and a half before being released in March 2000. Upon return to Chile, Pinochet was indicted by a judge there and charged with a number of crimes. He was never tried because of “health” reasons. Pinochet died in 2006, without being convicted in any case. [back]
Sources:
Lubna Z. Qureshi, Nixon, Kissinger and Allende, Lexington Books, 2008
Pilar Aguilera and Ricardo Fredes, Chile, the Other September 11, Ocean Press, 2006
Bradford Burns, “The True Verdict on Allende: Nixon and Kissinger fiddle and Chile burns,” The Nation, April 3, 2009
1991 Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, Part 3, Chapter 1
William Blum, Killing Hope, U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Common Courage Press, 1995
“The September 11 Massacre They Don’t Tell You About,” Revolution, September 17, 2006
“Augusto Pinochet: Fascist General in Service of the U.S. Godfathers,” Revolution, December 24, 2006
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
Ken Burns’ Documentary The Vietnam War:
Absolving War Crimes, Training People to Think Like Americans
October 23, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The Vietnam War, a new documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, recently aired on public television (PBS). Burns is renowned for his thoughtful, exquisitely presented examinations of different periods and aspects of American history and culture: The Civil War, Jazz, and The Dust Bowl are among his many films. He has generally had a progressive outlook on these experiences. A new Ken Burns documentary is often a highly anticipated social and cultural event, and The Vietnam War is the most heavily promoted show in PBS history.
Narratives + Facts Do Not Equal Truth
PBS’s advertising hook for The Vietnam War was “No Single Truth.” Burns and Novick explained the method and purpose that guided their approach to the movie in a New York Times essay: “There is no simple or single truth to be extracted from the Vietnam War. Many questions remain unanswerable. But if, with open minds and open hearts, we can consider this complex event from many perspectives and recognize more than one truth, perhaps we can stop fighting over how the war should be remembered and focus instead on what it can teach us about courage, patriotism, resilience, forgiveness and, ultimately, reconciliation.”
Their method is to tell multiple stories, from multiple perspectives, and present them all as “truth.” Hundreds of people were interviewed for this movie, and about 80 of them appear in it. They include people who fought for Vietnam’s liberation from imperialism and U.S. citizens who opposed the war, as well as Americans who supported the war and Vietnamese allied with them. But even on its own terms, this movie is profoundly dishonest. There are no extended portrayals of the massive resistance to the war and the military within the U.S. military; no close up presentations of people who went from patriotic flag waver to critic of imperialism; no discussions with people—including many thousands within the U.S.—who celebrated the final U.S. retreat from Saigon.
But more to the point, a “narrative” (or 80 narratives) sprinkled with some facts does not add up to truth. As Bob Avakian wrote, “What people think is part of objective reality, but objective reality is not determined by what people think.” (BAsics 4:11)
Why did the U.S. invade a small, mainly peasant country half way around the world, and wage a ruthless war there for years? Why did so many people in Vietnam sacrifice so much, fight so long and so hard, first against the French and then the Americans? What larger social and historical dynamics are the foundation for the narratives in The Vietnam War? Ardea Skybreak describes how people with methods similar to Burns/Novick essentially argue “that there is no such thing as ‘objective’ truth because the fact that each person brings their own subjective interpretations to things makes it impossible to ever know anything other than through this distorted subjective lens.”
Truth Really Does Matter
The reality—the truth—is that the U.S. and, yes, every soldier who fought in this war, waged an unjust imperialist war against an oppressed people who fought back, against great odds. The Vietnamese heroically fought a just war of liberation against a superior power until they drove it out of their country. Their courage, resourcefulness, and determination inspired people worldwide, including within the U.S., to support them and to fight other injustices. U.S. soldiers who either participated in or abetted atrocities against the people of Vietnam (including by silent complicity) were war criminals. The political and military leaders of the U.S. who commanded and directed this war should have been brought before an International War Crimes Tribunal. The only U.S. military personnel—present and past—who should be honored are the resisters who “break ranks” and fight to end the criminal wars their government sends them to wage.
At the movie’s beginning, the narrator says the U.S. war in Vietnam was “begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculations.” This is not mere garden variety bullshit. It is shameful for Burns and Novick to echo such vicious deceit. It is a profoundly wrong and immoral viewpoint that permeates the entire 18-hour movie. Further, Burns knows, and in fact documents, how U.S. leaders lied for decades about essentially everything concerning its war in Vietnam. The Pentagon Papers, secret documents that were released in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg, proved, as the New York Times wrote at the time, that the government “systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress.” The government responded not by apologizing and trying to somehow atone for the fact that millions had by then died on the basis of their lies—but by arresting Ellsberg and charging him with espionage.
The U.S. was the world’s main imperialist superpower when it began its war in Vietnam. Throughout the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, struggles of national liberation raged in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Many of them were led by communists, or had strong communist participation. Political leaders of the U.S. were determined to crush these righteous struggles, in particular the struggle of the Vietnamese people, to ensure and extend U.S. global domination. The U.S. also aimed to encircle revolutionary China and strengthen its contention with the then-imperialist Soviet Union.
The war the United States waged against the people of Vietnam was an enormous crime against humanity. That can never be forgotten. More than three million Vietnamese people were killed during the years the U.S. rained death on Southeast Asia. Hundreds of thousands more died—were murdered—by the United States in the neighboring countries of Cambodia and Laos. (See sidebar.)
Burns and Novick do depict some of this. For people who never knew of the massive atrocities the U.S. routinely perpetrated in Vietnam, and the lies they used to justify them, some parts of this documentary will be eye-opening. But the movie covers over the truth about the nature of this genocidal war, entombing it in a cascade of conflicting “narratives,” and despite all the evidence, maintains that the American effort was waged “in good faith by decent people.”
When war crimes by the U.S. are depicted—broken bodies strewn across barren land, soldiers using cigarette lighters to set fire to people’s homes—Burns and Novick “balance” this with, for instance, a former U.S. officer or official claiming that killing civilians and destroying their homes was not U.S. policy. Systematic U.S. bombing and massive destruction of Hanoi and other population centers in North Vietnam is shown. But throughout the movie Burns and Novick present sympathetic accounts of bomber pilots whose planes were shot down and who became prisoners in North Vietnam.
One of the most odious expressions of this method, and where it leads, is their presentation of the My Lai massacre, a mass murder that outraged the entire conscious world. U.S. soldiers systematically slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians over three days. Burns and Novick described this unspeakable depravity as a “killing.” After months of debate among the filmmakers, they decided not to use the word “murder.” Burns and Novick claim killing civilians is the kind of thing which “happens in all wars.” This is not true: there have been revolutionary liberation forces like the People’s Army in China when it was under the leadership of Mao Zedong with policies and rules of engagement that strictly forbade the targeting or abuse of civilians in any way. But the U.S. military, in Vietnam and elsewhere, kills civilians routinely and massively. This is a core part of their way of fighting. Burns explained his cowardly, contemptible reasoning to the New Yorker: “My Lai continues to have ‘a toxic, radioactive effect’ on opinion in the U.S. ‘Killing’ was the better word, he said, ‘even though My Lai is murder.’”
As Bob Avakian has repeatedly stressed, truth really matters:
There is a place where epistemology and morality meet. There is a place where you have to stand and say: It is not acceptable to refuse to look at something—or to refuse to believe something—because it makes you uncomfortable. And: It is not acceptable to believe something just because it makes you feel comfortable. (BAsics 5:11)
If you look at the U.S. Civil War, the central truth of that war is that it was about slavery. We can know that, and know that those who fought in that war—whatever they thought they were doing—were either fighting for or against the enslavement of human beings. So too with Vietnam—the central truth is that the Vietnamese were fighting for self-determination and national liberation, and the U.S. was determined to conduct mass murder and ecocide to maintain neocolonial domination, whatever anybody thought they were doing.
