Excerpts from an Interview with Carl Dix
No More to These Atrocities!
July 28, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The following excerpt is from an in interview Carl Dix did on July 25 on The Michael Slate Show (KPFK radio) about the Month of Resistance to Mass Incarceration, Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation:
First what I want to do is just talk about the reality that's driving us needing to do something like this. 'Cause I've just been looking at the past couple of weeks. A week ago, the NYPD choked Eric Garner to death. There's a video of it happening. If people haven't seen it, they should look at it. You see this guy being choked to death, and saying, "I can't breathe! I can't breathe!" And still they keep choking him, and then leave his lifeless body unattended for seven minutes.
The week before that, I was writing about and speaking out about an exposé of 129 inmates at Rikers Island who were dealt unspeakably brutal beatings by the guards in the space of less than one year, and no guards being disciplined for any of this, even though many of those beatings were also caught on video tape.
And then the week before that, there were the children down on the border, fleeing violence and poverty, being rounded up by Homeland Security—and violence and poverty that's enforced on their homelands by U.S. domination— being swept up by Homeland Security, accosted by flag-waving, racist mobs. And now they're debating how quickly can they send them back to that violence and poverty.
See, and all of that reality is part of a program. They're not isolated, unconnected horrors. They are horrors, but they're not isolated and unconnected. They're part of a program that has a genocidal thrust that's targeted at controlling, beating down and even penning in people that this system has no future for. Just the way that this system works, they don't need them any more. And they've got to figure out how to control them. And, look, on one level let's just be real. What's it gonna take to deal with this once and for all? It's going to take revolution, nothing less, and that's a message that I put out everywhere that I go—and that there is leadership for this revolution. There's a strategy for it, and people need to connect with the movement for revolution that the Revolutionary Communist Party is building.
At the same time, people need to stand up and just say, "No more!" to these atrocities. You can't just become aware of them and go about your daily lives. You can't become aware of them and even angry, and then talk about it amongst your friends. You've got to stand up and do something about it. And this October Month of Resistance is a vehicle for all of those who are seeing these horrors, all of those who are becoming aware of them, all of those people who are angry about them. And even for the people who are acting against one or another horror, to come together, to raise our voices in a united way, loud, strong and powerful, "No more!" To echo what Eric Garner said before the police began choking him, "This stops now."
Well, that's what we're going to be saying in October through a variety of forms of resistance. It's going to be happening all across the country, targeting the overall genocidal program of mass incarceration, police terror, repression and the criminalization of a generation, and doing it, not as, "OK, now that's done," but doing it as a step towards and a springboard towards ending mass incarceration and all of its consequences once and for all.
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