The hate mail will really increase after this one. BAMN, in my opinion from my experience as a Police Investigator, at a minimum the leaders should be tried for inciting violence. I think a legal case could be made for Sedition. What you will see below are words from them. From their website and from videos. Make your own decisions.
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BAMN Pledge to Become a Leader of the New, Independent, Integrated, Youth-Led, Civil Rights/Immigrant Rights Movement
If Yiannopoulos is able to go forward with his speech, Chancellor Dirks and his administration will be directly responsible for aiding and allowing this neo-fascist to come and endanger students at UCB, and all the fallout that takes place as a result. It is clearly dangerous for Dirks to be allowed to make the decisions for UCB campus. There is no question that he should leave his post immediately. Presidents of DePaul University, University of Missouri President and Chancellor, Claremont McKenna Dean of Students, Ithaca College President, State University were all forced to resign by anti-racist struggles on their campuses that included student mobilizations to shut down Milo.
The Milo Yiannopoulos tour represents an imminent, physical threat to the students and faculty of UCB. By hosting the event, the UCB administration would be giving direct license to the incitement of bigotry and terror across the campus. Hate speech is not free speech—a primary aim of demagogues like Yiannopoulos is to repress and silence the speech of minorities and women, to eradicate from all social life everything that Yiannopoulos labels as “political correctness.” His aim is to create a hostile climate in which free speech becomes impossible, in which the rights and obligations of civil discourse can no longer be upheld because civil discourse itself will cease to exist.
UCB should follow the example of other campuses that have canceled Milo’s tour engagements: NYU, University of Miami, Florida Atlantic University, Villanova University, and the University of Maryland. The alternative is the prospect of clashes between white and minority students, anti-fascist and fascist sympathizers as occurred at places like UC David, University of Washington, DePaul University, the UC Irvine, Rutgers University and others. Yiannopoulos incited, escalated, and promoted the confrontations, as his audiences chanted “grab her by the pussy!” and other hate speech. This is not an event that any college campus should condone—it threatens the safety and well-being of the students and faculty, and threatens the academic mission to promote learning and leadership. The confrontations will not be confined to the time and place of the event; hate crimes will escalate, and innocent people will suffer verbal or physical abuses. This is the established pattern of the Milo Yiannopoulos tour—that hateful pattern must be broken at UCB.
The faculty of Berkeley have already rightly demanded that Milo be kept off the campus. The faculty understands that this is not a question of abstract free speech; it is a question of the right of immigrant, minority, and women students to attend Berkeley free to live and learn in a safe environment. Dirks’ failure to recognize that warrants the faculty to call for his immediate removal now, and not wait until his scheduled departure in June. Students and the Bay Area community must also stand up against the proliferation of hate and the prospect of a lynch-mob, race-riot mentality spreading across campus. The instigator of this phenomenon must be stopped. Milo Yiannopoulos intends to speak at Pauley Ballroom in the MLK Student Union Building at UCB (corner of Telegraph and Bancroft) at 8pm. This event must not go forward on this campus. UCB prides itself as a diverse, international community, with students of many nationalities, ethnicities, religions, and cultures. We must defend the very best of that tradition now, against the threat that Yiannopoulos or other demagogues may seize upon the current political climate of the Trump presidency to build a fascist youth movement in America. The threat is real. Our stand must be clear: no white supremacist neo-fascists at UCB.
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The warning signs of an international emergency are everywhere—the flashing lights and blaring sirens of a political crisis can be seen and heard around the world. On January 20, 2017, the United States government will confer executive power to Donald Trump, whose ascension to the Presidency has been characterized primarily by the growth of a neo-fascist, anti-immigrant movement in both the United States and Europe. The entire global outlook is becoming overshadowed by desperate questions about the reality and the immediacy of Trump’s program, with his openly brandished threats of human catastrophe: the persecution of millions of immigrants and Muslims, the rise of an authoritarian police state, and the advent of nuclear war.
