On Saturday, December 20, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, two members of the U.S. domestic colonial occupying military called police, were shot down in Bedford-Stuyvesant while sitting in their car, doing what police do.
After identifying the shooter as an African man named Ismaaiyl Brinsley, New York police commissioner William Bratton declared that Brinsley “walked up to the police car. He took a shooting stance on the passenger side, and fired his weapon several times through the front passenger window, striking both officers in the head,” according to the New York Post of December 21.
The Post and other ruling class, State-supported media also claimed Brinsley bragged through social media, “I’m Putting Wings on Pigs Today.” He was also said to have referenced the police murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner in New York: “They Take 1 Of Ours…Let’s Take 2 of Theirs.”
Brinsley was then reported to have fled the scene and killed himself on the platform of a nearby subway station.
The hysteria following the execution of Liu and Ramos was predictable. The white ruling class and its media had spent months struggling to redirect the narrative of the spontaneous movement that has been steadily growing following the police murder of 18-year-old Michael Brown on August 9, 2014 in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri.
It’s not that the Brown murder was the most flagrant of recent police murders of Africans in the U.S. That title might go to the lynching of Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York in the previous month by cops who choked him to death in full view of an audience that allowed the entire grotesque killing to be captured on video and subsequently viewed throughout the world.
Sustained rebellions against colonial oppression expose U.S. violence
Almost two months after Brown’s assassination, 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers was gunned down by police with at least seven rounds to the back, less than 20 minutes away from the Brown murder. Since then the slaying of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was shot by police in a Cleveland, Ohio playground within two seconds of their arrival, has captured the headlines.
The murder of Mike Brown took on a special significance because of the response of the young working class African population on Canfield Drive in Ferguson where the unarmed teenager was slaughtered with several shots, two of which were to the top of his head.
This time the response of the people was different. It was not simply that the people rose up in rebellion. That had happened before. This time the rebellion was sustained. It just wouldn’t stop and it continues up to this writing.
It is not, however, only continuing in Ferguson, Missouri. The heroic response of the African population in Ferguson inspired and emboldened Africans and others throughout the U.S. It forced the U.S. government to expose to the world its ruthlessness in suppressing African struggle within its mostly unrecognized U.S. domestic colony.
The U.S. Pentagon weapons program that supplies domestic police organizations with extra military hardware for crushing African resistance here in the U.S. was brought to the attention of the world in Ferguson. Cops with Afghanistan and Iraqi-grade arsenals were rushed into the area with obvious intent to kill and maim Africans before an international audience.
Rebellions continue despite U.S. attempts to calm them
The U.S. government also deployed an assortment of “soft” power to quell the anti-colonial rebellion. Eric Holder of the U.S. justice department was eventually brought into Ferguson armed with the Obama tactic of reminding the Africans that he was also once black and, therefore, sympathetic to the cause.
Obama’s go-to Christian charlatan Al Sharpton, well-coiffed and well-dressed in obscenely expensive suits was quickly ushered onto the scene along with a host of other negro sycophants to preach Americanism, militant non-violence, tolerance and respect for occupying military forces called police.
But none of this has worked, not even the government orchestrated march on the U.S. capitol of Washington, D.C. that was designed, unsuccessfully, to capture the spontaneous motion of the growing mass movement and give it a benign definition and direction.
The fear by the U.S. government has always been that, left to itself, even without ideological direction and organizational coherence, this movement might achieve organization, ideology and metamorphosize into a full-fledged insurgency with everything that implies.
Hence, from the vantage point of the colonial white ruling class, the December deaths of two of their troops by gunfire, though alarming, was a godsend, something they might use to seize the moral high ground and turn the tide of propaganda to their advantage.
This would be their opportunity to take advantage of the political inexperience of an African population that has been without revolutionary leadership for the two generations since the vicious U.S. defeat of the Black Revolution of the 1960s that resulted in the U.S. murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton, Lawrence Mann and so many others, along with the destruction of most revolutionary organizations and the mass arrests of hundreds more.
U.S. government, Sharpton and squeamish liberals
The government correctly summed up the influence of white and negro liberals, sometimes with radical sounding names, among the spontaneous movement responding to police murder and violence within the African communities of the U.S.
