From Activists of the Communist Party of Iran (M.L.M.)—North America
Rise Up Against Police Brutality
October 5, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Every conscious person needs urgently to choose the side they are on in the face of the police systematic murder and terror of Black and Brown people.
#RiseUpOctober in New York City (October 22-24, 2015) is an important occasion for the people to take a stand and put a stop to this epidemic of police terror, which has taken and continues to take precious lives of hundreds of young people, overwhelmingly Black and Brown, in this country. In this intensifying crisis, indifference or complacency cannot be an option and we cannot stay on the sidelines.
#RiseUpOctober in NYC is an occasion to declare to this capitalist system of oppression and exploitation and its enforcers that business-as-usual must end. It is a time to show to the entire world the true nature of this system of injustice and its sham democracy. It is a time of solidarity with tens of thousands of fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters of the victims of police murders and outright assassinations. It is a time to expose the deliberate genocidal war on Black and Brown youth in ghettos and barrios.
It is an illusion to think that the capitalist establishment is willing to put a leash on its enforcers and unbridled cops who are tools in safeguarding an oppressive and exploitative order.
#RiseUpOctober in NYC is a time for the masses to announce to the rulers and their lackeys that Black and Brown youth have the right to walk the streets without the fear of being killed by vigilantes and killer cops if they’re holding a piece of candy or a mobile phone in their hands.
#RiseUpOctober in NYC is a time for people to loudly and resolutely declare that humanity rejects slavery, lynching, police terror and assassination, and mass incarceration of minorities and the disadvantaged.
Nearly two centuries ago, in 1831, a 31-year-old black slave named Nat Turner, who was leading a slave rebellion in Virginia, was executed. Someone by the name of Jeremiah Cobb who announced the rebellious slave’s death sentence said, “The judgment of the court is that you be taken hence to the jail from whence you came, thence to the place of execution, and on Friday next, between the hours of 10 am and 2 pm, be hung by the neck until you are dead(!), dead(!), dead and Lord have mercy upon your soul.”
More than a century later in 1969, Edward Hanrahan (Cook County State’s Attorney of Illinois) sent 14 local and federal cops in pre-dawn hours to the apartment of Black Panther Party leader, 21-year-old Fred Hampton, in the near west side of Chicago. They murdered him and 22-year-old Mark Clark in cold blood in their sleep and riddled them with a barrage of nearly 100 bullets.
Nearly a half century later, the same police terror continues. Black youth are murdered. A disproportionate number of them are incarcerated. Recently a secret interrogation compound called Homan Square was discovered in Chicago by the Guardian newspaper where mostly poor Black and Brown detainees are kept off-the-record without access to any basic rights. They had no searchable public records for their family members to find them and be represented by attorneys. It has been described as a domestic equivalent of the secret CIA black sites in various countries.
#RiseUpOctober in NYC is a time for people to march and expose the ugly face of an imperialist system of injustice, which is constantly brutalizing the underprivileged and underrepresented people by unleashing killer cops in choking to death someone like Eric Garner in New York, murdering a young man like Freddie Gray in Baltimore while in police transport, assassinating a teenager like Michael Brown in Ferguson or hanging Sandra Bland while in custody who was starting her new job at her alma mater in a small college town in Texas.
#RiseUpOctober in NYC is a time when people cannot afford to be silent and indifferent to the wanton murder of Black and Brown youth by cops, terrorizing them in their segregated neighborhoods. A society becomes dangerous to live in, not because of the bad people, but because of too many indifferent and complacent people who stay on the sidelines. (Albert Einstein).
#RiseUpOctober in New York City is a time to let your voice be heard all over the world that we are not just fighting for ourselves but for the oppressed and exploited people of the world who are preyed upon by the same imperialist-capitalist system that is ruling this country which is also destroying the planet Earth.
There is a much better way of life for humanity beyond the capitalist system of exploitation and oppression. A better way of life free of capitalist exploitation, wars, invasions, women’s oppression, national oppression, hunger and all injustices. This world can only be realized by a revolution which aims at emancipation of whole of humanity. Revolution! Nothing less!
Activists of the Communist Party of Iran (M.L.M.)—North America
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