NATIONAL NEWS

Five Years Since George Floyd’s Murder: The Flames of Rebellion Still Burn—Only Revolutionary Mass Organization Can Turn Uprising Into Power

May 25, 2025, marks five years since the police lynching of George Floyd beneath the knee of Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin—an act of state terror that sparked the largest wave of mass rebellion in the United States in the 21st century. From the burning of the Third Precinct to street clashes in over 140 cities, the masses, led by Black and Brown proletarians and youth, tore through the myth of American democracy and exposed the police for what they truly are: an occupying army of the rich, meant to protect white supremacy, property, and the empire.

For weeks, millions flooded the streets, with open rebellion, fire, and collective rage. Police stations were burned, luxury stores were looted, and armored vehicles were forced to retreat from working-class communities. The veil was lifted. The myth of peaceful reform was shattered. The people, for a brief moment, showed their historic strength, power, and revolutionary potential.

But five years later, what stands in the ashes?

The NGOs came crawling in with grants and talking points. The Democratic Party, corporate media, and liberal activists hijacked the people’s uprising, repackaging revolution into photo-ops, murals, and police “reform” bills. Billions were poured into new surveillance tech, community policing, and racialized capital—while police budgets ballooned, evictions soared, and anti-Black state violence only deepened.

The masses rebelled, but the lack of revolutionary organization and black working class leadership left the uprising vulnerable to containment. The ruling class learned their lesson—they now prepare more rapidly for insurgency than ever before, arming the police with drones, AI, and military-grade weapons, while criminalizing protest and ramping up repression.

But we too must learn our lesson. We owe it to George Floyd—and to the thousands murdered since at home and abroad by U.S. imperialism—to not only remember, but to organize.

Only through a revolutionary organization can we transform rebellion into revolution. Only by building power in our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and prisons can we prepare to bury this system once and for all.

George Floyd’s last breath was not the end. It was the beginning of a deeper, longer war.

The question now is: will we rise again—not only to fight, but to win?

National / International: May 19th Marks the Centennial Birthday of Malcolm X, Along with Revolutionaries Hô Chí Minh, Lorraine Hansberry, and Yuri Kochiyama

May 19th, 2025 marks the 100th birthday of New Afrikan/Grenadian Pan-Afrikanist, Muslim, and people’s revolutionary and freedom fighter Malcolm X, or El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz (May 19, 1925), legendary for his riveting militancy and organizing for Black self-respect, self-identity, self-defense and self-determination during the civil rights movement. His internationalism brought upon the honor of being what comrades and friends of the New Afrikan national liberation struggle call him “the ideological father of the People’s Republik of New Afrika.”

His quintessential autobiography, released after his February 1965 martyrdom, shaped a new generation of freedom fighters—from the concrete jungles of the U.S. empire, to the ghettos, barrios, and reservations of the beast; to the young guerrilla revolutionaries of Asia and Latin America—laying the groundwork for the emergence of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, rooted from his short-lived Organization of Afro-American Unity.

Furthermore, Malcolm was also extremely anti-Zionist and expressed solidarity with Palestine up to the very few hours before his assassination, as shown prominently in his “Zionist Logic” article released on Sept. 17th, 1964 in the Egyptian Gazette, about two weeks after his visit to Gaza’s Yhan Kounis camp. He created the link between Zionist ideology and colonial imperialism on the Palestinian people; his words on Palestine have been virtually absent from works regarding his life and revolutionary organizing, even omitted from his Autobiography.

Calling for New Afrikans and other oppressed peoples to wage international struggle against colonialist-capitalist-imperialism, he rightly called the struggle for Black liberation a struggle for land and independence, denouncing New Afrikans’ forced citizenship and ties with the U.S. empire continuing to terrorize the Black masses to this very moment. Quoting the late, great Minister of Defense of the BPP, Huey P. Newton on the 7/3/1967 issue of The Black Panther, “the black masses… learned from Malcolm that with the gun, they can recapture their dreams and bring them into reality”—the collective victory of Black salvation and liberation from the chains of the oppressor.

5/19/2025 also marks the 135th birthday of Vietnamese revolutionary Hô Chí Minh, founder and 1st president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1945–1969, his death). A committed Marxist-Leninist until the end, he was one of the most important anti-colonial Communist revolutionaries amidst the growing worldwide struggle against Western colonialism and imperialism post-WWII, waging the longest militant struggle against U.S. and French colonial imperialism.