It was assumed that a little retaliatory violence on the part of the oppressed would be enough to turn the stomachs of most squeamish liberals and put them on the back foot, reluctant to continue supporting the just demands of African people for an end to police murder and violence of the colonized oppressed.
It would provide them the basis for uniting with Sharpton’s bromides equating responsive violence of the oppressed with the reactionary, perennial violence of the oppressor.
And it worked, to an extent. After a barrage of criticism by sectors of the white ruling class, State-supported media, some claiming the protestors, liberals and revolutionaries were responsible for the cops’ deaths, New York mayor William de Blasio, a white man who, like Barack Obama, won an election and achieved his creds in part by being married to an African woman, called on the protestors to halt their demonstrations for justice until after the funerals of the dead cops. Others joined suit.
FBI informant, bourgeois media and Obama representative Al Sharpton led the family of Eric Garner in giving homage to the dead cops and their families.
In addition to the tired, insipid bourgeois practice of defining “violence” as the occasional actions by the oppressed instead of the daily lives of poverty, joblessness, cultural assassination, deprivation of soul and dignity imposed on the oppressed by the oppressor, the white ruling class depends on most of the people to ignore the violence of armed U.S. drones murdering people around the world in its name.
Revolutionary violence vs. reactionary violence
There is also an attempt to take advantage of most people’s general abhorrence of violence.
It is the responsibility of the revolution to take science into this struggle of the masses and to teach that as abhorrent as violence in general may be, we, the people, must abhor and oppose reactionary violence, violence used to colonize and oppress people, to annex their lands and steal their resources. But, we must support and celebrate revolutionary violence used to liberate the people, to oppose oppression and the annexation of lands and resources of the people.
De Blasio and his spineless cronies called on the people to renounce their “rights” to freedom of assembly and speech; they want the people to submit to the terror of the colonial State while the terrorists mourn the loss of one of their own.
This is something that some protest organizers and the people at large clearly understood and immediately defied, leading mass demonstrations against the colonial State in New York while de Blasio and Sharpton prostrated themselves before the blind and rotting corpse of U.S. democracy.
So, two occupying colonial military forces are dead, shot down in broad daylight in Brooklyn, New York. The hunters became the hunted. The worm turned, so to speak.
This is important. It is a sign that the worst fears of the U.S. ruling class and State are in the wings, ready to take full stage.
It will take an anti-colonial revolution, led by our revolutionary anti-colonial Party to free African people in the U.S. and the world.
Revolution is brewing; The Party must build it
Although some are inclined to see the actions of Brinsley on December 20 as evidence that revolution is upon us, as important as his act was, the revolution is not here and revolution is what we must build for, it is what the spontaneous protests and actions against police violence against our people must contribute to if it is to be successful in the long run.
Brinsley’s act serves as a thermometer of the political temperature boiling just below the surface among the masses. The fact that it was an act against the police is not surprising. It is the police, an arm of the colonial State, which functions as the first line of defense for an oppressive and violent system.
And, for all the explanations and bleating from apologists of U.S. imperialism about democracy and the lot, the State as an institution was brought into existence because of exploitation, because society is split between those who have and those who do not and because those who have do so through expropriation from the impoverished exploited.
In the case of colonialism, where the existence of a wealthy society depends on what it forcibly extracts from another people, the State is especially vicious because the people will not easily give up the future of their children and whole people for the benefit of another hostile, alien group.
Essential ingredients that went into creation of the organ of oppression and coercion that we know as the U.S. State were “slave” catchers, “Indian” killers and Texas Rangers that also functioned to kill Indigenous people, including Mexicans, whose land was being annexed.
Colonialism requires “extreme violence”
Extreme violence is absolutely necessary. Within the white society of the U.S. and the world, dictatorship (which simply means rule without regard for law) is invisible, masked by constitutional provisions and the right to vote and speak.
For the colonized, dictatorship, the ubiquitous intrusion by the violent colonial State—the police, military, grand juries and courts—is nakedly obvious and viciously so, with nearly full support from the (white) citizens of the colonial power.