Needed: More Divisiveness
There is a purpose to the method of Burns and Novick in their film. They want to reassure Americans that what their country did in Vietnam was a “tragedy”—for them as much as the Vietnamese. They wrap their package in a red white and blue shroud of “reconciliation.” By “reconciliation” they mean “honoring the warrior,” even though the “warrior” is a willing part of a machine that perpetrates mass atrocities across this entire planet.
Burns and Novick obliterate basic dividing lines between a people fighting for independence and liberation from imperialism and their oppressors. They see this as a way of “overcoming divisions” in the U.S. They end the movie with scenes of the Vietnam Memorial in D.C., where the names of the 58,000 Americans who died—not the three million and more Vietnamese—are inscribed, as the Beatle’s “Let It Be” plays.
Hell no.
The “divisiveness” of the 1960s and ’70s was the best thing that happened in this country in the 20th century. People rose up in protest and rebellion, including in ghettos and barrios across the country. Youth identified with and carried the flag of an “enemy” liberation force with whom the U.S. was at war. Millions of people would not accept and live with the status quo, and “go along to get along.” Millions of people danced to the beat that “the revolution’s here, and you know it’s right,” as a pop song from the era went.
Far from being something to mourn, regret, and try to reconcile, the profound divisions that erupted and clashed in this country over the U.S. war in Vietnam and genocide of the Vietnamese people were a good thing. It was a positive development that radical and revolutionary currents emerged as mass expressions of opposition to the war. It was inspiring that the whole world saw a section of youth in this country who burned draft cards and burned the U.S. flag. Protesters were courageous and had truth and morality on their side when they passionately chanted against their president: “Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today.”
People who took over college campuses, flooded streets from DC to San Francisco, protested in the face of brutal suppression in cities coast to coast were proceeding from the interests of humanity, they weren’t thinking like Americans.
A lot more of that kind of divisiveness is needed today. The U.S. is waging war in countries across the world. The U.S. military has military bases that span the globe, “special ops” assassination teams, drones that drop death on remote villages, nuclear armed vessels or planes on, above, and below the world’s oceans. And now, a fascist president threatening still more unjust violence on a more massive level, up to the actual use of nuclear weapons.
People really need to ponder and come to grips with something else Bob Avakian wrote:
While it is right and necessary to unite with people broadly in opposing the injustices and outrages committed by those who rule this country, and while this has taken on heightened importance with the coming to power of the Trump/Pence fascist regime, it is a basic truth that without breaking with American chauvinism—without confronting the very real horror of what this country has been, and what it has done, here and all over the world, from its founding to the present—and without coming to deeply hate this, it is not possible, in the final analysis, to retain one’s own humanity and act in the highest interests of all humanity. (From “The Problem, the Solution, and the Challenges Before Us”)
As in the ’60s, a basic question remains: Which side are you on?
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
Unconscionable Censorship of PRLF—Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund
Updated October 30, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Global Exchange, the fiscal sponsor for the Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund (PRLF), summarily cut off PRLF for explicitly political reasons after four years of excellent association. This cutoff means that PRLF can no longer accept tax-deductible donations. The new director, Jeff Ordower, stated, “Global Exchange is not interested in an association with Bob Avakian or the RCP [Revolutionary Communist Party, USA].”
This action by Global Exchange is unacceptable on general principle, but particularly in the time of Trump, this is downright unconscionable. This is also the most important time for PRLF’s annual fundraising drive.
In response to Global Exchange, four former prisoners immediately wrote a statement about what PRLF has meant to them. This statement is now circulating inside prison walls for current prisoners’ endorsement.
The PRLF is also sending out a letter to people of conscience who care deeply about the situation of prisoners to ask that they either contact Global Exchange directly or lend their name to a statement that will be sent to all members of Global Exchange’s Board of Directors to urge them to immediately reverse this decision.
PRLF’s objective is to have Global Exchange re-instate PRLF as a fiscal project of theirs. (Global Exchange can be contacted at web@globalexchange.org or 415.255.7296)
The PRLF has vowed to encourage supporters to protest outside Global Exchange’s office in San Francisco if the revocation of PRLF’s status is not overturned.
The following is the statement that PRLF is encouraging voices of conscience to sign:
“We, the undersigned, urge you to immediately reverse your decision to not continue Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund as a fiscal project of Global Exchange. The reason given that you do not wish to associate with Bob Avakian or the RCP is unacceptable, especially in the time of Trump. Some of us have actively engaged Bob Avakian’s work and value that engagement, but all of us protest this censorship on the part of Ordower on behalf of Global Exchange. In doing so, we recall the words of Pastor Niemöller:
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Signed: _____________________________________________________________
Printed name: ________________________________________________________
Organization (for identification purposes only): _______________________________
Best way PRLF can reach you (not for publication): ___________________________
PRLF is asking you to be an initiating signer of this statement. PRLF will publish it as soon as possible, encouraging more people to sign this letter.
If you contact Global Exchange directly, please let contact@PRLF.org know that you did. Please also let PRLF know if you get any response from Global Exchange.
If you have any questions, please get in touch with PRLF: contact@prlf.org, 773.960.6952
Signatories (list in formation):
Jason Bell, Regional Director, Project Rebound Expanded*, San Francisco State University*
John Burris, attorney
Colin Dayan, professor and writer
Carl Dix, Representative of Revolutionary Communist Party, co-initiator of RefuseFascism.org
Gregory "Joey" Johnson, former defendant, U.S. Supreme Court case Texas v. Johnson (1989), member of Revolution Club
Emily Kunstler, director/producer, William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
Sarah Kunstler, director/producer, William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
Nancy Michaels
*PRLF is an educational literature fund that has sent Revolution newspaper (www.revcom.us), works from Bob Avakian, (Chairman of the RCP) and other revolutionary and scientific literature to hundreds of prisoners across the U.S. for 10 years. PRLF has fought attempts by prison officials to censor these publications. For example, the ACLU of Southern California successfully represented PRLF in a censorship battle focused on Pelican Bay State Prison, with statewide ramifications in California.
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
Ex-Prisoners Speak Out Against the Global Exchange Censorship of the Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund
Updated October 30, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Recently, Global Exchange has notified the Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund (PRLF) that it will no longer sponsor it and enable it to receive tax-deductible contributions. Jeff Ordower, the new director of Global Exchange, explained this by saying, “First, Global Exchange is not interested in an association with Bob Avakian or the RCP....”
As former prisoners whose lives have been positively transformed through engagement with Bob Avakian’s works as well as a wide range of other literature provided by the Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund, we want to express our outrage and condemn what amounts to arbitrary and mean-spirited censorship of the PRLF by Jeff Ordower, the new director of the Global Exchange.
Jeff Ordower has stated: “Yes, I am a new director and one of the folks making this call. Two concerns pop up. First, Global Exchange is not interested in an association with Bob Avakian or the RCP....”
While incarcerated, enclosed by gloomy, gray concrete walls, we received literature from the PRLF that was truly a light in the darkness. The way we viewed the world and the role we played in society changed dramatically. We learned to think of more than ourselves and our present conditions, we learned of all the unnecessary suffering of masses of people throughout the world and were able to reclaim our humanity by recognizing it didn’t have to be that way and that there was a role for us to play in changing it. Through engagement with Bob Avakian we were inspired to think differently, to raise our sights beyond the monotonous comings and goings of prison life, and were able to envision a radically different world, without people being horrendously exploited, oppressed, degraded, cast off and ground up like human garbage by this system. Now Jeff Ordower wants to prevent other prisoners from getting the same opportunity.
