Carl Dix, spokesman for the Revolutionary Communist Party, said students should examine their support of the war in Afghanistan along with their support of the capitalist system in a speech this week at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University.
‘Don’t be a Buffalo Soldier. Don’t go off and fight in their wars killing other oppressed people to keep the U.S. stranglehold on the rest of the planet in effect,’ Dix said. ‘Don’t become mindless killers for the same system that is inflicting cruel oppression on black people and other oppressed people in the U.S. and all over the world.’
The Buffalo Soldiers were black servicemen who fought in the Civil War as slavery was being legally abolished, Dix said. These soldiers, Dix said, were brave and committed, yet were flawed in their allegiance to a country that oppressed them and used them to oppress Native Americans.
‘It’s a legacy that I had to personally deal with in the 1960s,’ Dix said.
In 1968, Dix was called into service through the draft board. Though he did answer the call after his second summons, he conscientiously declined to serve in Vietnam and subsequently served two years in the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan.
Dix said the treatment of minorities in the U.S. and the country’s expansion abroad was reason enough to look for another solution. For Dix, the solution was and is Revolutionary Communism.
‘Anybody who wants to see justice in the world, who wants to see misery and degradation ended needs to be fighting to (get) rid of this system in the only real way that it can be done and that’s through revolution,’ Dix said.
Frank Harper, correspondent and distributor of Revolution newspaper, said he believed in the movement.
‘People associated with Revolution newspaper here in Houston are motivated by our conviction that the entire system we live in is based on exploitation, here and all over the world,’ Harper said. ‘It is completely worthless and nothing better can come about until this system is overthrown.
‘But it is only those with nothing to lose but their chains who can be the backbone of a struggle to actually overthrow this system and create a new one that will put an end to exploitation and help pave the way to a whole new world.
