One would think that if the Kansas City Police were required to arrest five right wing protestors at a public rally it just might make the news.
No such luck for the Red Guards of Kansas City. Try as hard as the Red Guards do to force their way into public consciousness, this openly Marxist/Maoist cell of armed, self-described revolutionaries cannot buy a headline—even after a mass arrest. Alas, the Red Guards are forced to report their own news, and this they do on Facebook. There is, however, no reason to disbelieve their reports.
The Red Guards’ first report trumpeted the event: “Happy May Day! Come out and rally and march for the working class with us at 5:30.” The Red Guards glory in the mayhem that awaits America. “We stand at the edge of impending global and civil war,” their May Day literature insists. “Cast aside all illusions and build towards a Maoist revolution! Build up Red May Day in Kansas City!”
Among the joys America offers, promised the Red Guards, are “mass incarceration, genocide . . . [and] police brutality.” On May Day, the RGKC seemed intent on proving their point. “During our May Day march in celebration of International Worker’s Day, four of our comrades were arrested after being roughed up and thrown to the ground by heavily armed police,” they reported after the event. “Please help us raise funds to free them and get them back home.”
On the Facebook page itself, however, the Red Guards attributed the mass arrest to “KCPD pigs” not to the “police.” Again, this inflammatory word choice passed without comment from the local media save for Tony’s Kansas City, whose reporting alerted the Sentinel to the story.
For better or worse, the Red Guards succeeded in bailing out their incarcerated brethren. “Thank you all so much for the solidarity and especially for the donations,” they reported. The cops stacked the charges on our comrades, so we have legal battles coming up. Please keep the donations coming in so we can fight this political repression in court.”
Defiant to the end, the Red Guards proclaimed, “We have every damn right to rebel! This type of unjust repression and police brutality is only more evidence that we live in an illegitimate and decaying system that is coming apart at the seams. When the state comes down on us like this it only emboldens us, consolidates our ranks, and makes us fight harder.”
The Red Guards must be asking themselves, ‘If communists march down the street and the media refuse to hear them, has there really been a march?’