Jeff Ordower has through his actions appointed himself the position of “thought cop,” policing the ideas that prisoners are able to engage by unconscionably cutting off the lifeline to the outside world that the PRLF provides to hundreds of people behind prison walls simply because he doesn’t agree with communism. What the PRLF has done for us (and does for many more still locked up) was more than offer an escape from the maddening, mind-numbing and mind-killing conditions of incarceration, but more importantly awakened us to political life and moved us to radically change our morality and way of thinking in the most positive way imaginable, yes, through the works of Bob Avakian and the RCP, as well as other works from other perspectives. It is hard to imagine the immensely positive transformation that we have been through had it not been for the work of the PRLF in getting the works of Bob Avakian and subsidized subscriptions of Revolution newspaper into our hands and into our cells.
This censorship is nothing more than a cheap, unprincipled anti-communist attack and we the undersigned call for this action to be reversed.
Signed by four former prisoners and two current prisoners, whose names are being withheld to prevent political repression, and now being circulated among current and more former prisoners for endorsement.
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
The Righteous Outpouring of #MeToo
October 23, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader:
Bob Avakian recently wrote:
The outpouring of outrage against this sexual abuse and the all too commonplace institutional cover-ups and complicity with it, and the demand for a radical change in the culture—which has made a major leap in relation to the accusations against Harvey Weinstein and has now spread far beyond that, involving millions of women, in sphere after sphere throughout this country and in other countries as well—is right, righteous, and long overdue, and should be supported, encouraged, spread, and defended against counter-attack. (From “A Question of Basic Stand and Orientation, by Bob Avakian: SUPPORT AND SPREAD THE FURY AGAINST SEXUAL ABUSE”)
In this light, the #MeToo movement that has spread widely through society is shedding a much-needed light on the pervasiveness of rape and sexual assault in this society. It is providing millions of women a way to speak out and challenge people to confront the totally unacceptable situation—and to demand a STOP to this.
On October 15, actress Alyssa Milano tweeted: “If all women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote #MeToo as a status, we might give people a sense of magnitude of the problem.... If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.”
Within 24 hours, millions of people around the world were engaging in the “Me Too” conversation on Facebook. By several days later, the #MeToo hashtag had been used more than 1.2 million times on Twitter.
This storm of outrage comes with an unapologetic abuser and harasser of women, Trump, in the White House. The 2005 videotape that surfaced during the 2016 campaign let the world hear Trump bragging gleefully: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.... Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.” As one #MeToo tweet said: “It REALLY pisses me off knowing 62 Mill Americans put a predator in the WH.”
Celebrities including Anna Paquin, Lady Gaga, Debra Messing, Anika Noni Rose, Rosario Dawson, Gabrielle Union, and Evan Rachel Wood have joined the #MeToo movement. Olympic gold medal gymnast McKayla Maroney talked of years of sexual abuse by the doctor on the U.S. team: “It started when I was 13 years old, and it didn’t end until I left the sport. I had a dream to go to the Olympics, and the things that I had to endure to get there were unnecessary and disgusting.”
Most tweets came from regular women, like this one: “my mom won’t let me sleepover bc she’s afraid for my safety but she couldn’t protect me from her cousin in her own home for 4+ years #MeToo.” A tweet with a photo of a bloodied face said: “I posted a graphic selfie of my beating to tell the world #MeToo.”
Shedding a Light on Pervasiveness of Rape and Sexual Assault
One woman tweeted: “If the #MeToo movement makes you uncomfortable, good. We shouldn’t be comfortable with this.”
#MeToo is revealing how widespread rape and sexual assault is—among all kinds of women in every stratum of society—of all nationalities and ages, and including women who have accomplished a lot and achieved a certain status in politics, academia, and business. There have been #MeToo tweets from women doctors, lawyers, professors, and neuroscientists. Mazie Hirono, a U.S. senator from Hawaii, tweeted: “Pretty much every woman that I know, myself included, has a #MeToo story.”
And there have been #MeToo tweets from women all over the world. In India, where a woman is raped every 20 minutes, there has been a flood of #MeToo tweets.
Some men have also joined the #MeToo movement to say how this epidemic of sexual assault of women is unacceptable and calling on other men to do something about it. Australian journalist Benjamin Law tweeted: “Guys, it’s our turn. After yesterday’s endless #MeToo stories of women being abused, assaulted and harassed, today we say #HowIWillChange.” And through #HowIWillChange, men have been tweeting, saying they will start calling out predatory behavior—cutting off locker room talk, calling out harassment, and ending victim blaming.
Tarana Burke, who started the #MeToo awareness campaign in 2006, said of this recent outpouring, “It is an epidemic, and the news and media have to treat it like it’s an epidemic.” And Alyssa Milano said: “What the ‘Me Too’ campaign really does... is really put the focus back on the victims: to give us a voice, to give us strength, to give us power... And what that enables us to do is say, ‘No more. No more. We’re not going to put up with this anymore.’”
Rape, other sexual assault, and harassment is reinforced by this male supremacist society, with its culture that demeans and objectifies women. Studies say about one in four women is sexually assaulted in her lifetime. Amidst the accusations by women about Harvey Weinstein, the #MeToo movement has put a damning spotlight on how sexual assault is horrifically widespread—hitting women and girls not just in the entertainment industry, but throughout society, in homes, offices, churches, schools, in academia, in the military... by strangers, relatives, friends.
The #MeToo movement takes heightened importance and meaning at this moment when there is an open sexual predator in the White House—where the agenda of the fascist Trump/Pence regime includes a whole list of attacks on women.
The tremendous power of the #MeToo movement should feed into and be part of November 4 and the days to follow—where people will take to the streets across the country, beginning a struggle that must continue day after day and night after night to demand: This Nightmare Must End: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!
Tarana Burke who started #MeToo awareness said, "It is an epidemic, and the news and media have to treat it like it's an epidemic."
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
"There has been no oppression in the last 100 years that I know of."
Mike Ditka, Get the Fuck Off This Planet
October 23, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader:
This past week Mike Ditka, former player and coach for the Chicago Bears and an ESPN football analyst, proclaimed in a pregame interview before the Monday night NFL game that “There has been no oppression in the last 100 years that I know of.” Ditka was responding to the current anthem protests by NFL players in opposition to police murders and brutality against Black people. Ditka did not stop there. When he was then questioned by the pre-game show host Jim Gray about social injustice, Ditka said, “I don’t know what social injustices have been.” Ditka was doubling down on a previous comment he made when talking about Colin Kaepernick: “I don’t see all the atrocities going on in this country that people say are going on.”
No oppression or atrocities!!? Just look at some of the brutal oppression carried out by Ditka’s beloved Chicago police and others in Chicago just during Ditka’s lifetime.
- 1940s-1960s—Government subsidized housing forced Black people into segregated communities. Vast ghetto housing projects that were highly concentrated areas of poverty were built in Chicago. People in those housing projects were subjected to murder and brutality by the Chicago police. People living in those projects were subjected to poor and racist education, environmental hazards, the worst health care, predatory merchants, and terror by the police. (See American Crime Case #62.)
