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The Decline of Resistance from the Red Scare
اتهام کمونیست خواندن تا به اصطلاح جنگ علیه ترور
to the War on Terror
مقاله زیر فوق العاده میباشد .متاسفانه وقت ترجمه اش را ندارم ولی حتمن بخوانید
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(1)August 23, 1927. Sacco and Vanzetti, two anarchists accused and
convicted of a double murder in the course of an armed robbery, are sent to the
electric chair. Ten thousand mourners come to pay their last respects, twenty
thousand take to the Boston Common in protest, and many thousands more march in
the streets or attack US embassies and banks around the world to honor their
passing.
Historian Paul
Avrich convincingly argued that the two were innocent of the robbery and
murders, and were the victims of a judicial lynching. The evidence was spotty,
the media convicted them in advance, and the judge didn’t even hide his
political vendetta against the two.
On the other
hand, Sacco and Vanzetti were probably engaged in other highly illegal
activities, as participants in a tense and bloody workers’ struggle. And it’s
beyond dispute that the two of them, from prison, continued to call for
revolution against capitalism, and for vengeance against their executioners.
The most
remarkable aspect of the whole affair is how much public support they received,
not only on the streets, but from internationally renowned political figures and
intellectuals. People like John Dos Passos, George Bernard Shaw, Dorothy Parker, H.G. Wells,
Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Albert Einstein wrote letters and protested in
their defense. In today’s political climate, no one who cared about their social
status would be caught dead speaking out in favor of a political criminal who
espoused fiery and radical ideas.
(2)The War on Terror
is even more replete with frame-ups and judicial lynchings than the Red Scare,
although life imprisonment and solitary confinement, arguably far more cruel
than capital punishment, have come to replace the electric chair.
The main targets
of this War are Muslims and Middle Eastern or South Asian immigrants, radical
environmentalists, and anarchists. In one sense, not so much has changed, as
immigrants also bore the brunt of the Red Scare. The resounding difference is
the general silence outside the most directly affected communities.
How many people
today even know the names of (A)Tarek Mehanna, (B)Marie Mason, and(C) Eric McDavid?
In a massive
campaign of racial profiling after September 11th, 2001, the FBI visited and
questioned people in every single Muslim and Middle Eastern or South Asian
immigrant community in the country. Afraid of groups they saw as not culturally
integrated, they pressured thousands of people into becoming informants for
them, repeating the COINTELPRO tactic that helped destroy resistance in black
communities in the ’60s and ’70s. An unknown number of Muslims have been
disappeared to secret prisons in other countries, separated from their children,
and tortured over the course of years. Some are unaccounted for and may have
been killed.
(A)Tarek Mehanna is
a 27 year old Muslim Egyptian born in the US, with a doctorate from the
Massachusetts College of Pharmacy. He is respected both in the local Muslim and
interfaith communities, which may explain why the FBI was so interested in
turning him into a snitch. They began visiting him several years before his
first arrest, trying to recruit him as a paid informant, which would involve
giving fill-in-the-blank testimony for the feds against other people in his
community. As he consistently refused, the FBI became more and more threatening.
In 2008 they
seized the opportunity to arrest him on a technicality, indicting him for making
false statements during an earlier interrogation in 2006, concerning the
whereabouts of a friend of his.
Mehanna was
released, but then rearrested in October, 2009, amid a wave of Terror arrests
carried out in the first year of the Obama administration, at a time when the
new president needed to demonstrate his toughness. No new evidence was presented
for the second arrest, except for the testimony of another member of the Muslim
community, who had rolled over and agreed to work for the FBI after being bribed
with a reduced prison sentence, doing exactly the kind of dirty work Mehanna
refused.
With the second
arrest, the media hyped any story the FBI fed them, perfectly comfortable with
the Bureau’s long track record of manufacturing evidence and using the press to
spread disinformation. In no time, Tarek Mehanna was turned from a tolerant
Muslim into a “fanatic” who was plotting to go on a shooting rampage in a
shopping mall (that most sacred of American temples), to kill US officials, and
to join terrorist training camps along with a friend (or rather,
“co-conspirator”). For lack of evidence, the FBI story had to concede that the
pair did not actually succeed in making contact with any training camps, but
this did not at all diminish their concocted image as dangerous terrorists. An
article in Time even made a big deal out of repeating the rumour that at his
first court appearance, Mehanna wore all black and acted rudely. Oddly enough,
none of these accusations of concrete terror plots actually appear in any of the
indictments filed against Mehanna, according to his supporters.
Nonetheless,
Tarek is currently being held in solitary confinement and charged with aiding
and abetting terrorism, which could come with a prison sentence of life plus 75
years.
(B)Marie Mason is a
46 year old mother of two, a member of Earth First! and the IWW, a gardener,
musician, and community organizer who worked as an extended care assistant at a
Cincinnati school at the time of her arrest in March, 2008. After it came to
light that her former husband was working as an FBI informant, Marie pled guilty
to two politically motivated acts of property destruction, against a genetic
research laboratory at Michigan State University in December, 1999, and against
logging equipment in Mesick, Michigan, in January 2000. Both actions were
claimed by the Earth Liberation Front, which the FBI identified as the number
one domestic terrorism threat after September 11th, even though no one had ever
been harmed in any ELF action.
