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Since the publication of the below article, the crisis around the wall and the government shutdown has heightened. The situation remains in flux, and we will cover major developments as they might occur.
Trump doubled down with his January 8 Oval Office address and his threats to use executive power to build the wall without Congressional approval.This signifies another big step in the fascist remolding this regime is undertaking.
At the same time, the Democrats have continued their tack of essentially accepting the basic terms of Trump. For all their stern faces and charges of Trumpian irresponsibility, they, like Trump, cover over the fundamental guilt of the U.S. imperialist system for driving people from their home countries and the essentially illegitimate character of U.S. borders in the first place. They, like Trump, frame the argument as one of how to repress and control these desperate immigrants rather than what must be done to the system that has created this.
They too “change the subject” to the suffering that is being brought down on people within the U.S. through this shutdown. They pit that against what is being done to our immigrant brothers and sisters on the border (and within the U.S.). To be clear: that suffering is real, and the fact that people who are going hungry and sick, or who are a paycheck away from being homeless, now face even worse privation, is indeed criminal and extremely ugly. But the Democrats are opportunistically using this to shift focus away from the larger crime being committed around immigration.
The conflicts between Trump and the Democrats are in fact real conflicts over how to handle immigration, as the article below points out. But at this point, they also touch very directly on “norms of rule.” That is, Trump is changing the “rules of the game” that the imperialists generally adhere to—rules that both govern relations among themselves and afford a level of civil and democratic rights to masses of people. And this has serious implications.
But as the article also points out, this system has no answer, and both sides are united, above all, on saving this system. The challenge before those who are infuriated and anguished over what they see at the border is not to choose between oppressors, but to grapple seriously with what is said below on the roots of the crisis; what is laid out in the accompanying article on the Democrats’ history and current stance on this question; and what it will take to end this—revolution.
* * * * *
Donald Trump has shut down the government to get his wall on the border. This fascist wall must not be built, period. If this wall gets funded, in whatever form and with whatever concessions, it will represent a major escalation in the attack on immigrants. Even if it is seen as “symbolic”—and that will be what the Democrats tell you when and if they cut a deal with Trump—what it will symbolize will be that the tens and hundreds of millions of people seeking refuge from conditions created by this imperialist system are subhumans who must and will be kept out of the “gated community” of the very countries at fault for the disasters. Symbols are symbols because they mean something. After all, forcing Jews in Nazi Germany to wear “yellow stars” could be seen as “symbolic”—but what did they symbolize? A program of genocide.
The imperialist system oppresses the vast majority of the world’s peoples and nations. That system grinds up the labor and lives of billions of people daily into their machinery of capital. That system wages wars that create havoc and tears apart the social fabric in those countries. That system destroys the environment in those countries, turning whole areas of the world into deserts through global warming. That system has no answers for the crisis it has created.
Trump, and the whole fascist tide around the world, is one reaction to this. But how do the Democrats—who, yes, are like the Republicans, a political institution serving this imperialist system—oppose this? By proposing their own program for “border security”—that is, for keeping out and holding down immigrants—with high tech sensors and drones in what they say is the “21st-century way” of doing this.
In other words, the Democrats are united with Trump on using tools of repression and intimidation to prevent people fleeing U.S.-created oppression in their home countries from seeking asylum here. The accompanying article—on what these Democrats have actually done when they have been in power and what they actually propose to do now—shows that they have, if anything, been even more bloody than Trump (while being more discreet about it). Where they differ now is on two main points:
One, the demonization of immigrants is at the very core of the fascist program of Trump, part of a whole thrust to “make America white again.” Trump wants the wall as a high-profile, easy-to-understand way to dramatize his highly repressive assault on immigrants more generally. We should not forget that even as now the Democrats and even many anti-immigrant groups downplay the importance of the wall, it is a fact that border walls are one part of brutally enforcing apartheid and separation and that the existing U.S.-Mexican border wall, much of which was constructed by Democratic president Bill Clinton, has been a site of brutality and terror against immigrants. Trump is using the controversy over the wall to mobilize and stoke the fascist base.The Democrats go at this differently. They aim to maintain the support of those who are either victimized by or revolted by this program of ethnic cleansing, and keep them thinking and acting within the bounds or horizons of the current system. So while they too carry out highly repressive and even murderous policies on the border, they want to as much as possible keep their repressive policies out of the public eye. At the same time, they also want to promote a multilateralist multiculturalism, opening up immigration to those they regard as necessary to their economy and the projection of the U.S. role internationally. Thus, when they say that the wall is immoral—which is how those whom they see as their base feel about it—what they really mean is that it is “bad optics.” As the accompanying chart makes clear, it was the plan proposed by Bill Clinton that has ended up trapping and killing some 8,000 immigrant human beings in the desert over the past 20-plus years.Two, the Democrats actually argue that their form of keeping immigrants out (sensors, drones, informant networks) is more effective than the wall.
So, yes, the wall—and behind that the whole program and mentality being promoted by the Trump/Pence regime—must be thoroughly rejected and stopped. But it won’t be stopped by the Democratic representatives of a system that created 65 million refugees in the world—or a party that agrees with Trump on the need for “border security” while regularly trampling on the sovereignty of the very countries that the U.S. dominates and oppresses through wars and proxy wars for the dominance of the U.S. over the planet.
Why should we let ourselves be bound, and bounced around, between the choices that they and their system give you—between the contending forces of a capitalist-imperialist dictatorship, competing over who can better carry out that dictatorship? Where has this gotten us? And where has this gotten the desperate people now suffering in unbearably crowded shelters in Tijuana or “icebox” detention centers in Texas or trapped in the U.S.-created and maintained killing fields of Honduras or El Salvador—after all these years?
No human being is illegal. What we need—and what we need to openly proclaim and fight for—is a world without borders, which means a world beyond all forms of exploitation, oppression and the violent antagonistic conflicts between people. What we need is REVOLUTION!
Watch these excerpts from the speech by Bob Avakian Why We Need an Actual Revolution and How We Can Really Make Revolution and from the Q&A following the speech
The Democratic Party: “A Major Instrument of This Monstrously Oppressive System”
Q&A: Bob Avakian's Answer to People Who Complain about Immigrants Crossing Borders
Watch the whole speech, spread it, fund it
A three-year-old boy, Aylan Kurdi, drowned when the small rubber inflatable boat carrying his family from Syria to Greece capsized, September 2015.
Mexican police at the Mexico-U.S. border attack Central American caravan migrants as they attempt to cross border, November 2018. (Photo: AP)
Tens of thousands of migrants attempting to escape war and famine in countries in northern Africa cross the Mediterranean seeking asylum in European countries. (Photo: AP)
Afghan refugees who fled their country due to war and famine wait to get registered in Peshawar, Pakistan, August 2017. (Photo: AP)
Some 80% of the people in Yemen are in desperate need of basic necessities due to long-term extreme poverty drastically worsened by U.S.-backed Saudi Arabian attacks and fighting among other reactionary forces. Here, people get drinking water in the streets of Sana’a. (Photo: YouTube/United Nations)
The Imperialist System Has Created 65 Million Refugees Through Economic Plunder and Disruption, Ecological Catastrophe, and War.
This System Cannot Be Reformed—It MUST Be Overthrown!
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