In America today, it is increasingly evident that the core principles of the nation, “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” are now in serious danger. The defense of those principles will require defeating Trump’s impending attacks, and removing the tyrant from power. Essential to that defense is the building of a new immigrant rights and civil rights movement, a movement that is fighting to win by any means necessary. That movement will carry an immense responsibility that no other leadership in America is capable of fulfilling: “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The other official leaderships, who can barely recover from their own bewilderment, are attempting (in vain) to calm the fears of the public. Some have conjectured that Trump’s hateful bombast is nothing more than idle rhetoric, and have promised the emergence of a more “Presidential,” less demagogic version of Trump. But with each passing day, the bombast becomes more of a reality, while the wishful promises of a kinder, gentler Trump prove to be the emptiest rhetoric of all. Other leaders have sought to reassure the public by arguing that Trump cannot possibly accomplish the terrible things he has threatened, that Trump does not have the power to overturn the various checks and balances of American democracy. But the argument of Trump’s futility only raises a much more important and decisive question: who is going to stop him.
That question has become the most urgent crisis in modern history.
Across the United States and around the world, millions of people are mobilizing to protest the Trump inauguration. Among the protesters will be immigrants fighting for their freedom, oppressed people fighting for equality, and American citizens fighting for the democratic principle that their own votes—which defeated Trump by a substantial electoral majority—should carry the real power to decide the future of their nation. These millions of conscientious individuals belong, in large part, to a young and growing generation that is majority non-white and has an international character; they are the people who are ultimately at the very center of the struggle for political power. Their very existence is both the source of the highest hopes for progress towards freedom and equality, as well as the source of the deepest fears of the neo-fascist, reactionary movements in America and Europe. They are both the beacon for a bright, new world, as well as the “spectre” that is haunting the old world—they are everything, but they are treated as nothing.
The future of democracy and human culture, and perhaps even the future existence of human kind, now depends on the leadership of the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
The immigration crisis emerged as the product of U.S./European exploits in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. This organized profiteering, subsidized by massive finance capital and often enforced by military intervention, created unprecedented levels of unemployment, political turmoil, and violence in the exploited nations. Millions of people fled their homes, many enduring life-threatening journeys, ultimately to seek refuge in the very nations that had ravaged their homelands. The richer nations, having succeeded in their project of economic “globalization,” also unintentionally succeeded in globalizing their own national populations.
Now, these millions of immigrants are caught in a deadly vice, trapped between a richer and a poorer nation, and unable to find freedom anywhere. And as the global economy experiences contraction, the vice tightens as well.
Across Europe (whose economies suffered far worse after 2007 than the United States), the trend of immigrant-bashing hysteria has redrawn the political map. In Britain, the reactionary “Brexit” referendum policy—asserting that the nation would rather leave the European Union than allow any influx of immigrants—continues to be a dramatic performance of political absurdity. Russia’s regime under Putin is now the model of neo-fascist government, and the Russian state has maintained special organizations of repression that mimic the Hitler Youth. France’s leading fascist, Marine Le Pen, is poised to make electoral gains there, and recently visited Trump Tower. Incidentally, the three largest nuclear arsenals in the world are controlled by Russia, the United States, and France, respectively.
The rise to power of Donald Trump can be credited largely to his demagogic campaign of scapegoating immigrants for America’s economic problems—problems that immigrants did not create, and problems that the persecution of immigrants cannot solve. On the contrary, immigration has been a vital source of economic growth. But in spite of the fallacy of anti-immigrant dogma, Trump and his allies genuinely fear the growing minority populations in the U.S. and Europe as a threat to white-majority power. America’s first majority-minority generation was born in 2011. To Trump and other right-wing politicians, this demographic shift has created a political crisis for their ability to win elections and enforce reactionary policies.