Marie Mason’s
arrest came as part of the Green Scare, the targeting of environmental activists
that has put over a dozen people in prison for political acts of property
destruction. During the Green Scare, the FBI has made frequent use of grand
juries to force activists and independent media workers to snitch on their
friends or give information on political protests. Those who have refused have
been jailed for up to a year.
In 2009, Marie
Mason was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Recently, she was transferred to FMC
Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas. Carswell is believed to be the location of a
third Communication Management Unit (CMU). The CMU is an even more extreme form
of isolation, another of the gruesome artefacts developed for the War on Terror.
Prisoners held in the CMU are closely monitored and their contact with the
outside world is strictly limited. They are only allowed one fifteen minute
phone call per week, only four hours of visitation, behind glass, per month, and
all correspondence and conversations have to be in English, which is especially
cruel for the majority of CMU inmates who are Muslim immigrants. In fact, one of
the few CMU inmates who is not a Muslim is Daniel McGowan, another prisoner of
the Green Scare.
(C)Eric McDavid was
presented as a dangerous terrorist upon his arrest, but as the details of his
case emerged it became increasingly apparent that the bombing plot for which he
was convicted was the fabrication of a paid FBI informant who was hired to
infiltrate the US anarchist movement. The informant, known as “Anna,” went to
various anarchist gatherings around the country and found three other young
people whom she pressured into forming a group with her. Over the course of a
year and a half, Anna was paid $65,000 to manipulate and bully Eric and the two
others into discussing potentially illegal political acts with her. She
concocted a plan, fed to her by the FBI, to build a bomb, and used various forms
of pressure, including sexual and romantic, to keep the group together. When
finally the three had reached a point where they wanted out, the FBI sprang its
trap before its entire conspiracy fell apart. They arrested Eric, along with
Zachary Jenson and Lauren Weiner, in January 2006. Despite having no criminal
record, Eric was denied bail and kept in solitary confinement for nearly two
years until trial. In the meantime, Zachary and Lauren, who had very limited
experience with political activism and were being threatened with decades in
prison, snapped and agreed to testify against Eric in exchange for lighter
sentences.
Only Eric refused
to lie or snitch, and in 2007 he was convicted in a trial rife with
misinformation provided by the FBI. Before jury deliberations the judge gave
improper instructions that seriously hampered Eric’s entrapment defense.
Subsequent to the trial, after they had gotten all the facts two of the jurors
even denounced FBI misconduct and stated Eric should get a new trial. The judge
sentenced Eric to 20 years in prison.
*********************
In all of these
cases, despite the extremely abusive nature of the prosecution and the way the
defendants were treated, and despite the threat these political maneuvers by the
FBI represent to all of us, awareness about these cases and support for the
defendants has generally remained within their own communities. Few other people
know about them, and many of those who do remain silent. The executive board of
the IWW, the famed wobblies of American labor history, even denounced Marie
Mason after she admitted to participation in the acts of eco-sabotage.
Clearly, radical
movements today are much weaker than they were in the days of Sacco and
Vanzetti. But at least a part of that is our own choosing. Nowadays politically
active people show a much greater sensitivity to the timeless smear campaigns of
the media than they did in the past. Once upon a time everyone knew the
newspapers belonged to the bosses, and their headlines were just the police
truncheon in a new form. These days people are often afraid to be associated
with anyone branded as “radical.” Some folks even give credence to the term
“terrorist,” or to the accusations of FBI agents, even though the Bureau is
composed of the same mix of liars, torturers, racists, homophobes, murderers and
snitches as in the days of J. Edgar Hoover.
People continue
to donate to NGOs that are already rolling in dough, and that have long since
been shown to form a nonprofit industrial complex that opts for careers over
real change, but they won’t have anything to do with the support committees for
prisoners like these.
What all this
represents, far deeper than a general climate of fear, is an alienation of
resistance itself, from a broad and multiform but nonetheless connected movement
or struggle into a menagerie of isolated single-issues, each with their resident
specialists and careerists. And the sites of struggle themselves have been split
to such an extent that someone can “care about the issues” or “be informed”
while being entirely apathetic towards, ignorant of, or even hostile to those
who have put themselves on the line and suffered the consequences for following
their conscience and not selling out to the various forces that have pacified
resistance, from the FBI strong-arming people into becoming snitches to the NGOs
persuading people to be pragmatic while paying their pricey rent through the
perpetual management of these social problems.
We can break out
of this isolation by choosing now to build a spirit of solidarity and a practice
of common resistance against the War on Terror. An attack on one of us really is
an attack on all of us, and all these judicial frame-ups are nothing but
political repression.
Supporting our
prisoners means defeating their attempts to terrify us, insisting on the dignity
of our causes, and building communities in which we really do take care of one
another, no matter what powerful interests we may be contradicting. Under
capitalism, all true community is subversive.
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