Giuliani and Lynch Dream of Unleashing Hitler-Style Clampdown on the Whole Country
| revcom.us
On Wednesday, August 26, two fascist pigs, Patrick Lynch, and Rudy Giuliani, made speeches at the Republican National Convention (RNC) to highlight Trump as the “law and order” president.
These were perfect choices to hype Trump. Lynch heads the PBA (Patrolman’s Benevolent Association—which should be called “Police Brutality Association”). In 21 years, Lynch has never once failed to justify any of the hundreds of NYPD killings of civilians. In 2014 an NYPD gang attacked Eric Garner for allegedly selling loose cigarettes and choked him to death. Garner repeatedly pleaded, “I can’t breathe” before dying. Lynch’s response: “If you can speak you can breathe.” He called the cop who choked him a “model of what we want a police officer to be.”
Giuliani, a close Trump ally, was New York City’s mayor from 1994 to 2001. In his first five years, NYPD killed at least 187 people; thousands more were brutalized. Under Giuliani, NY cops in 1994 shot 13-year-old Nicholas Heyward Jr. while he played with an orange plastic gun. Nicholas’s last words were “We’re only playing…” The same year a young Puerto Rican man, Anthony Baez, was choked to death after a football he threw accidentally hit a cop car. In 1997, four NYPD cops beat and handcuffed Haitian immigrant Abner Louima, took him to their precinct and sodomized him with the wooden handle of a toilet plunger. Then they jammed it, covered with blood and feces, into Louima’s mouth, breaking his teeth.
After that, the masses in NYC started talking about “Giuliani Time”—meaning, a time when cops knew they could do anything and get away with it.
These two pigs both hit three common themes in their speeches.
First, they claimed major cities are plagued by “skyrocketing” rates of murder and other violent street crime,1 and they equated such crimes with the mass protests of millions against police brutality and systemic racism. According to Giuliani, the initial protests quickly “turned into riots… Businesses were burned and crushed, people beaten, shot and killed. Police officers routinely assaulted, badly beaten, and occasionally murdered.”2 Coupling this with the cynical use of tragic shootings of young people, they depicted the cities of today as terrifying hellscapes that are on the brink of getting vastly worse.
Second, they insisted that the “radical Democrats” are literally—in Giuliani’s words—“pro-criminal” and “anti-police” and are deliberately “handcuffing” the cops. Lynch said that “The violence and chaos we’re seeing now, isn’t a side effect.... It’s actually the goal [of the] radical left.” Giuliani claimed that Trump’s enemies were afraid that Trump would solve the problem of “police misconduct,” making him more popular. So “Black Lives Matter and Antifa sprang into action and, in a flash, they hijacked the peaceful protests into vicious, brutal riots.” Meanwhile, Giuliani claimed that Democratic mayors ordered police not to make arrests, and if they did, Democrats “released the rioters so as not to disrupt the rioting.”3
Their third point was that only if all constraints on police violence are lifted can this nightmare be stopped, and that can only happen if the Democrats are gotten out of the way (one way or another)—and that Donald Trump is the savior who will do this. Lynch said that Democrats make it “impossible for police officers to do our job.… Our hands are tied.”
To sum up: so-called street criminals need to be beaten down, locked up or killed; protesters are just street criminals in disguise; and the Democrats are as bad or worse than these “criminals.” That is the point of all of Giuliani and Lynch’s brazen lying and hysterical fear mongering. It’s not simply that they are justifying the many crimes that they have already committed, they are jonesing for a “final solution”—a fascist order, with the Democrats out of the way and the cops enabled to “clean up the problems in a day,” as Trump likes to say.
Lynch says Donald Trump “gives law enforcement the support and the tools we need, to go out there and put a stop to it, period, end of story.” Donald Trump promises “police officers everywhere, ‘I will never let you down.’” Giuliani says Donald Trump, “with his boundless love of our country and all our people, his disciplined work ethic, his exceptional ability to inspire and his deep understanding of our system of government and the strength of American values is the man we can trust to… make our nation safe again.”
If things go this way, this would be a true nightmare, akin to fascist regimes of Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Pinochet in Chile… or like life under the Islamic Fundamentalists in Iran or the Duterte regime in the Philippines. These are societies in which the people as a whole can’t speak up, can’t protest, can’t breathe, and in which people are constantly subject to extreme violence from the state and fascist organizations for any reason or none at all.
We CANNOT allow this to go down.
1. Violent crime in the U.S. has actually been dropping for decades, though there has been a small uptick this year. In NYC—where Giuliani says, “Murder, shootings, and violent crime are increasing at percentages unheard of in the past”—violent crime has hit record lows. In 2001—Giuliani’s last year as mayor—there were more than twice as many murders as occurred in 2019. [back]
2. Note, thousands of protesters were “beaten, shot and killed,” by the police and by fascist forces. There is not one instance of a law enforcement officer being killed by a protester, though one was apparently killed by a fascist, and another by an unknown person while guarding a store. [back]
3. In reality, Democratic mayors unleashed tremendous repression against protests—in the first two weeks of protests, at least 10,000 people were arrested nationally. [back]
BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian is a book of quotations and short essays that speaks powerfully to questions of revolution and human emancipation.
“You can't change the world if you don't know the BAsics.”
At New York’s marches against police violence, N.Y.P.D. officers met protesters with punches, shoves, tackles and body-slams. We found 64 episodes caught on video. https://t.co/80Zz4Gxi1s pic.twitter.com/0sApyFldjn
— NYT Graphics (@nytgraphics) July 15, 2020
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