Solidarity with the American students! This is the way!
In recent weeks tens of thousands of students have occupied nearly 80 university campuses across the US to denounce the genocide in Gaza, and above all, the complicity in it of the US Biden administration and the university authorities, bought off with billions by the Zionist lobby in order to keep silent or cover up the crimes of the Netanyahu government.
The solidarity movement with the Palestinian people, which has been occupying the streets of the US for months, has taken a new leap, through direct action, raising the most massive and powerful university protest since the Vietnam War, when the Democrats were also pushing for genocide and the slaughter of millions of civilians in Southeast Asia.
Finally, at two of the main occupied campuses, Columbia University in New York, where the protests began, and UCLA in California, there was a spectacular military assault by police forces in both cities, under Democratic control, arresting more than 1,500 people so far.
The police brutality, against students, but also against professors who organised cordons to protect them, is a good example of the reality behind the so-called ‘American democracy’. A farce that collapses when the mass movement questions the capitalist and imperialist interests of its elites and its government.
A savage police intervention that has been publicly backed by President Biden, that champion of freedom, democracy and progress so praised by the Spanish left, both by Pedro Sánchez and the vice-president Yolanda Díaz.
Biden has pointed out that the US is not an authoritarian country - that he has to say so gives an idea of how things stand - but that ‘order must prevail’. A statement completely in tune with Trump, who publicly called for police intervention to subdue the ‘angry lunatics’ protesting on campuses. And now Biden and the Democrats will call for a vote to stop Trumpism? What a fraud, they are the ones propping up Trump and the far right!
Whether it is the Biden Administration, the Democratic mayors of New York or Los Angeles, or Bernie Sanders and the so-called Democratic left who have refused to clearly condemn the repression, they are discrediting themselves in the eyes of millions in the US and around the world. They talk about avoiding violence - what despicable hypocrisy! The only violence there is is their own, that which they sponsor in Gaza, with police forces on university campuses, and that which has been exercised atUCLA by the fascist gangs of Zionist provocateurs who tried to storm a peaceful encampment.
This order that Biden and the Democrats are talking about is the order of the American imperialists and the Zionist supremacists, who are committing genocide in Gaza, with more than 40,000 people killed and nearly 100,000 wounded, 80% of them women and children; who have destroyed 60% of the homes, all the universities in the Gaza Strip and 80% of its health network and hospitals; and who are causing a famine by encircling the Palestinian population in an attempt to break its will to fight and resist.
The same Democratic administration is building a military base on the coast of Gaza, near the rich gas fields belonging to the Palestinian people, with the rubble left by the Israeli bombardment mixed with hundreds of dead bodies. What is the difference with the Nazis?
As we have been pointing out, the only thing that is putting Netanyahu's ultra-right and colonialist government, and its US and EU allies, including our government, on the ropes is more forceful mass mobilisation, such as we are seeing in the US.
Students face not only police brutality, arrests and possible jail sentences, but also expulsion from universities, with the financial burden that this entails, where in order to study you need credits that you have to pay for your whole life. Hence, prior to the police intervention, attempts were made to intimidate them by threatening them with expulsion from the campuses. But none of this has worked, and the mass protests are continuing outside the campuses. This is the way forward!
This is the only reason why there has not already been a new military intervention in Rafah, on the border with Egypt, where 1.5 million Palestinians are concentrated, which would mean a new massacre. It is the strength of this internationalist class solidarity that has prevented it.
In August the Democratic Convention will be held in Chicago to confirm Biden as a candidate for the presidency, hence the desperate attempt to crush manu militari the solidarity movement with the Palestinian people. But all they are succeeding in doing, as all the polls show, is to open the doors for Trump's comeback. It is Biden, Sanders, Ocasio Cortez and all the Democrats who are responsible for this comeback.
The fight against Trump and the extreme right is inextricably linked to the fight against imperialist war and against the Zionist genocide in Gaza. That is why the Democrats cannot lead and carry it forward - they are part of the problem, not the solution!
What is needed now is to continue to strengthen the resistance movement in the USA, from below, through direct action, extending this movement to Europe and the rest of the world. We must continue to raise internationalist solidarity with our sisters and brothers in Gaza, and now also with the American students.
The strength of the student movement in the USA must be fused with the strength that for years has been demonstrated by the American labour movement, which after years of setbacks is once again standing up to the bosses, the capitalists, the Republicans and the Democrats, promoting forceful and radicalised strikes, even winning important victories. We must extend this wonderful movement on the campuses to the factories and workplaces, promoting strikes against the genocide in Gaza, organising mass protests against their accomplices, blockading the companies or the ports that daily supply the Zionists with bullets, weapons and bombs. Only in this way can we stop this barbarism! Neither with impotent tearful speeches, nor by turning to institutions or to an international justice system that faithfully serves its imperialist masters.
Only the class struggle will stop the genocide!
