Fourth of July rally in Eugene: Call out fascism while there’s still time
Presenter: Veterans for Peace celebrated the Fourth of July, and independent videographer Todd Boyle was there.
Jazmin Florez: My name is Jazmin. I’m an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
Today, this country is celebrating our Independence Day, right, celebrating freedom. But freedom for who? And to do what?
This holiday is not really about our freedom. What today is really about is celebrating this government’s freedom to dominate the entire planet. They are celebrating the empire.
They are celebrating the slave owners and billionaires for their freedom to take away our basic rights which we have fought, bled, and died for against them in the field of battle.
They are celebrating the freedom to control history where they make us celebrate their heroes, genociders like Christopher Columbus, Andrew Jackson, slave owners like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison.
Their history is full of heroes who took people’s rights and lives away. And that is a legacy that this administration is carrying forward today. Shame.
We’re told that Abraham Lincoln freed all the slaves by signing the Emancipation Proclamation, but it was really the enslaved people themselves who fought and won their freedom.
That’s right. Thousands of them escaped plantations and joined the Union Army. Millions more who stayed on plantations took a part in the first general strike in U.S. history by refusing to work, sabotaged crops, broke farming equipment, and straight up took over plantations. And without their labor, the Confederate army completely disintegrated.
So make no mistake about it, they freed themselves. That’s the history that we need to remind everyone about and this America 250—the people’s history of struggle for our rights over the rich and powerful who want to trample them for profit.
That is the heart of every right we have won over these last 250 years, and that is exactly what this administration is fighting to take back from us, because that history is what tells us how we win.
It’s the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. It’s the Haymarket Massacre of 1886. And the communists and anarchist-led fights for the eight-hour work day, weekends off, lunch breaks, unemployment benefits, so many more.
It’s the GI resistance that finally put an end to the Vietnam War. It’s the blockade at Warner Creek and the fight against Jordan Cove. In every case, our people fought back against the machine, trying to trample our human rights.
Harry Haywood, Claudia Jones, Eugene Debs, Lucy Parsons, Albert Parsons, Marsha P. Johnson. These are our heroes that we are holding up at 250, and we claim the full legacy of our heroes, not the watered-down versions.
They tell us that Harriet Tubman freed some slaves from slavery via the Underground Railroad, but they don’t say anything about her being the first woman in U.S. history to plan and lead a major military operation.
I remember my teacher telling me that Rosa Parks refused her seat just because her feet were tired, she didn’t do it out of a purposeful resistance. But that was a lie.
It was actually an organized effort by her and several other organizers. It wasn’t that her feet were tired, it’s that they were all tired of the racist system that was oppressing them and millions of other black people around the country.
That’s right. We would read small portions of Dr. King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, but never his full speech entitled ‘Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam,’ given shortly before he was assassinated.
We would hear every sentence he ever said about nonviolence. But our people facing ICE in the street, being arrested and imprisoned for free speech, or being groomed for war, deserve to hear his opposition to not only racism, but also inequality, militarism and capitalism.
That’s right. And our people should know that he did not lead the civil rights movement alone. It was a mass movement of millions of people like us standing against Jim Crow apartheid.
This is our America at 250. But if we allow the billionaire empire to have control over our history, we can be sure that our descendants will be taught to praise and admire people like Donald Trump and his entire species.
These attacks on our rights, on the rights of Iranians, on Venezuelans, Cubans by this administration must be fought. But we also need to understand that Trump and his administration are just a symptom of a wider disease. Our rights have always been negotiable when a billionaire wants to trample them for profit.
So to secure our rights, we’re not only fighting Trump, what we’re really fighting against is imperialism, right? We fight the capitalist system that puts those rights on the chopping block.
That is our revolutionary history. And it’s imperative that we own our history, that we remind, that we remember the fights and struggles that we are living and experiencing right now, and not just here in Oregon, but around the country, around the world and all across our history.
Our history tells us that we have the power to fight this together, but we can only do this together.
Presenter: Rodger Gamblin, Veterans for Peace:
Rodger Gamblin (Veterans for Peace): The vote to sever ties with Great Britain happened on July 2, 1776. John Adams believed that was the day that would be celebrated by future Americans.
July 4th, in fact, was the day that the finalized Declaration of Independence was sent to the printer, John Dunlap, who worked late into the night typesetting and printing hundreds of the large printed posters or broadsides to be written across the 13 colonies and read aloud to the Americans they now applied to.
These broadsides were all marked with their printing date, July 4, 1776. And thus that became the day that we celebrate as our Independence Day.
That’s how powerful information is, how powerful it is to be read to, as I’m reading to you now, today truly is a celebration of the day that our Declaration of Independence was printed so that it could be read to us.
It is in that spirit that I speak to you now. I only have a few minutes to speak, and in that time I would like to, as it was in July of 1776, to read to you from the Declaration of Independence, not the beautiful and poignant words at the beginning that we all know—self-evident truths, unalienable rights, the pursuit of happiness, and the like—but the later part of the document.