- In the mid 1960s, the Chicago open housing movement led by Martin Luther King demanded the end to segregated housing in the city. Also known as the Chicago Freedom Movement, they held large rallies and marches demanding that the City of Chicago provide open housing, quality education, transportation and job access, healthcare, community development, tenant’s rights, and a better quality of life for the Black population of the city. On August 5, 1966, Martin Luther King led a march of 700 people starting at Marquette Park in Chicago’s Southwest Side which was to end at a real estate office to demand that properties by rented and sold to Black people in the all-white Chicago Lawn area, where swastikas were regularly seen and Nazis and white supremacists held rallies. Thousands of white people came out in opposition, jeering and taunting the marchers. One sign read: “King would look good with a knife in his back.” A stone was thrown, hitting MLK in the head, knocking him to the ground. (A nun was hit by a brick in another march during that summer.) The racist crowd attacked the march, throwing rocks, bottles, and firecrackers at the marchers. Over 30 people were injured, including MLK. After the protest King said, “I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen—even in Mississippi and Alabama—mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’ve seen here in Chicago.”
- 1968 was a year of massive protests against the Vietnam War and uprisings in the urban ghettos after the murder of Martin Luther King. Massive counter-intelligence measures were used by the government and the Chicago police against those going to Chicago to protest. Thousands of antiwar protestors came to Chicago. A massive force of Chicago police, the U.S. Army, the National Guard, and the U.S. Secret Service faced off against the demonstrators. On August 28, as the protestors marched towards the convention site, the cops attacked them with tear gas, rifles, and clubs. Protestors, reporters covering the protest, and doctors attempting to offer medical help were brutally beaten and injured. Over 600 were arrested.
- In 1969, in retaliation against the protests at the DNC, authorities went after the leaders of the antiwar movement by putting eight of them (the Chicago 8) on trial for conspiracy. Bobby Seale, leader of the Black Panther Party, was one of the eight. He was denied his constitutional right to be represented by an attorney of his choice. When he was also denied a request to defend himself, he protested. Racist judge Julius Hoffman had him bound, gagged, and chained to his chair. William Kunstler, one of the defense attorneys, called this out in the courtroom declaring, “This is no longer a court of order, Your Honor, this is a medieval torture chamber.”
- 1969—Fred Hampton, the 21-year old chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party was murdered by the police who machine gunned their way into Hampton’s apartment and shot him while he was in his bed. The raid was directed by Cook County State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan in close coordination with the FBI Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO).
- 1977—After the Puerto Rican Parade, Chicago police charged the crowd and shot in the back and murdered two unarmed Puerto Ricans, Julio Osorio and Rafael Cruz, in Humboldt Park as part of the government’s attempts to silence and squelch the Puerto Rican Independence Movement.
- 1970s-1990s—Chicago Police Department’s infamous torture crew rounded up more than 100 Black men who were shocked with cattle prods in the mouth and genitals, beaten with telephone books, and suffocated with plastic bags until many confessed to crimes.
- 2004-2015—At least 3,500 Chicagoans, 82 percent of them Black, were illegally held and detained at a CIA-type Black Ops Site at Homan Square. People were housed in chain-link metal cages stretching from floor to ceiling at the secret location. The detained there were kept out of the official booking databases. The cops would brutally beat people, resulting in head wounds. People were shackled for prolonged periods. Attorneys were denied access to the facility and people were denied access to legal counsel for long periods of time, including people as young as 15.
Mike Ditka has been the face of some of the NFL’s ugliest features—vicious play by trying to rip the head off of his opponents, the “manning up” syndrome, American chauvinism and patriarchy. He supported Donald Trump from the get-go.
Why the hell is this racist Neanderthal still being allowed to spew out his vile shit on the air when Jemele Hill was suspended by ESPN—with current rumors that she is going to be fired—for tweeting a suggestion that fans should boycott the advertisers of the Dallas Cowboys because their owner, “slave master” Jerry Jones, said he would bench players who refused to stand for the anthem?!?
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
"Black Identity Extremism":
FBI Report Calls for Intensified Attacks on Black Activists
October 22, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
A new FBI document signals an ominous escalation in government spying on and repression against Black people fighting murder and brutality by police. The document, titled "Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law Enforcement Officers," is an "intelligence assessment" put out in August and leaked to the journal Foreign Policy earlier this month.
The appearance of this document indicates the intent of the Trump/Pence regime to criminalize all Black protest against police abuse and murder and to turn every Black person who expresses interest in such protest or even in their African heritage into a potential suspect and target for spying. This goes along with the extreme white supremacist fascism of this regime. This should set off alarms for anyone who cares about injustice and underlines the importance of driving out this whole regime.
FBI "Guidance" Means Letting the Mad Dog Local Cops Off the Chain
The FBI is making the report available to police and intelligence agencies across the country, aiming to provide "guidance" to identify "extremists." It paints an utterly false picture, claiming there is ongoing violence by "ideologically motivated" Black "extremists." Its central point: "[I]t is very likely Black Identity Extremist (BIE) perceptions of police violence against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will very likely serve as a justification for such violence."
There is so much bullshit packed into that one sentence that several articles could be written taking it apart. But some key points:
- Police violence against Black people is a reality, not a "perception." It is deeply embedded and systemic in this society. Police are on pace to kill about 1,100 people this year. The victims are disproportionately Black and other people of color. Hundreds of thousands of Black and Brown people are warehoused in prisons across the U.S. Now the fascist Trump/Pence regime, and its white supremacist attorney general, Jeff Sessions, are removing even the pretense of getting police to act with "restraint."
- A determined national movement against murder by police, beginning in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, has been one of the most positive social developments in recent years. This resistance has been overwhelmingly nonviolent—on the part of the protesters. Protests have been repeatedly attacked and repressed by police. Protesters have been beaten, arrested, and in many cases charged with heavy felonies.
- Fascist white supremacists have repeatedly launched vicious attacks on people from Berkeley to Charlottesville. They have openly organized this violence on social media and web sites. They explicitly call themselves "white nationalists." Trump called them "very fine people" after their ugly march in Charlottesville where one of them killed a counter-protestor.
A Dangerous Development, a Big Challenge
The authors of this FBI report made up the term "Black Identity Extremism." They give no evidence that anyone at any time has used it to describe an outlook or organization. Then they use it retroactively to describe events from 40 and 50 years ago that have no organizational or ideological connection with today's activists. According to the authors and adherents of this report, anyone who identifies with their African heritage and opposes police brutality becomes a possible "extremist" and a target for FBI and police spying. The report, in a footnote, offers a token acknowledgement that advocating political positions "may be" constitutionally protected (emphasis ours). But it defines "black identity extremists" as people who advocate "a separate black homeland or black autonomous social institutions ... formed around ... a belief in racial superiority or supremacy."
The report's language is obviously meant to evoke the Black Lives Matter movement. It suspects anyone who uses terms like "the oppressor" or has tattoos and "pocket litter" associated with "black extremism" or who "likes" social media pages of "black separatist groups" as "BIE."
The report's authors try to cover up the fact that they have no evidence to back up their outrageous lies and accusations by claiming there are far more instances of "ideologically motivated attacks" by "BIE's" than their report indicates. They write that their report does not address "BIE's who have attacked law enforcement officers during the course of officers' routine duties." In other words, the report makes the outrageous and completely unfounded claim (again, with no evidence) that Black people who supposedly "attacked" police when they were being arrested may not have done so as part of a "premeditated" attack but were still motivated by "BIE."
