By Coco Das |
This week, legendary Watergate journalist Bob Woodward released a recorded conversation in which Trump confessed that he deliberately played down the danger of COVID-19 to “not cause a panic.” This is rich coming from a fascist lunatic whose whole rise to power has been built on stoking white supremacist panic against immigrants, Black people, protesters, Antifa, Democrats, and anything that stands in the way of their fascist America. The Woodward tapes have re-awakened outrage that at least tens of thousands of the 190,000 people who have died so far from COVID-19 could have been saved with a science-based policy to control the pandemic.
It’s valid to question the ethics of Woodward sitting on this information since February. We don’t know what might have changed if people had definitive proof that his policies were not based on ignorance but deliberate political calculations. But to those who have directed all their vitriol against Woodward, barely mentioning Trump in their diatribes or worse: excusing Trump because “we all know he lies anyway,” I have news for you. You now are also sitting on this information, and if you’re still not demanding Trump’s immediate removal from power and joining with people who are in the streets voicing their refusal to go along with this vicious murderous program, after 190,000 people have already died, you need to stop pointing your finger at Woodward and look in the mirror.
When we look back at Nazi Germany, we don’t only ask what the journalists did to allow Hitler to consolidate power. We don’t only look at the active collaboration of Weimar officials. We ask why the German people went along with it. We ask what they knew and when. And we judge them for standing aside instead of waging a massive struggle to stop it as people around them were being rounded up.
People in this country have known enough to refuse to accept this illegitimate regime since Trump started his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists, since the Muslim Ban, since family separation, since kids in cages, since concentration camps at the border, since Charlottesville, since Trump’s impeachment and acquittal, since unleashing the military on peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park and spewing conspiracy theories and venom against people of color and political enemies every time he takes the mic; need I go on? Knowing now that Trump knew what he knew and didn’t just hide it but actively encouraged armed thugs to storm state houses and “liberate” blue states, insisted on holding rallies with zero disease prevention protocol – turning them into superspreader events, and whipped up bloodthirsty racist fervor by calling the disease the “China Virus” and “Kung Flu,” should have every corner of society screaming for Trump’s removal from office at this very moment. Millions should be in the streets saying “Not one more death by this sociopathic Nazi regime!”
But that has not been the overwhelming response. The overwhelming response has been to sit, sit, sit, sit some more and sit tight for an election that is already being ripped right out from under our feet. The Woodward interviews come better late than never, apparently with even more damning information about Trump’s terrifying nuclear program in case we forgot that we truly have a demented bully with his finger on the nuclear button, but none of this matters if we don’t act in a way that can meet the accelerating danger of a regime on a collision course with humanity.
You must refuse to accept this fascist regime. What will you one day tell people you did when you knew the Trump/Pence regime posed a catastrophic danger to the world? What will you say you did when it was revealed to all the world that Trump allowed a novel virus and the deadly disease of fascism to ravage society? If you care about humanity, if you care about justice, then it better be more than shaking a finger at Bob Woodward and sitting tight until the elections. That would be complicity, and there is only one way out of that. Join others, rise up. Show the world that you do not comply and do not accept another needless death on your watch. As part of the 60 days of struggle launched by RefuseFascism.org on September 5, here is a chance you must seize:
September 21st
In Cities and Towns Across the Country
MARCH AGAINST DEATH, LIES, AND FASCISM AND FOR HUMANITY!
TRUMP/PENCE OUT NOW!
We in our millions are the ones to bring this nightmare to an end. September 21 protests and other mass non-violent actions in the streets, of many different kinds and involving many different sections of people, must bring the world closer to a situation where sustained, non-violent protests demanding Trump/Pence Out Now reverberate throughout this country by October. The future depends on us transforming these two months leading to the election into our time, not Trump’s.
Does a regime that worked to spread a pandemic that has killed 190,000 people need to go now? If you don’t think it does, if you think there is some solution short of driving this murderous regime out now, then you are already far along on the road to complicity. The good news is that you can still get off. Pull the emergency break. There’s a different path being blazed and you should be on it.