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Review of Yezhov vs. Stalin Dispelling Anti-Communist Myth of Red Hero, Joseph Stalin
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- 15 June 2017 945 hits
The 1930s were a decade of raging worldwide class war. Everywhere, workers were inspired to fight back against capitalism by the example of the world’s first workers’ state, the Soviet Union. From North and South America to Europe, Africa and Asia, communist-led workers led strikes and armed insurrection as the capitalist classes prepared for what became World War II. Within the Soviet Union, the class war raged just as bitterly, but the working class there had one huge advantage over the capitalists and their allies—the workers had won and held state power.
One of the organs of power used by the Soviet Union to hold class rule during this period was the Commission for Internal Affairs (Russian acronym “NKVD”). Soviet workers created the NKVD to manage everything from internal security, to border control and firefighting. For capitalists around the world, lies and partial-truths about the NKVD are key to attacking the example of the Soviet Union.
In particular, anticommunists use a series of executions that occurred from 1936-1939 to slander the entire Soviet workers’ state. Recent scholarship is helping workers around the world understand this period of time. A new book by Grover Furr, Yezhov vs. Stalin, describes the monumental 1930s villainy of Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD.
Red Thirties: Building a New World
Black pro-communist poet Langston Hughes once described the Soviet Union of the 1930s in his autobiography as a land with “no Jim Crow,” and also “a land still in flux” in places “where Soviet patterns [of life] were as yet none too firmly fixed.” Hughes marveled at what the diverse, multiethnic Soviet working class was building - without blueprints for their new society - while recognizing it was a state at war with capitalist habits and capitalist allies attempting to mount a comeback.
Despite numerous struggles and an uneven pace of development, masses of workers built an industrial base where there was none before in a matter of a few years. All the while they also built schools, libraries and worked toward abolishing racism, sexist treatment of women, child labor, hunger, illiteracy, and low standards of living. It was not a utopian paradise, but a glimpse of what the working class can do once it holds state power.
As the Soviet Union forged ahead, the rest of the world sank into the Great Depression, fascism, and imperialist war. In 1931, Japanese fascists invaded China; German fascists took power in 1933; Italian fascists invaded Ethiopia in 1935, and both German and Italian fascists invaded Spain in 1936. The Soviet Union’s dizzying progress spurred a sharpening internal class struggle, as pro-capitalist forces inside and around the world recognized the Soviets as a mortal threat.
In a country covering one-sixth of the earth’s surface, even well into the 1930s the Bolsheviks struggled in places to unify their immense state apparatus. Some Bolsheviks, like Nikolai Yezhov, disguised their disagreements and personal ambitions behind the red flag, enough to land him the top job at the NKVD in 1936.
‘The Bad Time of Yezhov’
Furr’s work shows that a significant minority of working-class enemies at first successfully hid their conspiratorial alliances with internal and external working-class enemies, including in the case of some the Nazis and Japanese fascists leading up to World War II.
Scattered widely geographically, Yezhov’s group appeared to the remote Central Committee in Moscow as representatives of the working class. Knowing that the Central Committee was hunting known terrorists after a variety of sabotages and assassinations, Yezhov’s group used their authority to mislabel thousands of dedicated communists, and protect the anticommunists.
Creating chaos and pitting workers against their own state is one of the ways capitalists try to regain power. Through this dual deception they hoped to overthrow the workers’ state and reimpose the capitalist class, certainly in exchange for privileges. Until their plot was discovered and ended, they succeeded in creating their massive mayhem. Yezhov and his anticommunist NKVD associates executed some 700,000 mostly innocent workers, labeling them as enemies of the working class, and the Soviet Union.
Setting The Record Straight
Known in Russian as the “Yezhovshchina,” (meaning: “the bad time of Yezhov”), anticommunist authors like Robert Conquest instead label it the “Great Terror” and blame it on the Soviet leadership and Stalin, a name and blame adopted by most historians ever since.
Historians who endorse the anticommunist version of history blame Stalin for crimes that at first he and his colleagues knew nothing about, and that were halted once he and other Soviet leaders discovered their existence. There are several myths underlying this false version.
Anticommunists claim that Yezhov was only carrying out Stalin’s orders, that there were no conspirators against the state and no collaboration with the Nazis and Japanese fascists, and that confessions at trial by co-conspirators were false and the result of torture.