You see, the largest portion of the declaration is not those mighty words of freedom and rights, but a list of grievances rightly leveled against the despotic King George III. I think that much of that list is as relevant to the America of today as it was the day it was written.
Without further ado, here are a selection of those words.
‘The history of the present king of Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
‘He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation, till his assent should be obtained, and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
‘He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states for that purpose of obstructing the laws of naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.
‘He has obstructed the administration of justice by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers. He has made judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.’
(Reminds me of DOGE.)
‘He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation.
‘For quartering large bodies of troops among us, for protecting them by mock trial from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states, for cutting off our trade with all parts of the world, for transporting us beyond the seas to be tried for pretended offences.
‘For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our government. He has abdicated government here by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us. Hear, hear! In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms.
‘Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.’
Presenter: From Indivisible Eugene Springfield, Stan Taylor:
Stan Taylor: Well, I was thinking about what to talk about today. And given that it’s the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, it occurred to me that we ought to be talking somewhat about patriotism.
You know, there are two types of patriotism. One type is the type that Nathan McCall, who’s an African American—
(Roaring engine, quip about ‘first beer,’ laughter)
Good illustration here because one of the things that Nathan McCall did was talk about how many people define patriotism or relate—their patriotism involves shallow patriotism and willful ignorance.
On the other side for patriotism are those who stand up for human rights and the environment and have been doing so throughout our nation’s history.
If you read that Declaration of Independence, it has a lot of beautiful words in it: the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But one of the words in it is: Those are rights for men. And if you really look at those rights at the time, they were for white men with property. They weren’t for Indigenous people.
They weren’t for women, they weren’t for slaves. They weren’t for wage labor.They were limited rights, and the history of our country has been the history of movements to bring those words life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness home to all people, one movement after another.
First, actually, the right of all white men to vote. But they didn’t. Just people with property.
Then of course, the rights of slaves for freedom, the rights of the women’s movements, the rights of the labor movements. And coming further forward, you know, we can look at the rights of the environment.
All this history is a history of social movements, bringing the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness home to all people who.
Today we have a government that is trying simultaneously to take back all the gains of progressive movements over the last two centuries. Right. Literally, this government wants to take us back to the time of kings and monarchs. What’s called reactionary politics, right? Reactionaries are taking us back, wanting to take us back to a time where only men with property had power.
So we’re at a point now where we have to recognize that all of these movements that have taken place over the last two centuries are under threat, and all of these movements need now to come together in one large movement facing the same direction, demanding rights for all people at one time.
What we’ve been trying to do at Indivisible Eugene Springfield is create those movements. So one of the things we did was reach out to try to create the Activist Coalition of Eugene Springfield (ACES), which has brought to you the No Kings rallies here in Eugene.
Right now we’re working on creating another set of alliances for election protection. We have combined with the NAACP. Let me make sure I get the whole list here.
The NAACP, Indivisible, SURJ / Showing Up for Racial Justice, 350 Eugene, the Immigrant Rights Coalition, all of these groups and more are joining together in election protection effort, joined with Common Cause, with trainings that will take place here in Eugene and in August to help protect the elections.
But we have to recognize that elections alone aren’t enough. We don’t want to have elections and wind up winning back in the Democratic Party and go back to the neoliberal order that was there before Trump came to power. Right.
We have to come together to build a new world that is a world that provides economic justice for all, gender justice for all, environmental justice for all. We have to come together to build these movements.
So elections are only the first step in a larger set. And we have to, as a movement, recognize that once we win these elections, we have to keep working as a movement to build the world we want to see.
Presenter: Chris Case:
Chris Case: Howdy, everybody. My name is Chris and I’m a member of About Face: Veterans Against the War. And I was a Marine Corps infantry veteran for five years.
Today marks the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. And since that founding, our country has been involved in both overt and covert conflict for over 230 years of that history.
We have overturned governments, staged coups, carried out bombings, and committed many more heinous acts, often the same ones we use as justifications to attack those countries.
There is no finer example of the hypocrisy of America than our current administration. We decry Iranian attacks as terrorism while we assassinate fishermen off the coast of Venezuela. We champion Christian values while we lock up nuns, and we shoot nurses in the back claiming immigrants are destroying our communities.
But whenever I turn on the television, it is masked government agents that I see destroying communities.
And finally, we have a president who runs a campaign on affordability, only to turn around and profit over $2 billion for himself and his family. And he will say to you, affordability is not something that I care about.
Our economy is tanking and the climate continues to wreak havoc across the country and across the planet. And the most recent war with Iran has cost us $132 billion dollars, according to Moody’s.
Every dollar we spend on war is a person we don’t feed, is a child we do not educate, and is a neighbor that we do not house.
We have children who work in slaughterhouses, who pay more taxes than the richest person in the world. And do you know what those taxes are going to pay for? They go to pay for bombs used to destroy Venezuela, Iran, Palestine and a host of other countries.
Do you think that families who had to bury their schoolchildren have any doubt about what America is about when they see a bomb that says ‘Made in Indiana’ on the side?
