Demand the NYPD stop the surveillance and political suppression of Revolution Club and Refuse Fascism activists! Demand the DA drop these outrageous charges immediately
March 21, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
There is a pattern of NYPD stalking and surveilling political speech coming to light— from the moment Refuse Fascism first published a full page ad in the New York Times individuals have been targeted for political and legal persecution for spreading the urgently needed political message, “NO! In The Name Of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America!”
What you can do:
We need to raise $2,500-$3,000 to cover legal costs for a mainly volunteer legal team so please donate generously here: https://RefuseFascism.org/donateand indicate it is for legal expenses.
On Thursday, March 23, flood the DA’s office and Mayor’s office with calls demanding these outrageous charges be dropped and that the stalking and harassment be stopped.
Next Monday, March 27, pack the courtroom.
Join a fund-raising potluck on Saturday, March 25.
On January 4, the day that Refuse Fascism printed a full-page ad in the New York Times, Refuse Fascism activists including several Revolution Club members went outside Fox News headquarters in New York City with a five-foot tall enlargement of the New York Times ad. As they were marching down the sidewalk towards the subway they were followed by NYPD vans, flashing their lights, and an entourage of around 8-12 NYPD officers. These stalkers followed them throughout the city, and all the way 35+ blocks downtown to a Refuse Fascism meeting happening in Greenwich Village, making sure to switch to cops from a different precinct as they got closer downtown and entered that precinct’s jurisdiction on the way to the meeting.
On January 12, New York police [from the 6th precinct] stalked, arrested, and brutalized a young person associated with Refuse Fascism and the Revolution Club. She and a friend were walking through Greenwich Village, on their way to a publicly announced Refuse Fascism event. She was carrying Refuse Fascism posters tucked under her arm. When her friend went into a store to pick up some food, a woman walking behind her read her sign aloud: “Stop Trump/Pence.” Seconds later, this woman—an NYPD cop in plainclothes—and two other cops, also not in full police uniform, grabbed the young woman and began manhandling her. Several police cars arrived, and the assembled NYPD force pushed her up against a car, and shoved her face against the trunk. The police subjected this woman to hours of abuse—political, physical, sexual, and psychological. And in addition to this she has been charged with three misdemeanors facing up to a year in jail. To read the fuller account, go to revcom.us.
On February 4, 2017, as the "LGBT Solidarity Rally" at the historic Stonewall Inn was drawing to a close, four people, revolutionaries with the NYC Revolution Club, and volunteers with Refuse Fascism, were brutally attacked and arrested by the NYPD. They are being charged with seven misdemeanor crimes carrying up to a year’s sentence on Rikers Island.
New York City, Stonewall Inn. Members of the LGBT community and many others rally to stand with immigrants. (Photo: Twitter/@Samynemir)
In a statement Noche Diaz and the other defendants said, “We were at Stonewall to stand with people against the first iteration of the inhumane "Muslim Ban. We challenged and connected people with the need to confront the fascist nature and direction of this regime, and that protest alone would not be enough; we need to build a movement and drive the regime from power, and do so not just for ourselves, but in the name of humanity. We were attacked for bringing out this message. We have previously been stalked and arrested by the authorities, followed, and harassed by police and Trump fanatics.”
The stakes of these cases are very high—a key part of fascism is the trampling on and tearing up of civil and legal rights, and there are moves across the country to further criminalize protest, to erode and eliminate the room to even oppose the moves by the regime against the people and the planet. [Read more]
Should the NYPD be able to get away with stalking, harassing and arresting those people who are putting before society the horrors facing humanity with the installation and consolidation of the fascist Trump/Pence regime? NO! THIS CANNOT STAND!
Should the message of Refuse Fascism—the necessity to drive out this fascist regime—be politically and legally suppressed? NO! THIS CANNOT STAND!
Should those people who recognize the horrific consequences for humanity and the planet and are acting to bring this to millions more be surveilled, targeted, brutalized and thrown into prison? NO! THIS CANNOT STAND!