Leading the Vietnamese masses in defeating the Japanese, French, and South Vietnamese national bourgeoisie, Minh was able to creatively apply the proletarian science of Marxism-Leninism (now Marxism-Leninism-Maoism) to the unique conditions of the Vietnamese nation, setting the stage for their groundbreaking victory in defeating the U.S. imperialists, effectively crushing the Vietnam War and helping Vietnam to achieve their liberation after his death, on April 30, 1975.

A little-known fact about Hô Chí was that he stood in solidarity with New Afrikans since his youth, attending UNIA meetings and witnessing Marcus Garvey in action when he lived in New York City, influencing his underrated writings about the U.S. empire’s institution of racism and terrorism against New Afrikans (i.e., lynchings).

Furthermore, 5/19/2025 is the 104th birthday of Nikkei woman revolutionary Yuri Kochiyama. Born and raised in San Pedro, California, her father was martyred at a hospital in an anti-Asian response to the Japanese imperialists’ attack on Pearl Harbor 9/7/1941 (located on the U.S.-occupied Indigenous nation of Hawai’i) and forcibly relocated from Los Angeles, along with her family and 120,000 other Japanese Americans under Executive Order 9066 by the U.S. empire, incarcerated in Jerome, Arkansas for two years.

This experience radicalized her very early on and after WWII moved to Harlem, where she became close friends and comrades with Malcolm X. From then on, she was knee-deep in the anti-imperialist struggle for New Afrikan, Puerto Rican, and Vietnamese liberation and self-determination until the end of her life.

The only Asian, non-Black member of Malcolm’s Organization of Afro-American Unity, she was also a member of the Young Lords Party, a conscious citizen of the People’s Republik of New Afrika, and founded Asian Americans for Action, fighting for reparations for survivors of the U.S.’s anti-Japanese internment camps.

Additionally, she was deeply involved in the fight for freedom of political prisoners, most notably with the Jehrico movement and the decades-long struggle to free New Afrikan freedom fighters Mumia Abu-Jamal and the late Dr. Mutulu Shakur. Relocating to Oakland towards the end of her life with her family, she continued struggling—organizing against the empire’s Islamophobic offensive after 9/11, supporting the plight of political prisoners, and showing unwavering internationalist solidarity with the struggles and causes of nationally oppressed peoples and nations within the U.S. empire and out.

Lastly, 5/19/2025 marks the 95th birthday of queer New Afrikan woman playwright, writer, and revolutionary Lorraine Hansberry. Born and raised in Chicago, she is best known for her groundbreaking story-turned-Broadway play A Raisin in the Sun, readopted on stage in the 70s as Raisin. Raised with a middle-class upbringing, the political times of her childhood and youth radicalized her tremendously.

She and her family were subject to Chicago’s suffocating redlining and forced to live in the South Side’s “Black Belt,” in reference to the New Afrikan migrants escaping racial terrorist violence in the Deep South; the Hansberry family were also targeted by racist, assimilated white mobs, leading to 30 blocks of the South Side at this time led open to be inhabited by New Afrikans.

A vocal critic of the U.S. empire and its Jim Crow institution, she was a member of early lesbian collective The Daughters of Bilitis, writing letters to their The Ladder publication and collaborating with comrade Paul Robeson writing for his progressive Freedom periodical. Furthermore, she was closely mentored by W.E.B. Du Bois, and was an avid member of the formerly-revolutionary CPUSA, establishing close comraderie with other New/Afrikan radicals including Robeson, Claudia Jones, and Harry Haywood (some of whom visited her childhood home on the South Side when she was growing up), marking her as an enemy of the U.S. empire, which led to FBI surveillance and her passport being revoked.

Nonetheless, she continued her work in the revolutionary cause and in the literary arena, with A Raisin in the Sun as a hallmark story confronting the materialist complexities of race, gender, and class among a New Afrikan proletarian family in redlined 1940s Chicago. Writing until her 1965 death from pancreatic cancer, Hansberry remained true to the progressive and revolutionary Black struggle, with her death coming immediately after the martyrdom of Malcolm X and an entire year before the BPP’s founding.