This is because the State functions to protect a status quo that consists, in part, of keeping Mexican and Indigenous lands and “slave”-created wealth in white hands. This is why it is so easy to create white hysteria in the U.S. by raising the specter of Mexican “aliens” coming across the border illegally and African people, especially young and especially big African men, waiting in the dark to do harm to innocent (sic) people.
The police, courts and grand juries do not cooperate in oppressing us because they are in need of repair. They do so because they are all arms of the colonial State, doing what it must do to preserve the status quo of wealth, stability and bourgeois democracy for the colonial power and generally agreeable white populace.
Revolution is not an event; it is not a single individual executing two armed agents of an oppressor state. Revolution is a process, one that must be able to read the signs of such an act and build on it.
Revolutionary violence vs. reactionary violence
For revolution to occur several things must exist for its success. They include crisis, the kind we have been witnessing for a while now that was punctuated on December 20 in Brooklyn, New York—the kind of crisis that made the selection of Barack Hussein Obama as U.S. president necessary as one attempt to diffuse or defeat it.
Revolution requires an inability of the colonial ruling class to rule in the same old way. Again, the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama is a splendid example of an inability by white power to rule in its own face, to rule in the same old way.
But so is so much of what is happening in the world, from the destruction of the U.S. “Back Yard” by the people of South America, Venezuela being the prime example, to the happenings in the Middle East/Persian Gulf, Eastern Europe and throughout Asia and Africa that challenge the hegemony of U.S. imperialism with stomach-churning urgency.
Revolution also requires an oppressed population that has concluded (to paraphrase Malcolm X) anything is better than hell! And is prepared to fight against their oppression regardless of the consequences.
Africans fighting tanks in the streets of Ferguson and confronting and killing occupying forces in broad daylight in Brooklyn, New York are examples of an incipient awakening of this spirit among the people.
Finally, revolution requires, perhaps more than anything else, a revolutionary Party, led by advanced, revolutionary theory. This is where the role of the African People’s Socialist Party is critical.
The Party must bring the people into revolutionary organization
The fact is that we are in a contest with the ruling class for the consciousness of a movement that has sprung up around the critical issue of the colonial State and its oppression of our people.
Our class enemies and national oppressors are struggling to intervene in a manner that will derail this movement by giving it a false consciousness, one that will facilitate our ongoing oppression, sometimes militantly, sometimes threatening to love our enemies to death or to disrupt their peace by bleeding in the presence of their innocent (sic) children and loved ones.
Not only must we ignore the bleating of our enemies, liberal and otherwise, not only must we reject the threats of the 35,000 strong New York military force that in one year alone stopped and searched 850,000 mostly African men and who appear to have publicly resolved to run amuck, publicly disregarding rule by law, we must escalate our struggle!
But we are not speaking here of blind escalation. We must take revolutionary science into the mass struggles. We must use all our creative energies to discredit the system before the masses, to help the people understand that revolution is the solution we are aiming for, even if it cannot be attained at the moment.
Our task is to use this struggle, one that many of us have been preparing for for more than two generations, to bring people into revolutionary organization, into the African People’s Socialist Party.
Black Community Control of the Police and Black People’s Grand Juries
The question before us all at this very critical moment is: To what end? We must reject the simple-minded notion that the movement is everything and the revolution is nothing.
Everything we say and do must advance the Revolution. It is from this mission that all our tactics and strategies must arise.
This is why we raise the demand for Black Community Control of the Police, to give the movement some direction that serves to deconstruct the colonial State organization most responsible for our oppression.
This is why we are advancing the program of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) to conduct Black People’s Grand Juries, starting with the one in Ferguson, Missouri on January 3 and 4to create a dual and contending power to define and determine our own anti-colonial justice, which has 20-20 vision.
Ismaaiyl Brinsley has given us another martyr.
Long live Ismaaiyl Brinsley!
Now, the struggle is for victory. As one comrade has eloquently stated: History is on our side, but not time!
Fight for Black Community Control of the Police!
Build the Black People’s Grand Jury!
Death to Imperialism!
Build the African People’s Socialist Party!
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Ismaaiyl Brinsley
Ismaaiyl Brinsley