Just months prior to Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, political commentators simply presumed that Trump would lose in a landslide—prominent journalists prematurely declared the death of the Republican Party due to Trump’s unwillingness to appeal to Latino voters. Trump himself did not expect to win, as he repeatedly complained that the election would be rigged against him. The “rigging,” from Trump’s standpoint, consisted of the votes of racial minorities. Trump’s program is therefore an expression of political desperation. There is no place for Trump or his politics in a majority-minority America. His power clings precariously upon his ability to persecute immigrants and to disenfranchise minority communities.
That precarious claim to power is precisely what we must attack with all of our strength.
The DACA program has offered protection to the many Latino youth who were brought to America as small children, have grown up as Americans, and whose only home is in America. The Latino youth in DACA have broken no laws—a child cannot be held responsible for the decision of their parents to cross the border—but they are now one of the most vulnerable groups of American immigrants simply because they gave their information to the government and trusted President Obama to protect them. As the DACA program is one of Obama’s executive orders, it is now on the chopping block of programs that Trump proposed to end immediately upon taking office.
It is imperative to organize effective defense for the people who are targets of Trump’s attacks. Entire city and state governments must refuse to cooperate, in any way, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Community defense groups must organize to prevent capture and deportation. The movement must grow strong enough to shut down detention centers (immigrant concentration camps). And the federal immigration courts must not be permitted to continue their current function as an automatic rubber stamp for deportation.
We cannot abide the weakness of the liberal politicians who propose to “challenge, but not obstruct” the agenda of President Trump. It is a completely worthless policy that benefits no one other than the cowardly politician, who wants to be regarded as a friend of the people while avoiding any conflict with the Trump regime. One could imagine opening a fallout shelter many years from now and finding the last words of such a politician: “For the record, I did not agree with the destruction of the world, but I did not find it appropriate to obstruct President Trump.”
But the entire resistance to the Trump regime must be based on the policy of “obstruction” in order to prevent the harm that Trump seeks to implement. The only serious policy for resistance is no “business as usual” until Trump is defeated. A new immigrant rights and civil rights movement must build up its power to conduct massive demonstrations, strikes, and walkouts—actions on a large enough scale to shut down entire cities, industries, and functions of government. We cannot afford to chain ourselves to the feeble electoral tactics of the liberals, tactics that were unable to defeat Trump in 2016 and will be even less viable against a Trump regime that has consolidated its power in government. Without a successful movement to drive Trump out of power, it remains an open question whether there will be any resemblance of democracy in the government four years from now.
Our movement is not responsible for holding up a divided house—our task is to build the struggle for freedom, equality, and democracy as the only solid foundation for our future. And to put things another way: this house has a big wall that needs to be knocked down—by any means necessary.
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Videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2dd1YoDULg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh8xO5xZvUU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EItm6EkjDxc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIiT0qWhKTA
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BAMN Pledge to Become a Leader of the New, Independent, Integrated, Youth-Led, Civil Rights/Immigrant Rights Movement
1. I pledge to lead mass actions and build the new integrated, independent youth-led Civil Rights/Immigrant Rights Movement. I will fight to save Dr. King’s Dream for America because it is my dream as well. The new student and youth-led movements in California and elsewhere are in the forefront of leading the struggles to win immigrant rights, to stop the attacks on public education from Pre-K-college and to restore affirmative action programs so that Latina/o, black, Native American and other underrepresented minority students have an equal opportunity to attend this state’s and this nation’s best public universities. To win, our new movements need a core of determined, optimistic young leaders who are prepared to lead in action and to learn from both their own experiences in struggle and from America’s two greatest and most successful leaders of militant mass movements of the oppressed, Frederick Douglass and Dr. Martin Luther King.
