Dave Stockton<\/i><\/p>\n
On August 3, 22 people were killed and 24 injured when the 21 year old white supremacist Patrick Crusius targeted an El Paso Walmart popular with shoppers from a Mexican background. Crusius, like Brenton Tarrant who shot dead 51 people in the Christchurch mosque attack, posted a manifesto on the far right hate website 8chan, railing against the so-called „Hispanic invasion of Texas“, and the \u201ccultural and ethnic replacement\u201d of whites.<\/p>\n
Among the victims were Jordan Anchondo, killed while shopping for school supplies, and her husband Andre, killed in a futile attempt to shield his wife, who in turn was shielding their newborn baby. The old were not spared either. Raul and Maria Flores, both 77, who retired to El Paso two decades ago, and 90 year old Luis Alfonzo Juarez were also murdered during the rampage.<\/p>\n
The wanton murder of these innocent people, dehumanized by the politics of their killer, shows that, in Donald Trump\u2019s America, people with Latin American roots have joined Black and Jewish Americans on the hate list of the far right. In a country built of immigrants, continued immigration has been battened on by the sinister forces of fascism and exploited of by the unscrupulous demagogue in the White House.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s hate campaigning<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s open hatred of Mexicans and immigrants from Latin America is brazen and repeated on an endless loop. During his presidential campaign he infamously said:<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen Mexico sends its people, they\u2019re not sending the best\u2026They\u2019re bringing drugs, they\u2019re bringing crime. They\u2019re rapists and some, I assume, are good people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Less than two months ago he tweeted:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe problem is that Mexico is an \u201cabuser\u201d of the United States, taking but never giving. It has been this way for decades. Either they stop the invasion of our Country by Drug Dealers, Cartels, Human Traffickers\u2026 Coyotes and Illegal Immigrants, which they can do very easily, or our many companies and jobs that have been foolishly allowed to move South of the Border, will be brought back into the United States through taxation (Tariffs). America has had enough!\u201d<\/p>\n
As New York State Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe president is directly responsible for what happened in El Paso.\u201d<\/p>\n
She is right.<\/p>\n
These provocations, which, along with his sexist abuse of female politicians, were a key plank of his first campaign, are calculated to galvanise his supporters for his second term campaign. This racist incitement against Mexicans and refugees \u201cinvading the USA\u201d is a direct cause of the horrific violence meted out by individuals who take it as license to vent their private grievances and complexes, real or imagined, against minorities. And Trump doesn\u2019t mind one bit. To this president, the victims of the Tree of Life Synagogue, El Paso, Charlottesville and others, are just collatoral damage.<\/p>\n
ICE racist raids<\/p>\n
The Trump administration\u2019s state sanctioned racism was demonstrated in the raid which targeted poultry processing plants around Jackson and Canton, in Mississippi on 7 August.<\/p>\n
This was the largest ever raid in a single state conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE. 680 workers from mainly Mexican backgrounds were seized in a raid carried out by an army of 600 heavily armed ICE agents.<\/p>\n
Dozens of their terrified and distraught children, some only toddlers, had to be picked up from school and taken to makeshift shelters by strangers. 300 workers have since been released. ICE field offices across the country have been instructed to identify at least two locations in their regions as potential targets for workplace enforcement operations, and Trump has said raids like those in Mississippi are a „very good deterrent“ for undocumented immigrants.<\/p>\n
Fighting Trump and racism<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s response during his cynical visit to El Paso, where the surviving victims naturally refused to see him, was to blame the antiracist, antifa network equally with killers like Crusius. This is of a piece with his remarks after Charlottesville where he refused the condemn the fascist murder of activist Heather Heyer, incredibly claiming that the Unite the Right and antifascist demonstrations \u201cboth contained good people\u201d.<\/p>\n
Whilst Trump himself is not a fascist, he is happy to use the far right, including real fascists, to build his popular base, revelling in the racist chants at his rallies across America; for example, asking what should be done with the Mexicans gathering at the Texas border and grinning when the answer comes back \u201cshoot them!\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump is a classic US racist populist who is willing to target Latino people, Black youth, Muslims, and women who dare to call out his misogyny, making this abuse an essential part of his permanent campaigning. And the \u201crespectable\u201d wing of the Republican Party is willing to go along with it, perhaps with a bit of criticism of his worst excesses but usually in silence. If Trump fails in 2020 the \u201cmovement\u201d he has generated could turn really nasty, in fact, actually fascist.<\/p>\n
The networks of predominantly young and white antifascists collectively known as Antifa, plus the left wing armed groups, show that some people are prepared to challenge the fascists when they try to take the streets. Clearly they can do little to stop \u201clone wolf\u201d mass shooters, but, as Boston showed, if they mobilise with the Black Lives Matter movement and if the union locals and DSA chapters join them, the far right ascendancy can be demoralized and stopped in its tracks.<\/p>\n
Finally, the task of revolutionaries is to organize self-defence of all those communities under attack whether from the fascists or from the police and immigration agents. The labor movement should take the lead in opposing the racist ICE posses hunting for \u201cillegals\u201d by organising mass unionisation drives in the „right to work“ states and amongst migrant workers.<\/p>\n
Coordinating a nationwide struggle which unites labor activists and the anti racist and women\u2019s movements is the first step to building an independent workers\u2019 party that can unite the resistance on the basis of a common program for working class power and socialism.<\/p>\n
\u2022 No one is illegal: equal citizenship rights for all<\/p>\n
\u2022 Disband the ICE units<\/p>\n
\u2022 Labor movement commissions to investigate the detention camps<\/p>\n
\u2022 Self defence against racist raids and deportations<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dave Stockton On August 3, 22 people were killed and 24 injured when the 21 year old white supremacist Patrick Crusius targeted an El Paso Walmart popular with shoppers from a Mexican background. Crusius, like Brenton Tarrant who shot dead 51 people in the Christchurch mosque attack, posted a manifesto on the far right hate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7724,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[104],"class_list":["post-5065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-archive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7724"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5065\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}