Never forget Vincent Chin
“It’s not fair.” Those were the last words of Vincent Chin outside a McDonald’s in Highland Park, Mich., a suburb of Detroit. The 27-year-old was beaten to death by two white racists on June 19, 1982, because he was Asian American.
Chrysler supervisor Ronald Ebens hit Chin with a baseball bat while Ebens’ stepson, Michael Nitz, held Chin down. Vincent Chin’s skull was fractured and he died four days later on June 23, 1982.
The United States was in a deep recession that year and the official unemployment rate reached 10.8 percent. It was worse in Michigan, with the jobless rate there climbing to 16.5 percent by the end of 1982.
Banksters and billionaires like the Ford family had already shut down hundreds of factories, warehouses and offices. They wanted people to blame Japan for deindustrialization. Their media and politicians repeated this big lie.
The result was that laid-off Chrysler straw boss Ebens yelled at Vincent Chin, “It’s because of you little m———-s that we’re out of work!” and killed him. That Vincent Chin was Chinese American made no difference.
Ebens and Nitz were clearly guilty of premeditated murder but were only convicted of manslaughter. These killers who robbed Lily Chin of her only son were sentenced to a mere three years probation and a $3,000 fine by Judge Charles Kaufman.
Thirty-eight years later, Trump wants us to blame the People’s Republic of China for the coronavirus. The racist pig in the White House calls this deadly disease “the Chinese virus.”
That’s not fair. Viruses don’t have a nationality. There’s been over 150 attacks on Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans since the pandemic started.
Every one of those attacked could have been another Vincent Chin. Trump’s rhetoric helps fuel this racist violence.
Hate epidemic
Blaming peoples and countries for disease is genocidal. Nazis claimed that Jewish immigrants from Poland were spreading tuberculosis in Germany.
Radio fascist Michael Savage claimed immigrants, particularly those from Mexico and Central America, were spreading tropical diseases in the U.S. That was the subject of his first hate show on March 24, 1994, broadcast from San Francisco.
The same year, California’s Proposition 187 was on the ballot. It would have kicked immigrants out of hospitals and public schools. Savage was put on the radio to promote this segregationist referendum.
Savage is now blaming the People’s Republic of China for the coronavirus and Chinese Americans in San Francisco for spreading it.
That doesn’t stop Vice President Mike Pence from calling into Savage’s radio program. Donald Trump has welcomed the hate monger aboard Air Force One.
It’s easy to dismiss Savage, who once touted coffee-filled enemas as a cure to kick cocaine addiction. But almost the entire capitalist media attack the People’s Republic of China for its handling of the coronavirus.
That’s not fair, either. China reported cases of pneumonia that had occurred in Wuhan to the World Health Organization on Dec. 31, 2019.
The next day, health officials closed the Wuhan seafood market that was linked to some of those who were ill. By Jan. 7, Chinese scientists had identified the new coronavirus.
The Trump administration and the $4 trillion medical-industrial complex squandered the advance notice given the United States by China. Trump and the airheads on Fox News belittled the new coronavirus. Radio bigot Rush Limbaugh dismissed it as the common cold.
It wasn’t China that shut down 135 hospitals across the U.S. since 2015. Capitalist greed and budget cuts got rid of the thousands of hospital beds that we now need.
China didn’t create dangerous shortages of masks and other protective equipment for medical workers. New York Gov. Cuomo is now begging for thousands of lifesaving ventilators.
Elderly patients may be forced to die because there’s not enough of them. Chinese factories are working around the clock making ventilators for the U.S. and Italy.
It’s because the People’s Republic of China is a socialist country that it was able to organize society to beat back the coronavirus. Tens of thousands of health care workers, including doctors, volunteered to go to Wuhan and the surrounding Hubei province.
Last year, the capitalist police in the U.S. killed at least 1,004 people. The unarmed socialist police in Wuhan would deliver food to people who were quarantined.
China gave the world, including the U.S., a vital breathing space to push back the pandemic.
Blaming the People’s Republic of China for the coronavirus is war propaganda. Don’t believe it. It’s not fair.
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