All four of these figures share one important thing in common: they were all nationally oppressed and struggled wherever they were and whatever they contributed to the struggle for justice, liberation, and self-determination against the tyranny of U.S. imperialism from within and outside, paving a great foundation for the children and youth of today to carry the torch of resistance, from New Afrika to Palestine to Puerto Rico to Hawai’i to Okinawa.

Missouri and Kentucky: 27 People Reported Dead in Tornadoes Due to DOGE Cuts Delaying Severe Weather Alerts

Over the weekend, tornadoes ripped through the states of Kentucky and Missouri (inadvertently forming a dust storm that blew through Chicago Friday night) and killed 27 people, many of whom were New Afrikan and/or poor.

This was the result of Afrikaan-Yankee settler capitalist Elon Musk and U.S. empire’s cuts to the DOGE service program, which would have sent critical alerts for severe weather to the people impacted by these recent tornadoes.

In St. Louis, the tornadoes hit the majority-New Afrikan and poor/working-class city with devastating aftermaths, particularly in the East St. Louis and North St. Louis areas where such a demographic is concentrated. Homes, community institutions and the like were either destroyed or damaged, with no form of help sent from the empire’s government to aid the Black poor residents, the same way they did New Orleans and Houston within the last 20 years.

Only delivering $160b in program cuts (including $135b in minimal savings lost), the aftermath of this past weekend’s tornadoes serve another reminder that the people are being terrorized yet ignored and abandoned amidst the U.S.’s fascist offensive on overdrive. Kentucky was lost with no live overnight forecasting, leaving 14 Kentuckians dead and leaving cut funds for a $6b Amtrak tunnel project, prioritizing profit and wasteful infrastructure over the people, at any cost.

National: Yankee Fascist Trump Administration Shuts Down CDC Infection Control Committee

Along with placing profit and genocide at top priority, Trump has recently terminated one of the CDC’s advisory committees, the Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee, overseeing guidance about preventing infection spread in healthcare facilities and created national standards for handwashing, mask-wearing, and isolating sick patients from others to prevent the spread of illness.

A gradual far cry from their “support” and “care” of the poor, working-class, and youth masses inside the empire 5 years earlier during the early onset of the ongoing COVID pandemic, the termination of the HICPAC, who has also ironically engaged in the devastating AIDS genocide of the 1980s and 1990s (leaving thousands of gay and queer people, even straight people, abandoned to die), there is fear of drug-resistant organisms spreading with no protocols, especially as measles is beginning to spread at an alarming rate.

The U.S. empire gives less of a damn about the oppressed masses they are actively murdering, just as they are murdering the Palestinian people through manufactured famine, disease spread, and mass-destructive weaponry.

Mississippi: White Supremacist Attacked After Hurling N-Word at Black Bar Patrons—Now Pigs Investigate Black Self-Defense for a “Hate Crime”

On May 17, 2025, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, a white man stormed into the C.J. Lounge, a predominantly Black community bar, and began spewing white supremacist hatred—calling patrons the N-word and escalating his behavior with threatening gestures and aggressive intimidation.

According to multiple eyewitnesses, this was not a case of barroom tension, but a clear, unprovoked white nationalist provocation. The man was reportedly asked multiple times to leave peacefully, but refused. He came to a Black space looking for a fight, fueled by the same sick anti-Black hatred that has always animated the settler-colonial soul of Mississippi—the same Mississippi that lynched Emmett Till, that starved Black sharecroppers, and that now leads in modern-day mass incarceration of New Afrikan people.

The community responded as oppressed people have done in the face of racial terror for centuries: with just and righteous self-defense. The man was physically removed from the premises by bar patrons, stripped of his clothes, beaten with poles and sticks, and drenched in beer—out of a long-denied assertion of dignity, security, and people’s justice.

Instead of investigating the racist provocateur, the Mississippi pigs are now moving to press charges against the Black patrons, framing the incident as a “hate crime” against a white man—a laughable and insulting inversion of reality. This is a colonial justice system that sees Black self-defense as criminal, and white racist aggression as protected expression.

This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that the settler U.S. legal system exposes its true nature: to punish any form of Black resistance, autonomy, or defense, no matter how justified. The police, media, and white liberal institutions want Black people to either die silently or bow their heads when insulted, attacked, or endangered. But Holly Springs shows a different example—a glimpse of what happens when the masses take matters into their own hands, refuse to be victims, and say “enough.”

