Two speakers at the Oct. 5 rally and march at Baltimore City Hall
The following are addresses given by young working-class activists Jace Carter and Colby Byrd at the rally for Palestine and Lebanon in front of Baltimore City Hall on Oct. 6.
Jace Carter representing Struggle-La Lucha for Socialism and People’s Power Assembly
Good afternoon sisters, brothers, and siblings! My name is Jace, and I am a proud member of both the Baltimore chapter of Struggle-La Lucha (aka the Socialist Unity Party) and the People’s Power Assembly.
I just wanted to start off by saying that as a recent Loyola graduate, Shame on my university! Shame on all the universities across America repressing encampments and our international solidarity movement for Palestine!
Struggle-La Lucha, the Socialist Unity Party, is dedicated to uniting all workers and the oppressed to overthrow our murderous capitalist system, and the People’s Power Assembly has fought against racist police terror and for the rights of poor and working-class people since the murder of Trayvon Martin.
Over the past year, our organizations have been tirelessly organizing people in and around the Baltimore community to show solidarity and our commitment to Palestine through marches, rallies, and direct actions, as well as education campaigns against our notorious misleaders: Mayor Brandon Scott and District Attorney Ivan “the Terrible” Bates right here in Baltimore, and Governor Wes Moore in greater Maryland.
They shamelessly continue to throw their support behind Genocide Joe and the genocidal entity of Israel! They know that participation in this grift can get them one step closer to a democratic party nomination for president. Imagine that. …
By the way, if you didn’t already know this, remember around May of last year when Ivan Bates shamelessly tweeted out pictures of himself smiling with the IDF soldiers he welcomed into our city without our consent? The same IDF Soldiers that annually train Baltimore Police Department officers! The same BPD that just received over $500 million in funding for this year! The same BPD that’s currently training in a $330 million Cop City facility right down the street next to Coppin State! Yeah, Ivan finally took that shit down, who’s surprised? But we will never forget.
Exactly a month from now, we will have undeniably the most important election in our lifetime, an election that either will save our precious democracy or plunge us in over our heads in terrible, terrible fascism.
That’s what our complicit mainstream media always loves to tell us every four years, right? For the past couple decades?! But oh, wait, what’s that? The fascism’s already here?! Well gee, I never would’ve guessed! All it takes is a quick look at TikTok and a quick look around you and our communities, our country, and the current state of the world!
You know what’s actually really funny though? This illusion that the people even have a choice, if we ignore the fact that we haven’t had a choice really since the founding of this country. This “choice” between one side that promises to “finish the job” in the Gaza strip and then across the rest of the Middle East, and the other side that even way before Oct. 7 has been happily throwing away billions upon billions of our taxpayer dollars to fund genocide and endless destruction in occupied Palestine, while workers continue to be starved of living wages, affordable housing, and healthcare, and students continue to have their First Amendment rights heavily repressed by ultra-liberal universities pretending to care about basic human rights!
Not to mention, FEMA recently announced a few days ago over a $9.7 billion shortfall for relief and aid for Hurricane Helene. Let that sink in for a second. A $9.7 billion shortfall for hurricane relief. Our government would rather intentionally manufacture another Katrina situation by sending over $8.7 billion to a genocidal entity to murder Palestinians and the people of Lebanon than do even the bare minimum to help those affected by Helene in the South!
Where does that leave us, where does this leave our movement, on this, the one year anniversary of one of the greatest lies our terrorist government and the terrorist Israeli entity and their media puppets have ever told before?
Our movement is at a critical juncture, a movement that’s worked so hard to make our voices heard and our actions seen. No doubt this feels like another 1968, doesn’t it? But we have an important choice to make this time.
Will we allow this country to be overtaken by a significantly stronger wave of fascism, whether it has a red or a blue face?!
I said: Will we allow this country to be overtaken by a significantly stronger wave of fascism, whether it has a red or a blue face?!
We, the people, choose socialism and national liberation!
We, the people, choose international solidarity over U.S. hegemony!
We, the people, say long live Palestine and long live Lebanon!
No boots on the ground, no bombs in the air! U.S. out of everywhere!
