This may be a perilous moment for our movement, but it’s also a perilous moment for our class enemies; if they can’t win the narrative battle over Uhuru, their chances for defeating the broader revolutionary effort will get harmed in an irrecoverable way.
Given how historically pivotal the Uhuru case is, it’s no surprise that the narrative managers have been acting cautious about it. The media hasn’t been talking about it at all—even though the case’s oral arguments are going to happen this week—and that indicates the case will cause grievous narrative damage towards our ruling institutions if it becomes far more widely known. When local media outlets have made substantial efforts to cover the case; and to platform the statements Uhuru’s representatives have made in response to being attacked; this has made hundreds of thousands of people newly aware of an org which speaks to working people’s desire for change. The bigger media outlets can’t cover the case, or else this would provoke a nationwide debate; a debate the ruling elites absolutely do not want to happen.
Even if the media, the BreadTubers, the intelligence officials, and the neocon politicians were to unite in denouncing Uhuru, this would fail to convince more than a fraction of the public to hate the org, and there would be resistance towards the narrative which the psyop agents can’t handle. Anti-liberal voices from across the political spectrum would speak out in solidarity with Uhuru, and help expose the obviously bogus stories the pro-liberal voices are putting forth. That’s what happened when the narrative managers aggressively promoted the Trump-Russia collusion accusations, and as a consequence they’re still needing to try to convince the public that Russiagate wasn’t a hoax.
Russiagate has succeeded at unifying liberals and opportunistic “leftists” behind the anti-Russian stance, but it’s also created a political realignment where far more conservatives are now antiwar. Which has gained the communists many unlikely new allies in the antiwar movement, and many potential new converts to Marxism.
Only a minority of the public is truly invested in the anti-Russian narratives, as evidenced by how most Americans have come to dislike the idea of sending more aid to Ukraine. For this reason, it wouldn’t be wise to try to convince the majority of the people that Uhuru has conspired with Russia to interfere in U.S. elections. The pandemic has shown how many Americans have a predisposition towards distrusting our institutions; the backlash to the Covid vaccines—which undeniably is based in at least some truth, since the USA’s corporate vaccine efforts are lacking compared to those of socialist countries—has made more people primed to question what the media tells them. If the media told us all that a group of Black freedom fighters deserves to be prosecuted, a majority of Americans would be able to figure out that something suspicious is happening; and this applies to plenty of conservative Americans, because Tucker Carlson has already defended Uhuru to his massive audience.
When the national security state only has hope for getting a minority of the people to accept the narrative behind its repressive campaign, its best option is to have the media keep quiet about the repression while working on other psyops. Psyops that could let the state complete its scheme to purge the country of anti-imperialists, so long as the Uhuru case itself remains obscure.
One of these psyops is that all the country’s pro-Russian orgs are nothing more than fronts for fascist politics. That’s a narrative which has been pushed by The Daily Beast, the outlet that’s most aggressively acted as a platform for Democratic Party and neocon propaganda throughout the new cold war. It’s significant that The Daily Beast is the only major media source which felt comfortable responding to the Uhuru indictment by actively trying to smear Uhuru; the Beast’s report on the indictment described those who’d been arrested as “alleged U.S. cult members,” a clear attempt to influence their readers towards assuming the charges are true.
That the Beast has a small following compared to outlets like the New York Times, especially when comparing the amount of activity their social media posts get, has let its hit piece content about Uhuru stay within its own niche of liberal neocons. Thereby, whatever debate this content has created is insignificant. But other types of propaganda that the Beast puts forth are safe for the broader media to repeat; the entire liberal media not only promotes psyops against Washington’s target countries, but conflates anti-imperialism with reactionary politics.
The propagandists have so far mostly been avoiding attacking Uhuru because of how many Americans are sympathetic towards the Black liberation cause, as well as towards the antiwar cause; but people Uhuru associates with, like Caleb Maupin, have been getting widely attacked for a long time. Maupin in particular has been made into the caricature the narrative managers seek to create of what an anti-imperialist is, getting negatively portrayed within propaganda pieces like the Netflix documentary “How to Become a Dictator.” (With the clip they used of him having been one where he shouted in protest against Obama’s criminal actions in Syria, which ironically only makes him look good.) The narrative they’ve constructed about Maupin, and about all who associate with him by extension, is that these political actors represent the left wing in a “red-brown alliance” between communists and fascists.
Even if popular support for Black liberation prevents the propagandists from effectively assailing Uhuru, they can at least use this “red-brown” narrative about Maupin and Uhuru’s other partners to convince members of the “left” niche not to respect Uhuru. If Maupin and his org CPI are fascists, as the story goes, then Uhuru’s members should supposedly be viewed as the types of Black political actors who reinforce white supremacy. They’re trying to make Uhuru’s leaders look like reactionaries; which is beyond absurd, given how Huey Newton upheld Uhuru as the formation that’s carrying on the legacy of the Panthers.
Of course, even if they were reactionaries they would still deserve solidarity, as the charges against them are based in logic that blatantly goes against constitutional rights. But the leftists who see such subjective criticisms of Uhuru as sufficient reason for neglecting solidarity with Uhuru are not the types of people whose priority is what’s best for the cause. Their goal is to build influence within a social justice niche; a niche that ironically scorns Black freedom fighters like Uhuru as punishment for allying with the “wrong” people. The average person is not driven by such narrow-minded thinking, so they’re ideologically compatible with the effort to defend Uhuru. And the leftists who may betray Uhuru have limited influence; they only control an insular political fandom space that’s deliberately made itself unable to build a relationship with the majority of the people. We can build a movement outside this space, and render it irrelevant.
Should we spread awareness about this case to enough minds, we’ll be able to bring about a mass mobilization effort against the national security state. An effort that the state can’t ignore, because for all the state’s power, its survival depends on a social contract with the people. When we inform the people that the state has broken this contract by violating their rights, the state will either have to cease its attacks on our liberties; or make its relationship to the people more openly antagonistic.
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