Letter from a Chicago Correspondent:
First Portland… Now Trump Sending Federal Pigs into Chicago

| revcom.us

Permalink: https://revcom.us/a/657/first-portland-now-trump-threatens-chicago-en.html

As the revcom.us article Trump Gestapo Violently Assaults, Snatches Portland Protestors—Not “Theater” vividly showed, the sending of federal forces to Portland is “part of deadly serious, all round fascist escalation.” Trump sent in these militarized police forces to Portland in defiance of both the local mayor and the state governor. Trump is attempting to exert his authority over these Democratic local authorities and insisting on even more brutal, openly fascistic means of repression. It is a threat to protesters in other cities and it is establishing a “model” for wielding a national gestapo force which can be deployed in other cities on Trump’s command.

Today, Monday, July 20, in comments at the White House, Trump repeated the threats: “I’m going to do something, that I can tell you, because we’re not going to leave New York and Chicago and Philadelphia, Detroit and Baltimore, and all of these—Oakland is a mess. We’re not going to let this happen in our country, all run by liberal Democrats.”

“We’re going to have more federal law enforcement, that I can tell you,” Trump said. “In Portland, they’ve done a fantastic job. They’ve been there three days and they really have done a fantastic job in a very short period of time, no problem.”

The Chicago Tribune reported it had learned that the “U.S. Department of Homeland Security, for example, is crafting plans to deploy about 150 federal agents to the city this week.” (Chicago Tribune, 07/20/20)

Conveniently, the new head of the FOP (Fraternal Fascist Order of Police) in Chicago wrote an open letter to Trump asking for federal help, saying the mayor “has proved to be a complete failure who is either unwilling or unable to maintain law and order here.” He also bragged about how he is a Trump supporter.

What will this mean? In late 2019, Trump spoke to the International Association of Police Chiefs and recounted his story of the Chicago motorcycle cop who told Trump that he could solve the shootings going on among the masses in one day because “we know the names of all the bad guys.” Think about the implications, sweeping up of people because pigs think they are “bad guys” and in a context where cops are trained to think ALL Black and Latinos are “bad guys.” So this would almost certainly mean widespread repression unleashed on oppressed neighborhoods. Trump has made the issue of youth tragically killing each other in Chicago a signature issue of his fascist program, saying things like he can “solve the problem in one day.”

Now, the repression is already extremely heavy in these neighborhoods, but if you think this will just be more of the same you’re mistaken. To draw an analogy, India has for decades viciously repressed the people of the area of Kashmir, with murder, torture, and false imprisonment. But after he was re-elected, the fascist Indian Prime Minister Modi took this to another level. Overnight and without warning, Modi cut off all cell phone and internet communication in Kashmir, closed all the schools, and called a curfew, and has kept it that way for months, occupying the area with a massive number of troops. That is how fascists like Modi—and his backer Trump—do it when they “solve the problem in one day.” And don’t tell yourself “it can’t happen here.”

The ACLU responded to the news that Trump is sending federal forces to Chicago. “Make no mistake: Trump’s federal troops will not be a constructive force in Chicago,” Colleen Connell, executive director of the group, said in the statement. “As our colleagues have seen in Portland, Trump’s secret forces will terrorize communities, and create chaos. This is not law and order. This is an assault on the people of this country, the specific protections of protest and press in the First Amendment, and the Constitution’s assignment of policing to local authorities—not from a president acting like a despot.” (as reported in the Chicago Tribune)

Like police in other cities, the Chicago police have a long and brutal history right down to today. Just in the immediate past: numerous police shootings of youth in the back as they ran away; an entire secret detention site (Homan Square); the “blue code of silence” that covered up the murder of Laquan McDonald, shot 16 times as he was walking away from cops; “deportations” of youth out of the downtown area, putting them on el trains running non-stop to the south side. As mayor, Lori Lightfoot backed her new police chief’s plan to sweep up youth off the corners and hold them in preventive detention over the extended July 4th weekend.

Trump berates Lightfoot and Governor Pritzker for not coming down hard enough. Trump’s conflict with Lightfoot is not over whether to embark on major police repression but a) whether the society should be openly organized on a white supremacist basis or whether there should be a “multicultural” ethos which gives some recognition to oppressed nationalities (and other “minority” groups) and even “diversifies” ruling-class institutions and structures, while preserving the essential content of white supremacist and male supremacist relations that are indispensable to the system’s functioning; and b) whether to take this to a full-out leap to fascism, where the masses of people have absolutely no rights whatsoever and where Black, Latino, Native American, and other oppressed nationalities are targeted for a “fast” genocide.

The Revolution Club Chicago has been urgently out among the youth in these communities calling on them that they are capable of something much greater than the negative and tragic conflicts – with each other – they are forced into, and they are caught up in … fighting to win them to get with the revolution that can actually overthrow the system of capitalism that requires brutal murdering police and uproot the conditions of savage inequality that keeps millions suffering so needlessly here as well as the billions around the world. (See “Revolution Club in Chicago Marches to Challenge the Violence Among the People: ‘Get Out of This Madness & Get Into Revolution’”) In this situation, “Anything But the Truth: Bob Avakian Exposes Lies, Distortions, Distractions and Evasions About the Murderous Oppression of Black People” needs to get out far and wide.

If Trump is able to consolidate his grip through these moves and make a big leap to fascism—and again, remember what happened with Modi in India—this will be immeasurably and qualitatively worse, for the lives of millions of people right now and for the prospects of revolution itself.

From:

ANYTHING BUT THE TRUTH
Bob Avakian Exposes Lies, Distortions, Distractions and Evasions About the Murderous Oppression of Black People

For those—whether outright racists or people who have allowed themselves to take up the thinking of racists—who try to dismiss outrage about police murder of Black people by talking about how more Black people are killed by other Black people than by anyone else (including police): As I have emphasized in a number of talks and writings, this, too, is caused by this system—it is the system “working on” people, confining masses of Black people in conditions of deprivation, degradation and hopelessness, and continually pumping at them the “dog eat dog” mentality that fuels this cut-throat system of exploitation and oppression, from top to bottom.

That Black people, who are already so viciously oppressed and suffering so terribly, are killing each other in such great numbers is something that should make any decent person heartsick—and it should drive them to seek the way to put an end to this by getting to the deeper causes of this and moving to change all that. If those people who are constantly citing statistics about “Black-on-Black crime” really wanted to do something meaningful about the fact that Black people, and especially the youth, are killing each other in tragically high numbers, they would join with those of us who are working to win these youth to the revolution that can bring down this system which is the fundamental cause of this, and bring into being a system which would uproot the conditions and transform the ways of thinking that give rise to this.

Read the whole article here.

Niko with Revolution Club Chicago helping lead the “No Secret Police Arresting Protestors” March! #OutNow #RevolutionNothingLess #Fuck12 #PortlandProtest #ChicagoProtests pic.twitter.com/dRKCecn652

— Revolution Club Chicago (@revclubchi) July 20, 2020

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