2. I pledge to accept the challenge of becoming my generation’s voice of freedom. I know this requires always speaking for and to the oppressed, telling the truth about racism and inequality and expressing both the anger and the aspirations of our communities. I reject the popular, wrong, and dominant ideology of most of those who claim to support progressive reforms, that the only people who have the power to make and change history are the rich and powerful. Accepting this false assumption places the oppressed in the dead-end position of having no alternatives other than making moral appeals to the rich and powerful or trying to find clever arguments to convince them that granting our demands will make it easier for them to exploit us. Those who are in power and currently decide the social, economic and political policies of our nation are completely aware that their determination to prioritize profits over people causes the vast majority of the world’s people to live in squalor and in despair. Changing the actions/attitudes of the rich and powerful and their political representatives requires asserting through mass action the superior power and will of the masses. This is the only road to victory.
3. I pledge to be a youth leader of mass actions led by the youth themselves. I do not fear the anger, boldness or power of youth in struggle. To those who criticize the legitimacy of our walkouts or other youth-led mass actions by saying “most of the students/youth cannot even say what they are fighting for”, I say rest assured we are always fighting for our dignity, equality, respect and justice. We understand that actions speak louder than words. We judge leaders by what they do and not their ability to make great speeches which they never deliver on. Some of our greatest leaders are those who lead in action and fight to win.
4. I pledge to be a great leader by always being proud of who I am and by just being myself. I am a role model for others when I am not ashamed to be myself. I cannot stand on the truth if I am trying to act like the people in power who oppress us and assign us to second-class status.
In American history, the only way we have ever secured progress, new rights and greater prosperity for the great majority of people of all races living here and some of the oppressed living in other nations, is by standing up and fighting against racism, including the ideology of black and brown inferiority. Our movement must consciously counter the false promises and racist theories put forward by those in power that an alliance between the white “haves and have-nots” to defend white privilege offers a way out of poverty and despair for the white masses.
We cannot counter this wrong theory and our movement will achieve nothing if we accept the premise of both left and right populists that by silencing any discussion on race or racism and simply fighting for more jobs or lower tuition we can win gains for everyone. In the nineteen thirties the programs created by the New Deal Populists actually widened the gap in wealth and social opportunities between the white and black, Latina/o and other poor, working class, and middle class communities. This in turn reinforced racist stereotypes. It took the Civil Rights Movement led by Dr. King fighting for black equality and initially, despite its integrationist stance, consisting almost exclusively of only black people to remove the badge of inferiority from all those who were not white and to substantially close the income and opportunity gap between rich and poor.
Young Latina/o, black, Asian, Arab, Native American, undocumented immigrant, LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender) and other oppressed youth standing up and demanding equality and justice must follow Dr. King’s example and adopt his attitude towards racism. If we fight intransigently for our equality and dignity, even if our struggles are initially only supported by a tiny minority of white people and are vehemently decried by the establishment leaders from our own communities, we will win.
As Dr. King repeatedly remarked that it was only when black college students, many from more privileged backgrounds, came out of their Brooks Brother suits (expensive, designer “dressed-for-success” attire), stopped acting like exaggerated white people, embraced their communities, put principles before career and built mass militant struggles that they became leaders of the whole nation. Masses of white youth became radicalized and inspired to fight because of the determination and success of the old civil rights movement. Dr. King’s fight to defeat the old Jim Crow gave birth to the student led anti-war movement and the women’s, the Latina/Chicana/o, LGBT and environmental movements. Our struggle to defeat the new Jim Crow can greatly strengthen and revitalize those movements.
If we lead others will follow. If we hesitate because we lack the support of the majority of white people or because we follow the worthless advice of the burned out, scared, cynical or demoralized establishment leaders of the civil rights, immigrant rights and/or union movements, we will not only fail our own communities but we will also fail the majority of poor, working class and middle class white communities whose fight for dignity, equality, justice and prosperity we unabashedly champion.
