Trump’s Promise Is Worse Than Worthless

Step Up the Struggle Against This Fascist Immigration Policy

June 21, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order that he claimed would solve the problem of the heartless separation of immigrant children who were arrested for the “crime” of fleeing murder and starvation. Early online coverage in places like the New York Times immediately began claiming that “Trump has caved,” and basically signaled that the struggle had been won.

Trump has NOT caved, and the struggle is far from over. All this order does is say that “the policy of this Administration to maintain family unity, including by detaining alien families together where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources.” This is barely a concession at all—that from here on out, the Administration will try to unjustly imprison families together rather than apart (though that depends on “available resources”).  

Meanwhile, the administration promises NOTHING on reuniting the 2,300 children who have already been torn from their parents and consigned to federal “shelters,” which are often nothing more than concentration-camp-like sets of cages. Whether some of these children will ever be reunited with their parents—many of whom have now been deported—is an open question.

Further, this executive order upholds the “zero tolerance” policy, which means that everyone who is arrested for illegal entry to the United States—including people who by international treaty have the right to seek asylum—will continue to be put in shackles and dragged through courts where judges dispense assembly-line justice to 70, 80, 100 prisoners at a time.

Some have pointed out that this whole offensive escalates what was already a horrible situation under Obama—who DID imprison whole families for the crime of fleeing persecution and misery and who did deport more immigrants than any previous president. When this was dragged into light, Obama responded by trying to tamp things down. He allowed some parents to be free from detention while they were either legally seeking asylum (which is NOT a criminal offense, by the way!) or awaiting trial for illegal entry, which Obama classified as a civil not a criminal offense. And he gave aid to Mexico so that they would stop the immigrants from the Central American countries on the southern border of Mexico, by any means necessary. In other words, he exported the brutality and heartlessness away from U.S. television cameras.

The Trump/Pence regime has escalated this in four ways. One, they almost totally shut down the asylum process. Two, they instituted a “zero tolerance” policy that means that everyone charged with illegally crossing the border would be tried as a criminal, which means that their children would be seized from them by the government. Three, Trump himself accompanied this with classic fascist rhetoric—saying that immigrants were “infesting” the country, as if they were bedbugs, that they were criminals, and all the rest of the garbage, all in an effort to rally the rock-hard racists who make up the soul and guts of the fascist movement. Four, the Christian Fascists in the administration used Biblical commands and ideology to justify this, thereby fighting further for a theocratic standard to be the measuring point of justice. Now, faced with a huge outcry, the Trump/Pence regime has maneuvered to try to demobilize what was beginning to swell into a wave of opposition and real struggle.

That struggle must continue to grow and spread. The demonization, persecution, and inhuman treatment of immigrants is the linchpin and battering ram of this whole fascist program—it is a huge part of the ideological “glue” that holds the Trump/Pence fascist regime and the mass movement supporting it together. These attacks are NOT going away. And it WILL be ramped up, in some form or other, as soon as they can find an opening, unless and until people in their millions who DO hate the Trump/Pence regime quit believing in fairy tales of “the Blue Wave will change everything” and build a movement that drives out this regime through massive nonviolent action. Such a movement has been called for and is being actively built by Refuse Fascism, which has taken initiative to fight this latest attack and which needs to grow in the midst of this into a powerful force capable of leading the struggle to drive out this fascist regime, and this should be supported.

Pulling Back the Lens

But let’s pull the lens back on this whole situation. Trump lies about how people are coming over the border to do harm to people in this country. This is utter bullshit. But ask yourself: where did this supposedly sacred border come from? From a war against Mexico in 1846 in which the U.S. invented some pretext to STEAL half of Mexico’s land, mainly because they wanted to expand slavery, as well as developing the “market” of America from coast to coast.

Which leads to the next question: where did this “great wealth” come from that “those evil immigrants” are supposedly coming here to take? From the people who were dragged to these shores from Africa and then enslaved for hundreds of years. From the Native people who lived on this continent before the Europeans invaded the land and committed genocide against them. From earlier generations of immigrants, including many children, whose blood fed the industrialization of the U.S.

And how has that great wealth been overwhelmingly amassed since then? Through plundering and distorting the economies and societies of Asia, Africa, and Latin America—the very peoples Trump targets today.

Pull the lens back further. How many times has the U.S., that great respecter of borders, sent armies and bombs and terror and CIA agents to crush the peoples in those countries who dared to resist or rebel against the dictates of the U.S.? Since 1890, the U.S. has intervened militarily in Latin America alone 56 times—and this doesn’t include its near constant economic, political, and ideological intervention! Over a century of American imperialist domination and crimes right up to today have ravaged countries like Honduras—where the U.S. backed a 2009 military coup—El Salvador, Guatemala, and many others, and reduced them to a state where people must flee for their lives to the U.S.

This System Is a Plague On the World, A System that Must Be Overthrown

This capitalist-imperialist system is a plague on the world. No wonder that Bob Avakian [BA], the leader of the revolution and the architect of a whole new communism, has said:

If you can conceive of a world without America—without everything America stands for and everything it does in the world—then you’ve already taken great strides and begun to get at least a glimpse of a whole new world. If you can envision a world without any imperialism, exploitation, oppression—and the whole philosophy that rationalizes it—a world without division into classes or even different nations, and all the narrow-minded, selfish, outmoded ideas that uphold this; if you can envision all this, then you have the basis for proletarian internationalism. And once you have raised your sights to all this, how could you not feel compelled to take an active part in the world historic struggle to realize it; why would you want to lower your sights to anything less? (BAsics 1:31)

We need a world without borders, a world without all the exploitation and oppression of this one, which is totally needless. And to get that, we need a revolution against this capitalist-imperialist system. We need to overthrow this capitalist system and replace it with one on the road to that emancipatory future, as put forward for everyone to get into in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America. This revolution has the leadership to do this in Bob Avakian and the party he leads; it has the science that BA has further developed to understand and transform reality; and it has the strategy in “HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution.” What it needs—what it urgently requires—is YOU.

The struggles today—which, again, must not die down but must go much further—can be waged to be part of getting to this new society. As “HOW WE CAN WIN” lays out:

While awaiting the necessary conditions to go all‑out for revolution, we need to hasten this and actively carry out the “3 Prepares”: Prepare the Ground, Prepare the People, and Prepare the Vanguard—Get Ready for the Time When Millions Can Be Led to Go for Revolution, All‑Out, With a Real Chance to Win. We need to Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution—protest and resist the injustices and atrocities of this system, and win people to defy and repudiate this putrid system and its ways of thinking, and to take up the outlook and values, and the strategy and program of the revolution, build up the forces for this revolution, and defeat the attempts of the ruling powers to crush the revolution and its leadership. With every “jolt” in society—every crisis, every new outrage, where many people question and resist what they normally accept—we need to seize on this to advance the revolution and expand its organized forces. We need to oppose and disrupt the moves of the ruling powers to isolate, “encircle,” brutalize, mass incarcerate and murderously repress the people who have the hardest life under this system and who most need this revolution. We need to “encircle” them—by bringing forth wave upon wave of people rising up in determined opposition to this system.

Seize the time now. Be part of changing the entire world, and emancipating humanity.

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