By Fighting Words staff
The Communist Workers League (CWL) condemns the recent racist massacres that occurred in Gilroy, CA; El Paso TX; and Dayton, OH. Our hearts go out to the victims, their families, their friends, and their communities for these brutal murders that can all be traced back to the genocidal creed of white supremacy.
It was certainly “lone wolf” young white gunmen who carried out these atrocities. But the blame for them lies at the feet of the white supremacist, anti-migrant, misogynistic rapist, anti-Muslim, anti-LGBTQ and enemy of the entire working class, monster-in-chief Donald Trump, as well as his loyal henchmen. The blame also goes to all of Wall Street that put this swine in office and provides massive support to him for the sake of their bottom-line profit margins.
On July 28, Santino Legan broke into the Gilroy garlic food festival and opened fire, killing three people, including a six-year-old boy and a thirteen-year-old girl. 13 other people suffered gunshot wounds. Legan had posted his interest in white supremacist material in social media before the shooting.
On Saturday, August 3, 20-year-old Patrick Crusius drove more than 600 miles from his home in Allen, TX, near Dallas, and then opened fire with an AR-15 military-type rifle in and around a crowded Walmart store and shopping area in El Paso. 22 people were killed, and more than two dozen injured. El Paso is a border town with its sister city, Juarez, Mexico. Most of the killed and injured were Latinx. According to the Mexican government, seven of those killed were Mexican nationals, as well as seven of the wounded.
Mexico has already announced plans to sue the Trump regime over this massacre!
Just minutes before opening fire, Crusius published an online Trumpist “manifesto.” Using the same language that Trump uses at his fascist rallies and in his racist tweets, Crusius attacked the so-called Hispanic “cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”
Just hours after the mass murders in El Paso, 24-year-old Connor Betts opened fire on a crowd in a nightclub district of Dayton, killing eight people, six of them Black. One of Betts’ victims was his own sibling, whom, reports indicate, was dating a Black man, that being the motive for this mass murder.
The Monday after these massacres, August 5, in a robot-like speech (clearly reading from a teleprompter), Trump blamed the shootings on “gruesome and grisly video games“ and “mental illness and hatred”. He condemned “white supremacy”, but failed to define it, obviously afraid to expose himself as the chief dispenser of that poison. He has hinted at criminalizing mental illness, as if these shooters didn’t have clear political agendas. He is also pursuing clamping down on freedom of speech on the internet – we know whose speech they’ll go after. There have also been call-outs against Antifa from his Republican cohorts, as if these anti-nazi defense forces have anything to do with the white supremacist mass shootings.
On Wednesday Trump flew first to Dayton and then to El Paso, where hundreds of demonstrators protested his visit.Many of the wounded victims refused to meet this bigot-in-chief.
In one grotesque scene, Trump is smiling and giving the thumbs up sign, while a smiling Ivanka holds the wounded two-month-old Paul Anchando, orphaned when his parents Andre and Jordan died shielding their baby from the gunman’s bullets.
On that same day, 600 hundred Trump-directed ICE agents descended on chicken processing plants in Mississippi and arrested nearly 700 undocumented workers. More than 150 small children came home from school and found their doors locked and parents gone. There is no limit to the cruelty of the Boss Trump regime.
Of course, the entire Republican Party, always in lockstep with their Wall Street masters, backs the Trump regime to the hilt. But what about the Democratic Party, supposedly the “friend of the common people.”Outrage at Trump’s policies and actions sparked a landslide election in 2018 that placed them in control of the House. And what have they done with that power?
This “loyal opposition” put the entire anti-Trump movement into the “Russian collusion” fantasy, as if the Kremlin somehow sabotaged the Clinton election, not voter suppression, not that the archaic electoral college system allowed Trump to gain power with three million fewer votes.
The Democrats built their case upon imperialism’s institutions of repression at home and abroad: the FBI, the CIA and the Department of Justice. They conveniently “forgot”, for example, that their “beloved” FBI Director James Comey told a gathering of police chiefs that “people who think there’s an epidemic of police shootings of black people aren’t well-informed.”
Now that their case has collapsed, they are busy proclaiming to the people enraged by all of Trump’s statements and actions that we must wait quietly until the November 2020 elections.
An August 9th Politico report goes a long way to explain this behavior by the leadership of the Democratic Party. “The House Financial Services Committee is a magnet for Wall Street campaign cash, but some Democrats are grumbling that Chairwoman Maxine Waters has been slow to deliver the goods to members who are key to holding the majority.
“Lawmakers, aides and lobbyists say Waters, a Los Angeles Democrat serving her 15th term, has yet to emulate other committee leaders who have used their perch to shower members with money through direct contributions and fundraising events.”
Democratic officials are far more eager to serve Wall Street banks and corporations than to establish a genuine impeachment campaign, based on all of Trumps abuses of power to uphold his white supremacist policies.
But there is hope. For twelve straight days last month the people of Puerto Rico poured into the streets demanding the impeachment of their corrupt governor, culminating in a general strike that shut the island down. This forced the governor to resign. Of course, Puerto Rico remains under the thumb of U.S. imperialism and its hated “Junta” board, but this tremendous struggle shows just how powerful a force is an aroused people against all the capitalist forces of oppression and exploitation, against the ruling class and their monster Trump.
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