5. I pledge to work collectively with the other young leaders of the new movements, struggling to overcome the ignorance, prejudice, and bigotry that living in a society so divided by race and distorted by the racism, sexism and anti-LGBT bigotry imbues in everyone. I understand that being a leader requires sacrifice, dedication, strength and the courage to grow and change. I know that I must learn to think critically and question the views of anyone no matter how well meaning they might seem, that urge me to put off fighting until a later time in my life (until I graduate from High School, College, Graduate School, etc…). I cannot win a bright, happy or hope filled future for myself by fighting only for my own prosperity or immediate self-interest. I know my future is bound up with our shared future.
6. I pledge to the millions of oppressed people around the world, most of whom I will never know but all of whom I regard as my brothers and sisters that I will fight for freedom, equality and the right of all of us to democratically decide the future of each of our own nations.
Winning freedom and justice for all in America is not possible so long as hundreds of millions of other people throughout the world live in desperate poverty, battle small and large man-made disasters on a continuous and regular basis and are forced to accept the dictates of wealthier foreign powers. To win, our movement must be an international movement of the oppressed. The issues of racism, immigration, the right of all to real direct democratic control of our governments and of what social forces and power will determine the policies of our nations are the questions of the day everywhere.
And so to all those who are oppressed, I say as a proud young leader of the growing new, integrated, independent, youth-led civil rights/immigrant rights movement: Your blood is my blood. Your enemy is my enemy. Your struggle for freedom is my struggle for freedom. Your dreams and hopes echo in my heart and mind. The borders that separate us will not divide us. We will win as one. We have the power to make this world into the world we want to live in. We can, if we act, create a new society in which the needs of humanity come before the enrichment of a few and for the first time in human history, human beings can finally think, love and socialize as equals while protecting and realizing the great potential of both human beings and all that inhabit this earth.
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TRUMP MUST GO by any means necessary: No “business as usual” until Trump is defeated
Español despúes Ann Arbor flyer ~ Detroit flyer ~ Los Angeles flyer (English, Español) ~ Oakland flyer (English, Español) TRUMP MUST GO BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY No “business as usual” until Trump is defeated WALKOUT * STRIKE * MARCH *SHUT DOWN MILO YIANNOPOULOS
No White Supremacist Neo-Fascists at UC Berkeley
Wednesday, Feb. 1 Pauley Ballroom in the MLK Student Union at UC Berkeley
(Telegraph and Bancroft, 10 min. walk from downtown Berkeley BART)
Arrive early at 5pm (Milo intends to speak at 8 pm)
***Wear a white t-shirt and blue jeans to show solidarity and ensure safety for protesters on our side.***
The Berkeley College Republicans and UC Berkeley plan to host an event by Milo Yiannopoulos, a racist, misogynistic demagogue whose speaking tour, the “Dangerous Faggot Tour,” has incited a rash of hate crimes and physical confrontations at numerous universities, and even the shooting of an anti-fascist protester by a Trump supporter at the University of Washington. Protesters at many campuses in the U.S. have cancelled his engagements. Yiannopoulos notoriously riles up a lynch-mob mentality in his audiences, promoting violence, rape, harassment, and repression against minorities, women, and immigrants. His “speeches” are a bombast of racial and sexual slurs, provocations, and curse-laden threats. His various YouTube videos are a catalogue of hate and bigotry. Yiannopoulos is not a stand-up comedian. He is a twisted psychopath and defender of rape who claims that all women who charge men with rape are liars. Now an editor for Breitbart, his career and infamy began through his internet harassment campaign against women and led to his prominence as an “alt-right” personality and news editor who calls Donald Trump “Daddy.” Steve Bannon, white supremacist and Milo’s other mentor, is likely driving this neo-fascist youth touring effort.If Yiannopoulos is able to go forward with his speech, Chancellor Dirks and his administration will be directly responsible for aiding and allowing this neo-fascist to come and endanger students at UCB, and all the fallout that takes place as a result. It is clearly dangerous for Dirks to be allowed to make the decisions for UCB campus. There is no question that he should leave his post immediately. Presidents of DePaul University, University of Missouri President and Chancellor, Claremont McKenna Dean of Students, Ithaca College President, State University were all forced to resign by anti-racist struggles on their campuses that included student mobilizations to shut down Milo.
