To know which moves the U.S. government is next going to make in its war on dissent, we need to look at where its weakest spots are in the battle for global hegemony. The decline of American power has forced our class enemies into a defensive position, taking away the firm control they used to enjoy and causing them to scramble. This reaction from the U.S. ruling class has been happening since the Iraq war backfired on it; but in this last year in particular, we have seen the hegemon experience defeats that are very close to the heart of the empire. And that the empire could respond to by pursuing a drastic new military adventure.
What’s happened is that the coalition of armed groups in Haiti, led by Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, has made unprecedented progress in its fight to liberate the country from neo-colonialism. Haiti’s capital has become almost entirely controlled by the revolutionary forces, humiliating the police and the Kenyan reinforcements that Washington brought in. Faced with the prospect of full victory for Barbecue, the empire’s last resort would be another U.S. invasion of Haiti; but there’s a reason why this hasn’t yet happened, even though our government started pushing for it several years ago.
The U.S. has been exhausted by Ukraine, with its additional military aid effort in occupied Palestine multiplying the war’s costs. Trump’s project to make Europe pay more for the war against Russia has opened up more possibilities, and we may soon see Washington invade Haiti, Mexico, or other Latin American countries. But there are factors in this beyond the empire’s control. Even if we don’t manage to stop our government from aggressing against Haiti, the U.S. will find itself fighting an army that has the backing of a popular revolution; that couldn’t have won without the material benefits which Barbecue’s movement has brought to the Haitian masses.
There are significant divisions within Haitian society over Barbecue, with many supporting him while others hate him for personal reasons; and the empire will try to take advantage of this, but if Barbecue’s movement has gotten this far it clearly has resilience. As residents of the United States, what we need to do is undermine our government’s drive towards war, build a solidarity movement with those fighting the imperial forces, and prevent our ruling class from crushing us. Which we can do if we take certain recent warning signs seriously, and implement the security measures that can let us survive a crackdown.
One way our government has been reacting to Barbecue’s gains is by stirring up hatred towards Barbecue, particularly within radical liberal circles, and weaponizing this against the domestic orgs which it seeks to crush. When a group of wreckers attacked the American Communist Party earlier this year, a narrative they put forth was that the party had been smuggling Russian weapons to Haiti; which drew from both the Russiagate psyop, and the propaganda about Barbecue being a brutal gang leader who commits war crimes.
This Russia-Haiti gun running accusation against ACP was made in January; then three months later, someone in the ACP’s circles had his San Jose home raided by the FBI. The FBI hasn’t charged him with anything so far; but we at least know that the FBI had been looking for evidence of a conspiracy with Russia, which would make sense if the FBI were going off of the story the wreckers had told.
There’s no telling who the feds will go after next as part of this campaign. During the San Jose raid, they seized the target’s electronics, which means they’re looking for people in the contacts of these devices who could be implicated. This represents a specific part of the war on dissent; one that’s intended to neutralize the political actors who are actually advancing international anti-imperialist solidarity.
When the Party for Socialism and Liberation experiences persecution, the purpose of this is to make way for repression against the orgs that truly threaten the state’s power; the PSL is an org that’s connected to the Democratic Party’s NGO network, so the recent investigation into it represents an effort at discarding one of the system’s appendages. With the repression against ACP, the state is attacking political actors who it truly views as an existential threat. That’s why the PSL has so far been served with a demand to hand over its internal communications, while with ACP the FBI has directly seized mobile devices to gain access to the messages. Another notable fact is that the San Jose raid happened earlier than the PSL’s persecution did; and even before the raid, ACP leaders Christopher Helali and Haz Al-Din had been detained by customs for attending Nasrallah’s funeral. It’s clear that the ACP is among the state’s biggest targets, even more so than PSL is.