Furr shows all of these to be false. He examined and quotes from recently released Soviet-era archival documents, among other primary source materials. Furr proves first that the leadership of the Soviet state (Stalin, Molotov, Zhdanov, Voroshilov, Beria and others) did indeed design its policies in the interests of the working class. Secondly, that class enemies did indeed conspire to commit mass murder and assassination and to overthrow the new working-class state, seize power, and resurrect an exploitative capitalist society.
Lessons from Class Struggle
Running at a little over 200 pages, Furr’s book is accessible to readers with some familiarity with Soviet history and would work well in Progressive Labor Party study groups debating whether or not the working class can seize and hold power, what that might look like, and what we can learn and apply today from the Soviet experience. One takeaway is that the seizure of state power is not the conclusion of a revolution, but the beginning. With the Soviet Union as a guide, we know the capitalist class will do anything to regain power.
With exceptions like Grover Furr, historians under capitalism generally accept the outlook of the capitalist class today in power. Opposition to their accepted outlook from a working class perspective brings retribution, while the rewards include publicity, prizes, promotions, job security, and fame. The anticommunist approach to history is reinforced, and the anti-Stalin outlook is a central feature of most of their writings.
Understanding the actual history of this first pioneering attempt at communist revolution is part of the foundation for the class-consciousness needed for the eventual victory of the world’s working class over the extreme exploitation and oppression of capitalism.
This review cannot begin to answer all the questions that will arise in the minds of thousands of readers. But the book can at least begin to answer them.
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Good Riddance to Zbigniew Brzezinski: Chief Architect of U.S. Imperialism’s Reign of Terror
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- 15 June 2017 621 hits
On May 26, Zbigniew Brzezinski (89), a major architect of U.S. imperialism and servant of the U.S. bosses, finally died. While history is made by the masses and outside the sole influence of just one person, Brzezinski played a disproportionately large individual role in helping shape the capitalist reign of terror we live in today.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was a professor at Columbia University in the late 1960s when, during a Progressive Labor Party-led student strike, he called for the arrest, trial and incarceration of the leadership of 1968 campus strikes—and “[i]f that leadership cannot be liquidated at least it can be expelled from the country.” (NY Times 5/26). Brzezinski shared the U.S. capitalist class’s concern for the fate of their empire, and eagerly offered his intellectual services to them.
Many of the student leaders to whom he referred were members of PLP. PLP remains proud to have been the publicly stated enemy of this arch-imperialist butcher!
Vietnam: Blow to U.S. Imperialism
Many readers of CHALLENGE have only known a world in which U.S. imperialism has waged perpetual war in the Middle East. They are too young to remember U.S. imperialism’s vicious assault on—and defeat at the hands of —the working people of Vietnam.
U.S. imperialism’s defeat in Vietnam was a major turning point, and changed the course of world history. Never again would U.S. imperialism adopt all out war, as waged there and in Korea. A “Vietnam syndrome” has forced US imperialism to wage war without exposing ground troops to mass casualties. Brzezinski led the charge into a new era, one where CIA operatives, air power and special operations troops wreak havoc in the furtherance of the interests of U.S. capital.
The U.S. bosses recognized Brzezinski’s usefulness in working out U.S. imperialist policies, despite these constraints, when he joined the powerful Rockefeller-backed Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski was elevated to a top position as National Security Adviser. Brzezinski articulated the strategic imperative that has guided U.S. imperialism in our lifetime—control the oil reserves of the Persian Gulf region, part of a larger worldwide “grand chessboard” that guides U.S. imperialism to this day.
Brzezinski’s boss made this policy plain as day with his “Carter Doctrine” of 1980:
Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.
For the capitalists, who see everything in terms of maximizing profit and minimizing costs, oil is by far the cheapest energy source to industrialize and fuel a military. Control of the Middle East means control of the world. He has advised and at times publicly criticized all presidents since Carter, including Barack Obama and most recently Donald Trump, for the absence of any coherent “doctrine” to guide U.S. imperialism (NYT 2/20).
Brezinski, then, has been an active architect of U.S. imperialist slaughter since 1980. This period of time, which includes the complete reversal of the workers’ revolutions in both Russia and China, has seen U.S. capitalism’s lethal grip extend to every corner of the globe.
Godfather of the Mujahideen, al-Qaeda, and ISIS
An outstanding example of imperialist short-sightedness and unintended consequences comes from Carter’s support for the brutal anti-Soviet “mujahideen” forces in Afghanistan.