Should the message of those revolutionaries who while doing this sharply put before people the real history of this country, the nature of the system and how things could be radically different, be silenced and suppressed? NO! THIS CANNOT STAND!
This struggle against repression is an important part of the overall struggle to drive out the Trump/Pence regime and YOU are needed.
We are calling on all people of conscience to express their outrage at the illegitimate suppression of political speech, to demand that these charges be dropped, and the surveillance, in particular by the 6th precinct, of Refuse Fascism and the Revolution Club members be STOPPED.
I don't like to waste my time with a lot of the dumb shit celebrities like to say. Most of them are stupid assholes, who get their opinions spread far and wide because they have some acting or singing ability. NOT intelligence. With all of that being said, I always knew this guy was a complete fucking moron, but his lack of understanding of the horrors of World War 2 and the futile attempt at historical analogy are baffling. Read about what a total fucking idiot he ( and other conservatives ) can be.
Anne Frank Center Demands Apology From Tim Allen Following 'Deeply Offensive' Nazi Germany Comment
Speaking about attending President Donald Trump's inauguration on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Allen said "I'm not kidding, you gotta be real careful around here, you get beat up if you don't believe, it's like '30s Germany."
The Anne Frank Center called on calling on Allen to apologize for making "a deeply offensive characterization that trivializes the horrors imposed on Jews in Nazi Germany" during the Second World War.
"Tim, have you lost your mind?" said Steven Goldstein, the center's executive director, in a statement. "No one in Hollywood today is subjecting you or anyone else to what the Nazis imposed on Jews in the 1930s — the world's most evil program of dehumanization, imprisonment and mass brutality, implemented by an entire national government, as the prelude for the genocide of nearly an entire people."
Goldstein added: "Sorry, Tim, that's just not the same as getting turned down for a movie role. It's time for you to leave your bubble to apologize to the Jewish people and, to be sure, the other peoples also targeted by the Nazis."
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Last month, Goldstein slammed President Trump for his delay in speaking out against anti-Semitism following the recurring incidents of vandalism and threats targeting Jewish centers across the country, describing his words as “too little" and "too late."
The director accused Trump of only making the comments amid mounting pressure to address anti-Semitism. "The President’s sudden acknowledgement is a Band-Aid on the cancer of anti-Semitism that has infected his own Administration,” he said. “Make no mistake: The anti-Semitism coming out of this Administration is the worst we have ever seen from any Administration.”
The chicago pigs are amongst the most racist and violent police departments in north amerikkka. If you think they were less so under obama, you are completely fucked. In fact, it seems that the pigs were killing even more Black youth under obama than ever before. Fuck him, fuck the chicago pigs, and fuck that motherfucker trump.
To Departing Chicago U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon as He Leaves Office:
Farewell... And FUCK YOU!
March 20, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The chief federal prosecutor for the Chicago area, U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon, was told by Trump to resign. He took the sock out of his mouth to say what he really thinks needs to be done in Chicago. What words came tumbling out?
Black community members begging for “resources”—be aware:
If Trump gives you “resources,” he is sinking werewolf fangs into your neck. The youth need a real solution—REVOLUTION.
Oink, oink, oink, put some lipstick on the pig, oink, oink, oink.
Police union officials and cop blogs applauded, saying they thought maybe he was ‘against us’ but now they know he’s really ‘one of us.’ Trump didn’t realize what a loyal servant he had in this prosecutor. An Obama appointee, Fardon’s main purpose in speaking out on his way out the door seemed to be to counter the damning Department of Justice (DOJ) report on the Chicago Police Department and to launch an attack against instituting even the very tepid reforms that the CPD is supposed to be undertaking.
Fardon was a party to the DOJ report about the racist and brutal CPD. And while he claimed to support the report’s findings, his departing words heap praise on the police, attributing any problems to a few bad apples, an entrenched culture, and lack of training. How do people like Fardon think the racist and brutal culture got so entrenched over decades? Because this is what the police are trained to do and it corresponds to their role to occupy and brutalize whole communities.
