As soon as someone in the core of the empire commits to being serious about anti-imperialism, they have to accept that this decision will place them at the center of the class war and its perils. At no point in the history of the United States have those who’ve challenged its imperial crimes been safe from persecution or assassination; when activists, politicians, journalists, whistleblowers, or celebrities have helped advance the anti-imperialist cause, the state has done all it can to shut them down. The First Amendment doesn’t apply when it comes to individuals who threaten the status of our ruling class, even when all they’ve done is speak without taking any more substantial actions.
A hit list of those trying to stop World War III
With the coming of the new cold war, this policy of silencing dissent has been expanded, our government orchestrating de facto state censorship across Silicon Valley’s platforms with the aim of shrinking anti-imperialist platforms. Since the start of the conflict in Ukraine, and the desperate situation that Russia’s success has created for the imperial hegemon, those who’ve set themselves up against the hegemon are to turn into bigger targets than ever.
The list of assassination targets that a state-backed Ukrainian website has created, which already includes Scott Ritter and some other U.S. citizens, could be greatly expanded. Theoretically, every member of the organizations that are partnering to hold the Rage Against the War Machine coalition’s upcoming rally is eligible for being placed on this list. The Party of Communists USA; Caleb Maupin’s Center for Political Innovation; the American Student Union; those in the Libertarian Party who are most active in antiwar organizing; the People’s Party; the Korean Friendship Association; these are increasingly viewed as serious problems, because their ability to make Washington’s war operations untenable is getting bigger the more influence they gain over the discourse. A NATO-backed public threat of violence could also be applied to RAWM-sympathetic orgs like the African People’s Socialist Party, which has already been raided and had some of its members indicted for supposedly conspiring with Russia.
This scenario where Ukraine’s murder list gets made longer, and more focused on Americans, is plausible; because even though Ukraine’s conventional armed forces have lost, its Nazi terrorist groups will remain. The Banderite militants didn’t have to be drafted into the conflict, they were in it from its start in 2014. They’ll continue to do all they can to perpetuate the bloodshed and hurt Russia, and they’ve been indoctrinating youth groups to make sure that at least some people will still be fighting for their cause decades from now. If they could pick off every person in the core who’s working to disrupt Washington’s project to back their race war, they would.
As the failure of Biden’s Ukraine proxy war becomes undeniable, and the State Department transitions to a hybrid war against BRICS+ that will inevitably end in even greater defeat for the hegemon, our government could get desperate to stop those involved in the anti-NATO coalition. Posting the names and addresses of these dissident actors, preferably on a foreign site that the U.S. government can claim plausible deniability about, is one way to do this. Another way is by using our national security state’s tools for covert counterinsurgency warfare against dissent, like the FBI coordination network InfraGard, to try to get rid of the targets.
Cultivating an environment of intimidation
The goal of those covert kinds of tactics, as was revealed by 2020’s Blue Leaks, is to terrorize the victims into no longer being effective forces within the anti-imperialist struggle. This could mean making them have nervous breakdowns; it could mean “canceling” them in a way that’s serious and actually destroys their ability to make a living; it could mean pressuring them into leaving the country.
The ways InfraGard has reacted to opposition to the Ukraine proxy war have shown that the latter outcome, where individuals get coerced into leaving, is a growing possibility; whereas the Blue Leaks provided insight into the surveillance and harassment that those opposed to the Soleimani drone assassination got subjected to, throughout the Ukraine war we’ve seen InfraGard’s more recent victims report having had to escape the stalking by fleeing the USA. I’m referring to Alexander Finnegan, the commentator who narratively countered the Ukraine psyop on the intelligence-controlled online platform Quora and then described facing a wild degree of retaliation. Earlier this year, he wrote to me the following story. I’ve already published the whole thing in its own post, but including it in this one will get it far more attention:
Quora is infiltrated by the FBI. Adam Clark-Joseph is an FBI agent who has several fake identities, some of whom are “American Maoists.” Another is an anarchist named “Mia,” who claims to have gone to the Sorbonne (not). This is also Clark-Joseph. He and his wrecking crew fractured the socialist movement on Quora by attacking me.