In 1978, the U.S. bosses, along with the bosses of Pakistan, began secretly funding and recruiting fascist Muslim religious extremists in Afghanistan. They called themselves the “mujahideen,” perverting another religious term for “personal struggle” to justify fascist beliefs. The goal was to overthrow the popular pro-communist government of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). Brzezinski hoped to “give the Soviet Union its Vietnam” (CHALLENGE, 9/17/08). Secretly supporting the mujahideen with an estimated $40 billion U.S. dollars, Brzezinski himself traveled to Pakistan in 1979, addressing the mujahideen training camps, stating “your cause is right and God is on your side” (The Nation, 2/15/99; BBC documentary “Cold War: Soldiers of God,” 5/8/12).
With Carter, Brzezinski and later U.S. covert support, the Afghan mujahideen recruited from around the world, including rich Saudi playboy Osama bin-Laden, who comes from one of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful families. The PDPA government survived the Soviet collapse until it was overthrown by a new generation of mujahideen fighters taking power: the “Taliban” (Pashto for “students,” short for “students of the mujahideen”). The U.S., Pakistani, and Saudi funding ensured the Taliban “students” came of age in mujahideen training camps, who recruited among thousands of young refugees displaced by war. The networks of Arab mujahideen fighters founded allied groups like “al-Qaeda” (Arabic for “foundation,” referring to their fundamentalist interpretation of Islam).
In the early 1990s, following the first U.S. invasion of Iraq and feeling betrayed by his former U.S. employers for stationing soldiers in Saudi Arabia, Osama bin-Laden and his al-Qaeda declared war on the United States. This culminated in terrorist attacks around the world, including the two major attacks on New York City, in 1993 and 2001. In 1998, Brzezinski downplayed his terrorist creation as “some stirred-up Muslims” and their global threat as “nonsense” (Counterpunch, 1/15/98). Following the second U.S. invasion of Iraq, al-Qaeda took advantage of Iraq’s political vacuum and, in 2011, spread to Syria. In 2013, a faction split, calling itself the “Islamic State,” often called “ISIL” or “ISIS.”
Butcher Brzezinski has left two other deep legacies: anti-Muslim racism and the mass displacement of workers. Much of the vicious anti-Muslim racism spawned by the U.S. state, domestically and globally, is in part thanks to him, as is the refugee crisis born out of imperialist wars.
Brzezinski’s World: Imperialist Slaughterhouse
The period since 1990 has been a trial by fire as U.S. imperialism ravages the Middle East through war and war-induced disease and dislocation. For the entire African continent, the period has been utterly devastating as rival imperialist powers back genocidal regimes to control minerals and resources. The world Brzezinski worked toward, has seen its sole remaining superpower, the U.S., back all sides in resource-rich Congo, where the largest armed conflict since World War II rages. The “free market” that reigns supreme allowed capitalist pharmaceutical corporations to stand idly by while HIV/AIDS ran rampant killing twenty seven million workers to date (aids.org; who.net) with the majority of these deaths being preventable. This same “free” market has starved millions more as arable African farmland is sown with crops for export in pursuit of maximum profit.
Throughout Zbigniew Brezinski’s unfortunately long life, he served U.S. imperialism faithfully, his final act helping Barack Obama craft his murderous policies to try reversing U.S. imperialism’s relative decline. Here was someone dedicated to anti-communism and imperialism, who lived to see Soviet imperialism vanquished and Chinese imperialism take its place as the main rival of the U.S., and who ultimately escaped working class justice. The same will not be true of the capitalist class he worked so hard to protect.
It remains for us to make good on the mortal threat Brzezinski perceived, in embryonic form, at Columbia in 1968 when he confronted the PLP-led student strike: the defeat of U.S. imperialism by powerful new communist movement, one dedicated to learning from the mistakes of past revolutionaries, winning state power and expanding the dictatorship of the proletariat until capitalism is defeated once and for all.
The main wing of the U.S. ruling class has escalated its campaign to check Donald Trump and bring him into line with the bosses’ primary objective: to win mass support among U.S. workers for the next big inter-imperialist war and the fascism the bosses need to wage it.
In the wake of the firing of FBI Director James Comey, the capitalist media scandal around Trump’s possible collusion with Russia is growing by the day. Former FBI chief Robert Mueller was chosen as special counsel to prosecute “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; and...any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation” (cbsnews.com, 5/17). The bosses are playing hardball. Their intensified effort to discipline their own ranks is a hallmark of rising fascism.