The police are highly trained—trained to kill, to think of Black people as “vermin” (former police commander Jon Burge’s words), to frame, railroad, and testi-LIE. And they are backed up by courts, city attorneys, and the government at every level. Fardon says he spent hundreds of hours on the case of the eight or so other cops on the scene of Laquan McDonald’s murder—the pigs who covered up and tampered with evidence—yet he never managed to prosecute any of them. So fuck you, Fardon!
Fardon complains that the cops were using too light a touch on the streets after the video of the police murder of McDonald was released for fear of being the next cop caught on video. He whined about the fact that police can’t make street stops without filing a report! This was an attack on an ACLU settlement reached with the CPD to end rampant racial profiling occurring at a rate far higher than when the controversial stop-and-frisk practice was going on in New York City. The ACLU found that in 2014, for example, “CPD officers conducted more than 700,000 street stops that yielded no guns and resulted in not a single arrest.” [our emphasis] The ACLU responded to Fardon’s letter: “Mr. Fardon ignores the real impact and harm of these stops ... these stops were often invasive—with officers reaching inside someone’s clothing—and intrusive, happening repeatedly to the same person. These stops also were regularly conducted without a sufficient constitutional reason....” Fardon ignores that police do not have a legal right to stop someone without reasonable suspicion nor to force people to stop and talk to them. Now on top of all this, Fardon called for violating the First Amendment right of free speech, urging heavy spying on social media and using it to prosecute youth for what they say online. So, fuck you, Fardon!
One of the most chilling things that Fardon says while pretending to care about programs to help young people in the inner-city neighborhoods is that when kids as young as 10, 1,1 and 12 get affiliated with a gang, then “Once that’s happened, it’s too late; their fate is sealed.” Think about what type of stone-cold person says this about children. These children’s fate is not sealed by the streets, it is sealed before they are even born by a system that has absolutely no future for them and tells them so in a million ways. So again, fuck you, Fardon. (See BA on No More Generations of our Youth ...)
And one more thing. Fardon calls for combining all the efforts of federal agencies like the DEA, the FBI, ATF into one task force to go after the violence on the streets. If you want to see what this looks like, read about the ATF racist sting operation in the Chicago area where a Black former prisoner is worked on relentlessly to get him to agree to commit a take-down of a gang’s drug stash house. So once more, fuck you, Fardon!
And this guy was the appointee of the liberal Democrat, Obama! Fardon’s call for more police and prosecution and punishment is very hard to distinguish from what the Trump regime has in store for Black people. Fardon, on his way out of office, is launching a broadside attack on very mild reforms called for in the DOJ report and by the ACLU. The only difference between Fardon and a Trump appointee might be that Fardon says that calling in the National Guard to barricade whole neighborhoods is not a good idea because it will be seen as declaring war on the populace. Instead, he wants to flood the areas with police and federal agencies combining their resources and letting them terrorize the population with impunity. Oink, oink, oink.
So as you depart Chicago, Zachary Fardon, let us sincerely say FUCK YOU!
Yesterday we started the daunting task of recording 32 songs at the Scott Henderson and Scott Bennett studio in Sooke . Except it wasn't that daunting at all. We got all of the bed tracks done, and had started on some of the vocals, but my voice is still too crapped out from being sick lately. That's okay, we'll give 'er a try another night. All in all, it was a good time. I always like hanging out with the band guys, and the two Scotts are awesome. Now the problem will be what to do with the finished product. Do we dare put out a 32 song CD ? Maybe a CD and a tape ? A CD, 7 inch record, and a tape ? Who the fuck knows. We'll figure it out, although we'll be open to suggestions. Tell us what y'all think. Good day.
These are serious times we're living in. I don't think it's wrong to call it fascism on the rise, and it is poisoning many countries right now. Read this article from the Comrades in Montreal.
