Permalink: https://revcom.us/a/681/fascists-storm-capital-we-cannot-sit-by-en.html
January 6, 2021 | revcom.us
Tens of thousands of fascists, many of them armed, succeeded in stopping the final step of the official reporting and certification of Joe Biden’s clear-cut victory in the presidential election. They overcame police, took over the halls of Congress, vandalized offices, and forcibly drove the members of Congress out to take shelter.
This was nothing short of a coup attempt, called for by Trump, and backed up by mob violence.
The crowd had been riled up by one of Trump’s hour-long recitations of his groundless “grievances.” He called on the crowd to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue and “be strong”—essentially a call to intimidate the “weak” Republicans who were not going along with his attempted coup—following up on Giuliani’s call for “trial by combat.” Hours into the violence, Trump refused to call his shock troops off, asking them only to “remain peaceful”—when they were not remotely peaceful in the first place; only under great pressure did he finally call on people to go home, hours after the paroxysm of reactionary violence.
There can be no more waiting. The need for the “decent people” to make clear their determination to stop this fascist danger has been overdue for years, and longer. Today is the payment for the passivity in the face of Charlottesville, of refugee children ripped from their parents and abandoned in cages, of the violent attacks on and unanswered defamation of the movement for Black lives.
So let’s learn that lesson. Now must be the time—nonviolently, in massive numbers—but now to stand up. To wait longer, to hold back amounts to capitulation. Even if these fascists are dispersed—and that is far from certain—there must be a powerful show of revulsion at what these people stand for and where they are hell-bent on taking this country… and the world.
Nobody can deny or should want to deny the shock and foreboding of seeing the rabid dogs of fascism rampage through the streets of DC.
The danger is NOW.
The time to stand up for humanity is NOW.