Whether or not Trump and his flunkies actually colluded with Vladimir Putin to help Trump get elected president last fall, the bosses’ open infighting is dangerous for the working class. It distracts from intensifying racist attacks in the U.S. and around the world, such as the U.S.-led airstrikes that have killed thousands of civilians in Iraq and Syria in three years of fighting with the junior capitalists of ISIS (New York Times, 5/25). And it uses Trump’s bizarre and reckless style to build working-class support for the state terrorists who compose the liberal main wing of the ruling class—not to mention the racist, murderous FBI (see box).
Trump, Precarious Servant for U.S. Empire
Trump’s short reign has been a horror for the international working class. He’s launched two raids in Yemen that killed at least 30 civilians (The Guardian, 5/24). He reinstated the racist “global gag rule” that denies family planning funding to organizations that discuss abortion as an option for women. Domestically, Trump has expanded Obama’s racist anti-immigrant policy, creating a climate of fear among all workers, undocumented, documented, and citizen alike. He has appointed overt racists like Betsy DeVos as education secretary and Jeff Sessions as attorney general. He has submitted a draconian, racist budget that slashes billions from what few social welfare programs are left. And his proposed healthcare reform threatens to leave an additional 23 million people without coverage (Congressional Budget Office, 5/24).
The rulers’ master plan is to force U.S. workers to accept fascist conditions in preparation for war with another world power, likely China or Russia. The bosses’ problem is that Trump is too volatile and unreliable to serve as an effective CEO for a U.S. empire in decline.
Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton before him, backed policies similar to Trump’s assaults on workers. But unlike Trump, they were able to hold on to the support of a large section of the working class, including most Black and Latin workers. They were helped by identity politics, which excuse racism and sexism when pushed by Black people. In 2014, for example, Obama signed off on an $8.7 billion cut to food stamps (MSNBC, 2/14). His signature education policy, Race to the Top, was no less destructive and racist than George W. Bush’s much-maligned No Child Left Behind. Obama deported a record 3.2 million immigrants, of whom more than 80 percent had no history of violent crime (Intercept, 5/15). All of this happened with relative quiet from the liberal bosses’ media.
FBI Comey, Not so Disciplined Himself
Unlike Obama or Clinton, however, Trump is unable or unwilling to veil his administration’s flagrant racism and sexism—and he refuses to be reined in, at least up to now. That’s a big problem for the ruling class. Trump’s most brazen act was the unceremonious firing of Comey after the FBI director had launched the Russia collusion investigation.
Comey is somewhat undisciplined himself. Last October, just eleven days before the presidential election, he announced that he had revived the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails of classified information. Though the investigation came to nothing, Comey’s bombshell may have helped torpedo Clinton, the main wing’s candidate of choice. It drew howls of outrage from Democratic Party main-wingers like Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer. Now, however, these same politicians are hailing Comey as a martyr and calling his firing a “Nixonian” coverup (Intercept 5/9). Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, joined a Washington protest to demand appointment of a special counsel (Mother Jones 5/10). Some Democrats and media outlets are even calling for Trump’s impeachment.
This is a message to Trump and the entire political class that their service is always conditional. They can be replaced if they do not serve their ruling-class masters appropriately.
Mueller, the Hammer to Bring Trump into Line
When it came time for the Justice Department to name a special counsel, Robert Mueller was the perfect choice to bridge the partisan divide and help unify the main-wing bosses. Mueller was appointed FBI director days before the September 11 attacks in 2001. He served under both Democrat Obama and Republican George W. Bush, and served them well:
Mueller is as straight an arrow as they come. He is the longest serving FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover himself and certainly the most influential. He took the FBI from a agency primarily focused on law enforcement and after-the-fact prosecutions and investigations into, really, what is a global intelligence agency deeply focused on counterespionage and counterterrorism cases…(Biographer Garret Graff on NPR, 5/17).
No friend of workers, Mueller can be a credible mediator for disagreements within the ruling class. For as long as they can, the bosses will use the legal system to solve their growing problems. Until they can’t.
Towing the Line of the Grand Chessboard
The first two stops of Trump’s inaugural overseas trip were Saudi Arabia and Israel, both staunch U.S. allies that reflect the deteriorating position of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East and the world. The U.S. State Department has known for years that Saudi Arabia has provided “clandestine financial and logistic support to Isis and other radical groups in the region” (Independent, 10/14/16). Israel, meanwhile, is widely hated for its ever-expanding West Bank occupation and apartheid treatment of Palestinians. During the Obama years, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, talked openly of defying U.S. wishes in the region. While Netanyahu has softened his stance since Trump’s victory, Israel remains a questionable ally in a period of intensifying pressure on U.S. imperialist aims.
