Washington, Lee and Trump:
5 Points That Must Be Clear

August 17, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

 

1. To stand up against Nazis, KKKers, and fascists is righteous and just.  Those who refuse to knuckle under to armed lynch mobs and forcibly or otherwise defend themselves and the masses against these fascists are heroes and must be unapologetically upheld.
2. This is a country that was born in genocide, mass kidnapping and slavery, and that literally invented racism.  Washington, Jefferson, and most of the rest of the “founders” not only individually owned slaves, with every bit of ugliness that entailed including rape and the destruction of families, but continually fought to defend and expand slavery.  As Bob Avakian has said, starting off his book BAsics, 1:1: “There would be no United States as we now know it today without slavery. That is a simple and basic truth.”
3. There is at the same time a special ugliness to the Confederate statues, all of which were erected to legitimize the oppression and humiliation of legal segregation and the outright terror of lynch mob rule.  These statues were built to, and still do, strike a chill in the bones and souls of those who suffered under this rule, or who hated it for simple human reasons; these monuments must all come down NOW, beginning with the many monuments in the official buildings of Washington D.C., and nobody must be tried or in any way punished for the public service of removing these monstrosities from public life.  Those who now defend these monuments to the terrorization of an entire people must be driven from public life—beginning with Trump, Pence and the whole rest of this fascist regime.
4. Trump inherits and defends the mantle of both the George Washingtons and the Robert E. Lees.  When Trump says, in a rare moment of truth-telling, that tearing down the symbols of the Confederacy will logically lead to tearing down the monuments to all the slave-owning founders, and this is a threat to American values, he reveals a great deal of the ugly hypocrisy at the core of mainstream American politics.
5. Trump is indeed a contemptible monster.  But to claim that Trump is somehow different in essence or in any kind of fundamental way from earlier presidents distorts reality. Presidents from Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat who purged Black people from federal employment and promoted the Klan-loving film The Birth of a Nation... to Franklin Roosevelt, whose reforms actually strengthened white supremacy... from Richard Nixon, whose “Southern strategy” blatantly appealed to those backward whites who hated school desegregation and the Voting Rights Act which enabled Black people to vote and whose Justice Department connived in the assassination of leaders of the Black Panther Party even, in the infamous case of Fred Hampton, as they lay sleeping... to Ronald Reagan, who opened his presidential campaign with a visit to the city famous for the lynching of three civil rights workers in 1964, and not only refused to mention the lynching but went on to uphold “states' rights”... from Bill Clinton who made a point of posing for campaign pictures showing him lording it over a group of Black prisoners on a chain gang and who put mass incarceration and police terror on steroids with legislation and money... on down to, yes, Barack Obama, with his relentless attacks on Black men for being “irresponsible” and his fatuous, and extremely damaging, claims that in America “you can make it if you try” and who assailed people who bravely rebelled against police terror in Baltimore as thugs... all of them upheld the institutions and logic of white supremacy.  
6. What DOES make Trump different from other presidents is not his recognition that white supremacy is essential to the history and present-day preservation of capitalist-imperialist USA as it is... but his insistence that in order to survive the U.S. political system and its representatives must now OPENLY and UNABASHEDLY dispense with the coded messages of the past and full-throatedly come out and defend open, blatant racism and, with it, must impose laws and measures that are genocidal in direction and intent. This is the particularly pressing danger of what Trump and the whole Trump/Pence regime represents: the move to fascism, to open dictatorship.  As we have said:  “Fascism is the exercise of blatant dictatorship by the bourgeois (capitalist-imperialist) class, ruling through reliance on open terror and violence, trampling on what are supposed to be civil and legal rights, wielding the power of the state, and mobilizing organized groups of fanatical thugs, to commit atrocities against masses of people, particularly groups of people identified as ‘enemies,’ ‘undesirables,’ or ‘dangers to society.’”
7. Trump continually demonizes Black people, immigrants, Muslims and other “minorities.”  But the Trump/Pence regime has a vicious and, yes, fascist political program as well.  This fascist regime has already set in motion plans to deprive millions of Black and Latino and other people of color of the right to vote, Trump himself has called for nationwide stop-and-frisk (another name for pervasive and often murderous racial profiling), he has moved to deprive further millions of basic health care, he has ordered the expansion of mass incarceration through his Attorney General Sessions—this is already a truly genocidal program. Now those who openly call for a white America, for ethnic cleansing, for an outright full genocide have this week publicly drawn heart from how Trump essentially supported them in the Charlottesville outrage.  Where is this going?
8. The fascism that is now moving so aggressively to set terms and consolidate power, embodied in this Trump/Pence regime, is extremely and extraordinarily dangerous to humanity worldwide and must be defeated and driven out—NOW.  Those who deplore Trump but neither recognize the fascist character of the Trump/Pence regime as a whole nor call for its removal and who instead counsel nothing more than waiting for elections well more than a year away do a grave disservice.  A powerful movement of millions, in the streets, reaching into every sector of society, demanding the removal of the Trump/Pence regime could in fact set off a crisis that could prevent this regime from carrying out plans that are indeed fascist and put humanity as a whole in direct danger.  Such a movement is not only urgently necessary but possible, but only if extremely diverse sections of society and political points of view come together to do it.
5. Finally, people must come to grips with the true character of a society and system that not only spawned Trump but elected him to the highest office of the land and continues to tolerate him in that office.  This means coming to grips with the true history of this country, rooted in slavery and the genocide of 90 percent of the Native peoples living here; the nature of the system of capitalism-imperialism that generated that history; and the fact that there actually is a solution to this madness, a society able to, on the road to and making it a core mission to uproot the poisonous soil of oppression and heal the scars of the horrors committed by this system.  That solution can only come about through revolution—a revolution for which there is the strategy, the vision and “blueprint” for a new society (concretized in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America) and the leadership, in Bob Avakian and the Revolutionary Communist Party which he leads.

 

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