BUT HE IS A FUCKING PRICK.....

In yet another case of a  racist asshole hiding behind "freedom of speech", lars vilks of denmark was holding a "freedom of speech" cafe night in that country when it was attacked by religious zealots, shooting into the building and killing one.
   As I've said before, nothing could justify such a stupid action, but it should also be understood that this shit doesn't happen in a vacuum.  lars vilks has portrayed the prophet Muhammed as a dog, and has said he would have attended a rally put on by the kkk if they had invited him. It bears repeating that he didn't deserve to be shot for this, but it certainly gives this action a different context. He's a prick who didn't need to be shot for his shitheadedness.

Lars Vilks defends decision to join Geller’s hate fest: “If the Ku Klux Klan had invited me, I would have gone”

by Emperor on September 1, 2012 in Loon-at-large

Your right to draw anything you want, anyway you want it, without fear of violence is a right that must be protected, even if it is offensive.

But should you draw Prophet Mohammed as a dog and then join the hate group SION for an anti-Muslim hate-bash to commemorate 9/11? I believe that says something about where you are coming from in regards to Muslims, and it is not good, but hey I guess Lars so hates the Muslim community now that he would be willing to accept an invitation from the KKK if it was about bashing Muslims.

Lars Vilks defends decision to join Geller’s hate fest

Swedish artist Lars Vilks has defended his decision to speak at an anti-Islamic conference in New York on September 11th, claiming he would also accept an invitation from the Ku Klux Klan.

Vilks, the Swedish artist who enraged Muslim groups with his depictions of the Prophet Muhammad as a dog, agreed earlier this month to speak at a conference organized by the anti-Muslim group Stop Islamization of Nations (SION).

Last week, however, an art gallery in northern Sweden booted him from a planned group exhibition because of his decision to accept the SION invitation. Several of the other participating artists pulled out in solidarity with Vilks, stirring up a debate in Sweden this week about artistic freedom and Islamophobia. The art exhibition, which was due to open on September 30th, has since been cancelled.

In a lengthy interview published in the Aftonbladet newspaper on Thursday, Vilks defended his decision to speak at the SION event. “If the Ku Klux Klan had invited me, I would have gone,” he told the paper.

The Local, 31 August 2012

TOO MUCH HYPE

I haven't read the stupid book, will not see the fucked up movie, and I don't give a fuck if you call me closed minded because of it. Fuck you.

Fifty Shades of Grey: A Putrid Pornographic Story

by Rigel Kane | February 9, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

This February 13, the movie based on the book Fifty Shades of Grey will be released. On Valentine’s Day, couples and friends across the country will go to see the anticipated blockbuster based on the international bestseller that tells the story of a young journalism student (Anastasia Steele) who signs a sex contract with a rich Wall Street entrepreneur (Christian Grey). This man takes over her life and her body. She is beaten, tormented, isolated, and at many times feels trapped, but all this is portrayed as sexual stimulation and, ultimately, love. Christian Grey’s fits of rage and desire to own and control, Anastasia being beaten to the point where tears are streaming down her face from pain and fear, and pretty much everything else in this book-made-into-a-movie is caked in the dust of centuries of women being brutalized and treated like property. This story poses itself as "kinky" and "edgy" and rebellious against repressive sexual “norms,” but in reality it is just recycled garbage, taking to even more absurd and dangerous extremes the same old and brutal notion that women should be abused, controlled, tortured, humiliated, and terrified, and find all of this “fulfilling” and even “liberating.” In a world where an international sex trafficking industry continues to shatter female bodies and minds, glorifies rape in a multibillion-dollar porn industry, pimps out young girls on the streets, convinces men they are entitled to women's bodies, and then tries to convince women that this is what they should want, people everywhere can and must reject and resist the blatant mainstreaming of this putrid pornographic slave story.

Fuck Fifty Shades of Grey.

You may say, "Who are you to tell people what should turn them on? Everyone is different." The irony is that right now this system—and this movie—is telling you what should turn you on. It is simply a fact that people do not develop their sexuality and sexual fantasies in a vacuum—just like they don't develop their attitudes towards women in general, or towards people of different genders, or people of different nationalities and “races,” in a vacuum. In every society, it is first and foremost the accepted and enforced social relations that set the terms for how individuals come to see these questions. Romanticizing and eroticizing female torture and enslavement is part and parcel of—it reflects and serves—a world that tortures and enslaves women.