In 2019, as a response to China and Russia doing propaganda, the US government paid for a backdoor into Quora to have superior editor status and to operate Operation Earnest Voice software using sock puppets with VPNs and deepfake profile photos. Adam Clark-Joseph, an FBI agent, and Adrian Zenz, a CIA agent (also associated with the fake “Uyghur Genocide” claims), along with several others, began working propaganda and psyops. The COINTELPRO part Clark-Joseph intended on doing was to build up the socialist space with fake anarchists, far-left characters, and to build up the Marxist-Leninist space but then to set me up to rise to prominence, only to then “expose” me as a violent extremist and bring me down, thus “discrediting” Marxism-Leninism. Hutton in particular absolutely hates communism.
When I posted several pieces condemning violence and saying that anyone associated with promoting it would be banned from my Quora spaces, Clark-Joseph was infuriated. The Ukraine War was used as an opportunity to tear apart the socialist community. After I posted several articles condemning the Biden Sanctions in Europe and telling the truth about the origins of the Ukraine War, the smear campaign started in earnest. One of Clark-Joseph’s fake characters, “Dr. David Moore,” began one of the first public crucifixions of me. Adrian Zenz, under the fake name “Alan Gould,” twisted my words and misrepresented me, along with his fake character, “Libby Maitland.” I was portrayed as being “genocidal” and “wishing for the rape and murder of Ukrainian women and children.” These lies were used to have me placed on the Domestic Terrorist Watch List on 7/22/22.
Michael Hutton, NSA, is head of propaganda on Quora. He ordered the smear campaign against me prior to me being put on the Domestic Terrorist Watch List. During this operation, Clark-Joseph would message me attempting to befriend me, basically inquiring to see if I was suicidal (that was their goal). I had to inform him I wasn’t. 215 smear campaign messages tearing me to pieces (with the assistance of FBI psychologists) was not enough to break me. So after they put me on the Domestic Terrorist Watch List, they hacked my phones and computers.
Using a Twitter exploit, they were able to hijack my Twitter and Reddit accounts to stream video footage, which included two clips. One of them was LA gang members talking about coming to rape and kill my family at 3 am and a Ukrainian hit team with a midget named “Little Niko” who would break into people’s homes and murder them. Combined with sleep deprivation and InfraGard swarming my home, these were MKULTRA II methods to psychologically break me down and cause a regressive state in which I was “deprogrammed” away from communism. The irony is that all of their bullshit just made me more convinced how evil they are and how much I absolutely hate America. It also made me more convinced that only Marxism-Leninism can save our species from destruction at the hands of a psychopathic, warmongering, genocidal, settler-occupier regime, the US of KKKA.
Subjected to surveillance 24-7, fake classified documents put on my computer to frame me, disturbing images put on my computer, a drone flown above my home, our house broken into when we weren’t home, InfraGard goons shooting outside our home, numerous death threats, and another smear campaign would follow in November after I had fled the US on October 3, 2022.
I still have people shooting outside our home as of February 2, 2023. They destroyed my life. I lost my childhood home, all of my things, and my wife lost her career. I feel bad for her because she was a good nurse who helped people during the COVID pandemic. She studied in school for nothing. Nursing was her passion. Now, all of those skills are wasted. They even talked her mother into working with CPS to take our children from us. Separating children from their parents is what these beasts do as a form of terrorism. I did an FOIA request recently and it was denied because my placement on the Domestic Terrorist Watch List “Cannot be confirmed to exist or not exist.” And, if it did exist, it “would be classified” as “national security.” In other words, it exists and they refuse to provide me the right to confront my accusers in court. The Constitution is dead, and it was murdered by George W. Bush and his Neocon Junta.
There are many who don’t believe me. The Langley Boys still say I am a “paranoid schizophrenic” who “couldn’t handle being in the spotlight.” Such claims are used against all gangstalking victims to discredit them. Nothing new there. What was most shocking, however, was the quickness with which my neighbors, supposed “friends,” and even my mother-in-law were willing to toss us under the bus. I know, now, how the Jewish people felt when their neighbors and friends abandoned them to the Nazis.
