Farrakhan Says You Can Make a Deal With Trump; We Say Drive That Fascist Out of Office and Overthrow This Goddamn System!
Carl Dix is a courageous freedom fighter from the 1960s who went on to become a revolutionary fighter and a communist. Dix spent two years in military prison for refusing to fight in the unjust Vietnam War. He emerged unrepentant and went on to become a founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), USA, dedicating his life to the emancipation of all humanity. Today, Carl is a follower of and advocate for Bob Avakian, his leadership and his visionary new synthesis of communism. Carl is a co-initiator of Refuse Fascism. Carl Dix and Cornel West co-founded the Stop Mass Incarceration Network (SMIN), and Rise Up October that brought thousands into the streets in New York City demanding a stop to police terror.
by Carl Dix
March 25, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam ended his keynote speech at the NOI’s annual Saviours’ Day event this year by saying: “Why you [Black people] are afraid is you don’t see God’s hand in Donald Trump becoming president. ... God put him there to dismantle this house.” The house Trump is supposed to dismantle is the domination of the world by white people!
Earlier in his speech, Farrakhan said: “Be careful how you [referring to Black people] talk about the president—I talk, but I’m respectful. ... because if anything happens to Mr. Trump, these people [his white supporters] are gonna cut loose, and who you think they gonna cut loose on first—us [Black people].” Farrakhan also said it was time for Black people to separate from white people. “They [white people] are not gonna give you enough jobs, and they’ll never grant you justice. But with President Trump, you might be able to make a deal when the chastisement of God gets so severe.” Farrakhan even said Jim Brown was right to go meet with Trump because Trump is a powerful man and Brown is smart enough to make a deal with him.
This is bullshit. Farrakhan saying god put Trump in the White House to dismantle white world supremacy is like a Zionist leader of the Jewish community back in the day saying god put Adolf Hitler in charge of Germany in order to drive the Jews to Palestine!1 God didn’t put Hitler in office—the imperialists in Germany did—and the Jews ended up being murdered. Trump WAS put in the White House—by the U.S. ruling class. He is on a mission, and it’s not one from god—it couldn’t be, since god doesn’t exist in the first place. It’s a mission to impose a fascist form of rule on this country.
The Trump/Pence regime has already begun to demonize and target group after group. Trump has asserted that the truth is whatever he says it is. He has attacked the media and threatened those who criticize him. Where Trump is headed is clear. He is aiming to reinstate open white supremacy; have the U.S. run amok all over the world; slam women “back into their place”; persecute Muslims, immigrants, and gay and trans people; and take away legal and political rights altogether. The Trump/Pence regime is fascist, and it must be driven out before it’s too late.
Farrakhan’s “advice” calls for Black people to betray other oppressed people who are feeling the lash of Trump’s program by leaving them out there on their own. And it disarms Black people in the face of the hammer the Trump/Pence regime will bring down on them and sets them up for the slaughter.
What kind of a deal can you make with a man on this kind of mission? What Farrakhan is saying is that Black people should aim for their piece of the pie in America, by looking to make a deal with Trump to get control of their own communities. And that to get to make that deal means staying on Trump’s good side. Standing aside and keeping quiet while other oppressed people are targeted in Trump’s fascist onslaught because if you speak out, you’ll come under attack too. And besides, it might mess up whatever deal you could work out with this powerful man.
And Farrakhan is putting this shit forward at a time when many, many people are being impelled into political life, resisting in ways they haven’t before and asking big questions about why things are the way they are, and what can be done about them. There is potential to build the kind of movement that is needed to end all the horror America enforces on the world, and Farrakhan advises Black people to stand aside from it and look for an opportunity to cut a deal to get their piece of the rock.
I know some supporters of Farrakhan will say I’m not being fair to the minister because there’s more that he has in mind than what he put out in his speech; that he didn’t lay everything out “because you can’t let the enemy know your full plan.” To them I say, a leader who has a “hidden plan” is out to use that plan to ride the backs of the masses of people. The Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) has a plan—making revolution and getting rid of this system and the exploitation and oppression it enforces on humanity. It puts its plan out to the masses so they can take it up, wield it and change history.
As Bob Avakian, the leader of the RCP, says:
There is the potential for something of unprecedented beauty to arise out of unspeakable ugliness: Black people playing a crucial role in putting an end, at long last, to this system which has, for so long, not just exploited but dehumanized, terrorized and tormented them in a thousand ways—putting an end to this in the only way it can be done—by fighting to emancipate humanity, to put an end to the long night in which human society has been divided into masters and slaves, and the masses of humanity have been lashed, beaten, raped, slaughtered, shackled and shrouded in ignorance and misery.
There are two diametrically opposed outlooks here. Looking for a chance to get yours by grabbing a share of the exploitation and plunder of this system versus becoming part of the emancipators of humanity and acting to end all exploitation and oppression.
The Trump/Pence regime has a program for Black people: unleashing the police to kill and brutalize even more people, filling the jails even fuller, doling out a few jobs to bribe people into becoming enforcers of his clampdown, using its lackeys to spy on, confuse, divide, and crush anybody who says NO to all this. They aim to crush the struggle of Black people against their oppression, once and for all. There will be no deal with this regime that achieves anything good for Black people. Talk about maybe dealing with Trump “when the chastisement of God gets severe” amounts to looking to sign onto the Trump program when you think you can get the most out of it. This would be a program of getting in on the oppression of the Black masses.
Black people need to join in with all different kinds of people to drive this regime from power. And in driving out the regime, the aim is not to get things back to the way they were before, because the way things were before was no damn good. Billions of people throughout the world and millions of people in the U.S. suffered unnecessarily. The fight to drive out the regime that has even greater horrors in store for humanity needs to be taken up as part of bringing about an actual revolution that ends the suffering this system brings down on humanity, once and for all.
1. By the way, this analogy is also apt because Farrakhan plays a role today similar to that of the Zionists back then: they told their people not to fight against all oppression, but to sell themselves to imperialism as oppressors of others. And now the state of Israel brutally serves the U.S. in the dirty work of its oppression of not only the Middle East, but whole world. [back]
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