From Bob Avakian:

Break ALL the Chains!

Bob Avakian on the Emancipation of Women and the Communist Revolution

Sampler Edition

Break ALL the Chains!

Bob Avakian on the Emancipation of Women and the Communist Revolution

Today, we live in a society defined by deep divisions of people into oppressor and oppressed, exploiter and exploited, master and slave. It is not a coincidence that this is also a society that has normalized the enslavement of women. In the U.S. alone, men can buy little girls from an international sex trade, order wives online, rent the wombs of women in Third World countries to bear their children, and pimp out little girls in their own neighborhoods. We live in a global system that buys, sells, and discards women, that markets them like meat, and promotes rape as both a tool of war and an expression of "love."

It is not necessary to have—nor should we accept—a world where wars for empire ravage and destroy the people and resources of the planet, where Black and brown people in this country are snuffed out by police or caged in prisons, while a tiny handful of people exploit millions and use their lives like pieces in a chess game. The way that women—half of humanity—are used and abused, enslaved and degraded, is a cornerstone in the foundation of that kind of world. If we want a world without any of this, we must break all the chains—including those that bind women. As Bob Avakian—the Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, and the leader who has re-envisioned revolution and communism—has said:

You cannot break all the chains, except one. You cannot say you want to be free of exploitation and oppression, except you want to keep the oppression of women by men. You can't say you want to liberate humanity yet keep one half of the people enslaved to the other half. The oppression of women is completely bound up with the division of society into masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited, and the ending of all such conditions is impossible without the complete liberation of women. All this is why women have a tremendous role to play not only in making revolution but in making sure there is all-the-way revolution. The fury of women can and must be fully unleashed as a mighty force for proletarian revolution.
BAsics 3:22

This is what we must be doing—and that means fighting against women's enslavement, not romanticizing it!

BAsics 2:3

Now let’s imagine, let’s step out of this world that they keep us chained in. And let’s imagine what this future can and will be like.

When we finally get to the final goal of communism, there won’t be the relations of exploitation and oppression that are so commonplace and that mark all of society today and that we are told over and over again are just the natural order of things and the way things have to be. As Karl Marx pointed out, the communist revolution leads to what we Maoists call the “4 Alls”—that is, the abolition of all class differences among people. The abolition or the end to all the production or economic relations underlying these class differences and divisions among people. The ending of all the social relations that go along with these economic or production relations. Oppressive relations between men and women, between different nationalities, between people of different parts of the world, all that will be put an end to and moved beyond. And finally, the revolutionizing of all the ideas that go along with this whole way, this whole capitalist system, these whole social relations. In place of this, what will be the guiding principles in society consciously and voluntarily taken up by people...not forced on them, but consciously and voluntarily taken up as the basis for having abolished exploitation, oppression and inequality? In its place will be collective and cooperative principles aiming for the common good and at the same time, within that, individuals and individuality flourishing in a way that has never been possible before.

Fifty Shades of Grey is the exact oppositeof what we need—in fact, it not only smacks of thousands of years of tradition's chains on women, it is part of a ramped-up and even more perverse revenge being waged against women in every sphere of society. Both big changes in the world and people fighting back against oppression have brought forward sharp contention over the role of women in society, and we are living through a vicious backlash against the very notion that women are human beings. There are people in power who do not think this society can survive without "traditional family values" that includes the subjugation of women, and there are many, many men who have been trained to feel entitled to women's servitude, to hate the fact that they might have a female boss, that their wives have thoughts and goals that are out of their control, or that a woman they catcall on the street could dare to tell them to fuck off. Both the rulers of this system and those brainwashed by it are making great efforts, some consciously and some as a knee-jerk reaction, to slap the heaviest chains back onto women that held them down for far too long.

What does this wave of revenge against women look like?  

Around the world: An epidemic of rape, gang-rape, "date" rape, rape porn, rape culture, is on the rise. There are horrific, and in some cases rising levels of honor killings, acid attacks, genital mutilation, murder, shunning, silencing, forced motherhood, forced sterilization, forced marriages, forced surrogacy, coercion of every kind imaginable. All this, along with sexual harassment, sexual violence, sexual exploitation, and sexual stigma teach a woman “her place.” There is no place in the world where it is safe to be a woman.

