C. CLARK KISSINGER and REFUSE & RESIST! (R&R!)

• Maoist activist
• National secretary of Students for a Democratic Society
• Originator of Not In Our Name and Refuse and Resist
• Member of the Revolutionary Communist Party
• “The problem in this country [is] the oppressive system of capitalism that exploits people all over the world, that destroys our planet, that oppresses minority people, that sends people to the death chambers in droves.”

Charles Clark Kissinger is a prominent member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). He was instrumental in the formation of the groups Refuse & Resist, Not in Our Name, and World Can't Wait.

Born in 1940, Kissinger began his public activism in the early 1960s when he served as the national secretary of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the leading radical organization of its day. He also worked closely with Fred Hampton and the Black Panther Party.

Kissinger, who supported Mao Zedong’s Communist regime in China, continues to enjoy strong support from the Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM), which, in its own words, "upholds the revolutionary communist ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism" and views the Chinese Cultural Revolution as "the farthest advance of communism in human history." MIM seeks to achieve its ends "by building public opinion to seize power through armed struggle" and full-fledged "revolution [in] North America.”

A devoted backer of Iran's Islamic revolution, Kissinger in 1979 traveled to Iran when Ayatollah Khomeni seized power.
In October 1983, Kissinger and RCP tried to sabotage American efforts to deploy Pershing and cruise missiles in Germany. Kissinger personally led a “World Without Imperialism Contingent” (WWIC) on an eight-week tour of Germany to lay the framework for thwarting the missile deployments. Accompanied by members of Peru's Marxist guerrilla army, the Shining Path, Kissinger and his RCP comrades penetrated the Mutlangen U.S. military base in West Germany, where Pershing II intermediate-range missiles were stored.

The following month, Kissinger’s fellow RCP / WWIC members were involved, along with Red Cells and other German anarchist-terrorists, in an assault against Vice President George H.W. Bush's caravan during a visit to Krefeld, Germany.

In January 1984, the RCP newspaper Revolutionary Worker, for which Kissinger has written frequently, called for the assassination of President Ronald Reagan.
In 1987 Kissinger created "Refuse & Resist!" (R&R) -- on whose National Council he continues to serve. Kissinger and his R&R allies hold a grim view of American life and culture. "Domestically," they complain, "we see subway vigilantes made media heroes and a record of sympathy for white supremacy become the passport to high judicial office.... Against women there is escalating violence, with compulsory child bearing and domestic servitude elevated as ideals.... Xenophobic attacks are made on anything foreign, combined with calls for the compulsory use of English."

"The problem in this country," says Kissinger, can be traced to one root cause: "the oppressive system of capitalism that exploits people all over the world, that destroys our planet, that oppresses minority people, that sends people to the death chambers in droves. That is a problem that has to be done away with." "Revolution is the solution," Kissinger expands. "And the Revolutionary Worker has put out a call to people to join with them in formulating a new program for revolution in this country, a blueprint to go forward."

In 1991 Kissinger spoke out against the Gulf War at numerous teach-ins on college campuses across the United States.

In 1992 and 1993 Kissinger was in Los Angeles defending prisoners who had been arrested for their roles in what the RCP agitator dubbed the "Los Angeles Rebellion" -- i.e., the infamous riots (in the wake of the Rodney King verdict) that left 58 people dead, more than 2,300 injured, a billion dollars in property damaged or destroyed, and at least 5,300 buildings burned. Kissinger's RCP had been instrumental in triggering the violence.

Since the 1990s, one of Kissinger’s chief ongoing priorities has been his campaign to "stop the legal lynching of Mumia Abu-Jamal," incarcerated for the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia police officer. Describing Abu-Jamal as "an African-American journalist on death row," Kissinger attributes the killer's conviction to America's "political program of criminalizing black youth, using prisons and death chambers to 'solve' the problems of poverty and social breakdown, and the use of police powers to suppress radical or revolutionary opposition."

In 1999 Kissinger was a supporter of an initiative titled "Call to Justice," which proposed a nationwide "Mumia Awareness Week" aimed at overturning Abu-Jamal’s purportedly wrongful conviction. Fellow backers of this campaign included actor Ossie Davis, Robert Meeropol of the Rosenberg Fund for Children, and Sam Jordan of Amnesty International's Program to Abolish the Death Penalty.