The Milo Yiannopoulos tour represents an imminent, physical threat to the students and faculty of UCB. By hosting the event, the UCB administration would be giving direct license to the incitement of bigotry and terror across the campus. Hate speech is not free speech—a primary aim of demagogues like Yiannopoulos is to repress and silence the speech of minorities and women, to eradicate from all social life everything that Yiannopoulos labels as “political correctness.” His aim is to create a hostile climate in which free speech becomes impossible, in which the rights and obligations of civil discourse can no longer be upheld because civil discourse itself will cease to exist.
UCB should follow the example of other campuses that have canceled Milo’s tour engagements: NYU, University of Miami, Florida Atlantic University, Villanova University, and the University of Maryland. The alternative is the prospect of clashes between white and minority students, anti-fascist and fascist sympathizers as occurred at places like UC David, University of Washington, DePaul University, the UC Irvine, Rutgers University and others. Yiannopoulos incited, escalated, and promoted the confrontations, as his audiences chanted “grab her by the pussy!” and other hate speech. This is not an event that any college campus should condone—it threatens the safety and well-being of the students and faculty, and threatens the academic mission to promote learning and leadership. The confrontations will not be confined to the time and place of the event; hate crimes will escalate, and innocent people will suffer verbal or physical abuses. This is the established pattern of the Milo Yiannopoulos tour—that hateful pattern must be broken at UCB.
The faculty of Berkeley have already rightly demanded that Milo be kept off the campus. The faculty understands that this is not a question of abstract free speech; it is a question of the right of immigrant, minority, and women students to attend Berkeley free to live and learn in a safe environment. Dirks’ failure to recognize that warrants the faculty to call for his immediate removal now, and not wait until his scheduled departure in June. Students and the Bay Area community must also stand up against the proliferation of hate and the prospect of a lynch-mob, race-riot mentality spreading across campus. The instigator of this phenomenon must be stopped. Milo Yiannopoulos intends to speak at Pauley Ballroom in the MLK Student Union Building at UCB (corner of Telegraph and Bancroft) at 8pm. This event must not go forward on this campus. UCB prides itself as a diverse, international community, with students of many nationalities, ethnicities, religions, and cultures. We must defend the very best of that tradition now, against the threat that Yiannopoulos or other demagogues may seize upon the current political climate of the Trump presidency to build a fascist youth movement in America. The threat is real. Our stand must be clear: no white supremacist neo-fascists at UCB.
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Defend Immigrant Rights
Stop Trump’s Deportations
Defend DACA and DAPA
Open the Borders
Shut Down Immigrant Concentration Camps (Detention Centers)
Defend Sanctuary Cities and Sanctuary Campuses
No Wall, No Militarization of the Border with Mexico
Defend Public Education
Save Roe v. Wade
Stop the Creation of a Trump-led Police State
The people rejected him – Trump must go. The principle of democracy must prevail over the Electoral College
Build a Mass Movement for Democracy and Equality to Stop Trump’s Racist and Misogynist Movement of Hate
Join BAMN. We will not accept the coming to power of a fascist movement in America. No Trump Tyranny!
The warning signs of an international emergency are everywhere—the flashing lights and blaring sirens of a political crisis can be seen and heard around the world. On January 20, 2017, the United States government will confer executive power to Donald Trump, whose ascension to the Presidency has been characterized primarily by the growth of a neo-fascist, anti-immigrant movement in both the United States and Europe. The entire global outlook is becoming overshadowed by desperate questions about the reality and the immediacy of Trump’s program, with his openly brandished threats of human catastrophe: the persecution of millions of immigrants and Muslims, the rise of an authoritarian police state, and the advent of nuclear war.