On the Internet: Porn is teaching boys and men that if a woman says "no" repeatedly and you force yourself on her, she will end up loving it and thanking you for it—that sexuality is a conquest, and boys should be proud of pushing girls past their comfort levels.

On the radio: Violent, insulting, and hateful speech about women. The kind of bragging about "breaking" a woman that sounds like a slave master talking about his slaves echoes across the airwaves.

See also:

End Pornography and Patriarchy: The Enslavement and Degradation of Women at revcom.us

StopPatriarchy.org

In the Congress and courts of the U.S.: Abortion rights are being abolished. The idea that women's duty is to bear children—even if/when she does not want to and even if it risks her own life—is being resurrected and given the backing of the law and its enforcers.

Everywhere: Girls are taught that their value lies in their sexual attractiveness (but if they actually have sex they are shamed and often bullied or worse), or their ability and willingness to otherwise serve a man.

Fifty Shades of Grey is a part of all this and is part of making all this even more mainstream.

See also:

From StopPatriarchy: STOP ROMANTICIZING WOMEN’S ENSLAVEMENT! START FIGHTING FOR WOMEN’S LIBERATION!

You know, it would be really fucking nice if sexuality were free from the puritanical, stigmatized, stifling, patriarchal bullshit that has filled women with shame and self-loathing for too long. But let’s be clear: The pornographic, degrading, stifling, patriarchal bullshit propaganda that is Fifty Shades of Grey is NOT a rebellion against those repressive “norms.” It is the “modern,” distorted, house-of-mirrors reflection of the same damn thing. It is not necessary for half of humanity to be enslaved to the other half, or to have any masters and slaves at all, and we have to fight like hell to end both a cult-like worship of virginity and motherhood, as well as complete sexual objectification, and, yes, all forms of oppression and enslavement of women. Women are not breeders or sex toys. Women are human beings. This system is robbing women of their potential and their very lives, and robbing men of their empathy and humanity; it is this old-ass patriarchy as adopted and adapted by the horrors of capitalist commodification (turning everything and everyone into a thing to be exchanged for profit) that is pushing so hard right now to glamorize violence toward women, demand their submission, and sexualize their enslavement. That's pretty uniform, not unique, and not even a little rebellious.

So fuck Fifty Shades of Grey. Fuck glamorizing the story of a young and sexually inexperienced woman being owned, stalked, and tormented by a rich and sadistic man. Fuck portraying being possessed, tricked, and terrified as “liberating.” Fuck the notion that a woman's highest purpose should be "saving a man from himself" by withstanding all this abuse. Fuck that. This story is all played out.

Read the special issue of Revolution.
PDF edition available also.

Love looks nothing like hate. Freedom does not look like slavery. Liberation does not look like submission. It's not that complicated, really. A woman is not property looking for an owner, or some kind of pet, dumbly skipping through life waiting for a man to rape her, “take” her, and show her “true self.”It is only the kind of society we live in, in this era of revenge against women, that can market misogyny (women-hating) as intimacy and sell it back to millions of people. 

People of all genders: Get off that shit! Reclaim your humanity and fight for a world where all these horrors in every form really are ancient history! If you want to rebel against the oppressive “norms” of this society, which you really should, fight forwomen’s actual liberation—their ability to participate fully and equally together with men in every realm of human endeavor, including—as one essential part of this—women's ability to truly explore intimacy and sexuality based on mutual respect and equality. Refuse to go along with this awful premiere, refuse to see it go off unopposed,stand up and protest it to send a jolt throughout this whole society that has accepted rape and normalized slavery in so many forms. People need to stand up and say, “We see straight through your multimillion-dollar facade of ‘edginess’ to the oppression you are celebrating and the entitlement you breed!” This revenge wave, this sexualized slavery, this old posing as new, let's expose it for what it is, and call on others to do the same:

Stop romanticizing women’s enslavement, and start fighting for women’s liberation!

GOOD OL' AMERIKKKAN RACISM

Here's a decent article on the film by the pig clint eastwood, which was made in order to justify unjust war, and promote further racism against an occupied people.....