In July 1999 Kissinger and 95 fellow activists were arrested for their involvement in a public protest, held at the site of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, against Abu-Jamal’s incarceration. Kissinger was subsequently found guilty of "failure to obey a lawful order" and was given one year of supervised probation, which restricted him from traveling outside the federal court district wherein he lived. But Kissinger disobeyed the order; in August 2000, he spoke publicly at a pro-Mumia event at Thomas Paine Plaza in downtown Philadelphia. He was introduced to the crowd as “D. Clark Kissinger” (supposedly the “twin brother” of C. Clark Kissinger), and he used the occasion to denounce Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush and the death penalty. For violating the court order, Kissinger was sentenced to three months in jail.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Kissinger created the anti-war group Not In Our Name (NION), which condemned "the injustices done by our government" in its pursuit of "endless war"; its greed-driven "transfusions of blood for oil"; its determination to "erode [our] freedoms"; and its eagerness to "invade countries, bomb civilians, kill more children, [and annihilate] families on foreign soil.”

In 2003 Kissinger joined the National Lawyers Guild, Lynne Stewart, Ramsey Clark, Leslie Cagan, and Michael Ratner in calling for Jose Maria Sison to be removed from the European Union’s terrorist watch list. Sison, an activist with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (a guerrilla faction) and the Communist Party of the Philippines, would later be arrested for his involvement in three high-profile assassinations.

In 2005 Kissinger established World Can’t Wait, a project that sought to organize “people living in the United States to take responsibility to stop the whole disastrous course led by the [George W.] Bush administration.”

In an April 2005 article on his website, Dissident.info, Kissinger charged that President Bush and like-minded "reactionaries" were seeking to establish a "theocracy" and "smash the independence of the courts in the name of God." He characterized Bush as a "Christian fascist" whose modus operandi closely resembled that of Adolph Hitler.

Also in 2005, Kissinger formed the "International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration." This Commission indicted President Bush and key members of his administration for such transgressions as “wars of aggression [in Iraq and Afghanistan], detention and torture [against prisoners of war], destruction of the global environment [specifically, ‘systematic policies contributing to the catastrophic effects of global warming’], sabotage of global health programs, and the abandonment of New Orleans [in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005].” The Commission found the Bush administration guilty on all counts.