Comrades, do get it into your heads, this ‘lesser evil’ which Year after year has been used to keep you completely out of the fight Will very soon mean having to stomach the Nazis. – Bertolt Brecht
If we were to be honest, however, we would have to admit that the times have been dire for a very long time, especially for those who live in the global peripheries. Try telling a teenager in Afghanistan who has grown up over the fifteen years of invasion and occupation that only now the times are dire; such a question is meaningless since the most powerful nations have always permitted fascist excess in the nations they dominate. But we don’t need to go so far as Afghanistan to recognize that dire times have been in effect, and for quite awhile, for certain populations. Under Obama it was okay, if you were a cop, to shoot whatever Black American you wanted to shoot and be exonerated. In the months leading up to the recent Trump election the US was sending its army unto Indigenous land to protect a pipeline. And up here in Canada, under the supposedly enlightened rule of Trudeau the Second, Indigenous protestors were being threatened with violence for daring to challenge the Liberal government’s own pipeline projects. Before this, Canadian politicians were signalling fascism; Trump was simply isometric to the rightward drift of Canada’s mainstream political order.
When Pinochet was dropping people out of helicopters and disappearing activists en masse that was okay because his fascism was in the service of “democracy”. When Modi’s regime enforces caste supremacy and designates all non-Hindus as inferior that’s okay as long as India accedes to imperial might and defends the economic interests of the imperialist camp. Haiti, Honduras, Afghanistan—there are too many examples of imperialist intervention that was not uncomfortable with fascism. Because who cares about fascism if it’s somewhere else? But now it’s not only somewhere else; it’s rebounded and is in the backyard of the nations that once pretended they were the locus of civilization.
Therefore, if the rise of fascism represented by Trump’s election tells us anything it is that now the repression once reserved for “other people” are going to be visited upon even more people, many of whom benefited from these past excesses. But only a short-sighted asshole would laugh about this fascist rebound; this is not a chickens-coming-home-to-roost scenario but a degeneration that will be even worse for the historically oppressed. Reality is becoming another genocidal threat for the traditional targets. Nazis are crawling out of their holes now that some of them are in positions of power. The so-called “alt-right” is repackaging and marketing white supremacy. Liberal pretenses are disintegrating as the bourgeois order closes ranks to become thoroughly and openly fascist.
* * *
Everyone wants to be a Nazi hunter just as long as the profession is imaginary. A decade ago “Nazi” was a common insult though it was generally used inaccurately, meant to signal moral failure. Every schoolboy since WW2 likes to pretend that they would have resisted National Socialism if they grew up in Germany, that they would have fought Hitler with more commitment than their forbearers. The truth, however, is that this moral fortitude is easy to proclaim in the context of fictional depictions of fascist violence but quite difficult to follow in the face of real world fascism. Where is this army of Nazi hunters at the very moment they are required? It would not be inaccurate to say that many of them are collaborating with the current fascist resurgence: some are embedded in the liberal camp, some have been drawn into Trump’s right populism and are working hard to pretend that their politics are not fascism. The problem, of course, is that the identification of fascism with evil was a hollow equivalence: there was no real definition of what fascism actually was—that it was a particular expression of capitalism—aside from it being “evil”. So now, when it is upon us again, only the left and some worried liberals are able to recognize what is happening, and the latter camp have no idea how to fight it.
The truth is that the re-emergence of fascism is a tragic historical irony. This year marks the centennial of the October Revolution, an event that produced both a state and worldwide movement that would lead the fight against early 20th Century fascism. Both this revolution and past fascisms manifested in the crucible of capitalist crisis as militant political orders diametrically opposed in their response to capitalism’s dilemma: whereas communism claimed that this dilemma could be solved by progressive social transformation, fascism sought to save capitalism by popularizing its most exterminist impulses.
Once again we are confronted with an economic crisis that is also a crisis in thought: imagine a world that transcends capitalism or imagine capitalism’s salvation through its most depraved and reactionary articulation. But in this conjuncture we lack the same kind of worldwide communist movement of the past; the reactionary imagination seems to possess an advantage. In this context The Red Flag hopes that this small intervention will contribute to the kind of counter-hegemonic movement able to undermine the fascist advantage.
Fighting against the oppression and enslavement of women is not about being " PC " or some other such shit. If you're going to make it that shallow of an issue, then you're a fucking imbecile. If you were just a little bit smarter, you'd be an idiot. It's about ending the female sex slave trade, the daily violence perpetrated against women by those who say they love them, and rape. If you think it's anything less than this, fuck off.