Confront ‘American Sniper’

By Editor    February 10, 2015

Try to imagine this movie: Iraq’s urban population, angered by a foreign invasion, mobilizes to resist an army of occupation. The robocop occupation troops are weighed down with body armor and heavy weapons. They drive armored Hummers decorated with death heads and kick down doors to invade Iraqi homes. Young Iraqis wearing tatters risk death to challenge the robocops. Whole families support this resistance.

If you already understand U.S. imperialism’s crimes in Iraq, that’s what you might take away from the movie, “American Sniper.” But many viewers, unaware of the truth behind the war, receive a distorted message. Directed by Clint Eastwood, the film looks at the events only through U.S. eyes. It twists the truth, falsifying historical context while adding poisonous anti-Arab bigotry.

Because this film is a box-office hit and is being pushed for multiple Academy Awards, including best picture, it is a weapon in the hands of the Pentagon generals planning future wars, from Iraq to Ukraine to Somalia to Venezuela. Workers World urges its readers who know the truth about the U.S. war on Iraq to confront the film wherever possible.

The movie’s central figure is Chris Kyle, a real sniper whose memoir is the basis for the film. In the film version, Kyle starts out as a Texas cowboy, gets patriotic upon seeing the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya on TV, and enlists as a Navy SEAL.  After seeing the World Trade Center collapse on TV, Kyle aches to leave his beautiful, pregnant wife and fight in Iraq, where he returns for four tours totaling 1,000 days and makes 160 “confirmed kills” of those he considers “savages.”

Most of the Pentagon’s million “kills” in Iraq were done with drones, bombs and rockets, from wrecking the infrastructure and sowing sectarian civil war. Kyle’s kills are up close and personal. In other words, like the earlier Rambo slaughtering Vietnamese, he’s a racist serial killer on steroids.

The U.S. Marines and Navy SEALs kicking down doors kill dozens of Iraqis for each U.S. troop killed. But the film shows how the bodies and minds of U.S. troops are also damaged by warfare. When they come home, many can’t cope — and they get little psychological support.

The context Eastwood omits is that these troops’ political leaders have lied to them about Iraq, which had no connection to the bombings in Africa or with 9/11. In the real world of 2002-2003, the George W. Bush administration lied hundreds of times, claiming Iraq had ties to terrorists and held “weapons of mass destruction.”

Bush lied so that people like Kyle would risk their own necks for the billionaires, bankers and oil magnates who rule the United States and wanted to conquer Iraq. Today, the Pentagon uses a movie like this one to deceive U.S. youth into thinking a career in the armed forces defends their families and neighbors.

Despite some hints of disillusionment with the war among Kyle’s buddies, “American Sniper” is just another example of typical Hollywood war propaganda. From early racist “Cowboy and Indian” movies through the Rambo films of Vietnam to today, these movies slander “the enemy” as inhuman brutes.

If the audience could view the film through the eyes of the mass of ordinary Iraqis who defend Fallujah, Ramadi and Sadr City from the U.S. occupation troops, they could get closer to the truth of this criminal, genocidal U.S. war.

Eastwood once made a pair of films about the U.S. war with Japan. “Flags of Our Fathers” tells of the battle for the strategic island of Iwo Jima from the U.S. viewpoint, while “Letters from Iwo Jima” tells the same story from the Japanese side. But don’t hold your breath waiting for Eastwood and Hollywood to make a sequel showing the Iraqi viewpoint. Speak out against “American Sniper” and make it part of an anti-war debate.

Print PDF

Also see:

RARELY

It almost never happens, but once in a while those dirtbags in the mainstream media show something honest and worthwhile, instead of being cheerleaders for genocide in other lands like they usually are. Specifically, I'm talking about the show detailing police brutality and harassment in oppressed minority communities. I watched this last night, and it is tough going. This shit will make you angry and sad, and for me at least, is convincing proof that this society has to be torn up by the roots and something better put in it's place. Fuck the police.

NEVERENDING PIGGERY

Maybe cops need sensitivity training, so they don't call Black people the "n" word so much while they're in the process of killing them.....

