Trump’s “Alternative Facts” (LIES) About Black People vs. the Truth
No, Trump, You Racist Pig, You Will NOT Get Away With Your LIES About Black People... or Your Genocidal Police-State Plans
January 30, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Last week Trump threatened to send “the Feds” into Chicago to stop what he called “the carnage” of young people killing each other. He started this theme in his inaugural speech when he said a few words about the lack of jobs and the failing schools, and then gave his punch line: “And the crime and gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and right now.”
Trump blames the entire situation in which this system gives Black and Latino youth in the inner cities no shot at a future on them. These youth, according to Trump, are the culprits stealing the lives of people. The police, according to Trump, must not be criticized but must be strengthened and allowed to further run amok in the communities of the oppressed. The prisons, according to Trump and his designated attorney general, must be filled with even more oppressed youth. And sending “the Feds” according to Trump—presumably some combination of the FBI and National Guard, with a declaration of martial law suspending all rights, is the solution.
This entire program of Trump is an upside down inversion of reality. Trump takes one highly distorted aspect of the truth, and he fashions out of it a BIG LIE—one with horrible consequences.
So let’s tell the truth.
This SYSTEM Has Created Carnage on Top of Carnage... and That Is the Truth
No more generations of our youth, here and all around the world, whose life is over, whose fate has been sealed, who have been condemned to an early death or a life of misery and brutality, whom the system has destined for oppression and oblivion even before they are born. I say no more of that.
Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:13
Let’s tell some basic truths here. Study after study, book after book, has sifted through mountains of evidence and, using rigorous and basically scientific methods, has shown that the system consciously decided to confine Black and Brown youth to lives of no future, and to criminalize them. Study after study, book after book, again, with extensive documentation and rigorous methods, have shown definitively how the federal government (with the help of racist realtors like Trump) created and reinforced the ghettos of the cities, how the police were allowed to impose terror against the people with absolute impunity, how the federal government in the 1960s—yes, under the Democrats—created the so-called “war on crime” as a way to control and beat down these youth. Study after study, book after book, have shown how the gangs were allowed to flourish by the police even while they were being controlled and messed with, and how the recent increase in violence among the people in Chicago has everything to do with measures taken by the police to disrupt these gangs, and to destroy public housing and then disperse Black people into different neighborhoods. And study after study, book after book, have shown how capitalists have systematically moved factories out of the cities into the suburbs, systematically discriminated in hiring, systematically created unequal schools, and all the rest.
Let’s drill down even further. As Bob Avakian has said, “There would be no United States as we now know it today without slavery. That is a simple and basic truth.” (BAsics 1:1) Again, there has been a mountain of scholarly work and research into the real existing world using source documents and standing up to rigorous criticism, showing the truth of the matter: the centrality of slavery to the great power and wealth of the U.S., and to its dominant position in the world. There has been a tremendous amount of scholarly work showing the terror unleashed against Black people after the Civil War, the murder of literally thousands and the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands, in an attempt to crush their resistance and their striving for a better life. (See the 2005 report from Equal Justice Initiative, “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror.”) A tremendous amount of scholarly work showing, again, the terror unleashed against Black people after World War 1, where it’s estimated over a thousand people died from white pogroms (racial or ethnic massacres) against Black people.
Further, a tremendous amount of work, in this case using documents “liberated” from the FBI itself, which were later verified by a Congressional committee, has also been done to show how the federal government spied on, fomented splits, set up and carried out murders of Black leaders and revolutionary, and even non-revolutionary organizations, in the 1960s, as part of preparing for the long counter-revolutionary years beginning in the 1970s, when the prisons expanded by tenfold and the conditions of the masses sharply worsened, while a small sliver among the oppressed were allowed some opportunities, even as they were subject to the relentless and all-sided oppression that went with, and still goes with, being Black, Latino, or Native American in this society.
The Threat to Go With the Lies
Trump, this racist who has a whole history of discriminating against, lying about, and going after Black people—going back to his demands that the Central Park 5 be executed and his continuing insistence down to today that they be re-imprisoned, even after they served heavy years for a crime for which they have been legally exonerated, and extending to his insistence that Obama was not born in the U.S.—now says that he is going to “save the day” with some kind of federal force that will... do what? He doesn’t say, but his meaning is clear: sending in pigs of one kind or another to murder, rampage, imprison, spy, and suppress. This ugly clown, who would be pitiful if he were not so utterly vicious and extremely dangerous, has put Black people directly in his sights, and he is preparing the ground with the BIG LIE.
Carnage, Herr Trumpf? Your system has created carnage untold, crimes unequalled in the history of humanity.
The revcoms will tell the truth and take it to the masses. We will stand with and work with all those who want to oppose this Nazi pig and his plans to make the situation a thousand times worse in Chicago. We will challenge—and have been challenging—those youth to whom this system has given no chance, and whom Trump now wants to round up, brutalize, and worse, to be part of fighting the fight that needs to be fought—against this system. And we will build all this as one part of the revolution that needs to happen to get rid of this system, and bring in a society where this oppression and inequality can actually be eliminated and a whole better world brought into being.
These are some of the many published materials that are relevant to what is discussed in this article:
Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal, James R. McGovern, LSU Press (October 2013)
The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI, Betty L. Medsger, Vintage (October 2014)
“Code of Silence” (a series of articles exposing systematic brutality and corruption in the Chicago police department), The Intercept, Jamie Kalven (October 2016)
COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom, Nelson Blackstock, Anchor Foundation (September 1988)
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Matthew Desmond, Crown (March 2016)
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, Elizabeth Hinton, Harvard University Press (May 2016)
Gang Leader for a Day, A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets, Sudhir Venkatesh Penguin Books (December 2008)
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, Harriet A. Washington, Anchor (January 2008)
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander, The New Press (January 2012)
On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, Alice Goffman, Picador (April 2015)
The Origins of the Urban Crisis, Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, Thomas J. Sugrue, Princeton University Press (1996)
Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools, Jonathan Kozol, Broadway Books (July 2012)
Turbo Capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy, Edward Luttwak, Harper Perennial (February 2000)
When Affirmative Action Was White, An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America, Ira Katznelson, W. W. Norton & Company (August 2006)
Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.