FBI: Long Piggish History and Fascist Current-Day Reality
The FBI has a long, ugly piggish history of attempting to disrupt and break up progressive, radical, and revolutionary organizations and movements. One example: the infamous COINTELPRO program during the 1960s and '70s, which used vicious and illegal methods to especially go after groups and individual leaders who opposed the oppression of Black people. They slandered and threatened Malcolm X before he was assassinated, and organized murderous assaults on the Black Panther Party.
The fact that this "BIE" document came out now, as the fascist Trump/Pence regime is moving to rapidly consolidate its grip on power, indicates the extent of lies and deceit the rulers of this country will utilize to suppress repeated outpourings against police brutality. It also drives home the importance of stepping up the fight against murder and terror by police, and the urgency of ending the nightmare of the Trump/Pence regime.
Finally, this document alone should show the folly of any hopes that the FBI will somehow "restrain" Trump and Pence.
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
Police Attack Grassroots Disaster Relief Team in Puerto Rico
October 23, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
In the early morning of October 16, a SWAT Team and other police stormed a Mutual Aid Disaster Relief compound in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, outside the capital city, San Juan. The U.S.-based group describes itself as “a grassroots disaster relief network based on the principles of solidarity, mutual aid, and autonomous direct action.” The group sent volunteers to deliver aid to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief reports they’ve “delivered food, cases of water, water purification tablets, and provided health care to elderly residents and their families” who are without access to aid or medical care. They are also raising money for small-scale modular water treatment systems and solar arrays for areas without access to clean water and electricity.
In a post on the website itsgoingdown.org, Mutual Aid Disaster Relief reported that on October 16:
Several police vehicles, an armored tactical vehicle, and law enforcement personnel including swat team pointed their guns at relief workers while surrounding and then entering our base of operations...Law enforcement communicated that they were acting from a call that Mutual Aid Disaster Relief volunteers were engaged in “kidnapping.” After checking everybody’s belongings without consent, they forced volunteers out of what was the Mutual Aid Disaster Relief Puerto Rico hub at gunpoint and the threat of arrest. Law enforcement intimidation also included aggressive questioning of our purpose there and whether or not we were protestors or Antifa, had we ever used the raised fist, if we were distributing propaganda, and if we were planning to overthrow the government.
This outrageous police assault must be condemned. As we’ve reported at revcom, most recently here, the Trump/Pence regime’s response to Hurricane Maria’s devastation in Puerto Rico has been truly criminal on a monstrous, even genocidal scale! The government’s attack on Mutual Aid Disaster Relief is further exposure that their concern is maintaining U.S. imperialist domination over Puerto Rico, not meeting people’s urgent, crying needs.
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
An Open Letter to The New York Times
October 23, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
October 23, 2017
An Open Letter to The New York Times:
Regarding the special issue of the Book Review (October 22, 2017) marking the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution:
I’ll leave aside the false narratives, fatuous assertions, and egregious distortions in this tired litany of anticommunist invective—though it’s something when Condoleezza Rice gives the most “balanced” appraisal of all your writers. I’ll leave aside Martin Amis’s morally moronic comparison (and factually ridiculous statement) that daily life for most Germans under Hitler—with the evidently small “exception,” he notes, for Jews, Communists, LGBT, and Roma—was better than for citizens of the Soviet Union.
I, among others, have refuted these charges at length elsewhere (“You Don't Know What You Think You ‘Know’ About the Communist Revolution...” and “Set the Record Straight”); and Bob Avakian (“Key Works...on the First Stage of the Communist Revolution”) has summed up both the overwhelmingly positive achievements, as well as the errors and shortcomings—yes, some of them indeed grievous—of the first wave of revolution that tried to emancipate humanity from class exploitation and all forms of oppression. (All available at revcom.us.)
No, I’ll just ask this: when, dear Book Review, can we expect your special issue on the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its relationship to the U.S., with its toll of 10 million and the hundreds of millions more kept in literal chains for centuries, as the “democratic West” grew fat on their labor? When can we expect you to highlight the extremely important work that has been done in just the past ten years, let alone going back to Du Bois, which for decades in this country had to fight to even get air?
And when will we be treated to your reviews of those monsters Jefferson and Washington who sold human beings away from their families, who committed rape, and whose actions led, directly and indirectly, to the violent and genocidal dispossession of one people and the further and even more horrific terms of enslavement for African-Americans (speaking here of Washington’s genocidal campaigns against the Indians and Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase in particular)?
Finally, your special issue calls to mind the joke about the professor who asked her class of history students what is the main thing they think is wrong with communism. To which each and every student replied that the problem with communism is that it teaches people to think alike.
Sincerely,
Raymond Lotta
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
Press Alert from RefuseFascism.org
Nov 4 Protests Are Under Attack by the Alt-Right, Lies, Threats of Violence, Denial of Permits
RefuseFascism.org Demands Media Exposure and Permits Be Granted
October 23, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Press Alert October 23, 2017
RefuseFascism.org
Contact 917 407 1286
press@refusefascism.org
November 4th National Protest Movement to Demand: This Nightmare Must End: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!
These Protests Are Under Attack by the Alt-Right, Lies, Threats of Violence, Denial of Permits
RefuseFascism.org Demands Media Exposure and Permits Be Granted
Alt-Right, conservative, white supremacist, and outright fascist organizations have threatened violence and even issued death threats against nationwide nonviolent protests organized by RefuseFascism.org scheduled for November 4. Spreading disinformation and outright fabrication, these forces spearheaded by Alex Jones and InfoWars.org, are endangering the safety of thousands of people. At the same time, authorities in NYC and San Francisco are denying or obstructing permits based on technicalities for the RefuseFascism.org non-violent rallies and marches.
These denials or obstructions, together with the right-wing threats on the Nov 4 protests, endanger the safety and even the lives of the protesters, with their right to dissent curtailed if not outright suppressed. RefuseFascism.org spokesperson, Sunsara Taylor, said today: “The protests on November 4 will go forward. Our aim is just and in the interests of the people of the world and we will not be deterred. We will not let the threats of white supremacists and fascists prevent the people from standing up against the cruel and hateful agenda of the Trump/Pence Regime.”
RefuseFascism.org is a national movement made up of people from diverse perspectives united around the recognition that the Trump/Pence regime poses a catastrophic danger to humanity and the planet. Refuse Fascism is organizing protests in cities and towns across the country on NOVEMBER 4 that BEGIN a movement of continuing protests until the demand: “This Nightmare Must End: the Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!” is met. This moment, when even the conservative Republican Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations says that the Trump has put the country on the “path to World War 3,” calls for unprecedented mass action.
RefuseFascism.org is organizing thousands to begin nonviolent political protests on November 4 that inspire and draw forward a movement of protests that continues and grows over the coming days, weeks and even months if necessary – growing from thousands to millions. Organizers have invoked the protests that rocked Seoul, South Korea last year that resulted in the impeachment of the South Korean President in March. Refuse Fascism’s Call for Nov 4 states:
“Our determination to persist and not back down will compel the whole world to take note. Every force and faction in the power structure would be forced to respond to our demand. The cracks and divisions among the powers already evident today will sharpen and widen. As we draw more and more people forward to stand up, all of this, could lead to a situation where this illegitimate regime is removed from power.”
