Jason Van Dyke, the Chicago cop who murdered Laquan McDonald, has been convicted—of second degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery. After decades of police and racists getting away with murder—from Emmett Till to Fred Hampton and up to Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Darius Pinex, Justus Howell, Rekia Boyd, Aquoness “Quono” Cathery, and Harith Augustus—we finally got a little bit of justice. We forced a conviction of a cop for murdering a Black person. People are right to celebrate this, and the pigs have no right to suppress them or take vengeance against them when they do.
It should’ve been first degree murder. The evidence showed this. The video shows Van Dyke opening fire on Laquan as he walked away from the police with his hands at his side. Van Dyke pumped 16 shots into Laquan’s body, most of them as he lay on the ground bleeding.
Right now, it seems that these convictions are enough to send this murdering pig to jail. But we need to be vigilant that they don’t find some loophole to let him walk. We can’t go to sleep on this.
During the trial some activists and leaders said, “Yes, we should protest but we don’t want another Ferguson.” Let’s be clear: this murdering cop never would’ve been on trial in the first place if it weren’t for what people did in Ferguson and Baltimore and the other places where people straightened their backs. This spread all across the country, including Chicago taking to the streets to demand police terror STOP! And as part of this, there were all the exposures, the marches and rallies in Chicago in response to the release of the video of the murder of Laquan and the massive coverup that ran right to the entire city administration.
This struggle has impacted the way people more broadly look at these police murders of Black and Brown people. So much so that in this case, even though there was only one Black juror and the state put on a lackluster prosecution, the jurors still looked at the video of Laquan being murdered and saw it for what it was—MURDER. HOW WE CAN WIN, How We Can Really Make Revolution, the guide to making revolution, says: “We need to oppose and disrupt the moves of the ruling powers to isolate, ‘encircle,’ brutalize, mass incarcerate and murderously repress the people who have the hardest life under this system and who most need this revolution. We need to ‘encircle’ them—by bringing forth wave upon wave of people rising up in determined opposition to this system.” This was a step toward that.
We don’t want to just keep fighting these same battles year after year. What they do to people here and all over the world is a horror … and it is unnecessary. It is caused by their system of capitalism-imperialism—and we must and we can overthrow that system. We have the science that lets us know how to fight. We have the strategy for fighting and winning in HOW WE CAN WIN. We have the plan for a new society, where all exploitation and oppression can be abolished and humanity can be emancipated, in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America. And we have the leadership, in Bob Avakian, architect of the new communism, whose film Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution goes online at revcom.us on October 19.
I call on everyone in Chicago and all over the country who wants to see a better day, who yearns for freedom—get with the revolution and join the Revolution Club (for information, go to revcom.us).
Carl Dix is a representative of the Revolutionary Communist Party and a follower of and advocate for Bob Avakian, his leadership and his visionary new synthesis of communism. He is a courageous freedom fighter from the 1960s who went on to become a revolutionary fighter and a communist. Dix spent two years in military prison for refusing to fight in the unjust Vietnam War. He emerged unrepentant and went on to become a founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), USA, dedicating his life to the emancipation of all humanity. Carl is a co-initiator of Refuse Fascism. He co-founded, with Cornel West, the Stop Mass Incarceration Network (SMIN), and initiated Rise Up October that brought thousands into the streets in New York City in 2015 demanding a stop to police terror.
I want to be very clear here. So here I go:
I reject the word “pig” for cop. We have many fine police in MA and many lay their lives on the line to help the public, including this former father and husband.
Weymouth shooting: Officer, bystander fatally shot near Boston – CNN
https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/15/us/massachusetts-police-officer-shot/index.html
Jul 16, 2018 – A policeman near Boston was fatally shot with his own service weapon Sunday morning by a man who used the same gun to kill a female …
It is quite possible that nobody can tell me a darn thing about racism that I haven’t already learned.
My friend, Andy Goodman, was arrested by a sheriff and good old rednecks.He and two others were brutally murdered. Then the next summer I got to help take care of Ben Chaney, James’s brother.
My dentist. Irwin Wadler, use to close his practice in August, load his family’s station wagon with goods from his Synagogue until the car body from weight was almost scraping the ground so he could Freedom Ride down south and distribute the goods there.
His wife would be holding back tears, as would his two children and members of my family. We worked hard to not cry since we knew that his actions were dangerous. We knew that he could die.
Here: want to see the type of situations that can transpire? Here:
Be aware that I was spit on and sworn at by a white supremacist and sworn at his wife when collecting Green Stamps when I was thirteen years old. I was collecting them in Florida to exchange for bus rides for Selma protests back in 1963. (Yeah, and I’ve been called a honky, too, as well as verbally attacked by Marines, who threatened me for my anti-war stance. … Yeah, some of us like me, a pale blond white, can’t win for losing.)
One of my friends, who looks very white, is a Muslim in India. He’s working to lift Dalits (Untouchables) and others in his society. So he is on hate lists from Muslim extremists (terrorists) and some Hindu fanatics alike, who disparage his social justice stances. (Yeah, we have a similitude between us, don’t we?)
In the end, I want better justice in the USA and around the world. I am glad that this awful cop was tried and found guilty. However, he does not make all cops be pigs. FYI: Our new Boston police chief, who is wonderful for many diverse reasons, is an African American. Would you call him a pig?
An exchange with a friend follows. You will easily identify the problem that I have with the word “pig”
inter-exchanged with the word cop.
When a socialist quotes Aldo Leopold, you know something has changed. This is literally the first essay I”ve read by a socialist that pulls together the arguments for an ecological paradigm and society. Sadly he will probably be the only one. While he correctly fingers capitalism (i.e. a society based on endless economic growth, production and consumption), he did not go far enough nor did he touch on the
disturbing mistakes and misunderstandings that characterize the left’s pathetic and continuing attempts to squeeze ecology into Marxist politics. Nonetheless it’s a start and let’s hope the article gets read more widely in leftist circles. It is a far better analysis than that of John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology, which I have criticized on my web site.
LS
My reply:
People might put Steve K., other friends of mine and me in a socialist camp. I hate labels in any case. I will not be pigeonholed. It is demeaning and trivializing of my fullness, complexity, contradictions and much, much more about who I am in my positions.
When I see such repulsive designation happening to children, I get infuriated. Nothing like self-fulfilling prophecy to harm lives, which can lead to painted bird syndrome when “outsiders” catch onto the description so as to reinforce it, along with the target person doing so. The outcomes are tragic and totally unacceptable! … I have many examples that I’ve personally witnessed.
Suicide of Phoebe Prince – Wikipedia
The Painted Bird – Wikipedia
I have a neighbor, who is a retired police officer. If he were to see as police officer messing up a dark skinned man through the window of his home, he would exit his home in a flash with his two well trained dog and give them a command. All three would take the policeman down or some (maybe all) would die trying. You think this is a pig?
GIVE UP THE DAMNED LABELS. Everyone in a group, i.e., cops, are not the same — period!