The security state’s hope is that it will be able to incriminate and legally entrap a critical number of the people who are involved in the USA’s anti-imperialist movement, halting our struggle’s momentum in time for when the empire carries out its next big maneuvers. Of course, the empire already feels comfortable with making major moves, as evidenced by Trump’s strike on Iran last month; but these attacks so often take on a form that’s designed to have a psychological impact, without committing to escalations that will guarantee a larger conflict. As Lorenzo Maria Pacini has observed about this theatrical nature of the war the hegemon is waging:
Let us try to observe what is happening with scientific detachment. The effect and the consequences are all in the mind. Of course, missiles are being fired, targets are being destroyed, and there are even casualties, yet the timing, movements and transformations are all different from what would happen between real enemies. Something that “seems” to be something is not that something. We are seeing exchanges of tweets, posts, multimedia material running on platforms, statements that now say one thing and shortly afterwards say another. Attacks declared and not carried out, attacks carried out but not declared. Confusion, like in a giant global disco. Only those at the console understand the music, what came before and what will come next, while everyone else dances, follows the flow and lets themselves get carried away.
The parts of this global war that aren’t in the mind, that have impacts which are truly consequential to the economic and political order, are the fights that involve actual territory. The campaign to ethnically cleanse and colonize Gaza is something very material; Washington’s attempts to take the Strait of Hormuz back from Ansarallah has real economic stakes; the empire is seriously concerned about losing all of Haiti to the revolutionaries. Many of the tactics that the anti-imperialist struggle’s enemies use, whether abroad or in the U.S. itself, rely on manipulating perceptions.
Aside from the San Jose raid, and the border police’s detentions of ACP leaders, the attacks which the party has faced have been in the realm of online psyops. There have been efforts to draw the party’s members into time-wasting conflicts, there have been publicity stunts like January’s wrecking attempt; but none of it has hindered the progress which the party has made.
The state is absolutely getting ready to crack down further on ACP, and on the other parts of this country’s revolutionary movement. And we should take this threat seriously, but we have to remember that the biggest danger we face is not any of our enemies; it’s our own potential for folly. When an officer asks you to answer their questions, and says that it’s the only way to get law enforcement attention off of you, they’re trying to get you to fall for a trick. When the ACP’s ankle-biters try to draw us into pointless conflicts, they’re trying to make the illogical parts of our minds get the better of us. We need to maintain our security as a movement, and ensure that we’ll be able to keep building up our organizational presence even if we get forced underground.
Should we be put into such an extreme situation, it will no doubt follow major war maneuvers by our government, which uses wars as a pretext for cracking down. And if all of its geopolitical maneuvers in Europe go well, the empire will be able to get that war, with Haiti being perhaps the most likely location for it. But for the time being, that escalation has been delayed, because certain allies of ours in the global revolutionary struggle have outmaneuvered the empire.
Last month’s strike on Iran was largely a psyop; it was about exaggerating the extent to which Washington had truly done damage, with the hope being that Iran would take the bait and enter into a war which would overwhelm it. Instead, Iran refused to counter-attack the USA, and responded by simply continuing to bombard the Zionist occupier. Which has sped up the occupier’s collapse, while buying time for everyone who the empire seeks to defeat (including us).
The imperialists have become so panicked about Barbecue’s movement, Ansarallah, and Hamas because these forces are successfully subverting the hegemon’s attempts to halt revolutionary gains. As Washington carries out its schemes to destabilize the globe, and to destroy the multipolar economic order, it’s encountering anti-imperialist insurgencies that only keep making more progress.
What Barbecue has built is the perfect threat towards Washington’s designs in the American hemisphere in particular; to ensure Haiti’s continued subjugation, the U.S. engineered the destabilization of Haitian society, but now Barbecue has come in to unite the gangs while lifting up people’s living standards. The empire’s worst fear is that this revolutionary struggle will keep spreading, until it comes to overthrow the imperial state itself. To try to stop this, the empire may start an entire war; but if we navigate our conditions properly, we’ll make that war backfire on the enemy.
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