The lunatic right wing operative, Alex Jones, who Donald Trump has appeared with, and has supported in statements, has been the major amplifier of the dangerous attacks on Refuse Fascism. On September 29, 2017, Jones published on his website, InfoWars, lies that set off a chain reaction of disinformation that has spread throughout the alt-right internet world, resulting in:
- leaders of Refuse Fascism being threatened
- organized efforts by far-right groups to bring guns to their counter-protest of
RefuseFascism.org in Austin, Texas - outright death-threats and rape-threats against artists and other supporters of RefuseFascism.org and November 4
- a widespread and organized virulent campaign that has doxxed thousands of supporters of RefuseFascism.org
At the same time, Facebook has suspended various administrators of RefuseFascism.org’s accounts, apparently because they have posted content that has been systematically “flagged” and reported by fascist trolls. This content for which Facebook has suspended accounts includes video of legitimate political protest that was covered in many major media outlets, footage of illegitimate police violence that was being exposed and protested, and poetry. Meanwhile, fascists who are issuing death threats against RefuseFascism continue to post on Facebook at will.
All of this is based on and further spreads disinformation and lies which undermine the legitimate Nov 4 protest and which could cause protesters physical harm.
Yet, there is very little word about this movement in the mainstream media. This use of violence and threats of violence to suppress speech by thugs and the state are a hallmark of fascism. It is imperative that these lies and threats by these fascist forces be exposed throughout the media and that the actual aim and political objective of November 4 be accurately reported by media.
The denial or obstruction of permits by New York and San Francisco, despite declared opposition to Trump’s agenda by the mayors and governments of these cities, not only interferes with the right of the people to protest, it also gives credence to the lies and scare tactics of the Alt-Right. The obstruction or denial of permits potentially frightens away supporters of the November 4 demonstrations and objectively reinforce the fascistic suppression of speech by the Trump/Pence Regime and the fascist gangs it has unleashed. It is dangerous, and must not be allowed to continue, that fascists are able to spread lies and threats of violence with a free hand, while the principled organizers of November 4, who are organizing people to stand against fascism, are being targeted and then suppressed by silence in the media.
Refuse Fascism and every progressive person, every person and organization who cherishes justice, every journalist and media outlet who values that the truth be told, needs to expose the lies, denounce and stand against the threats and demand that NY and San Francisco grant the permit applications for Nov 4.
Background:
1} RefuseFascism Call to November 4
2} RefuseFascism.org Statement on the Lies and Distortions by Fascist Web Sites & Trolls
3} Sample Threat – see below
4} Threat against Rock Band Outernational – see below
5} RefuseFascism Statement on Antifa
Sample Threats:
“There are a lot of hunters with precise aim in those Republican strongholds that will protect their property. These hunters can hit their target with one bullet, they don’t have to shoot 25 times to hit one person.”
“When they riot, kill the rioters. End of problem. When they riot about that, kill more rioters.”
Threat sent to Rock Band Outernational:
OPEN LETTER TO ANTIFA:WARNING!!!!!
Dear Antifa kids,
I’ve been hearing through social media that you’ve got this big attack planned for 4 Nov. 2017. I heard that you’re stocking up on weapons and ammunition for this attack. I heard that you’re planning on initially attacking civil servants and first responders (i.e. police officers, EMTs, and fire fighters). And then you plan on attacking government buildings and personnel in order to disrupt society.
Okay, pay attention, because this REALLY needs to sink in;
IF you plan on doing this, you will not only be going up against fire fighters, EMTs, and armed police officers, but you’ll also be going up against bikers, hunters, CCW carriers, other citizens, 87 million militia and last but not least....members of the United States military. Because all of these aforementioned groups of individuals will NOT stand by and let you try this. So, think before you act because you’re biting off WAY more than you can chew. I’m sure if you try this, there will be a lot of dead kids that thought they were rebels until it was time to do rebel stuff. And no amount of training that you could do in such a short time, will prepare you for the Hell you’ll face if you try this.
Have a nice day,
A Patriotic American Citizen
Copy & past.
Lets post this in abundance
Get them the message.**
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
Just Stop. Think.
October 24, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Once again this morning, Bob Corker, Republican head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that Trump is so dangerous that he is setting the country on a path to World War III. And remember, Corker is not running for re-election. He is not a Democrat. He has no “skin in the game,” other than what he perceives the overall interests of the ruling class to be. And now, for the second time in two weeks, he has made this point.
So stop. Think. If what he is saying is true—and if anything, he understates the problem—this means that all of humanity is in direct danger of extinction at the hands of a fascist regime headed by a demented bully and an end-times Christian fanatic.
How is this not something that everything stops for? How are we not seeing both Republicans and Democrats stopping business as usual and clamoring for immediate hearings, calling people into the streets, and taking drastic steps to prevent such a calamity? Again, think of what’s being said! “On the road to World War III.”
We cannot wait for those on top to see reason or to find a heart. They, as well as all of society, must see and hear masses of people coming out on November 4, and the days thereafter, demanding that this regime be driven out and replaced.
The future depends on it.
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
Press Release: October 24, 2017
Cleveland Municipal Court Dismisses 12 Cases Against RNC Protesters
Judge rules all 12 arrests unconstitutional violations of protesters’ First Amendment rights.
October 24, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
CLEVELAND, OHIO ― On October 20, Cleveland Municipal Court Judge Charles L. Patton dismissed all charges against 12 activists who were arrested and charged with violations of aggravated disorderly conduct and obstruction ordinances after they participated in a flag burning action during the Republican National Convention in July 2016. Last fall, the protesters filed motions to dismiss the charges, arguing the arrests violated their First Amendment rights because the ordinances were unconstitutionally applied to them and their arrests imposed unconstitutional prior restraints on their freedom of speech and assembly.
Burning the flag has long been indisputably recognized as a free speech activity, protected by the First Amendment. At a January 2017 hearing on these motions, Chief of Police Calvin Williams acknowledged that flag burning was legal. Citing Supreme Court precedent, Judge Patton’s order reads, in part, “The government may not prohibit the verbal or nonverbal expression of an idea merely because society finds the idea offensive or disagreeable, even where our flag is involved… If there is a bedrock principle underlying the first amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea without more that removes the idea from the First Amendment’s protection.”
“Judge Patton made the right decision in declaring these arrests unconstitutional and dismissing all charges, as the City of Cleveland targeted and arrested activists legitimately engaged in free speech,” said attorney Jacqueline Greene, partner at the law firm of Friedman and Gilbert and one of the lawyers representing the charged activists. “This should be read as a clear message to the City—and particularly to the police—that they must respect the First Amendment rights of protesters, whatever their message.”
“Our freedoms of speech and assembly are bedrock principles of this county. The City of Cleveland was obligated under the law to protect the rights of protesters; instead it charged them with crimes in retaliation for their speech, in an attempt to cover up the unconstitutional actions of the police. Such egregious attacks on our democratic principles cannot be tolerated,” said Sarah Gelsomino, also a partner at the law firm of Friedman and Gilbert and one of the lawyers representing the charged activists.
“We are thrilled that the Court saw these arrests for what they were: quashing dissent. We are proud of what we did at the RNC and that we stood up to the suppression of speech. Dismissal was the only just outcome after we suffered from the City of Cleveland’s aggressive arrests, days in detention, and almost a year and a half of ongoing prosecution—when we had committed no crime,” said Noche Diaz, one of the 12 protesters whose charges were dismissed.
The events leading to these arrests and subsequent criminal charges occurred during the Republican National Convention, held in Cleveland, Ohio from July 18 through 21, 2016. On the afternoon of July 20, 2016, dozens of protesters gathered near East 4th Street and Prospect Avenue with the purpose of burning an American flag as an expression of their political views in protest of the Republican Party and then-presidential nominee Trump.
