Above: a 2023 protest against Atlanta's massive “Cop City” police training center, photo by Megan Varner/Reuters
Last month, our government’s effort to make three communists into political prisoners was defeated. Omali Yeshitela, Penny Hess, and Jesse Nevel, who helped lead the Uhuru organization, were falsely charged with foreign interference; they were also charged with conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government. In December’s trial, the judge gave them no prison time for the latter charge, handing them a relatively lighter sentence than incarceration. This came after they were found not guilty of conspiring with a foreign power during their September trial.
These two victories would not have been possible without the efforts of all who mobilized against the persecution campaign. And we should recognize these wins for the encouraging developments that they are. The enemy is going to strike back, though; the U.S. ruling class wants to import the Jakarta Method, the Indonesian dictatorship’s strategy for eliminating dissent. And it’s going to try whatever new means that it can for implementing a U.S. equivalent of Jakarta. We must note which actions made the civil liberties movement victorious in the case of Uhuru, and apply these lessons to our future fights. We must also apply the practices that organizations have historically used to survive when they’ve found themselves illegalized; practices like building small cadres which can keep information tightly shared, while operating within larger networks.
These clandestine actions are essential to the struggle’s survival, but they’re not the full part of the solution; the other part is to loudly and unapologetically agitate in solidarity with the victims of repression, for as long as the state allows us to do so. That way, even if such speech gets fully criminalized, we’ll have already gained the mass backing required for an underground operation to succeed. An underground operation that lacks sufficient mass basis will either fizzle out, or devolve into criminality, like unsuccessful guerrilla movements have done. The story of the Hands off Uhuru movement’s success provides insight into how we can build an adequate mass base, and do so by using the state’s attacks as a rallying point.
When the state’s repressive efforts result in a dissident org gaining more mass support, and the org hasn’t even been weakened in its structure or morale, then the dissident side has gotten a total victory. And that’s what’s happened with Uhuru; from this, it’s gotten both greater mass support and greater morale, with the victory providing a reason for more organizational confidence. Uhuru, and all who support it, now know that they’re capable of winning a fight like this one.
Enough people found out about the persecution campaign, and were compelled to act in solidarity, that the state couldn’t accomplish its goal. The feds went after the Uhuru 3 with the objective of setting a new precedent, wherein all international anti-imperialist solidarity work would have become criminalized. The targets hadn’t done anything that wasn’t constitutionally protected; they’d held meetings with people in Russia, and spoken out against the Ukraine psyop. If the state had managed to define this as illegal, then every pro-Palestine org would have become criminalized; all the feds would need to do is find examples of activists speaking with people in Palestine, or make up accounts of this happening.
But the project to repress anti-imperialists has been set back, because the backlash to Uhuru’s persecution was stronger than the FBI’s own efforts; during September’s trial, the FBI ended up discrediting itself, because its case was too flimsy to be taken seriously by any honest judge. To maintain these gains within the power struggle, and keep the deep state from swaying our legal system in future cases, we have to redouble our civil liberties agitation efforts. We have to build upon the momentum that we’ve already gained, and further put the power balance in our favor; because if our solidarity efforts fail on any front, the state will get the precedents it’s been searching for.
In response to Uhuru’s latest win, the National Lawyers Guild has said that “this is just one victory in a long ongoing battle. Similar false charges have already been levied to try and intimidate rising political dissent in the Palestinian solidarity and anti-cop city movements. Samidoun — The Palestine Prisoner Support Network — has recently been declared a terrorist organization by the Treasury Department, part of the latest iteration of a resurgent McCarthyism, with claims of terrorism being the new anti-communism. Sixty one Stop Cop City protesters are facing RICO charges in Atlanta.” RICO being the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations criminal category, where a group has allegedly engaged in corrupt business dealings that affect interstate commerce.
This is the best the state can come up with to try to criminalize activists who’ve focused only on domestic issues; for Samidoun, and all the other pro-Palestine orgs by extension, the state is using the “terrorism” accusation. Which means that our ruling class already has a substantial precedent for targeting the pro-Palestine movement. As the National Lawyers Guild has also said:
The unjust targeting of Samidoun mirrors the Los Angeles 8 case, litigated by NLG and other organizations. In 1987, eight Palestinian and Palestine solidarity activists were brutally arrested by the FBI in Los Angeles and held in jail for three weeks before being released. They too were wrongly accused of association with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and their so-called crimes were distributing Palestinian magazines and fundraising for humanitarian relief. Mainstream media relentlessly called them terrorists, causing a chilling effect across left social movements throughout North America. Shortly thereafter, the National Lawyers Guild and other organizations filed a lawsuit against the US government for its unconstitutional arrests and bogus charges. Twenty years later, Judge Bruce Einhorn dismissed the lawsuit, calling the government’s actions in the prolonged case “an embarrassment to the rule of law.”
We’re limited in how effectively we can combat repression, but limitations are a given when you’re involved in any fight. The crucial thing is to know what your strengths are, and what your opponent’s weaknesses are. Hands off Uhuru’s story has taught us that when we mobilize in solidarity with one of the state’s targets, this will attract considerable mass support for what we’re doing. Because the state attacked Uhuru, and enough principled people were there to speak up for Uhuru, the org’s ideas gained traction within the alternative media; Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson talked about what the Biden administration had done to Uhuru, which made a lot more average people aware of the org’s existence and political relevance. By extension, many more became aware of its pan-African communist message, even if this was only their introduction to that message. Since the FBI raided the Uhuru House in 2022, we’ve learned that keeping repressive acts hidden is one of the state’s weaknesses; while gaining attention is one of the anti-imperialist movement’s strengths.
Or rather this can be one of the movement’s strengths when we take advantage of it; whenever the imperialist enemy commits a crime, whether that crime is to persecute an innocent person or to bomb civilians, we must expose that crime to the masses. We must be consistent in decrying the imperial state’s evil acts, and we must decry these acts in a way the masses will understand; that’s why phrases like “deep state” are valuable. While doing educational work, we shouldn’t just talk about the most basic aspects of any given topic, but we should communicate with the people through language they’ll recognize.
If we utilize this mass-centered practice, we’ll be able to gain much more popular support for the next civil liberties fights, and for all of our other fights. This will make it less likely that the state succeeds in criminalizing our work. And should the state still succeed in this, if we have preexisting mass support for our orgs, it will be less likely that the state sabotages our clandestine operations. In every way, our strategic standing will be improved if we balance our inner cadre work with mass work.
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