Bosses’ Media Sells Lies and Racism

THURSDAY, JANUARY 29, 2015 AT 1:33AM

BALTIMORE CITY, January 14  —  For the 76th time, ever since the brutal racist police murder of unarmed Black worker Tyrone West in July of 2013, a weekly West Wednesday rally was held today, demanding justice!
Mr. West, aged 44, was beaten to death by 12 to 15 cops, after a traffic stop during which they dragged him by his dreads out of his car. The cops called Mr. West the “N” word several times, maced him, tasered him and beat him.
A witness said — after Mr. West tried to escape from the unbearable beating, and ran a short distance to a nearby alley — that officers caught up with him and started beating him again, this time with batons on his head and back. Another witness said he was at a relative’s house and had gone outside when he heard women screaming.
He “vividly remembers” one of the officers “cocking his arm all the way back, and laying a haymaker [a punch using a person’s full strength, intended as a knockout] on the man. At this point, he was already definitely down, and I didn’t see any movement.”
Racist News Station
Attacks Anti-racist
This week, the West family, along with the Baltimore Bloc organization and other activists, rallied outside FOX45-TV at night, in the bitter cold, but as always with bold and inspiring determination!  There has been a West Wednesday rally every week, regardless of rain, freezing temperatures, or snow!
We held this week’s rally at FOX45 because on December 21, the day immediately after the crazed shooting of two cops in New York City, FOX45 repeatedly aired a false and vicious accusation. Fox45 claimed that Mr. West’s sister, Ms. Tawanda Jones, along with others, had been chanting “We won’t stop! We can’t stop, so kill a cop!” at the large Justice for All protest in Washington DC one week earlier. In actuality, the chant was, “We can’t stop! We won’t stop, until killer cops are in cell blocks!”
The manipulated video seeming to show Ms. Jones saying “Kill a cop” was an attempt to discredit and weaken the massive, nationwide fight against police terror. In fact, that lie, first aired repeatedly by FOX45, was then aired nationally by many TV stations. In addition, the on-air distortion put a life-threatening target on the back of Ms. Jones, who is well-known to Baltimore police as a leader of the West Wednesday rallies and a strong participant in many additional actions opposing terror and murder by racist police. Those who killed Mr. West are still on the force. No charges have been pressed against them.
Just two weeks earlier, a couple of the cops who were involved in beating Tyrone West to death had also severely beaten another Black man, Mr. Abdul Salaam. However, if those two cops had quickly faced appropriate justice for the beating of Mr. Salaam, then Tyrone West might still be alive today!
Reacting quickly after the lies aired on FOX45, members of the West family and supporters repeatedly contacted the station, and strongly insisted the story be retracted. FOX45 nevertheless ran the lie yet again but, in the end, the station had no choice but to come clean (well, partly clean), because the original, unedited video clip, clearly showing the real chant — which demanded that killer cops be put in cell blocks — was available for everyone to see on the internet. Under pressure, FOX45 interviewed Ms. Jones, and did indeed show that interview on their station. They also apologized on air, but called the manipulated video a “mistake,” refusing to admit it was done on purpose.
In addition, FOX45 fired two people: the reporter, Melinda Roeder, and also the cameraperson, Greg McNair. However, those two seem to have been used as fall guys for higher-ups. As the Baltimore Sun newspaper reported, “Roeder said the idea for the story came from station management — it was not hers. FOX45 management has declined to discuss how the edit came to be.”
There’s an important lesson in all this. At first glance, it may seem that, yes, FOX is super-conservative, racist, and dishonest. No surprise.
TV, Radio, Movies All Part of the Bosses’ Propaganda Machine
It’s important, however, to dig deeper. As it turns out, FOX45 is owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group, and their reach goes far beyond just FOX. In fact, Sinclair is one of the largest and most diversified television broadcasting companies in the U.S. today. They own and operate, do the programming, or provide sales services to 162 television stations in 79 markets. Sinclair’s television group reaches approximately 37.5 percent of all U.S. households, and includes FOX, ABC, MyTV, CW, CBS, NBC, Univision and Azteca affiliates.
In other words, the lie, about Ms. Tawanda Jones’ chanted wording, was not just a FOX lie. It was a lie by the whole spectrum of capitalist-owned media. When fired reporter Melinda Roeder let the cat out of the bag and — probably telling the truth in this instance — said the manipulated news coverage came from above, who knows from how high up the order the lie originated.
One thing for sure, the lie benefitted the entire capitalist class, which needs racism and police terror as part of its ruthless effort to keep the working class oppressed and under control. Maybe a brain-washed station manager, seeing life through the lens of sick capitalist culture, made the decision. Or maybe someone in the know, much higher in the media hierarchy, gave the order. Either way, it was not simply a conservative local FOX reporter, doing her own predictable distortions. It was the media, owned and controlled by the capitalist class, doing what their class needs.
On a personal level, as a result of the media’s cold-blooded decision to air a shameless lie about Ms. Tawanda Jones, they have put her in grave, ongoing danger. On a daily basis, Ms. Jones is receiving threats. Ever since the airing of the lie about her on nationwide TV on December 21, she has also been enduring nightmares, and is no longer able to sleep well.
Nevertheless, despite these personal difficulties created by the capitalist class, Ms. Jones together with similarly courageous family members remain steadfast in their commitment to the struggle. They are fighting to win justice for her brother, for all victims of police brutality, and for everyone else who may one day face that same fate.