The City of Cleveland intervened immediately as the flag was lit. Chief of Police Calvin Williams and several other officers pushed into the circle of protesters. The Cleveland Division of Police subsequently arrested sixteen people, held them in jail for approximately 30 hours, and filed criminal charges. This intervention, as Judge Patton ruled today, violated their constitutional rights, including the rights to freedom of speech and freedom of association and assembly.
Every single criminal charge against RNC protesters has now been dismissed. In January 2017, the City of Cleveland dismissed criminal charges against two other RNC Protesters, including Gregory “Joey” Johnson, defendant in the 1989 Supreme Court case that declared flag burning to be protected speech activity under the First Amendment. In September, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Mike O’Malley dropped all felony charges filed against two protesters who also participated in the flag burning. The two protesters were charged with assaulting a police officer, obstruction, and resisting arrest.
“We stood at the gates of the RNC the same day Donald Trump was selected as the Republican candidate for president. We burned the American Flag and declared ‘America was Never Great!’ The State targeted us for our message and stopped us from exercising our rights in sounding the alarm on the unfolding nightmare of the Trump/Pence fascist regime,” Johnson said.
More than 40 local attorneys with the Ohio Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, the Cleveland Branch of the NAACP, and other affiliated lawyers volunteered to defend protesters’ rights during the RNC on a pro bono basis.
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/514/this-is-fascism-the-past-few-days-en.html
Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
October 27, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From RefuseFascism.org:
THIS is Fascism: Updated 10/23/17
Fascism has direction and momentum. Dissent is piece by piece criminalized. The truth is bludgeoned. Group after group is demonized and targeted along a trajectory that leads to real horrors. Fascism is a qualitative change in how society is governed. (From the Refuse Fascism Call to Action).
In Just the Last Few Days the Trump/Pence Regime…
- Stripped all references to climate in revised EPA websites that had previously provided crucial information about climate change. Some of these resources had been taken down in April to “reflect EPA’s priorities under the leadership of President Trump and Administrator Pruitt.” The websites that have been put back up have been purged of essential knowledge and research – a further assault on the truth, science, and the planet. (source)
- Put a new face on its war on the media with Chief of Staff John Kelly, who used his own son’s death to elevate military service as the ultimate moral service, made a personal connection with military families a prerequisite for journalists asking questions, and evoked nostalgia for a time (pre-civil rights) when four things were sacred: women (in their traditional roles as wives and mothers), religion, “life,” and military families. (source) Here is one veteran calling this out for the bullshit it is. Veteran Answers John Kelly: No Blind Obedience to the War Machine.
Key parts of the Trump/Pence regime’s fascist base also made their own advances:
- Richard Spencer, determined to normalize white supremacist terror under the guise of free speech, forced an appearance at the University of Florida Gainesville. The college paid $500,000 for security and Florida declared a state of emergency to lock down the campus, but protesters righteously resisted both inside and outside of Spencer’s talk. The Neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer encouraged flash mobs to intimidate Jewish and non-white institutions in the Gainesville area. Three were charged with attempted murder after open firing into a crowd. (source)
- Georgia lawmaker Betty Price, wife of former Trump cabinet member Tom Price, made a “provocative and rhetorical comment” — she asked if people with HIV should be quarantined. These provocative and rhetorical comments are how genocidal ideas gain legitimacy. (source)
- Former White House strategist and Breitbart fascist Steve Bannon gave a disturbing speech at the California GOP convention that laid out a strategy for a fascist take-over of California, the bluest of blue states. He outlined a united front of libertarians, “populists” (fascists), economic nationalists (America First xenophobes), and evangelical Christians was necessary for defeating liberalism, and decried a lack of urgency for fully consolidating fascism. (source)
And for further reading, why comparing a lying Trump to a lying Hitler is absolutely appropriate, this column by Charles Blow: Trump Isn’t Hitler but the Lying....
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
100+ Women Stage a “Handmaid’s Tale” Protest vs Pence
October 27, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
October 26—When Trump’s second in command, Mike Pence, came to Denver for a Republican fundraising event, he was met with more than 100 women dressed in costumes out of The Handmaid’s Tale protesting the regime’s attacks on women and reproductive rights. The Handmaid’s Tale is a current TV series based on a Margaret Atwood novel depicting a Christian fascist society in which strict biblical law and patriarchal values are viciously enforced by the rulers.
One of the protesters told the Boulder Daily Camera, “We thought Ronald Reagan was bad enough with the religious right and Focus on the Family. That is what inspired the book [by Atwood]. But that was nothing like Mike Pence." A member of the Indivisible Front Range, which helped organize the protest, said, “It's a scary thought, thinking someone like Mike Pence is dead set on taking away the rights of women. We stand against discrimination of any kind, and women shouldn't be relegated to the second class."
Pence is a key leader of the powerful Christian fascist movement in the U.S. backed by major sections of the U.S. ruling class—as revcom.us has pointed out, he is a dangerous “holy warrior” waiting in the wings.
A report at CommonDreams.org on the Denver action pointed out, “The protest comes as Republicans in the [U.S. House of Representatives] this week announced hearings for a bill that would make it illegal for doctors to perform abortions after only 6 weeks, earlier than most women even know they are pregnant. That comes after the House, in fact, passed a similar ban for abortion after 20 weeks. The GOP leadership in the Senate has said the 20-week ban will get a vote, but hasn't specified when.”
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
Interview with a Member of the Revolution Club Chicago
What Happened at Kenwood High
October 27, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Thursday, October 19, at Kenwood Academy High School, Chicago police swarmed students after school, using force and intimidation tactics to attempt to stop the students from talking with organizers about the Refuse Fascism call for Nov. 4—It Begins... sustained nonviolent protests to drive out the Trump/Pence regime. Kenwood Academy is in the Hyde Park/Kenwood neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago.
See also:
From Revolution Club Chicago:
Police Blare Sirens to Drown Out Word of November 4 Outside High School
In response to the initial report from the Revolution Club, a senior attorney associated with a civil rights organization asked a series of questions. The answers shed even more light on how outrageous this police action was in suppressing the students’ right to shape the future.
Attorney: Do you know who called the police and was the school involved?
Revolution Club Member: I don’t know who or if someone called the police or how involved the school was. We were first approached by a plainclothes police officer who seems to work at the school.
Attorney:What, if any, reasons did the police give for their actions?
Revolution Club Member: The things they said were: “You’re not allowed to do this here”; “You’re not allowed to talk to kids about this, they’re underage”; “You don’t have approval.”
But they also did a lot without bothering to explain themselves. Like grabbing flyers and stickers out of the hands of the students, and shoving them along saying, “Go on. Get out.” And then of course just driving the police SUV slowly ON the sidewalk and into the crowd of students with sirens blazing loudly to try to drown out the conversations we were having.
Attorney: Can you give me some more detail about the sequence of events? For example, when did Revolution Club members arrive, how many were there, and where were they stationed?
Revolution Club Member: There were four members of the Revolution Club who arrived at about 3:30 pm, well before school got out (about 4:15 pm) and waited across the street. As students started coming out of school, we crossed the street and stood on the sidewalk adjacent to the school. We had a banner and a bullhorn as well as flyers and stickers. As students began coming out of school, we began reading the banner out loud on the bullhorn as well as generally speaking about why we were there: to talk to them about Refuse Fascism’s plans for sustained nonviolent movement to demand the Trump/Pence Regime Must GO, beginning November 4. Many students came up to us and were asking questions, wanting to know more; they were taking flyers, and they were signing their names and messages onto the banner. [The banner reads: “Hey Trump, from those you like to demonize: You and your GANG in the White House are the real thugs and threat to humanity. In the name of humanity, WE WILL DRIVE YOUR ASS OUT!”]