Different Sides, All Capitalist
Regardless of who comes out on top in this struggle among bosses, workers will lose. While Trump’s open fascism is a threat to the international working class, the gravest mistake we can make is to choose sides in this battle. We cannot support Democratic politicians in their move against Trump, whether they’re mainstream leaders like Schumer and Pelosi or liberal fake “outsiders” like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The Democrats also represent the forces of war and fascism. If anything, they are even more dangerous than Trump and his ilk, because they are better able to deceive and mislead honest, anti-racist workers.
The only path away from these imperialist misleaders is the path to Progressive Labor Party and communist revolution. Our Party and our paper, CHALLENGE, have consistently attacked politicians and media of all strains for what they are: agents of capitalism. A PLP of millions—leading a working class of billions—will sweep them all away.
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FBI: Myth & Reality
The glorification of James Comey and Robert Mueller is a naked attempt to win the working class to support the FBI, a ruling-class institution, as a lesser capitalist evil. But the FBI’s racist history makes it clear that this is a deadly proposition:
Contrary to Hollywood’s image of the heroic FBI rooting out the Ku Klux Klan in the South (as portrayed in the movie, Mississippi Burning), nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, the FBI focused on smashing local militant anti-racist groups (such as Deacons for Defense) as well as national organizations, from SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) to the Black Panthers.
The FBI established COINTELPRO, a counter-intelligence program, in an effort to crush both the Communist Party USA and the growing civil rights movement. After the 1963 March on Washington, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover singled out Martin Luther King, Jr. as a primary target. COINTELPRO also targeted Malcom X (Manning Marable, A Life of Reinvention). It has been well documented that the FBI conspired to destroy the Black Panther Party (In These Times, 12/4/13).
The FBI played a crucial role in aiding HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) during the anti-communist crusades of the 1950s. From 1946 to 1952, the FBI doubled its number of agents. In 1951, it launched a secret “Responsibilities Program” that spied on teachers and lawyers, among others. Its most vicious attacks were reserved for Black communists like Paul Robeson.
In short, let us expose the FBI for what it is: a ruthless agent of capitalist dictatorship.
New York City school students suffer the racist indignity of attending one of the most segregated school systems in the country. This is no accident. It is a calculated plan by the city’s ruling class to maintain exclusive enclave schools that are significantly or predominantly white—and to subject the other 90 percent of the city’s 1.1 million public school children to a racist, sub-par education.
The bosses’ segregation strategy is designed to divide the working class, build racist ideas about Black and Latin children, and blame students for the failure of capitalism. Fewer and fewer opportunities exist for young people. High-paying jobs are a thing of the distant past for workers with high school educations. Entry-level, low-paying jobs in offices and restaurants are increasingly filled by people with college diplomas. In this wage-cutting climate, where the bosses are funneling resources into the U.S. military for the next global inter-imperialist conflict, they see no need to pay for a school system that prepares all students to succeed.
Instead, they are fostering a school system of a few so-called “good” schools and a vast number of “bad” schools. The “good” schools are a hybrid public-private system to serve the city’s middle-class and more affluent residents. These schools receive more money per student and get better facilities and more varsity sports teams. On top of that, many have PTAs that can raise up to a million dollars a year or more to further supplement their funding from the New York City Department of Education (DoE).
Racist residential school zones, deliberately drawn to exclude Black and Latin students, are used to keep certain elementary schools mostly white. A school “choice” system to legitimize racist screening practices helps middle and high schools do the same. From a young age, most white students are categorized as “smart” or “talented and gifted” or “hard working.” Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Black and Latin students are branded as deficient and undeserving of a decent school.
In the midst of these daily racist attacks on New York City school children, the parents, teachers, students, and administrators at Park Slope Collegiate have been trying to build a public secondary school in Brooklyn that is open to all. The PSC community has struggled for years against the DoE’s racist education system. It refuses to track students into ability groupings, a proven tool of segregation. It actively recruits an integrated student body. It publicly protested the DoE’s installation of an elitist enclave school in its building. It continues to battle to rid the school’s campus of metal detectors, and to defend its students against racist assaults by school safety agents and the New York Police Department. Most recently, PSC rocked the DoE’s racist boat by demanding an integrated sports program, with equal access to varsity sports teams for its Black and Latin students. The Progressive Labor Party is proud to have participated in many battles against racism fought by the PSC community.