The Outpouring on March 8, a Day Without a Woman—and the Wellspring of Outrage Against the Trump/Pence Regime
March 13, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
It was very important that on March 8, International Women’s Day, women across the U.S.—and across the world—took off work, wore red, went into the streets, and acted in other ways to give voice to their outrage against the intense, and intensifying, oppression they face, and in many cases against the Trump/Pence regime. And it was important that many men joined in the Day Without a Woman protest that had been called for that date.
Many who acted on March 8 were part of the Women’s March on January 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration, when millions of people throughout this country and in many places across the globe poured into the streets, making clear their disgust and anger at the rise of Trump/Pence. The Women’s March was followed by other determined protests—people rushing to and clogging up the airports against Trump’s Muslim ban; the Day Without an Immigrant and other actions against the Gestapo-like round-ups of immigrants; students mobilizing to stop fascists on their campuses; and other resistance. In all this, many who are being compelled to act, both young people and those who are older, are new to political protest.
Like the Women’s March and other recent protests, the broad range of actions and people involved in the Day Without a Woman points to the reality that there continues to be a deep and significant well-spring of alarm and anger against the Trump/Pence regime. In particular, there is alarm and outrage among many, many women—and people of all genders—at the crude, rape-culture, women-hating piggery that Trump concentrates, in combination with the straight-up Christian fascist patriarchal clampdown represented by Pence.
All this shows the potential for the kind of resistance that is urgently needed, now, as the Trump/Pence regime forges ahead very rapidly to consolidate fascist rule. As the speech from the Revolutionary Communist Party given at this year’s International Women’s Day events said, in relation to the recent resistance including the Day Without a Woman:
This is extremely important—and it must be built upon, it must get even broader and more determined, and it must spread. At the same time, it must get increasingly linked up with the fight to drive this fascist regime from power—and growing numbers within it need to increasingly be linking this to the fight to make an actual revolution, to dig up the roots of this oppression by overthrowing the system that requires and enforces this oppression, by putting an end to all exploitation and oppression and the very division of society into classes, into masters and slaves, oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited.
On this page is a round-up of what happened on "A Day Without a Woman" around the U.S. (including reports from readers in a number of cities), report about response to Refuse Fascism’s call for people to go out into the streets on March 8, and a survey of International Women’s Day protests around the world.
“A Day Without a Woman”
Boston, Massachusetts, International Women's Day. (Photo: Special to revcom.us)
On March 8, International Women’s Day, women—and men—across the United States marched and rallied, took off from work, wore red in solidarity and acted in other ways for “A Day Without a Woman.” The call for the action came from the organizers of the January 21 Women’s March when millions took the streets across the U.S. and around the world. They said that on this day, “women and our allies will act together for equity, justice and the human rights of women and all gender-oppressed people”—and that they drew inspiration from “recent courageous actions like the ‘Bodega strike’ led by Yemeni immigrant store owners in New York City and the Day Without Immigrants across the U.S.” They say the day was meant to show women’s economic and political strength and to speak out on many different social justice issues, like reproductive rights, LGBTQIA rights, immigrant rights and environmental justice. And many of these actions served as a way for women to speak out against the Trump/Pence government. Read more
Refuse Fascism, International Women’s Day in NYC: March to the Tower! Drive Them From Power!
Refuse Fascism co-initiator Sunsara Taylor speaks to hundreds of defiant protesters near Trump Tower in NYC on International Women’s Day.
On March 8, International Women’s Day, Refuse Fascism called on people to go into the streets saying:
Break the Chains! Unleash the FURY of Women! Say NO to All Forms of Female Enslavement! Drive Out the Trump/Pence Regime!