In America today, it is increasingly evident that the core principles of the nation, “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” are now in serious danger. The defense of those principles will require defeating Trump’s impending attacks, and removing the tyrant from power. Essential to that defense is the building of a new immigrant rights and civil rights movement, a movement that is fighting to win by any means necessary. That movement will carry an immense responsibility that no other leadership in America is capable of fulfilling: “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The other official leaderships, who can barely recover from their own bewilderment, are attempting (in vain) to calm the fears of the public. Some have conjectured that Trump’s hateful bombast is nothing more than idle rhetoric, and have promised the emergence of a more “Presidential,” less demagogic version of Trump. But with each passing day, the bombast becomes more of a reality, while the wishful promises of a kinder, gentler Trump prove to be the emptiest rhetoric of all. Other leaders have sought to reassure the public by arguing that Trump cannot possibly accomplish the terrible things he has threatened, that Trump does not have the power to overturn the various checks and balances of American democracy. But the argument of Trump’s futility only raises a much more important and decisive question: who is going to stop him.
That question has become the most urgent crisis in modern history.
Across the United States and around the world, millions of people are mobilizing to protest the Trump inauguration. Among the protesters will be immigrants fighting for their freedom, oppressed people fighting for equality, and American citizens fighting for the democratic principle that their own votes—which defeated Trump by a substantial electoral majority—should carry the real power to decide the future of their nation. These millions of conscientious individuals belong, in large part, to a young and growing generation that is majority non-white and has an international character; they are the people who are ultimately at the very center of the struggle for political power. Their very existence is both the source of the highest hopes for progress towards freedom and equality, as well as the source of the deepest fears of the neo-fascist, reactionary movements in America and Europe. They are both the beacon for a bright, new world, as well as the “spectre” that is haunting the old world—they are everything, but they are treated as nothing.
The future of democracy and human culture, and perhaps even the future existence of human kind, now depends on the leadership of the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
The international immigration crisis
Over the past twenty years, the United States and Europe have experienced the largest migration of people across national borders since the World Wars of the last century. This modern migration has absolutely perplexed the world’s most dominant powers—nations have militarized their borders to combat peaceful and unarmed civilians, and politicians now rise or fall on the basis of their appeal either to a progressive internationalism or to xenophobic hatred.The immigration crisis emerged as the product of U.S./European exploits in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. This organized profiteering, subsidized by massive finance capital and often enforced by military intervention, created unprecedented levels of unemployment, political turmoil, and violence in the exploited nations. Millions of people fled their homes, many enduring life-threatening journeys, ultimately to seek refuge in the very nations that had ravaged their homelands. The richer nations, having succeeded in their project of economic “globalization,” also unintentionally succeeded in globalizing their own national populations.
Now, these millions of immigrants are caught in a deadly vice, trapped between a richer and a poorer nation, and unable to find freedom anywhere. And as the global economy experiences contraction, the vice tightens as well.
Across Europe (whose economies suffered far worse after 2007 than the United States), the trend of immigrant-bashing hysteria has redrawn the political map. In Britain, the reactionary “Brexit” referendum policy—asserting that the nation would rather leave the European Union than allow any influx of immigrants—continues to be a dramatic performance of political absurdity. Russia’s regime under Putin is now the model of neo-fascist government, and the Russian state has maintained special organizations of repression that mimic the Hitler Youth. France’s leading fascist, Marine Le Pen, is poised to make electoral gains there, and recently visited Trump Tower. Incidentally, the three largest nuclear arsenals in the world are controlled by Russia, the United States, and France, respectively.
The rise to power of Donald Trump can be credited largely to his demagogic campaign of scapegoating immigrants for America’s economic problems—problems that immigrants did not create, and problems that the persecution of immigrants cannot solve. On the contrary, immigration has been a vital source of economic growth. But in spite of the fallacy of anti-immigrant dogma, Trump and his allies genuinely fear the growing minority populations in the U.S. and Europe as a threat to white-majority power. America’s first majority-minority generation was born in 2011. To Trump and other right-wing politicians, this demographic shift has created a political crisis for their ability to win elections and enforce reactionary policies.
