Which Side Are YOU On?

Members of Refuse Fascism and the Revolution Club, LA are being dragged into court for disrupting the business-as-usual of fascist normalization.
They need to be defended.

August 19, 2019 | revcom.us

 

From members of the Revolution Club, Los Angeles:

In the Fall of 2017, the #Freeway9 blocked rush-hour traffic on the 101 Freeway in downtown Los Angeles with the message: Trump/Pence Must Go. In the Spring of 2018, the #UCLA5 disrupted Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, speaking at UCLA, calling him out for being “part of a regime that is hellbent on consolidating fascism.” They were responding to the call from Refuse Fascism for mass, sustained, nonviolent protests to drive the Trump/Pence fascist regime from power—sounding the alarm and calling people into the streets.

For this, the “liberal” city of Los Angeles arrested all these people, spied on them, harassed them, prevented them from speaking out, involved the “counter-terrorist” division of the LAPD, and is now engaged in vindictive prosecution. Two defendants already went to trial, and the jury was unable to convict, with 9 jurors arguing for acquittal. (Go here for a basic fact sheet on these cases.)

Instead of giving them a heroes’ parade through the city, celebrating the #Freeway9 and #UCLA5 for their far-sightedness and conscience, and vowing to join them, the liberal Democrats who run this city continue to do the work of the fascist regime by prosecuting them and fighting to send them to jail.

They are sending a message to all: “Stay in line. Collaborate with the regime. Or else.”

Which will you choose?

Several weeks before the #Freeway9 brought traffic to a halt, a white supremacist murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville amidst torch-bearing Nazis in the streets chanting “you will not replace us.” What was to come wasn’t written, but it could be foreseen. If you hated what happened, and recognized the blood on Trump’s hands but thought you could rely on investigations and elections to stop this, you chose the wrong side—the side of passive complicity, of collaboration with this regime.

Fast forward almost two years later, to El Paso, Gilroy, immigrants tortured in concentration camps at the border, “send them back...”

You can again recognize the blood on the hands of this regime, but—if you don’t act commensurate with the actual dangers—you will also see the blood on your hands.

In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America!

Wake up and shake off the passivity.

The normal channels that brought this regime to power will not stop it. On the contrary, as can be seen in the cases of the Freeway9 and UCLA5, the existing institutions of this system—including the Democratic Party—are greasing the skids for fascism. Stopping this will require stepping outside the bounds of this system’s politics as usual. It will mean upheaval and determined struggle. A big part of the role of the Democratic Party is exactly to tamp down this kind of struggle—working overtime to keep people locked into the normal, ineffectual confines of electoral politics and meaningless protest-as-usual. As Bob Avakian has said, “The Democratic Party is a major instrument of this monstrously oppressive system.”¹ It is party of the mainstream imperialist wing of the capitalist rulers. The Democrats do have big differences with the fascist Republicans, but those differences are over how to expand and defend this empire... they are over how the masses of people, here and around the world, will be brutally oppressed and exploited... not over whether this will take place. While the fascists are preparing for civil war, tearing up what are supposed to be legal and civil rights, shredding the norms of imperialist functioning, the Democrats are desperately clinging to those norms—while the whole thing moves further to the right. Even as they themselves are under attack by the fascists, the last thing the Democrats want is for their social base, the people they claim to represent—oppressed people, progressive people and the broad middle strata—to get out from under their control.

They prefer—and will brutally enforce—the order of this system, even as it hurtles headlong towards fascism—than risk what would be required to prevent that fascism.²

Lift your sights to what humanity and history demands: defending these protesters and taking up their call for thousands and millions, in the streets, not stopping until the demand is met: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go... Now!

An Illegitimate, Unreformable System... the Need for Revolution

A system that uses its courts, police and prosecutors to criminalize those standing up to stop the catastrophe that is to come while the regime in power foments its violent, white supremacist, fascist social base is an illegitimate system. A system that spies on, harasses and arrests the people working to stop fascism, going so far as to call antifascists “domestic terrorists” while giving a green light to nazi stormtroopers... is an illegitimate system. A system that puts power into the hands of an open white supremacist thug like Donald Trump or a Dark Ages troglodyte like Mike Pence... and then tells you to hope in a delusion that the Democrats will stop them, is an illegitimate system.

The Republican Party Is Fascist

The Democratic Party Is Also a Machine of Massive War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity

This System CANNOT Be Reformed—It MUST Be Overthrown!

We Need an Actual Revolution

The Revolution Club is organizing for an actual revolution to overthrow this system at the soonest possible time... to put an end to all forms of oppression, exploitation and degradation. The National Revolution Tour is traveling the country, recruiting for that revolution, to move toward the time when we can get rid of this—and bring a whole better world into being. We’re joining the call from Refuse Fascism, uniting broadly with everyone with a heart for humanity, for massive, sustained, nonviolent, determined protest of the people in the streets.

We don’t need to be relying on this system, we need to be getting organized to overthrow this system.

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1. From a clip from the film WHY WE NEED AN ACTUAL REVOLUTION AND HOW WE CAN REALLY MAKE REVOLUTION. [back]

2. To understand these underlying dynamics of this regime and why the Democrats are part of the problem, watch the film of Bob Avakian’s speech THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America, A Better World IS Possible. Also see “The Pyramid of Power and the Struggle to Turn This Whole Thing Upside Down” by Bob Avakian. [back]