All this was within the first few minutes after the last bell, before a plainclothes officer approached without identifying himself. He said to me, “You’re not allowed to talk to kids about this, they’re underage,” and when I was going to explain what we were there saying and why it was important for the students to hear, he interrupted saying, “I know why you’re here. You’re talking about Trump. We can’t have you doing this here, we have to ask you to leave or go somewhere else. You’re not allowed to do this here.” I responded asking “Who is ‘we’?” He stuttered and stumbled and said, “I’m talking about you all, your group here. You don’t have approval.” To which I responded, “No, you referred to yourself as ‘we’. Who is ‘we’?” Only now did he open his jacket and flash a badge that was hooked onto his belt and then identified himself as with the CPD. At this point I told him that “We are breaking no laws, we have a right to be here, and if you give me your card I would be glad to have an attorney call and explain the law to you.”
After this I believe most of their verbal harassment and attention was toward the students. For us, they mainly drove an SUV right on the sidewalk and blasted the sirens to drown us out and try to run us off, and physically tried to block us from interacting with any students. For the students, they would grab flyers or stickers out of their hands, shove them along telling them to leave; they would tell students they couldn’t stop and talk to us; students who were trying to read the banner they would block and get in the way and tell to leave. This went on for some time, and we still attempted to speak with as many students as we could and we did have some limited interactions (which would often be cut short by the police activity) until most of the students had exited the building and left the area, when we finally wrapped up and left.
Attorney: Were they [Revolution Club] on school property and if so did they have permission to be there?
Revolution Club Member: We were on the public sidewalk which is very spacious there. We were not on school property.
Attorney: At what point did the police arrive?
Revolution Club Member: It appears at least one was already there when we arrived, and I believe another two eventually showed up who were also in plainclothes. A police SUV would arrive a few minutes later blasting the sirens. Another two arrived either at the same time (but not immediately on the sidewalk like the first one) or some minutes later. In total, three SUVs and about six additional uniformed cops.
Attorney: Was anyone arrested/charged?
Revolution Club Member: No.
Attorney: How many students were involved?
Revolution Club Member: A couple dozen I would say were directly involved in the sense of having been yelled at by the police to not talk to us, having stickers or flyers grabbed out of their hands, being driven off by the police SUV driving right up to them, being told not to talk to us and to leave by the police (and later toward the end someone associated with the school would join in with them), or being interfered with when signing the banner.
Attorney: Did any of them take pictures/video?
Revolution Club Member: Yes but we are not in touch with any who have video.
Attorney: Are you in contact with any of the students?
Revolution Club Member: Around 6-10 gave us a way to contact them. We have been loosely in communication.
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
Vehicular Hate Crime in Brea, California:
Driver Plows Through Immigrants’ Rights Protest
October 27, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Brea, a city southeast of Los Angeles in Orange County, was the scene of what appears to be the latest hate crime against people protesting the Trump/Pence regime’s assaults on the people, in this case immigrants.
On Thursday, October 26, several hundred were taking part in a permitted, nonviolent protest outside the office of Congressman Ed Royce. Their demand: that Temporary Protective Status (TPS) be extended for the 300,000 immigrants now in the U.S. who are unable to safely return to their homelands due to war, environmental devastation or other factors. Protest organizers said the TPS is now under threat by the Trump/Pence regime and will expire if it’s not renewed by Congress. These immigrants and refugees “tirelessly care for our children, clean our homes and offices, and work in our fields. There is no doubt they would suffer unspeakable hardship if they are forced to return to their countries of origin,” the protest organizers declared.
When the Congressman’s office refused to meet with protesters, many formed a picket line in a nearby intersection, blocking it. At that point one driver, a 56-year old white man, began slowly plowing through the people! When some protesters jumped on his car or got in front to try and stop him, he sped up.
One who courageously did so told the LA Times, “My only thought is that I just want him to stop...I’m like, if I just jump on the car, he’s going to stop. He did stop, thank God, because if he didn’t stop, he would [have] run over a lot of people that [were] crossing the street. It was so quick.”
The driver stopped a short distance later, and outrageously the pigs on the scene were threatening protesters to get away from the car, showing more concern for the driver than the victims of this attack! The driver was arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon but then quickly let go. Police were already whitewashing his actions, saying he was just trying to get through the intersection.
The SEIU United Service Workers West union who organized the action, issued a statement calling the driver’s action of plowing into “a crowd of families, seniors, and children,” an apparent “deliberate and hateful crime.” The union said six people were taken to the hospital.
“We are shocked and saddened that families seeking refuge from violence in their home countries were victimized here in this country. Unfortunately, such hateful crimes have been fostered by the climate of fear and division established by the Trump Administration, and vehicular attacks have actually been actively promoted by the forces right-wing extremism.” The Union vowed to continue to struggle for immigrant rights: “we refuse to be silenced in the face of oppression and violence.”
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Revolution #514 October 23, 2017
Theodore Roosevelt Statue Defaced in Protest vs. “Genocide, Dispossession, Displacement, Enslavement, and State Terror”
October 27, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
As reported by the arts website Hyperallergic.com, a new activist group calling themselves the Monument Removal Brigade (MRB) took responsibility for splashing red paint on a statue of Theodore Roosevelt in front of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City on Thursday, October 26. In a statement available online, the MRB described their action as a “work of public art and an act of applied art criticism”—a “counter-monumental gesture that does symbolic damage to the values [the statue] represents: genocide, dispossession, displacement, enslavement, and state terror.”
Theodore Roosevelt was U.S. president in the early years of the 20th century, when the U.S. was rising as an imperialist power. Before becoming president, Roosevelt led a regiment with the U.S. forces that defeated the former Spanish colonialists in Cuba and then proceeded to occupy the island, beginning decades of U.S. domination and plunder. And as president, among other things, Roosevelt claimed the U.S. “right” to act as an “international police power” in the Caribbean—in order to grab control of the region from the European powers.
The MRB statement points out that in the monument in front of the museum, “Roosevelt is pictured on horseback, reaching for his pistol as he gazes onto the horizon. He is flanked subserviently by a shirtless Black man and an ‘Indian chief.’ They are both holding rifles, willing foot soldiers in the expansion of American Empire. A former NYC Police Commissioner and proud descendent of Dutch settler-colonists who first expropriated Manhattan from the Lenape, Roosevelt rose to fame for his role in the Spanish American war, which involved the colonization of Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, and Cuba. Roosevelt was also a staunch endorser of Eugenics, the pseudo-scientific movement whose calls for sterilization, population control, and racial purification would directly inspire the Nazis. Roosevelt was an open white supremacist and imperialist who is still lionized by the museum and the city plaza standing in front of it.”
The MRB goes on to say: “The monument not only embodies the violent historical foundation of the United States, but also the underlying dynamics of oppression in our contemporary world. In highlighting the bloody foundations of the monument, we salute those movements struggling against the values epitomized by Roosevelt: past, present, and future. From the uprisings of Ferguson and Standing Rock, to popular self-defense at the frontiers of gentrification in the Bronx, in the ground zero of climate crisis in Puerto Rico, or in the crosshairs of ICE raids terrorizing immigrant communities. We also salute the history of artistic actions undertaken against the monument, especially the six Indigenous activists who temporarily marked it [in] 1971 in solidarity with the occupation of Alcatraz Island by The American Indian Movement (AIM). On the base of the monument they inscribed: ‘Return Alcatraz’ and ‘Fascist Killer.’ Decolonization and Anti-Fascism remain the horizons of our time.”
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