In response, hundreds of people rallied at Columbus Circle in New York City. A dozen or so wore bloody pants and people carried bloody coat hangers, invoking the reality of women who have died from illegal or unsafe abortions. After the rally, people marched towards Trump Tower chanting, “No Pussy Grabbing! No Patriarchy! No Fascist USA!” They intersected in the streets with a contingent on its way to the women’s strike—some of them joined with Refuse Fascism heading for Trump Tower chanting, “March to the Tower! Drive Them From Power!” At one point, the two marches were going down sidewalks on both sides of the street, creating a wild scene of resistance. Read more
Around the World: International Women’s Day—in the Streets for Equality and Against Anti-Women Violence
In Buenos Aires, Argentina, tens of thousands were part of the Ni Una Menos (“Not one less,” meaning not one more woman killed by violence at the hands of men). (Photo: AP)
Across the world on March 8, women as well as men were out in the streets to mark International Women’s Day. A particular target of many of the protests was demanding an end to rape, murder, and other forms of violence against women. Some of the actions were part of a Global Women’s Strike, demanding equality for women at work in other areas of life and society.
As the speech from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, for this year’s International Women’s Day said, “International Women’s Day could not be more important and urgent than it is this year. We gather at a time when all across the globe, women are being violated, brutalized, humiliated, kidnapped and beaten, bought and sold into actual sexual slavery, objectified and humiliated in pornography, denied control over their own lives and reproduction, forced to have children against their will or to risk their lives and even die to avoid it... Women are raped, stalked, viciously exploited in the factories and fields, imprisoned in veils and harassed on the streets, terrorized, shamed, taught to submit and treated as less than human. Everywhere.” Read more
It's quite common both here and in the u.s., to hear people of either liberal or conservative persuasions to talk about " supporting the troops ", even if they don't support the particular war of conquest they are currently engaged in. This is complete horseshit. Read this fucking thing.....
On This March 8 When the Future of Women Is Being Fought Out All Over the World... Break the Chains! Unleash the Fury of Women as a Mighty Force for Revolution!
In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse To Accept A Fascist America
March 13, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Read these selections from BA Speaks: REVOLUTION — NOTHING LESS! Bob Avakian Live (film of a talk given in 2012):
The following is the text of a speech that was prepared by the Revolutionary Communist Party and given at International Women’s Day celebrations around the country this past weekend.
Welcome everyone to this celebration and gathering for International Women’s Day. And welcome to the screening and discussion of clips from Bob Avakian’s historic speech REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! This is a real treat because no one has gone as deeply as he has into the roots of women’s oppression and how we can end this oppression that binds half of humanity once and for all as a key part of making revolution to end all exploitation and oppression everywhere. If this were all he had done, this would be a huge contribution; but BA has actually taken the science of revolution, of human emancipation and communism, to a new level... he has made this method available to all... he has developed a Constitution for a new society, the New Socialist Republic in North America... and he has developed a strategy for how people could fight for and actually win, when millions are ready to fight and the time is right, an all-out revolution with a real chance of winning. And he has done this from the standpoint of making revolution all around the globe, from the interests of the seven billion...
And in addition to all that, BA leads the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA – he’s fought to keep it on the revolutionary road and right now that party is preparing the ground to make a real revolution in the belly of this beast at the soonest possible time and, as a crucial immediate part of that, joining with others to drive out the Trump-Pence regime.
So, for everyone who is perhaps engaging BA for the first time today, this should be just the beginning of going deeper into his work—and for everyone else, the same.
Before we dive into the film clips, I want to speak a little bit about the moment we are in.
International Women’s Day could not be more important and urgent than it is this year. We gather at a time when all across the globe, women are being violated, brutalized, humiliated, kidnapped, and beaten, bought and sold into sexual slavery, objectified and humiliated in pornography, denied control over their own lives and reproduction, forced to have children against their will or to risk their lives and even die to avoid it... Women are raped, stalked, viciously exploited in the factories and fields, imprisoned in veils and harassed on the street, terrorized, shamed, taught to submit, and treated as less than human. Everywhere.