Just months prior to Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, political commentators simply presumed that Trump would lose in a landslide—prominent journalists prematurely declared the death of the Republican Party due to Trump’s unwillingness to appeal to Latino voters. Trump himself did not expect to win, as he repeatedly complained that the election would be rigged against him. The “rigging,” from Trump’s standpoint, consisted of the votes of racial minorities. Trump’s program is therefore an expression of political desperation. There is no place for Trump or his politics in a majority-minority America. His power clings precariously upon his ability to persecute immigrants and to disenfranchise minority communities.
That precarious claim to power is precisely what we must attack with all of our strength.
Trump must go. No “business as usual” until Trump is defeated
The first targets of the Trump regime are likely to be immigrants for whom the government already has records: Muslim immigrants with student and work visas, and the 750,000 Latino youth who enrolled in Obama’s program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).The DACA program has offered protection to the many Latino youth who were brought to America as small children, have grown up as Americans, and whose only home is in America. The Latino youth in DACA have broken no laws—a child cannot be held responsible for the decision of their parents to cross the border—but they are now one of the most vulnerable groups of American immigrants simply because they gave their information to the government and trusted President Obama to protect them. As the DACA program is one of Obama’s executive orders, it is now on the chopping block of programs that Trump proposed to end immediately upon taking office.
It is imperative to organize effective defense for the people who are targets of Trump’s attacks. Entire city and state governments must refuse to cooperate, in any way, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Community defense groups must organize to prevent capture and deportation. The movement must grow strong enough to shut down detention centers (immigrant concentration camps). And the federal immigration courts must not be permitted to continue their current function as an automatic rubber stamp for deportation.
We cannot abide the weakness of the liberal politicians who propose to “challenge, but not obstruct” the agenda of President Trump. It is a completely worthless policy that benefits no one other than the cowardly politician, who wants to be regarded as a friend of the people while avoiding any conflict with the Trump regime. One could imagine opening a fallout shelter many years from now and finding the last words of such a politician: “For the record, I did not agree with the destruction of the world, but I did not find it appropriate to obstruct President Trump.”
But the entire resistance to the Trump regime must be based on the policy of “obstruction” in order to prevent the harm that Trump seeks to implement. The only serious policy for resistance is no “business as usual” until Trump is defeated. A new immigrant rights and civil rights movement must build up its power to conduct massive demonstrations, strikes, and walkouts—actions on a large enough scale to shut down entire cities, industries, and functions of government. We cannot afford to chain ourselves to the feeble electoral tactics of the liberals, tactics that were unable to defeat Trump in 2016 and will be even less viable against a Trump regime that has consolidated its power in government. Without a successful movement to drive Trump out of power, it remains an open question whether there will be any resemblance of democracy in the government four years from now.
By Any Means Necessary
Abraham Lincoln once said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” He spoke these words during a crisis in which the nation could no longer sustain the contradiction of being the land of the free and the home of slavery at the same time. One hundred years later, the nation had to resolve the contradiction of whether it represented the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or the nightmare of Jim Crow. Today’s contradictions are now strained to the breaking point, testing whether we can survive with a Statue of Liberty in the harbor and a militarized wall across the southern border. Both visions for America cannot endure; one must prevail and overthrow the other. And in spite of the cleverest compromises of American politicians, they can never make the house stand half slave and half free.Our movement is not responsible for holding up a divided house—our task is to build the struggle for freedom, equality, and democracy as the only solid foundation for our future. And to put things another way: this house has a big wall that needs to be knocked down—by any means necessary.
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Videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2dd1YoDULg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh8xO5xZvUU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EItm6EkjDxc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIiT0qWhKTA
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