Beyond the Sinclair Broadcast Group, it’s also important to recognize that the nationwide FOX network is not — as many people think — a fringe conservative voice, largely disconnected from the rest of capitalist media and business. The truth is that FOX News is owned by 21st Century Fox.
The number-two owner of 21st Century Fox — after Rupert Murdoch — is Prince Al-Waleed, the 16th-richest man in the world, and a nephew of the late king of Saudi Arabia, an important ally of powerful U.S. oil companies.
In addition to FOX, Al-Waleed has investments in Apple and Twitter. He also has big stakes in rival media giants Time Warner and Disney. Time Warner owns HBO, Cinemax, Turner Broadcasting, CNN, Warner Brothers and DC Comics. Disney owns Pixar, Lucasfilm, ABC, ESPN and Marvel. Even more significantly, Al-Waleed helped rescue the U.S. banking giant Citigroup twice, and he is one of its largest investors. The members of the Board of Directors of Citigroup, who hire and fire the CEO, and make policy for that powerful bank, also sit on — and interlock with — the Boards of Directors for many other major corporations including Target, Ford, Estée Lauder, Pepsi, Comcast, AT&T, Halliburton, Johnson & Johnson, and American Airlines.
Simply put, FOX and Baltimore’s dirty-dozen cops are not the only ones guilty of criminal behavior. It’s the whole capitalist class of super-rich business owners who don’t care whom they hurt in order to preserve their wealth and keep the working class in its place. They use racism to justify a third of their blood-soaked annual profits, derived from paying Black and Latin workers less than white workers. And they also use racism to divide, weaken and conquer the whole working class — of all skin colors — who suffer with low wages and meager benefits, whether working for the country’s largest private employer, Walmart, or working just about anywhere else.
In the struggle against racism and police brutality, we need to defeat the entire capitalist class, not just FOX. What’s needed, after revolution, is a new world in which racism can finally be defeated, a world of sisterhood and brotherhood where we share the benefits of our hard work for the good of all, without rich and without poor.
Progressive Labor Party calls that way of life communism, and — let’s be clear — if we want to end police brutality, we need to dedicate our lives to the struggle for that new world, run by and for the working class. Dare to struggle!  Dare to win!

JE NE SUIS PAS CHARLIE

and this is why.........

Anti-Islam frenzy in France targets kids

By G. Dunkel February 6, 2015

In Paris, “United Against Islamophobia.”

