Speech by Sunsara Taylor given at 9/25/07 protest against Bush’s visit to the UN:
We’re here at a defining time in U.S. history and global history. And I want to speak to everybody, but especially to the young people here. I want to say, look, every generation puts its mark on the world. Every generation shapes the world one way or the other. But not every generation lives through truly history-shaping, epoch-shaping times. The generation that rose up and abolished slavery. The generation that laid down in the face of the Nazis. There are some generations that are remembered, that are celebrated or are scorned, for generations to come. And everybody growing up in America today, everybody living and coming of age in college and high school today, you have a bigger role, a bigger mark to put on this planet, than any generation I just mentioned, because the crimes of the Bush regime, the crimes of this system, are monstrous and if they are not stopped will dwarf even those of Hitler.
And I’ll tell you right now that George Bush came out last week–and I mean that this is a defining week–he came out last week and said no, we’re staying in Iraq until victory, we’re staying no matter who becomes the next president; it doesn’t matter who you fucking elect. They’re staying with their colonial, imperialist occupation, their murder and plunder, and they’re doing it in our name. And then he comes here today to lie–this guy is a proven liar! He’s a proven liar! Not about the little things, about the big mother- fucking things. About WMD’s and links to Al Qaeda, and now you have a million dead Iraqis. He lied about how no one could know that the levees in New Orleans would break, and then you saw what happened with Katrina and the victims there. This guy is a liar and he’s coming here to say that he has a basis for a war against Iran. Fuck that shit! (big applause from crowd)
There’s nothing this man can say to justify his war of aggression against Iran, and let me say something else. Yesterday at Columbia and in the country and in the world today, we’re being told you have to pick between U.S. imperialist crusades, like George Bush’s wars, or Islamic fundamentalism. And we are saying we refuse to choose between McWorld and Jihad. Those are not the only choices. Humanity needs another way. We refuse to choose between Shariah law and stoning women and lynching gay people under Islamic fundamentalist theocracy, and the state-sanctioned restriction of abortion and birth control in this country, the illegalization of gay marriage in this country, the moves toward theocracy right here at home. We refuse to choose between Bush’s lying crusades for empire that kill millions and Islamic fundamentalism. Humanity needs another way. But while we’re at it, we have to be clear, what is the biggest danger, what is the biggest threat facing humanity? And it is the government that claims to speak in our names. It is the Bush administration.
I know we’re on the precipice of potentially a new war, but I want to say a few things about the whole Bush program. Because this is a program that, yes, has legalized torture in our names. This is a program that has shredded habeas corpus and rights to defense and lawyers, in our names. This is a program that is bringing restrictions to women’s right to abortion and even birth control. It is demonizing gay people. It is suppressing science. It is dragging us back into a high-tech Dark Ages, and the whole thing has to be resisted, repudiated, driven out and stopped. And that is the mission of this generation; it has to be our mission. And I know there’s maybe a few hundred young people here today. Well, we have to be on a mission to go out and get everybody else, and get in their faces and say, no, you can’t be on the sidelines, history is being made. You are either for this shit or you’re against it, and if you’re against it you have to show it, you have to show it every day wearing orange, the color of the torture victims, orange, the color of resistance. Spread this everywhere, and you have to be out in the streets.
And I’ll tell you, last week people went down to Jena, Louisiana, because here we are in 2007 and you have nooses flying in school yards, and you have six Black kids who had the daring to protest that facing decades in jail. And people went down there. We sent Revolution newspaper, and revolutionaries in Harlem organized a bus to go down to Jena. And they got off the bus and they started chanting. They said, “Jena 6, Harlem’s got your back!” And they were answered by people saying, “Jena 6, Atlanta’s got your back!” “Jena 6, Houston’s got your back!” And this is how it happened. Tens of thousands of people went down there. (big applause)
And this government says that after all that, after 30,000, 40,000 people descended to defend the Jena 6, they said we’re not even letting Mychal Bell, the first of the Jena 6, out on bond, we’re holding him. A slap in the face to Black people and people generally, and we have to continue that fight, but we also have to ask: to the people of Iran right now, who have the crosshairs of a new U.S. war on their backs–can we say, people of Iran, New York City has your back. People of Iran, this new generation has your back. Are we going to get out there and put a challenge to our peers, to our friends, to our classmates and say no, we have to rise to the challenge before us. History is being set and we have to be the ones who decide that we are not going down for fascism and global empire.
I want to announce one really important thing coming up for the students. There’s this really outrageous, fascist assault going down on the campuses, targeting professors who are dissidents, targeting Muslim student groups and women’s studies professors, ethnic studies professors. There’s this thing called Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week coming at the end of October, October 22 through 26, being launched by David Horowitz who is himself a fascist. And he is targeting people on 200 campuses. They’re claiming to be concerned about the rights of women in the Muslim world, and the way they’re showing it is by staging sit-ins at women’s centers, by targeting and calling Muslim student organizations terrorist groups, and by trying to get everybody to say that if you don’t sign up with Bush’s war on terror, then you’re with the terrorists. This has to be resisted, this has to be exposed, this has to be defeated. We’ve got coverage of this in Revolution newspaper this week. We’ve got coverage about the Jena 6 and the protests. You need to get a copy of this. Get the truth about who David Horowitz is, the guy planning this Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, a man who has said, and I quote, “Black people should be grateful for slavery.” This is a man who has no right to speak on behalf of women, against fascism, and we have to expose this and resist this. So you all are enlisted and drafted.
So I’m almost done, but I do want to say: We have to be out here. We have to be building resistance every day. We have to change the way we live. We have to change the conversations we’re having. We have to change what is acceptable behavior for people living in this country. But for everybody who looks at this and says, why, 150 years after slavery, are nooses still flying? Why, a generation after the struggle to end the Vietnam war, are we still waging illegal wars of aggression? Why does this shit keep happening? And we want to get to the cause of it, this capitalist-imperialist system, and want to get down with revolutionary struggle and a revolutionary movement to end this and lift this off the back of the planet once and for all. You should come up and get a copy of Revolution newspaper. We need to spread this. We need to spread a movement in the spirit of resistance and a revolutionary movement as well. And this has to be what our generation goes down over and is remembered by.
So really loud as I leave, I want everybody to say, what is up and what we need to do. The World Can´t Wait! Drive Out the Bush Regime! The World Can´t Wait! Drive Out the Bush Regime!