Originally Posted by Gregory Williams
This is my personal statement on #cville, offered only for myself, written for distribution to the press and the public. Feel free to share or use in whatever way you think best smashes fascism.
Yesterday, those of us who were in Charlottesville witnessed a Nazi murder Heather Heyer and injure many others on Water Street. This was not an accident. I was 6 feet away and saw the racist ram his car into another car, which sent other cars, people, and glass flying. I saw the bodies. I heard the screens.
The members and friends of the Raleigh-Durham IWW General Defense Committee who went to Charlottesville are all home safe. Contrary to reports that arose from video that showed us near the front of the line holding our IWW flags, no IWW members were killed. But all of us are deeply affected by what we saw and heard, and many of us will choose, in the coming days, to take time and space to care for ourselves, since we've got a long struggle ahead.
I am not just "saddened" or "disturbed" by this cold blooded murder. I am sick at heart. I feel the force of this attack not only because I witnessed it, but because we know from experience, we know from history, and we know in our bones that this was an attack on all of us, on the whole working class. This didn't start in Charlottesville and it won't end there. We are living in a period when even the small gains of the working class - and especially immigrants, black people, and other working class people of color - have created such a crisis in white supremacist, capitalist America, that the only response it can generate is to meet out horrific violence on our communities. That violence comes from organized nonstate actors like the League of the South and the National Socialist Movement in partnership with state actors like ICE, the cops, and the department of injustice.
That was why the IWW General Defense Committee was in Charlottesville in the first place, and it is why we will be in the streets again. More importantly, it is why we will be organizing our workplaces and neighborhoods, running skill shares, creating food justice projects, and standing up with other organized freedom fighters against ICE and the Durham County Jail like Alerta Migratoria and Inside-Outside Alliance.
Like most others in the IWW General Defense Committee, I believe that organized worker's power is the best, indeed the only way to overcome the fascism that threatens us now but has always been an inevitable byproduct of white supremacy and capitalism in America. Neither feel good rallies that say "we're not this" from a distance, nor random, individual acts of rage, however well intentioned, will suffice. If you want to join this fight, we urge you to join an organization that uses direct action to fight fascism, preferably as part of a broader anticapitalist struggle. The IWW General Defense Committee, to which I belong, is one such organization.