In a state long known for white vigilantism, this act of Black defense against racist provocation must be celebrated and defended. We must say it clearly: This was not a “hate crime”—this was self-defense against hate. No charges should be filed against anyone except the white aggressor. And the masses must be organized to defend all oppressed people who protect their communities from white supremacist violence.

As long as the U.S. empire exists, Black defense will always be treated as criminal. The answer is not more pleas for “justice” from the system, but the construction of our own structures of people’s power, self-defense, and revolutionary justice.

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

RSU Joins FACAM in Denouncing Indian State’s Bloody Repression of Revolutionaries

Revolutionary Student Union has received a communication today from the Forum Against Corporatization and Militarization (FACAM) on the vile and bloody massacre against 27 revolutionary comrades of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). This massacre is part of the Operation Kagar, which is orchestrated by the Indian State aiming at eliminating Maoist-led resistance to the reactionary regime. Comrade Basavaraj, the General Secretary of CPI (Maoist), who was kidnapped by the Indian State when seeking medical treatments was murdered among other martyrs.

The revolutionary struggle of the Indian masses, under the leadership of their party, CPI (Maoist), is a great example for all revolutionaries, workers, youth, and oppressed peoples around the world. Although the fascist Indian state repeatedly attempted to wipe out the Maoists and the masses who support them with massacres and extermination campaigns, the Indian revolutionary movement keeps carrying its committed struggle forward. Indian students and youth were always active participants in this struggle for equality and socialism, who gave up their privileges and joined the struggle of Indian peasants and workers in the jungle and the countryside, shedding blood to defend and advance people’s rights and power.

Revolutionary Student Union condemns this massacre and calls on the Indian state to end its brutal campaign of extermination in Bastar and the whole country. We pay our tribute to the revolutionary students and youth in India, and vow to take them as our example to develop the anti-imperialist and revolutionary struggle in the United States. We stand with the workers and the oppressed masses in their revolutionary struggle to end all exploitation and oppression they face and call on all revolutionary and anti-imperialist students and youth in the United States and across the world to engage in solidarity and actions to condemn this massacre conducted by the fascist Indian State and stand with FACAM and CPI (Maoist).

Down with the Operation Kagar!
Long Live the Indian Revolution!

– Revolutionary Student Union (5/22/2025)

South Sudan: U.S. Empire Attempts to Use African Nation as Dumping Ground for Deportees

On May 23, 2025, a federal judge halted a fascist scheme by the Trump regime to deport eight migrants—not to their countries of origin, but to South Sudan, a nation devastated by imperialist war, foreign intervention, and economic collapse. The deportees, who originally came from Myanmar, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Mexico, and South Sudan itself, were labeled “criminal aliens” and marked for disappearance.

The plan? To dump surplus labor and stateless poor into one of the most unstable regions on Earth, using South Sudan as a necropolitical landfill for the unwanted of the empire. A place ravaged by decades of British colonialism, U.S.-backed civil war, oil extraction by global capital, and proxy battles between imperialist blocs, now made to serve as the back alley of U.S. immigration policy.

Let’s be clear: this was not a bureaucratic error or last resort—it was intentional cruelty, a calculated tactic rooted in the genocidal DNA of U.S. empire. South Sudan, whose own fragile sovereignty has been shattered repeatedly by outside powers, is being re-weaponized: not with bombs or drones, but with bodies marked for exile by the empire’s courts and prisons. The deportees were given no notice, no chance to fight, no regard for survival. If Judge Brian Murphy had not intervened, they’d already be gone.

And what of South Sudan? This nation—the world’s youngest—has been bled dry by oil giants, flooded with foreign weapons, and torn by artificial ethnic lines carved by British colonists and deepened by U.S. and Israeli military advisors. It has absorbed the fallout of imperialism for over a century, now forced to serve as the dumping ground for the very system that helped engineer its suffering.

This is the genocidal logic of the U.S. immigration regime: to cage the poor, deport the expendable, and treat Black nations as disposable terrain—abandoned when their oil is dry, called upon when the empire needs somewhere to offload its “undesirables.” This is not about “illegal immigration”—this is about colonial counterinsurgency, inside and outside the borders.

No ruling class court ruling can undo this logic. The temporary block is not a victory—it is a stall, a legal technicality in the engine of a system designed to kill. Only revolutionary mass organization, rooted in the internationalist unity of oppressed peoples, can destroy the structures that produce deportation, borders, and imperialist domination.