An 8-year-old boy in Nice, a small city on France’s Mediterranean coast near Italy, was hauled out of school to the police station. The boy’s father was called, television crews were summoned and headlines blared about the boy allegedly not respecting the minute of silence for Charlie Hebdo victims. An atmosphere of frenzied overreaction was created. (TV2, Jan. 28)
A report from Agence France Presse of a 9-year-old boy being charged with “supporting terrorism” in Aisne, a small city northeast of Paris, is yet another sign of this government- and media-manufactured frenzy that especially targets Muslims. (Jan. 30)
Another example is the high school philosophy teacher in Poitiers in western France who has been suspended for four months while he’s being investigated for charges of “defending terrorism.” These charges carry a penalty of five years in jail and a 10,000 euro fine. Despite the atmosphere of reaction, colleagues have filed notice of a one-day strike Feb. 5 in his support. (Libération, Jan. 30)
Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the newly appointed minister of education, claimed the 8-year-old Nice boy’s father had been “charged with promoting terrorism.” But Radio Beur FM, a French chain directed by and to the North African community in France, called that “the sad reflection of a state lie draped in virtue.” (Oumma.com, Jan. 30)
According to his lawyer, the boy, named Ahmed, had been playing in a sandbox when the school’s principal slapped him on the back of his head and said, “Stop digging. You won’t find a machine gun to kill us all.” Although Ahmed is diabetic, he was deprived of his insulin. He was taken to the police station, and then his father was notified. (Libération, Jan. 28)
A report claims the French ministry of education is investigating 200 reported cases of “supporting terrorism” throughout France. (AFP, Jan. 14)
These cases suggest widespread resistance to the current campaign of promoting French imperialism and an anti-Islam frenzy under the guise of advancing “the republican values of the French state.”
Given all the heavy state artillery directed against an 8-year-old who dared to say, “Je ne suis pas Charlie” (“I am not Charlie”), it was interesting to look at French reviews of “The Interview,” the U.S. film about a CIA plot to assassinate Kim Jung Un, leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. In the reviews by Le Figaro and Le Point, there wasn’t a word about this crude film extolling terrorism.
For the French and other imperialists, “terrorism” only flows out of the resistance of the oppressed.

DEFEND FERGUSON!

Defend Ferguson. Fuck the police!!!!

As Part of Retaking the Political Offensive...

Defend the Defiant Ones of Ferguson

February 5, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Editor’s note: Ferguson. A small suburb of St Louis comes to stand for the refusal to accept the murder of a young unarmed Black youth at the hands of the police. When you ask youth from other parts of the country, they might not immediately recognize the name Ferguson but they all know “Mike Brown.” They know the people stood up—“Hands Up Don't Shoot!” The people of Ferguson, in particular those cast off and trapped at the bottom of this society, especially the youth, stood up in resistance and awakened hundreds of thousands of people. They changed the political and moral landscape in this country. They concentrate and symbolize the urgency and potential to wake up society to the epidemic of police murder and brutality that is daily lives of Black and Brown people everywhere in this country. The authorities are scared at what they see in embryo—a potential force for revolution.

February 5, 2015

Letter from a reader:

I want to call people's attention to heightened repression, including physical attacks against people active in the movement in the Ferguson/St. Louis area. By the end of 2014, there were already over 600 people arrested in Ferguson/St. Louis, a significant number of whom face serious felony charges. These attacks have continued to intensify. People everywhere need to have the backs of the courageous people of Ferguson.

Last November, when the grand jury refused to indict Darren Wilson after months of struggle, there was understandably a ferocious response to this outrage in Ferguson. Soon after, the authorities started an open-ended investigation of Mike Brown's stepfather for inciting a riot. Right around the time that the NY Times floated out that the federal government would not charge Darren Wilson for any crime, the local authorities released videotapes—videos taken from stores that were damaged the night that Wilson walked and which purportedly showed “looters.” The public is being urged to identify and turn those people into the police. In a highly publicized case, a 19-year-old activist, prominently associated with the defiant ones, was arrested and charged with arson. The people who “step outside” the bounds of acceptable protest, especially among the youth are demonized and criminalized while police who commit cold-blooded murder walk.

There are other attacks where who or what is behind the attack is not obvious. On MLK Day, there was a march from Canfield Green memorial for Mike Brown to the Ferguson Police Department. Afterward, back at Canfield Green there were multiple shots fired from an unidentified source toward a group of people who had been part of the protest. Bullets struck a car which has been very visible in the protests for months in Ferguson. Others reported being narrowly missed. A young woman activist in the car was struck but not critically injured. People are left with questions and a bad taste afterward. Was this a wrong-headed attack from among the people who think people are somehow disrespecting them? Or is there something more sinister at work? Does the state and its operatives, of different kinds, have a hand in these attacks?

