Donald Trump Has TOLD YOU What Kind of Fascist Repression He Means By “Help” For Chicago
January 5, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On January 3 Donald Trump tweeted “Chicago murder rate is record setting - 4,331 shooting victims with 762 murders in 2016. If Mayor can’t do it he must ask for Federal help!”
During his campaign, he told you what that means.
Trump’s nominating convention featured former New York mayor, Rudolph “Adolph” Ghouliani, screaming about “law and order” and “blue lives matter.” And this was a major theme of Trump’s campaign.
During the campaign, Trump said, “Chicago needs stop-and-frisk ... with good strong, you know, good strong law and order.”
Chicago actually already has stop-and-frisk policing. A piece in Time magazine (September 27, 2016) summed up that the impact was “singling out black communities as problem areas, and [saddling] them with unique forms of surveillance and control.” And, “Chicago’s violent crime rates would get significantly worse after implementation of stop-and-frisk.”(emphasis in original)
The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces all this oppression and madness.
Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:24
From 2002 to 2011, New York City had a massive Stop-and-Frisk policy. During that time, Black and Latino residents made up close to 90 percent of nearly four million people stopped, frisked, humiliated, insulted, threatened, and abused by police. Overwhelmingly they were not even charged with committing a crime. A federal judge ruled NYC’s Stop-and-Frisk unconstitutional.
Trump has said that violence in Chicago could be stopped in a week if police were “very much tougher.” Trump claims “The police in this country have done an unbelievable job of keeping law and order, and they're afraid for their jobs, they're afraid of the mistreatment they get... they can't act. They're afraid for losing their pension, their job. They don't know what to do.”
In the U.S. police have done “an unbelievable job” of locking up over two million people in prison, killing over a thousand people a year, terrorizing and brutalizing millions more, including young children, and even when caught on video murdering people, they get away with it over and over again. And when Trump says they can’t do their job because people are outraged about this, protesting it, and exposing it, he’s telling you that when police murder people, especially Black and Brown people, they are doing their jobs.
It has been important and necessary that people have been protesting, shining a light on police brutality and terror, and demanding it to STOP. That movement must not stop, but grow and be built toward revolution—an actual revolution that overthrows this system at the soonest possible time—because there is no solution to these outrages under this system, and as long as we live under this system, this will go on... and on.
Which brings us back to the profound danger represented by Trump. As we wrote in Point of Orientation on the Struggle to Prevent the Trump-Pence Fascist Regime:
To make it very clear: If people are beaten down and repressed it is NOT better for revolution. If the masses are decimated, and all their strivings for something better are decimated, if their organizations—including the vanguard—come under severe and open violent repression, we’ll be that much further away from what we need.
Do our youth need to stop killing each other? Of course! (See “The Revolution Club in Chicago Says: F***K YOU DONALD TRUMP—KEEP YOUR FEDS’ HANDS OFF CHICAGO.”) But when Trump threatens these pigs will be “very much tougher” he is threatening to make life much worse, much more dangerous for the oppressed for whom this system has no future. Trump is an admirer of another “tough on crime” leader—Rodrigo Duterte, President of the Philippines who pledged to stop the drug epidemic there by killing 30,000 drug users and dealers in the slums and said he would hand out presidential pardons for mass murder—including to himself—at the end of his term. Duterte’s cops and vigilantes have already killed about 7,000 people.
Our youth need a future. Not death squads and fascist police running amuck.
Trump’s tweet is ominous indeed, and one more very compelling reason why we need to STEP UP our efforts to Stop Trump-Pence BEFORE they come to power.
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