From the July-August 2018 issue of News & Letters

Chicago—Free Syria activists gathered on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile on June 8 within sight of Trump Tower in a vigil opposing the ongoing genocide against civilians who are ignored by most of the world. One Palestinian added his Palestinian flag to our Free Syria flag and our banners demanding that the Dictators International stop bombing civilians in Syria, Gaza and Yemen.

Photo: David Turpin

While the press covers Russia hosting the blood-soaked World Cup, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bombers have, with Donald Trump’s complicity, killed or driven out of Daraa more than a quarter million civilians, many seeking refuge in vain at the closed border of Jordan.

The free hand that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Putin have had, using bombs and chlorine gas against patients and staff in hospitals and children in schools and other civilian targets in Aleppo and Eastern Ghouta and elsewhere, has only encouraged Saudi massacres against civilians in Yemen and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza.

While we know that our display of banners, far from Syria, falls short of halting counter-revolutionary attacks around the globe, Chicagoans and passersby who responded to our demonstration expressed their appreciation.
One woman told us she would be carrying the message of resistance and the pictures she took back to Florida.

One of our signs proclaimed,“You cannot massacre an idea of freedom.” But in the face of unrestrained campaigns against civilians, we need as many Americans, Syrians (and Yemenis and Gazans) to take part when that idea of freedom propels revolution again.

—Marxist-Humanist participant