Thank you, comrades!
Colby Byrd representing Struggle-La Lucha for Socialism
I have no love for the Uniparty. I do not want to and will not cooperate or reach across the aisle with racists, misogynists, war profiteers, and genocide enablers. The Uniparty is trying to bury the Palestinian struggle. It is trying to delegitimize it and hide it away somehow behind a mountain of corpses. They do all of this because they are scared of the struggle and what it means. They tremble and panic as the continued resistance in occupied Palestine tears open and exposes the old contradictions that propped up imperialist domination of the globe. A domination that leads to the systematic destruction of different cultures around the world, continuing into today.
When I hear stories like the massacres at Nuseirat, Al Rashid, al-Mawasi, Tal al-Sultan, and Tulkarem my heart gets heavy with sympathy. My mind begins to race and my breathing becomes erratic as I fill with a sadness that I know all too well. It is the same feeling when I think of the Tulsa massacre or the Rosewood massacre, or Vicksburg, Memphis, Atlanta, and Springfield, to name others. All of these and the many others I didn’t name were attacks by the colonizer on my people. Videos of settlers and soldiers storming mosques and homes, I close my eyes and see the Charleston church or Breyonna Taylor’ss apartment. The other random and targeted attacks and killings of Palestinians wound my soul in the same way the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Micheal Brown, George Floyd, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Daunte Wright, Atatiana Jefferson, Ahmaud Arbery, Botham Jean, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, and Donnell Rochester did.
I of course cannot continue without saying that my heart bleeds for the many other Black victims of white supremacy and the insidious systems that uphold and nurture it.
These systems that oppress and kill black people here are the same systems that oppress and kill Palestinians over there. Even down to the label it’s stamped with. From Amazon to police agencies, U.S. investments in Palestinian oppression and genocide are the continuation, evolution, and exportation of the systems that have systematically killed my people.
“There will be no retreat from the path of confrontation, no matter how great the sacrifices are.”– Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
After nearly a year of War and Genocide. …
Palestine Lives after over 70,000 tons of explosives were dropped across the occupied strip. … Palestine Lives.
After Israeli soldiers and settlers have pillaged, and razed the land. … Palestine Lives.
Through countless atrocities, massacres, forced starvation, and forced displacement. … Palestine Lives.
The People, the Palestinian People live on. Through impossible odds and hardships, they claw every moment closer to true freedom. Through this brutal confrontation for national liberation, the Palestinian people have been placed by Fate and Time to champion the Struggle and lead the fight. This fight stretches across the entire globe and encompasses each and every one of us. It is a fight, a brawl, a war for human decency and survival.
Around the world, the ruling class is consolidating its gains wherever it can and brutally suppressing those in their way. We see it clearly in Palestine, where everyday people are fighting against Occupational forces and roaming gangs of settlers. Fighting to defend their homes, their culture, and their very way of life from extermination. We see this fight in Lebanon where the people are fighting back against the Israeli terrorists invading their country. We see this kinetic action also in Sudan, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran, all against the outstretched imperialist enemy.
As the fight intensifies abroad, we here must rise to the challenge. Continue to organize and fight back in any way available. It will take all of us. The capitalists have declared total war. They show us every day, whether it be overseas or here, they have no problem killing men, women, and children, of all possible varieties for just one more dollar. We see it on the bodies of our class siblings who bear the scars of being overworked and maimed for an executive to get a bonus states away. We see in the countless recalls of food, the rising housing costs, crumbling infrastructure, and the lack of good employment, how they have tried over and over to waste us away, all to increase profits for the upper few.
They will continue to try, they will continue to harass and harm us, continue to shoot us, and stomp out our voices. They will do everything they can to sever our connection to the beating heart of revolutionary change going on in Palestine but we will break through! We will continue to live, march, protest, and fight back over here for as long as the resistance needs us to.
From the river, around the world, and back to the river, we stand united. It is indeed a revolution until the liberation of the land and of the human being.
Long Live Palestine!
Long Live Lebanon!
Long Live Yemen!
Long Live Iran!
Long Live the Resistance, and Long Live International Solidarity!
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