Intervening at UCLA: Who are the REAL Criminals and What’s the REAL Solution?
November 7, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Correspondence from Revolution Club, LA:
“...immigrants are not the real criminals, the criminals are this country and this entire system that feeds off the exploitation and oppression of the people of the world. We are the Revolution Club and we are organizing people to get into this movement for revolution to overthrow this system at the soonest possible time.” This is the agitation that met people as they were leaving a reactionary event hosted by the Bruin Republicans at UCLA.
This pro-fascist club at UCLA has become rather infamous for the positions they take on social issues (such as LGBT rights, women’s rights/feminism, and immigration) and the events they hold in relation to their positions. This time around, they hosted Sabine Durden, a featured speaker at the RNC this summer, who is “a legal immigrant from Germany and now proud American citizen, Sabine will share Dominic’s story to continue his legacy and shed light on the destruction of her family at the cost of illegal immigration.”
Revolution Club UCLA intervenes in an event sponsored by the pro-fascist Bruin Republicans club.
When the Revolution Club marched into the area, chanting “It’s time, to get organized...” and “We are the revcoms,” most of the attendees were already seated inside. There was a small crowd standing around and in line to get inside, and campus pigs were lined up and stationed outside. We got into formation and posted up facing the crowd, announcing who we are and why we came, as part of actively organizing for an actual revolution to bring this system down at the soonest possible time, and as part of that, to repolarize society and oppose all the oppressive bullshit ideas the system and its mouthpieces spew out and which people broadly then take up—in this case, xenophobia, racism, and putrid nationalism. The scene wasn’t so great upon arrival as most of the people outside were pigs or supporters of the event, but we decided to stick around until the end of the event to catch the people coming out and to send two people into the event to see what would go down.
The event was exactly what you’d imagine from an individual who tours with Donald Trump and an organization that supports him. Durden told the story of how her son died: She listed the criminal record of “an illegal alien” who had been deported for drunk driving and came back “without consequences,” got deported once more and came back again, and the third time around he killed her son while drunk driving. She said he got probation and “only 35 days in jail,” and that if anyone else had done the same thing, they’d have been in jail a much longer time, trying to prove the idea that “illegal immigrants” somehow get preferential treatment. The whole of her story is that her son was killed because the individual came into this country illegally and got break after break but decided to not learn and do the right thing, as in become a legal, naturalized, assimilated, and proud American citizen. As she argued, criminality is completely tied in with the individual’s status as an “illegal” immigrant—their very existence is criminal.
At the Q&A portion of the event, many in the crowd erupted at the racism and ignorance being disseminated by Durden and the Bruin Republicans (half, if not over half, of the attendees were in opposition to the event). Some gems of ignorance include: accusations of xenophobia and racism are boring and worthy of only a “yawn”; Donald Trump has a great sense of humor; it’s very hard to trace/see the legacy of the oppression that founded this country and to address it (as in the genocide of Native peoples and the enslavement of Africans); someone called for an individual who was disrupting the event by doing Spanish chanting to “get a job” and that “he needs to be deported.” One woman in particular addressed the argument being made that just like the homes we live in, you have to have walls and a door with a lock not just to keep those you don’t want inside out, you have to have those things in order to protect those living inside. She passionately asked about people like herself, a Black woman, who are afraid every day of their lives, even in their own homes, because you never know what’s going to go down. The speakers completely dismissed her and asked her to tone down her passion, to which she and the crowd responded hell no, we will not tone anything down!
We have since summed up that there’s even more we could have done in leading people to understand and act on the illegitimacy of this whole system, but here’s some of what happened after the event: Once the event was over, the other members of the club set up outside the door with an American rag on the floor surrounded by the “HOW WE CAN WIN” pamphlets and palm cards for THE NEW COMMUNISM. As soon as people started flooding out, we started agitating about who we are and what were working for, an actual revolution, the only way there is to address the crimes of this system, including demonization of immigrants and the genocidal persecution of Black and Brown people. We called on people to stand on the rag and quite a few readily joined us and began chanting passionately alongside us. People were openly confronting and debating those who came out of the event with pep in their step after having their racist ideas bolstered. There were a lot of moments of tense confrontation between the openly racist and those in opposition to them, which included people from other, progressive campus groups.
After most of the crowd had left the event, the Revolution Club stuck around to talk to those who were left, and who happened to be the most defiant and willing to oppose what was going on. They were eager to stay in contact with the revolution and get into deeper conversation, and we are planning on meeting up with them again soon.
This important intervention from the Revolution Club got attention from several reactionary websites and was tweeted about by the fascist Ann Coulter who said, “Our new country’s going to be great! UCLA Students Shout Down Mother Whose Son Was Killed by Illegal Alien.”
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