REFUSE & RESIST! (R&R!)
Communist organization founded in 1987 by C. Clark Kissinger Opposes the War on Terror Supports convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal Supported the 1992 Los Angeles rioters Opposes the enforcement of immigration laws Refuse & Resist! (R&R) was founded in 1987 by C. Clark Kissinger, a longtime member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), which is a Maoist organization calling for the overthrow of the U.S. government and the establishment of a "dictatorship of the proletariat." The close relationship between R&R and the RCP is evidenced by the fact that the two entities frequently issue joint press releases. Kissinger and his organizations enjoy the backing of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which, by its own words, "upholds the revolutionary Communist ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism," and views the Chinese Cultural Revolution as "the farthest advance of communism in human history." R&R's founding statement condemns America for what it calls the country's drive to use "force of arms" to achieve "global dominance and superiority over other people" -- a goal with "a distinctly fascist aura … raising the specter of a police state." Strongly opposed to America's current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, R&R accuses the U.S. of engaging in "the glorification of war in general through the promotion of mindless Ramboism." R&R representatives maintain a visible presence at most anti-war rallies around the United States. A number of these representatives -- most notably the organization’s national spokesman Carl Dix -- have appeared as guest speakers at such events. R&R is a member of the Not In Our Name Project, an anti-war movement founded by Kissinger; it is also a sister organization to the anti-President Bush group World Can't Wait; and it is member organization of the United for Peace and Justice anti-war coalition, which is led by Leslie Cagan, a longtime communist activist who aligns her politics with those of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Consistent with its opposition to America's war on terror, R&R strongly opposes the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center where several hundred terror suspects are in the custody of the U.S. military. Said R&R in April 2004: "We believe that the President cannot be allowed to create a 'legal Black Hole' into which people are dropped with no recourse to the courts or to international law. ... [T]his dangerous new presidentially-designated category of 'enemy combatants' who have no legal rights is unjust, illegal, and immoral, and cannot be allowed to stand." On the domestic front, R&R claims that racism in the United States is on the rise: "A record of sympathy for white supremacy [has] become the passport to high judicial office." Characterizing Americans as intolerant of immigrants, R&R states, "Xenophobic attacks are made on anything foreign, combined with calls for the compulsory use of English." In addition, R&R condemns America's "compassionless market economy." "The problem in this country," says Kissinger, can be traced to one root cause: "the oppressive system of capitalism that exploits people all over the world, that destroys our planet, that oppresses minority people, that sends people to the death chambers in droves. That is a problem that has to be done away with." Consistent with its belief that the U.S. is a nation infested with racism and injustice -- particularly in the criminal-justice system -- R&R endorsed an October 22, 2002 National Day of Protest exhorting Americans to rise up and "Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation." The document announcing this event stated: "Since September 11, 2001, the authorities have rapidly imposed a resoundingly repressive atmosphere. … All over the U.S. people are being killed by law enforcement officers at an escalating rate. … In city after city, cops viciously beat people, confident that they will face no punishment. … Racial profiling … has now come back with a vengeance. … Since September 11th thousands of Muslims, Arabs and South Asians have been rounded up, detained and disappeared. ... Hard-won civil liberties and protections have been stripped away as part of the government's 'war on terrorism.' The USA-PATRIOT Act brings in a new set of repressive laws and restrictions on people …” Moreover, this document explicitly defended the convicted murderers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier, as well as Lynne Stewart and Jose Padilla, who were convicted on terrorism-related charges -- depicting all four as persecuted political prisoners of a repressive American government. Throughout its history, R&R has consistently portrayed law-enforcement officials as racists intent on corralling and incarcerating minorities on the weakest of pretexts. When some social commentators called for the boycotting of the rap singer Ice-T's controversial 1992 song "Cop Killer," R&R held a demonstration outside the headquarters of Time-Warner (the record's distributor), displaying banners that read, "Ban Killer Cops, not 'Cop Killer.'" During the 1992 Los Angeles rioting, which R&R characterized as a justifiable "rebellion" against societal inequities, Kissinger's group attempted to gain amnesty for all those arrested in order to "preserve the right to rebel." The group similarly applauded the 2001 riots in Cincinnati, which erupted following a police shooting of a young black man. R&R represented the rioting as "spirited and righteous protest." R&R opposes the enforcement of immigration laws, likening illegal aliens who have been detained or deported to the "disappeared" -- a reference to those political prisoners of totalitarian states who simply vanish and are never seen again. When the Patriot Act required male immigrants from some twenty Arab or Muslim countries and North Korea to register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, R&R objected, warning that such a policy would be a steppingstone toward the establishment of "a nation behind barbed wire" wherein many people would eventually be herded into concentration camps. Viewing the United States as a nation that oppresses women, R&R says, "We cannot look to courts, cops, and politicians to protect women's rights. ... Women and men across the country have to thunder our outrage, organize a real defense of the [abortion] clinics, and go on a new footing against the forces of misogyny. We ourselves have to create both a political climate and a practical situation where it is impossible for the Christian fascists to wage their attacks on women and their clinics." R&R was a Co-Sponsoring Organization of the April 25, 2004 "March for Women's Lives" held in Washington, D.C., a massive rally that advocated unrestricted access to taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand. On March 10, 2005, R&R exhorted Americans to celebrate a National Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers. "Stand up with your abortion services provider," said R&R, "and say: 'Thank you for your heroism, perseverance, courage, and commitment to women.'" R&R accepts financial contributions in two forms: Credit card donations go directly to the organization, while check donations are made payable to "IFCO / Refuse & Resist!" IFCO is an acronym for the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, a pro-Castro group founded in 1967 for the purpose of raising money for leftist causes. IFCO is currently the financial sponsor of R&R and is closely allied with the Not In Our Name Project.