October 5, 2010

Solidarity from Project South

“They came for us in the morning and they will come for you in the afternoon” is expressed loud and clearly through the recent arrests of anti-war and pro-Palestinian activists in Chicago and Minneapolis late Friday afternoon September 24.

Histories of struggle remind us that they came for indigenous communities, we call that genocide; they went after the labor movement, we called that the Red Scare; they came for women of color and people with disabilities, we call that eugenics; they came for the Jews, we call that the Holocaust; they went after our movements and many of us call that CoIntelPro; they’re going after the undocumented, we call that the ICE Raids and SB1070, they’re going after Muslims, we call that the War on Terror; they’re going after political dissent, we call that the USA PATRIOT Act; and they’re still coming for Black people, we’ve come to call that Oscar Grant, Aiyana Jones, Kathyrn Johnson, Hurricane Katrina, the Prison Industrial Complex or simply deepening poverty and bloody Genocide.

Our politics must begin to assert that that if they take one, they take us all because when they take one, they intend to come for us all. We stand in solidarity with those recently arrested and the many more indefinitely detained on trumped up charges because we know fear moves down the line along predictable paths and eventually it shows up on one’s doorstep in the middle of the night. History is clear on this point.