The point is not to speculate about who/what is involved in these recent attacks on activists. The point is that we should understand that the authorities use all kinds of ways to attack the resistance. People who bravely stood up to tanks and phalanxes of police can become confused and demoralized when the attack appears to come from among the masses, and that is exactly the point! (See the www.revcom.us article "Important Lessons on Political Piggery: How FBI COINTELPRO Targeted Radical Groups")

Some Lessons from History

The police and other authorities like the FBI have a long, bloody history of behind-the-scenes maneuvering and dirty tricks that are aimed at fanning differences and creating antagonisms among the people, and people need to be alert to this and not let them get away with it.

People in Ferguson, Missouri standing up together against the police murder of Mike Brown, August 16, 2014. Photo: revcom.us

The authorities historically have done everything in their power to break down gang unity truces like those forged in the wake of the LA Rebellion in 1992. The gang turf mentality itself can lead people into doing what the system wants us to do, fight among each other. (One of the most inspiring things about Ferguson was the pictures of the youth with signs saying “Guns down for Mike Brown” and youth sporting red or blue colors standing shoulder to shoulder defiantly in the face of pigs with armored vehicles and machine guns trained on them.)

The authorities can instigate or turn a blind eye to the operatives of pro-police fascist and racist forces, including ones that have already been active in Ferguson like the Oath Keepers. Police also utilize informants and operatives from among the oppressed themselves, including people who they coerce into carrying out their dirty work.

Historically and down to today, the rulers have gone after both the organized forces for revolution and people who are newly gravitating to the movement for revolution in order to send a message loud and clear: “don't you dare think about getting rid of all this once and for all.” (See the www.revcom.us article "The Ominous Attacks Against the RCP and Bob Avakian")

The enemy does all this to make people afraid, to divide and demoralize people, and to derail the resistance.

What can we do in response to all the enemy can throw at us? We need to transform the situation into one of deeper and stronger unity among the people in resisting the outrage of police murder in Ferguson/St. Louis and throughout the country. We need to build principled unity and draw in a growing number of people (not just in Ferguson but throughout the country) to take on and beat back the heightening repression and any attempts to sow dissension and foment disunity among those who have stepped forward to protest and resist police brutality and murder (and other outrages bound up with this). This in turn must be developed as one key front of the larger effort to more fully re-seize the political and ideological initiative and retake the political offensive, to have this protest and resistance become even much broader, deeper, and more determined. For revolutionaries, this also means working to win people to see how this interconnects with all the other oppressive outrages of this system and the solution to this through an actual revolution.

As an integral part of this, adopting some basic principles (standards) that the movement embraces could be very valuable in forging deeper unity that can stand up to all the various ways that the enemy will attack and in enabling those who are part of the resistance to sort out contradictions among the people and resolve them on the right basis and prevent them from being turned into or being used by the enemy to intimidate, derail and demoralize the movement. If people widely adhere to these and struggle for them, then it will be clearer if someone is doing the work of the enemy, and it will be possible to expose and keep it from causing havoc.

This is a proposal for adopting such principles. (I would urge that they be considered for adoption at the Stop Mass Incarceration Network's national meeting in Atlanta [or in its immediate wake], as well as shared with and adopted by others.)

PRINCIPLES:

As part of building the fight to STOP the outrage of police murder and brutality right now, many different people and political forces from different perspectives come together and make plans on how to unite in common struggle against a common enemy. And within that, there should be a spirit of lively wrangling over differences. If done in the right way, with largeness of mind and generosity of spirit, this kind of wrangling actually deepens the unity of any group or community of people working together.

At the same time, there should be and must be a few simple principles of what does NOT go in this movement. We recognize that the police and other authorities like the FBI have a long history of behind-the-scenes maneuvering and dirty tricks that are aimed at fanning differences and creating antagonisms among the people, and people need to be alert to this and not let them get away with pitting people against each other. (Learn about COINTELPRO.) By adhering to principles, it makes it much harder for the authorities to get away with such attacks.

We urge these principles be widely adopted:

Differences among people and groups should be struggled out in a principled way.

* There must not be physical threats, let alone physical attacks, against anyone in the movement to end these outrages.

* Do not make accusations that someone or some group is working with the police—being a provocateur or informant—without actual evidence.

* There are times when "working with the police" is necessary to negotiate permits, etc.; but in no instance is it ever permissible for people in struggle to finger, or turn over, others to the police or to speculate to the press—who often work closely with the authorities—about someone else in the movement. Such activity should actually be cause for barring people and individuals from the people's movements, until they renounce and change these practices.