We must build ties between migrant workers, African liberation movements, and working-class communities under siege across the globe. From South Sudan to Jackson, Mississippi—from the detention center to the plantation to the prison—we are bound by the same enemy and must rise in a single war for liberation.

We don’t just say: stop the deportations.
We say: abolish the empire that deports, cages, and kills.

Reparations to South Sudan. Defense of all migrants.
Down with the U.S. deportation machine. Long live proletarian internationalism.

Brazil: Lula Orders Brutal Cuts to University Funding—Students and Teachers Rise in Occupation Struggles

At the end of March 2025, the Brazilian government under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva approved a sweeping new round of austerity attacks on public education, slashing critical funding to the country’s universities. Despite his image among some liberals as a “progressive,” Lula governs as a loyal servant of big landlords, financial capital, and the IMF. The latest budget measure confirms it: the farce of reformism has become a tool of academic strangulation.

One of the worst-hit institutions is the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)—the largest university in Brazil. UFRJ will lose R$ 17 million under the new budget. According to the university’s own administration, it needs at least R$ 480 million to function properly. Lula’s education ministry has pledged only R$ 310 million, forcing universities to cut programs, lay off workers, and halt services.

This move is not accidental—it is a coordinated class attack on the youth and working masses of Brazil. It seeks to defund public education and clear the way for privatization, capitalist restructuring, and anti-poor repression on campus. It is an assault not only on schools, but on the right to learn, to organize, and to build revolutionary consciousness.

In response, students and teachers have launched waves of struggle, including mass assemblies, strikes, and building occupations. Even where the occupations were suppressed, the ferocity and discipline of student resistance shook campuses and cities across Brazil. These struggles, even when “unsuccessful” in bourgeois terms, mark a new phase of militancy in Brazilian student politics—and expose the real face of Lula’s rule.

We must be clear: Lula is no friend of the masses. He is not the “leftist” savior some make him out to be—he is the smiling face of repression, the polished administrator of a state built on slavery, dispossession, and genocide.

From Rio to Recife, the students are showing the way forward.

Education is not a privilege—it is a battlefield.
Down with cuts! Down with the landlord-bourgeois state!
Support the UFRJ student struggle! Long live the student occupations!

Ireland: British Occupation Intensifies Repression in Maghaberry Prison—Cultural Warfare Targets Irish Republican Prisoners

In May 2025, the British colonial regime escalated its repressive campaign against Irish Republican political prisoners held at Maghaberry Prison in occupied Ireland, intensifying efforts to erode the morale and national identity of the imprisoned fighters. The latest assault takes the form of a ban on all Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) sports and related attire, an open attack on Irish cultural expression behind the prison walls.

This cultural ban is a part of a long-standing strategy by the British state to criminalize, dehumanize, and break the spirit of Republican prisoners, who remain firm in their resistance to occupation. Maghaberry has long functioned as a counterinsurgency site, where political prisoners are subjected to isolation, brutality, and daily humiliation. The prohibition on GAA sports—key to the prisoners’ cultural life—is an attempt to further isolate them from the Irish national community and strip them of any form of collective identity and resilience.

This action comes amid a broader pattern of intensified repression. The British state, through its intelligence networks and prison service, has doubled down on efforts to suppress all expressions of Irish resistance—cultural, political, or armed. The prison system plays a critical role in this apparatus, not only through solitary confinement and psychological warfare, but now also through cultural erasure and imperial discipline.

Maghaberry has a long history of abuse. Political prisoners have faced extended solitary confinement, physical assault, and denial of basic rights. Now, the colonial authorities seek to break the continuity of resistance by banning even the smallest expressions of national identity, such as Gaelic sports, songs, and traditional symbols.

But this repression will not succeed. The Republican prisoners, like their comrades in the past, stand as unbowed combatants in a centuries-long war of national liberation. Their struggle is not limited to prison walls—it is a frontline of the broader fight against British imperialism in Ireland.

As revolutionaries around the world, we must stand in unconditional solidarity with the Irish Republican prisoners of war. The battle for cultural, political, and national dignity is one and the same. Every act of repression in Maghaberry is an act of war by the British state—every act of defiance by the prisoners is part of the global fight against colonialism.

Support Irish Republican prisoners!
End British occupation of the North of Ireland!
Victory to national liberation and socialism in Ireland!