The Venceremos Brigade, which brings solidarity and aid to Cuba from the U.S., is one of over 40 groups named in the State Department report attacking Cuba and the progressive movement in the U.S. (Photo: Venceremos Brigade)
The House Ways and Means subpoenas against peace and justice organizations, paired with the State Department's designation of Cuba as the center of global terrorism, represent a coordinated McCarthyite attack designed to criminalize dissent and silence the growing opposition to U.S. wars and imperialism.
Originally published in Workers World.
What is the meaning of the House Ways and Means Committee subpoenas, demanding that three peace and justice organizations — BreakThrough News, The Peoples Forum and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research — turn over all internal communications, membership and financial records by Aug. 7? The Republican-dominated Committee claims that this is a tax inquiry.
The subpoenas came just one day after the July 20 release of a State Department 100-page report titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” which claims that Cuba is the center of global terrorism.
This State Department report names at least 43 people and organizations. Among them are the mayors of New York City and Los Angeles, members of Congress, the Amazon Labor Union and numerous journalists and organizations across the movement. They include the National Lawyers Guild, the Venceremos Brigade, IFCO / Pastors for Peace, the National Network on Cuba, Black Lives Matter, CodePink and the Democratic Socialists of America. Many of the organizations named are broad coalitions involving hundreds of other organizations and activists.
Four days previously, on July 16, President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened an international “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism” at the State Department. The gathering drew officials from 66 countries to call for a machinery of counterterrorism against left-wing movements worldwide.
The State Department meeting labels all movements opposing U.S. domination as “Far-Left Terrorism” and proposes these movements be met with “the same seriousness and ferocity” the government reserves for “jihadist” attacks. Multiple cabinet departments, and even foreign governments, must be involved in “crushing” the “radical left.” Rubio said new terrorist designations for left-wing groups were coming.
Clearly this is a desperate and coordinated approach to paint all forms of dissent with such a broad brush that nearly anyone and anything critical of any government policy can be labeled as terrorist, rather than be protected as they should be under the First Amendment right of free speech.
Rubio claimed Iran and Cuba direct the world’s left. But the millions of people in the streets outraged at Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) raids and killings and opposing U.S.-funded Israeli genocide in Gaza know that terror comes from the White House. They know who orchestrated the bombing of Lebanon and Iran and attacks on Cuba and Venezuela.
Giving sweeping coverage to this whipped-up campaign is Fox News, whose “investigation” claims there is a global conspiracy, a network encompassing 2,000 nonprofits, activist groups, think tanks and media organizations worldwide. This conspiracy is purportedly behind anti-Israel demonstrations, pro-Cuba actions, mass opposition to ICE raids, protests targeting artificial intelligence and opposition to data centers. (Fox News, July 22)
How the movement must respond!
Everyone under attack — individuals or organizations targeted by this police-state move — must be defended by every organization in the movement. Anyone and any group that refuses to submit to the subpoenas should be praised for resisting a criminal proceeding.
The U.S. government is the center of terrorism. Terrorism is government policy. The terrorists are in the White House.
But U.S. imperialism’s endless wars, regime change operations, starvation sanctions, targeted assassinations, kidnappings and fully subsidized Israeli genocide in Palestine face a major obstacle: The population in the U.S. is increasingly opposed to their wars. Most frustrating to those who profit from the endless wars is the growing popular sympathy for the countries targeted by the U.S. war planners.
The war profiteers aim to remove this obstacle. They ask themselves how they can silence the most outspoken forces opposing their criminal policies? How can they generate fear and silence instead of domestic opposition? How can they prepare the many government agencies of repression to focus on this artificial “threat”? How can they force the corporate media into lockstep to go along with this manufactured threat.
The war profiteers’ answer is to reach back to the totally illegal, discredited tactics of the past McCarthyite era of the late 1940s and 1950s. Their problem is that this period was when U.S. imperialism was at its height in productive capacity, market domination and in popular support. That is far from true now.
Plus, as intense and as coordinated as the late 1940s-1950s repression was, it was defeated by the early 1960s when a new upsurge in struggle led to collective defense and people refusing to be intimidated.
Now U.S. wars are proving to be unwinnable and unpopular. The U.S. global economic position and productive capacity is in an irreversible decline. Domestic repression can’t reverse this global downslide.
The power of collective response and unified opposition in the face of attack dates to the earliest workers’ movements. The old union slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” is the only way forward today.
In this week’s segment, we discuss the status of talks between Iran and the U.S.
Ajamu Baraka is a Black Agenda Report contributing editor and Director of the North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Right
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