Comment from a reader
“Avakian is saying we need to take to the streets and drive out the Trump regime, and I’m with him on that.”
October 30, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
We received this comment from a Black person who has been in and around resistance to the horrors this system has inflicted on humanity for decades, on the film THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America. A Better World IS Possible, a talk by Bob Avakian.
It was an excellent speech. I liked the way Bob Avakian developed the whole thing of capitalism and how he dealt with the history of Black people. I liked how he dealt with the Republicans and Democrats and how they’re all on the same team, which reminded me of a speech he gave years ago, “You Can’t Beat the Enemy While Raising His Flag,” because that’s the same flag of the Nazis, the KKK, the skinheads. That’s the same flag they raised when they castrated and hung Black people. The same flag Black people went to war under and came back and couldn’t get any justice in this country, still under segregation, racism. So that put me in the mind of that.
After Black men fought and died for this country in WW2, segregation still continued. German prisoners of war had better seats on the train than Black soldiers who had fought and died for this country.
And when he talked about the Nazis and Hitler, and people remaining silent, or saying we’re on the same team—no, we’re not on the same team. They’re on the team of murder and plunder and racism and sexism—we’re not on that team. That goes back to what I said: You can’t beat the enemy while raising his flag. And back to the part he said about the Democrats and the Republicans being on the same team, and they are.
And how he spoke to the things the U.S. does, not only in this country but around the world, and how they justify it with the concept of democracy and freedom. How much freedom do Black people, Latinos, and poor white people have in prison? There’s a host of things he touched on for me. It was excellent.
And there was the question of how do we see humanity as a whole. That was great. And I always used to wonder about all the scientists, not just in this country but around the world, who see what’s happening to the environment and global warming. They talk about it, but they don’t come out about it.
Getting back to the Nazis and Hitler and how German people smelled something funny, a smell that was being caused by the Nazis putting people in the ovens and those good Germans didn’t do anything.
It was just an overall good speech. I told my kids that they had to listen to it, I told my friend about it.
And he brought out how the parliament had been burned down, and the Nazis knew the communists hadn’t done it, but they put them on trial for it. And when the court did not convict the communists, many people said, see, the system does work. I thought that was important, which goes back to the Democrats and the Republicans. It’s like loving eyes never see—people see what they want to see, and because people love this system they turn a blind eye to what’s actually going on.
I thought about this after watching the video when I heard about Trump saying to the widow of the soldier who died in Africa that he knew what he was getting into. He didn’t know what he was getting into. He thought this system was about democracy. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, they should start at home. With all the 1,001 ways they mistreated Black people in this country.
Things like that keep coming into my mind off of watching Avakian’s video, and he was right on about everything. I have listened to it four times, and I haven’t found anything I disagreed with.
As far as those who say Black people have been thru all this before, we have been thru this movie before and it’s not new, but what is new is that they try to tell us, that was back then. Avakian brought out that back then and now there’s nothing that’s been fundamentally changed. And you can’t understand what’s going on now if you don’t understand what happened back then. Look at how they distort what slavery was like in the school books, or how they distort what communism is. They do that for a reason—because they don’t want people to be able to get out from under the muck and the mire. They’ll tell you communism is wrong, and they don’t know a damn thing about communism. But people buy the okeydoke about communism, and they don’t see what’s going on right now and how horrible it is.
I was thinking about something my nephew told me about when he went to prison. He said: “That place was not fit for human beings, and I don’t ever want to go back there.” There’s no guarantee he, and others, won’t end up going back because of how this system uses prisons as a source of free labor and exploitation for people they have no future for.
When I visited NYC I went to a meeting about Rikers Island and to a demonstration about Rikers Island off of learning about Kalief Browder who was in Rikers for several years charged with stealing a backpack—a crime he never committed. Off of the devastation of those years in prison, he committed suicide when he was finally released.
It was a great speech and it definitely opened my eyes to go back and read things I hadn’t quite grasped before. This system is a good teacher, if you don’t get it the first time, it continues pounding you down into the ground with its rhetoric about democracy.
Getting to the part of driving out Trump, I have kind of hesitated on seeing that and I guess I have to go back to that. My whole point is that the whole system has to be changed. For that to happen we have to stand up to all the injustice not only here in this country but all around the world. Particularly what Trump is doing because it’s giving a neon sign to all the racists and the skinheads, the KKK and all these reactionary people—it is your time to shine. And you even see some white people who are siding with Trump based on trying to keep “our country” and “our race” first. “Our race” is white nationalism.
I liked how he brought out that white people who see this injustice can’t remain silent, like the good Germans who smelled something from the concentration camps but didn’t speak out. We can’t remain silent either. We have to stand for something or accept anything. We have to do something about this.
The U.S. cheered when the wall between East and West Germany was torn down, and now some of the same kinds of people are cheering Trump wanting to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. What hypocrisy.
I used to talk about how people in this country cared more about their dogs than about Black people. Bob Avakian mentioned that in his speech—that if dogs were being killed in the numbers that Black people are shot down in the streets by the police, people would be up in arms. But no outrage about Black people being shot down by the police, and when people say Black Lives Matter in response to police murdering Black people, those people get all upset.
After Katrina hit New Orleans, they didn’t care about getting clean water to the Black people there, and in Flint right now they’re pumping poison water into Black people’s homes, but in LA when the fires hit there, they were giving bottled water to the animals. Bob Avakian is right on the money on that.
Avakian is saying we need to take to the streets and drive out the Trump regime, and I’m with him on that. On the part of the ruling class, I was thinking what are they more afraid of, communism or fascism, and I think they more fear communism not fascism because fascism is the control and manipulation of the whole society and how it’s governed. It’s not the lesser of two evils—fascism is evil.
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