Communist Party of the Philippines oppose repression of U.S. protests

Fight Back News Service is circulating the following June 2 statement from the Communist Party of the Philippines.

Denounce brutal suppression of U.S. protests against racism and fascism! Support and draw inspiration from the American people’s mass protest actions!

The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) joins the American people in condemning U.S. President Donald Trump for ordering the mobilization of police and national guard forces to “dominate and crush” mass protest actions currently sweeping across the United States. He has denounced the mass actions and organizations and threatened to “designate” them as “terrorists.”

Over the past three days, hundreds of thousands of Americans have risen up in mass protest actions demanding justice for the May 25 murder of black worker George Floyd. “I can’t breath,” Floyd’s last words while on the ground and while being knelt on the neck by a police officer, has reverberated across the country and galvanized the American working people of all colors to unite and take collective action.

These demonstrations and various forms of protests manifest the collective outrage of the American people over racism and police brutality against Blacks and other minority groups in the US. The protests are directed against the Trump government which has fomented the worst kind of misogyny against women and racial bigotry against blacks, immigrants and other minorities. The demonstrations have expressed the united sentiment of hundreds of millions of workers and middle-class Americans against the Trump government amid widespread unemployment, worsening social, economic and public health conditions, and its failed response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Large protest demonstrations have been mounted over the past three days and nights in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Kentucky, New York, Washington and scores of other cities. Demonstrators have breached White House barricades and protested inside its premises. Riots, burning down of police cars and other property and incidents of looting have erupted across the nation.

Police, US Marshals and Secret Service have resorted to using tear gas and firing rubber bullets and other projectiles against demonstrators in a vain attempt to push back against the rising protests. At least one person has been killed while scores have been injured in brutal dispersal methods employed by state forces.

Trump has unmasked himself as a fascist brute determined to silence and put down by force the mounting protest actions of the people. The fascist core of the US government is unraveling as trappings of bourgeois democracy are being shed off. Trump wants to openly employ the US fascist machinery because he is gripped by fear that the demonstrations sparked by police violence will inspire even greater protests.

The need to raise their voices and collectively manifest indignation is driving millions of Americans to join street demonstrations even amid the Covid-19 pandemic. In the face of an acute crisis of mass unemployment and worsening desperate straits for millions of American workers and middle-class families, the people’s anger has become so many time greater and more urgent than the fear of the virus.

Demonstrations supportive of the American people’s mass protests have also been mounted in front of the U.S. embassies in London, Berlin and Denmark, as well as in Rio de Janeiro and Jerusalem. International solidarity has flooded social media.

Just as the American people have long been inspired by the democratic mass movement in the Philippines, the Filipino people today draws inspiration from the protest movement in the United States in this time of pandemic.

On the same day George Floyd was killed, the lifeless body of Carlito Badion, secretary general of the urban poor group Kadamay, was found in a shallow grave in Ormoc City, Leyte. He was abducted two days before by armed men believed to be military agents. Badion earned the ire of the Duterte regime for leading the fight of the urban poor against the demolition of their communities, as well as against the anti-poor drug war killings. His body bore marks of torture.

Like the killing of George Floyd, the murder of Badion is utterly condemnable and rouses indignation. State forces under the Duterte regime are carrying out increasingly abominable crimes with impunity. Brutal fascist attacks against the democratic forces are set to worsen even more with the impending enactment of the Anti-Terrorism Law.

In the same way that Trump is now invoking “anti-terrorism” to quell the protests, the Duterte regime will undoubtedly use this impending law against the democratic forces to terrorize and suppress them and silence all opposition against Duterte’s corruption, fascist brutality and subservience to the US and China and remove all hindrances to establishing a fascist dictatorship.

Drawing inspiration from the American people, the Filipino people can carry out their own mass protests actions to express solidarity and amplify the demand for justice for George Floyd and all victims of racial violence, and an end to racism, and Trump-instigated bigotry in the U.S.

There must also be mass protest actions to give expression to the Filipino people’s indignation over the regime’s military lockdown purportedly to contain the virus, but merely used as a brutal instrument to force the people to their knees and require compliance with the dictates of the Duterte-Año-Lorenzana-Esperon junta.

Just like the American people, the Filipino people demand the right to express themselves outside social media and come together in various forms to vent their protest over the regime’s corruption, incompetence and failure to manage the pandemic and address the socio-economic needs of the Filipino people resulting in widespread hunger and poverty during the lockdown. They also seek to vent out their protests over the worsening militarism and the anti-people and debt-driven neoliberal policies that the regime is imposing under its oppressive “new normal” order.