Think about this: Just this past week the New York Times ran a headline exposing a “secret” Facebook group of Marines and ex-Marines that shared naked and sexually compromising pictures of female soldiers—pictures that vengeful boyfriends had leaked, pictures they had taken surreptitiously while women were changing or going to the bathroom, or pictures they had stolen. And then they traded crude comments about these women, threatening and “joking” about rape and sexual violence against these women, demeaning them for their bodies, insulting their humanity. Now, when you hear the word “secret” in the headline, you think this might have been a few Marines who ran this site... or maybe a few hundred... but no, it was 30,000 Marines. It wasn’t a “secret”—it was a widespread alliance of male supremacy and predation, tens of thousands of Marines who took part in this, who reveled in it, who bonded over it—who openly conspired together to degrade and humiliate the females they work and fight alongside. Men who have been conditioned to see these women they work and live among not as full human beings, but as sex objects to be threatened and dehumanized for sport and for bonding. This goes along with the epidemic levels of rape, sexual assault, and rampant harassment and violence against women in the military. And this is not just the military—armies are a concentration of the kind of society and the kind of relations they are fighting to protect and extend. The oppression and degradation of women, treating women like sex objects or punching bags, like breeders of children or servants of men, is a cornerstone of U.S. society—just as it is a cornerstone of all societies based on exploitation and oppression.
Or, think about this: Cervical cancer—a cancer which by its very nature only affects women—is completely preventable, but it takes the lives of a quarter of a million women worldwide every year, 4,000 women right here in the U.S.—a hugely disproportionate number of them Black women. Revolution newspaper, www.revcom.us, got into why this is, in an article last week—you should read the whole thing. Actually, you should read revcom.us every day. The article gets into the two big things that stand in the way of stopping these needless deaths of women. First, there is the “bottom line.” Like everything under capitalism, medicine is an industry. People get health care if some capitalist can make a profit—otherwise, they are left to suffer and die. Black women are doubly oppressed and disproportionately in extreme poverty, so they die needlessly in disproportionate numbers. But then there is the other part. For years, Christian fascists like those grouped around Trump have fought against the vaccine that could prevent this deadly cancer. Why? Because the main strains of cervical cancer come from sexually transmitted infections, and these woman-haters don’t want to send the message that it’s OK for women to have non-marital sex. Women, in their view, must be virgins until marriage and then breeders for their husbands. They are so opposed to women controlling their own sexuality that they have absolutely no problem punishing these women with death if they choose to have sex.
But that is not all. We gather at a time when, despite all the claims of progress and equality—and even despite the very real and heroic struggle of women to break out of many traditional forms of enslavement and oppression—all around the world, the chains of women’s oppression are being tightened, patriarchy is being violently reasserted and intensified, and women are being slammed even further backwards. Mass and repeated rape as a weapon of war. Trafficking of millions of women and young girls as sexual slaves. Shrouding women in burqas and veils and burning them with acid if they don’t submit. Sexually harassing women in the workplaces, raping them in the prisons and detention centers. Beating them in their homes—from one corner of the globe to the other.
Right here in the U.S., Donald Trump—a man who boasted about sexually assaulting women in the most crude and degrading terms, a man who has unapologetically shamed women, calling them “fat pigs” and “slobs” and “dogs,” a man who oozes arrogant contempt and hatred for women—has become president. He is not only enshrining this open, crude degradation and hatred of women as normal and acceptable from the highest office of the land, he is championing a cruel revenge against women—whipping up and giving vent to the frustration that many men have felt about having to hold back their desire to degrade and hold women down after it got challenged for a time by women rising up. Trump is ushering this back with a vengeance. And all the while, he is holding hands with that Christian fascist theocrat Mike Pence—a man who has spent decades shaming women, fighting to criminalize abortion even in cases of rape and incest, and even when the woman’s life is in danger, and who has also fought to take away birth control from women, to legalize discrimination against LGBTQ people, and to enforce Old Testament Biblical literalism as the law of the land.
