By Richard Mellor in California
Well, I just returned home and turned on the TV to see what else was said about what appears to be a terrorist attack in El Paso. I don’t have cable so I watched some news reports on You Tube that were about two hours old and then checked the Internet.
I saw on CBS news a report about vigils being held and it showed a couple of people walking toward the vigil site with candles. The news report also gave some information about the numerous vigils that are being held in the area. People were praying and lighting candles.
I mean no disrespect to people who pray. I don’t do it because I don’t believe there’s anything listening. But I have a lot of friends that pray and my view is that if this praying gives you the strength to act (and more than vigils as I think we are beyond that) then that’s good praying. But I have to say this. Do you think in reporting on a strike the mass media would give the public the locations of the strike solidarity committee meetings in the area? I don’t think so. That alone should warn us about putting too much emphasis on the ritual of prayer.
On CBS, the newscaster, or more accurately, the story teller talked about the “horrific nature” of the killings and said that investigators were “trying to determine a motivation.” (I think this was CBS but they’re all the same).
Spurred on by Trump and his sycophants in the Administration
Now I am not a university graduate. I have no degree except the GED I got when I came to the US. But when I heard about this, I never heard the guy was a Muslim so I assumed he was white/European. Then, and I know my geography as I wasn’t educated here, I said to myself, “El Paso is across the Rio Grande from Mexico”. This could well be an attack by some white fascist on Mexicans as it is as close to the border you can get without going through a check point; not an easy task with an assault rifle.
I came over to the computer and the Internet. It turns out, as I suspected, the terrorist is a white dude and he has a manifesto. He wrote about the, “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” In this manifesto. He wrote, “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can be more sustainable.”
The New York Times writes that, “What brought him to a crowded shopping center in El Paso is one of the many questions on the minds of investigators.” Is that so say I with my GED and my certificate as a backhoe operator under my belt? I’ll tell you what brought him: Latinos. He wanted to kill some, spurred on by Trump and his sycophants in the Administration. They are all murderers.
This is the extent they will go not only to ignore the problem; the insecurity and alienation that the capitalist mode of production creates, but they have to try to obscure the fact that this was a white European. This is not because the white racist ruling class in the US loves white European workers any more than any other worker, the Irish have white skin so do English workers whose children worked in coal mines as young as 10 years old. It is because at this point in time they are the most numerous. Their propaganda, for centuries has been that white people are superior. They even created the idea that there is such a thing as a “white race” in order to undermine unity between both white workers and workers of colour in order to divide and rule, to exploit us all. Sexism plays the same role.
When in 400 years has the English ruling class, who happen to have white skin, considered the Irish, who also have white skin, of the same race? Never, that’s when. Their own working class, the peasantry and then the wage labourer were always lesser human beings to them.
Trump has placed racism front and centre
As I wrote some time ago on Facebook, we had a shop steward fired for making a comment that was threatening to his boss. It was a stupid comment and everyone knows it was no threat. He was shackled at his home in front of his kids. A restraining order was taken out against him and he lost his job.
Trump is not the root cause of this. But he as placed racism, xenophobia and misogyny front and centre. He has relied on the base and appeals to it every day. In that sense he is responsible for this mass killing, not the second amendment. I will not even discuss this issue to any length at all as it is not the problem.
The last thing I read in the New York Times article was, “once again on Saturday, America’s epidemic of mass shootings intersected with the divisive issues of race and immigration.”
Oh such liberal claptrap. I have lived and worked in this country for 47 years. Racism is a problem not because individuals are racist, but because racism is endemic to capitalist society. Racism is built in to the system we can see it in the reporting on these events. The white racist ruling class needs to convince the white worker that our fortunes are linked but that is false and it is getting harder and harder to make that case. If it wasn’t colour it would be something else, in Northern Ireland it’s religion. Integration of people in the USA in the workplace and socially is greater than ever before.
Lastly I have to say this. The heads of the trade unions with 14 million members are a disgrace. It is beyond that; they are criminally negligent. I have written enough about this subject and their disastrous role so I am not going to go in to it here. They are not simply “inefficient” or “moderate” as Eric Blanc, a DSA member like myself described them in a recent Jacobin article. But if you are in a union and if your are an activist, socialist, militant, shop steward or even a left Democrat politically. If you are not working to get your union to take up this issue and offer an alternative, if you are not confronting the present leadership (the dogs that never bark) and condemning them for their inactivity not only on wages hours and working conditions, but social issues and what we are witnessing here, the rise of white nationalism and fascist terror, then you are not fighting for your members or the working class as a whole. You are not fighting for the future.
“I’m not sure the US can make the change”
We can blame people for not acting, but history shows that without organization and leadership rooted in and out of its own ranks, people put up with a lot until their backs are against the wall and they have no alternative to fight.
I spoke with a good friend tonight who wrote in response to this awful racist killing that “I’m not sure the US can make the change. But we have to!”
Like me, I don’t think she has a PhD but she is honest, has lived a life, raised kids and so on and shares what she sees and she’s right. Personally, I’m not sure either. Not because I think the US working class not will move into struggle to change the situation, to resolve the many crises we face, but because in such situations leadership is crucial. Because there is no organizational form that the anger in US society can turn to let alone a leadership with any real semblance of a plan; the working class will have to go through a tumultuous struggle to find its feet and out of this movement a new leadership steeled in struggle will come to the fore.
But, there are no guarantees are there.
August 5, 2019
From the US socialist website, Facts for Working People, at:
https://weknewwhatsup.blogspot.com/2019/