And as has been stated by others, that boomerang is coming home. The imperialism practised abroad will always find its way home. And what you have seen in the last few months is a litmus test for what the United States government thinks you are willing to accept.
When the U.S. government is posting war crimes in the Caribbean, it is showing you what is coming home to your community. The Israeli prison guards who are subsidized by our tax dollars, when they aren’t sexually assaulting prisoners to death, are coming to this country to train our police and our federal agents.
The government that is asking us to celebrate today only has the continued commiseration and pain of its citizens on offer. They will continue to press until rights for women, BIPOC folks, LGBTQIA folks, and anyone that isn’t rich and white enough are a thing of the past. But this does not have to be the case.
American history is full of people whose stories are embodied by the values that we just use as branding often. Consider somebody like Dorothy Day, who spent her entire life locked up in prison for workers rights and for immigrants rights, and who would be locked up at the age of 75 standing with United Farm Workers.
Consider somebody like Joe Hill, an immigrant who was killed in this country fighting for workers rights against the mine owners in Utah. These are our stories and our legacies. Folks like John Brown, Assata Shakur, Sylvia Rivera. These are the names that should inspire us. You can keep your slave-owning George Washington and all your pimps and all your war profiteers.
That’s right. It is finally time for us to have the country that working people deserve. A country where no one is allowed to go hungry or unsheltered in the richest country that has ever existed. A country where no person is forced by the meanness of their circumstance to abandon their humanity and their dignity.
A country where petty nationalism is cast aside. And we can finally recognize that those of us in the world are neighbors. It will not be easy. It will not be fast, but it is necessary if we are going to finally stop lying and truly embrace the phrase, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ then let us stand together, shoulder to shoulder, and secure the birthright for working people.
Long live the fighters! Long live the workers! Free Palestine!
Christine Patterson: I’m Christine with Veterans For Peace. We are talking today about how our rights are being stripped away by the current administration. It’s bad now, and more and more people are realizing how grossly our basic rights are being violated.
This is empire coming home to roost for more and more people in this country every day. Ask a Black person if their rights to due process or equal protection in this country have been enforced in every state in the Union. More Black people, even babies, are killed by police than any other ethnicity at three times the rate of white people. For them, empire has been home.
Ask the Native American community if they received justice while Indigenous women are murdered at four times the rate of white women with next to no prosecution for these crimes for native people. Empire has always been here.
Ask an immigrant if they are protected as masked ICE agents kidnap and detain them in concentration camps with no access to lawyers, medical care, proper food, or their families.
And I will remind you, detention centers existed before this administration and children were housed in them then, too. For many immigrants, empire first came to their home and is now home again on the 250th anniversary of America.
The Empire coming home to roost for all good people reminds us that there are at least two Americas, one for those who run empire and one for whom empire will eventually come home to roost. For this is what the U.S. government has always done at home and abroad.
Our government murders Venezuelan fishermen in the Caribbean on unfounded claims of narcoterrorism, removing any possibility of due process. Where are the basic rights of Cubans as our government starves a nation?
This is empire and it’s coming home to roost.
These lists of violations are not exhaustive. They are a starting point for us to educate ourselves. If you want a much more comprehensive list of violations by the current administration, check out CivilRights.org.
But don’t stop there. We say freedom over fascism. The empire loves to talk about freedom.
Slave owners fought to own slaves in the name of freedom. So when we say freedom, we have to be clear. Freedom for whom and to do what? the freedom and the future this administration is fighting for is not inevitable. We can win. And if we fight, say it with me, we will win. But we cannot be free if we only concern ourselves with the violations that affect us.
We are not free until we are all free. Until people of color are free. Until trans people are free. Until Native American people are free. Until women are free. Until Palestine is free. Until Cuba, Venezuela and Iran are free. Until we stop violating human rights at home and abroad in the name of empire and corporate greed.
Freedom over fascism.
Ron Schwindler (Veterans For Peace): My name is Ron Schwindler. I’m a member of 159 Veterans for Peace. I’m a Vietnam veteran. I was a Vietnam veteran in the American war in Vietnam, that’s how I look at that, anyway.
As we asked on the Fourth of July to celebrate our nation, our basic rights are threatened by the National Presidential Security Memorandum-7.
It treats political speech as terrorism with no reference to the First Amendment. As a result, there has been a dramatic increase of investigations targeting a wide variety of organizations, private citizens, and individuals whom the administration deems as political enemies.
That’s all of us right here. We are political enemies.
The wording and sentiment inherent in the NPSM 7 echoes the verbiage of the war on terror, as codified in the Homeland Security Act of 2002. It continues the nation’s legacy of racism and imperialism.
We reject the violations of the Constitution and the illegal stripping away of the rights it guarantees to all persons in the United States of America.
We must choose freedom over fascism and end the attack on our communities, and must call this by its name—fascism—while there is still time.
Presenter: The nation celebrates the printing date of a declaration made July 2. Field recordings by independent videographer Todd Boyle. You can see the event in its entirety at Todd’s Youtube channel.