The bosses and their system are powerful but fragile, which explains why the DoE deems PSC a threat. The recent McCarthyite attack on PSC (see CHALLENGE, May 31), an attempt to use anti-communism to divide the school and stop its multiracial fight against racism, is an old bosses’ ploy. During the Civil Rights Movement, the KKK governors of Mississippi, Alabama, and other Jim Crow states tried to block the unity of Black and white workers and students, many of whom were communists, by declaring that “race mixing is communism. “ New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina and Mayor Bill De Blasio are defenders of the new Jim Crow, which feeds on school segregation and racist inequalities.
Since our formation in the 1960s, PLP has joined workers’ battles against racism. Our Party is committed to the struggle to build a communist society led by the working class, free from capitalist racism, exploitation, oppression, and devastation. Standing shoulder to shoulder with the families and school staff at PSC, fighting to defend young people from a racist school system, is a part of our responsibility to fight for workers’ power and a communist world.
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Still No JUSTICE FOR Laquan Courts Protect Kkkop, Attack Antiracists
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- 02 June 2017 435 hits
CHICAGO, IL, May 23—Another pre-trial hearing was scheduled today at the Cook County courthouse for killer Chicago kkkop Jason Van Dyke, who is responsible for the murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald on October 20, 2014. Caught on dashboard camera, the 16 shots that Van Dyke pumped into Laquan’s body as he lay lifeless in the street was another stark reminder of the role the kkkops play in the defense of the racist capitalist system. The resultant cover-up by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and State Attorney Anita Alvarez further demonstrated the racism of the state, sparking mass outrage and militant fightback throughout the city and beyond. As Van Dyke’s lawyer baldly stated in court, the murder of Laquan was simply “business as usual.” (Chicago Tribune, 5/25)
Bosses’ Kkkourts Protect Killer Kkkops
The court showed its role in protecting the racism of the state when an observer in the courtroom was brought up on charges of contempt of court for his response to the racist proceedings. Despite already being indicted on first-degree murder charges, Van Dyke and his attorneys continue to postpone his trial by filing ridiculous motions attempting to have the murder indictment dismissed. During this hearing, the crowd was forced to listen to Van Dyke’s scumbag lawyer prattle on at length over all the reasons he was “justified” in his racist murder of a Black teenager.
The judge denied the motions to have the murder charges cleared. This outcome provoked excitement among many of the anti-racists in the room, including one anti-racist teacher, who snapped his fingers repeatedly in approval of the judge’s decision. “What is your purpose here, sir?!” the Cook County presiding judge barked at the teacher.
“To see a racist murderer go on trial,” the anti-racist defiantly responded, turning to face Van Dyke and his lawyers.
With this bold statement and a multi-racial crowd packing the courtroom, these antiracists and PLP helped send the message that racist kkkops and the capitalist state that protects them will never be tolerated as “business as usual.”
The judge and his bailiffs used the disruption as an excuse to set an extreme example of the bold anti-racist. The judge demanded that he be brought forward. In response to having his racist authority undermined by both the snapping and the teacher’s defiant response to his questioning, he had the man arrested for direct contempt of court with bail set at $40,000.
Once the initial shock passed, PLP comrades present wasted no time. Immediately after the hearing was over, we determined the identity of the man and began contacting community bond organizations, his family, and lawyers in order to have him released as soon as possible. He was out on bond that same evening. We commend this fighter for defying Van Dyke and the racist kkkourts and will stand in solidarity with him in any legal battles that lie ahead.
Not Just a Few Bad apples
Despite the presumed “victory” of the judge dismissing the motions to prevent Van Dyke from going to trial for murder, we communists will continue to stress the relationship of the cops, the courts, and the preservation of the murderous capitalist profit system. Even if the killer cop stands trial, even if he were to be found guilty by a jury (fat chance), the brutal system that breeds racist murderers like Van Dyke would still remain intact. Despite the gratification that would result from seeing a racist cop locked up, such a conclusion could lend itself to the false argument that “it’s only a few bad cops” and that the bosses’ justice system can be reformed to meet the needs of the working class.
The comrades here in Chicago will continue to challenge Van Dyke and the racist, sexist system that trained him, armed him with weapons, and unleashed him on our class. We will challenge them in the courtroom, in our neighborhoods, our workplaces, and our schools. We will march again on his very home in the Archer Heights neighborhood, as we did last summer, to remind everyone that there will be no refuge for racist murderers (See Challenge 7/16). With every action, every argument, every new comrade won to the Party, we will build the momentum and power to eventually bury the bosses once and for all with international communist revolution.