One of their first acts was to sign the Global Gag Rule, which denies funding to any agency around the world that provides health care or any other services if they even so much as mention to women where they might go to find a legal, safe abortion. In other words, they are blackmailing health agencies around the world—telling them you cannot provide Ebola care or other health care if you don’t become part of denying women access to safe abortions. This immediately sentenced thousands of women to death—because when women cannot access safe, legal abortions, they die from illegal back-alley abortions. Some 70,000 women die every year around the world from lack of safe abortions. But that is not all: Millions of women have their lives foreclosed by being forced to have children against their will; they are driven into poverty or trapped in abusive relationships, or forced to drop out of school, or go to desperate measures to survive and feed their children. This has already been done by these woman-haters in the White House, and they are only getting started. They have the full intent to stamp out abortion and birth control for women altogether, including here. And let’s be very clear—this is NOT about the so-called life of the fetus, this is about controlling and enslaving women. Fetuses are not babies. Abortion is not murder. Women are not incubators. Women are full human beings.
Or look what they are doing to women who are driven in desperation to flee their countries and make the dangerous and degrading trip across the border into this country. Not only has Trump whipped up all this vicious anti-immigrant hatred... not only has he already unleashed the state to kick down doors and snatch immigrants away from their children and families... Trump is openly threatening to charge women who are detained near the border with their children with the crime of “human trafficking”! To take their children from them, detain the children and women separately—and then to charge these women with human trafficking—as if they, who are risking everything to help their children escape desperate conditions, are the criminals and traffickers! This is tantamount to the great crime of the U.S. in turning away Jewish refugees in the 1930s from Nazi Germany, but it’s worse—it’s as if they had also charged these women with crimes! All this from a boastful sexual predator!
These two men—Trump and Pence—concentrate not only the vile hatred and misogyny that stalks women all over the world, but also the ugly revenge and punishment that is being unleashed against the ways that women have risen up against and broken out of many of the traditional forms of oppression they have faced—and as a means for seeking to hold society together in a reactionary way precisely in a time when their system is going through major challenges and big changes. This violent reassertion of patriarchy is part of an all-around fascist remaking of society they are hammering into place—with their violent attacks on immigrants and Muslims, their threats against the press, their undermining of the separation of powers, their denial of climate change and frontal assault on science altogether, and much more.
It would be very difficult to overstate the profound danger this represents not only to women everywhere, but to all of humanity. This regime must not be allowed to consolidate its fascist agenda; it must be driven from power. So, we gather at a time of great and growing danger.
But this is not the only thing going on. We also live in a time of profound stirrings of resistance and outrage. It is very important that the day after Trump’s inauguration, millions of women and men poured into the streets and clogged up every major city and many small towns across this country—as well as many around the world. They could not sit home and stomach all this—they had to be among others, make their voices and outrage heard and felt. This has been followed by other very important forms of resistance—against the Muslim ban when people flooded to the airports, against the roundups of immigrants as Latino immigrants and others went on strike and took to the streets, among students rising up against fascists on their campuses and in other ways. And, just a few days ago, women across the country and around the world once again rose up—taking off work, going into the streets, wearing red, giving voice to their righteous outrage. This is extremely important—and it must be built upon, it must get even broader and more determined, and it must spread. At the same time, it must get increasingly linked up with the fight to drive this fascist regime from power—and growing numbers within it need to increasingly be linking this to the fight to make an actual revolution, to dig up the roots of this oppression by overthrowing the system that requires and reinforces this oppression, by putting an end to all exploitation and oppression and the very division of society into classes, into masters and slaves, oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited.
Most of all: We gather at a time when the future of women—half of humanity—is being fiercely battled out. And this fight is completely bound up with the fight for the future of all of humanity. As Bob Avakian put it several decades ago, but which continues to be true and even sharper today:
The whole question of the position and role of women in society is more and more acutely posing itself in today’s extreme circumstances... It is not conceivable that all this will find any resolution other than in the most radical terms... The question yet to be determined is: will it be a radical reactionary or a radical revolutionary resolution; will it mean the reinforcing of the chains of enslavement or the shattering of the most decisive links in those chains and the opening up of the possibility of realizing the complete elimination of all forms of such enslavement?
The answer to this question—of whether this struggle over the role of women will be resolved in the most revolutionary and liberating of ways, or whether it will be resolved through the forceful reassertion and cementing into place of even more cruel and oppressive enslavement—is not yet determined. What we do has a lot to do with what the answer will be. And, what we understand is going to shape what we do.
