Omar Mateen’s anti-gay sexist killing in Orlando fuels the anti-Muslim racism the ruling class uses to further divide the working class.
The 49 people dead and 53 wounded at the Pulse nightclub were targets of Mateen’s hatred, possibly self-loathing, of the gay and transgender working class.
This capitalist world’s nature is to exploit, alienate, terrorize, and murder—all for maintaining profit and imperialist domination. It is no surprise then that Mateen had internalized the inner logic of this system. Capitalism seeks to alienate and sicken the way we relate to members of our class. The attack was years in the making and is supported by ages of sexist oppression and violence against the gay and transgender working class.
Chickens Coming Home to Roost
Hillary Clinton’s odious statement reveals the ruling-class sentiment: “this is the deadliest mass shooting in the history of the United States and it reminds us once more that weapons of war have no place on our streets” (NYT, 6/13). Surely this aspiring terrorist-in-chief isn’t referring to the “weapons of war” the Obama administration used in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and Syria, or those used by militarized kkkops on the streets of Ferguson, Baltimore, and Brooklyn.Some ruling-class media is linking Mateen with ISIS. If that is indeed the case, where does ISIS come from? ISIS is the Frankenstein’s monster of decades of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. ISIS is a murderous offshoot of al Qaeda, which the U.S. initially funded and built (“We Created Islamic Extremism,” Salon, 11/17/15). The U.S. still remains the biggest world terrorist organization, with $600 billion annual military budget.
To paraphrase Malcolm X, the U.S. bosses never foresaw that the chicken would come home to roost. While he was referring to the Kennedy Assassination—if hundreds of thousands of civilians are being killed by the imperialist war machine, like in Vietnam and today the Middle East, some will react the way Mateen did—by attacking the working class, be it ISIS or individuals like Mateen.
Workers do need to react to imperialist ruling classes around the world, but by uniting the working class—Black, Latin, Asian, white, gay, straight, men, and women—to confront and smash the bosses!
Bosses Breed Anti-Muslim Racism
The working-class youth have been fed, in addition to the vicious anti-Black racism, the fear of Muslim workers, especially since the Sept 11 attacks. Just last year, following the Paris and San Bernardino shootings the bosses’ media’s ramping up of anti-Muslim racism led to an increase in the attacks on Muslim workers and youth.
The bosses’ racism is evident in calling the Charleston church mass shooting by white racist vigilante Dylann Roof (June 2015) an act of mental illness but that of Muslim Mateen an act of ISIS-related terrorism. This racism is bred by the bosses to drive their imperialist agenda. Patriotic hatred of Arab and Muslim workers is very useful when there are oil wars to win in the Middle East.
While the bosses push the racist idea that Muslims are inherently dangerous, in fact, all religious movements are dangerous to the working class, because they all divert workers’ natural anti-capitalist anger into the false and divisive unity of nations or religious creeds. Whether Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, or Muslim, from Pope Francis to the Ayatollah Khamenei, the cynical leaders of these movements work hand-in-hand with mass-murdering capitalist rulers to preserve the profit system. In the words of a gay protester at a multiracial rally including Muslims in New York City, “where was all this support when Christians were killing us?”
Regardless of where it stems from, terrorist violence is always anti-working class. The communist antidote and alternative is mass, revolutionary, working-class violence to seize power from the capitalist class and build an egalitarian, internationalist world. The Progressive Labor Party is organizing a movement to create such a world—a society run by workers to serve workers’ needs, a society without profit or wage slavery or any form of exploitation.
Individual violence can never defeat the rulers’ racism. It was the working-class masses in the Soviet Union and China and the Resistance movements that smashed the Nazi and Japanese fascists in World War II. Racism can be obliterated only by mass working-class revolutionary violence. The liberation of the gay/transgender working class is connected to the Black, Muslim, undocumented working class. Let us unite as a class! We need to organize tens of millions of workers, under the banner of the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, to smash capitalism and build a worker-run society: communism.