Finnegan and his family are now living in Guatemala, which he had to choose as the country to flee to due to the travel logistics he faced. Cuba would have been better, and it’s where he initially tried to go to, but Guatemala is where he ended up; and that’s let the USA be better able to continue terrorizing him. This shows that if you ever find yourself subjected to the type of terror campaign he became a target of, it’s not guaranteed you’ll be able to relocate to an anti-imperialist country and find safety there. Most likely you won’t be free from the menace of the U.S. empire until the U.S. empire no longer exists, that’s the practical reality.
There are constraints upon how far the government feels comfortable taking its war against dissent. These constraints come from how the government needs to maintain the illusion that our society is free and democratic; it can’t admit that it goes after anti-imperialists because of their speech, it has to make up narratives vilifying them based on myths. The notion that the target is mentally deranged is one that’s been used for this purpose since the trial of John Brown, where the state tried to discredit Brown’s anti-slavery revolt by falsely portraying him as insane. The goal behind these attempts to make it look like these rebel figures always bring their fates upon themselves, like they consistently just so happen to be disturbed or sexually predatory or murderous, perpetuates the belief among those who believe the propaganda that the state is innocent; that every time it comes into conflict with those it labels as menaces, these people genuinely are menaces.
Among those involved in the revolutionary struggles, though, those who become wise to the state’s demonization narratives about these figures get a sense of intimidation when it comes to their government. They know someone who challenges our ruling institutions can be targeted purely for that. When the U.S. empire got Julian Assange sent to the inhumane Belmarsh prison, the goal was to make an example out of him; yet because his persecution has been based on the pretext that he’s an indecent sexual assailant who broke the law by publishing military secrets, among many other myths about him, those who uncritically accepted the Assange smears thought his arrest was perfectly benign. Those who were able to resist the lies had to experience the harrowing realization that journalism is now against the law if you expose the crimes of the wrong people.
As long as the state can keep the proportion of people with an anti-imperialist consciousness small enough, it can maintain this dynamic of “those who don’t know are blissfully ignorant, those who do know are scared.” But if enough of our society becomes conscious, those in the conscious element will stop feeling as intimidated, as their cause will have gained serious influence.
By introducing the RESTRICT act this year, the new cold warriors tried to expand the amount of conscious individuals who can be successfully persecuted and vilified; the act’s goal is to codify the legal standard the DOJ has applied to Uhuru, where anyone who does international anti-imperialist solidarity work can be criminalized for supposedly engaging in a foreign conspiracy. With the goal behind this being to reduce how much of the population the anti-imperialist movement can educate and mobilize, keeping liberal “democracy” stable. The reason RESTRICT hasn’t been passed after several months is because passing it would create too great of an inconsistency between liberalism’s claim to being “democratic,” and what actually happens under liberalism.
The people the state wants to use RESTRICT to make into criminals can’t be made into criminals, at least not within the popular consciousness; the Uhuru indictments and RESTRICT’s introduction have provoked enough backlash for it to be clear that legally labeling everyone who does global solidarity work a foreign agent wouldn’t be narratively viable. This obstacle towards repression that the state has encountered is giving us a bit more opportunities to advance the anti-imperialist cause.
Preparing for an escalation in the class struggle
We need to use wisely the time that RESTRICT’s failure so far to pass has given us. Every day is one that can be used to build relationships with anti-imperialists domestically and worldwide; to fight the information war; to get the people into the streets to resist the war machine. We have to build anti-imperialist platforms on services that aren’t at risk of censorship, like Substack and Telegram, while creating organizing networks on genuinely secure communications services like Threema. We must expand the mass base for our movement as much as possible, while in our inner cadres we preemptively come to operate as if the repression has already intensified.
The attempts by the feds and their opportunistic allies within the “left” to gatekeep organizing spaces; to divert popular outrage towards avenues within the Democratic Party’s control; are the first parts of the counterinsurgency we face. As the anti-NATO movement continues to have more of an impact, the state becomes more pressured to switch towards direct suppression of dissent. We’re surviving the discourse management stage of the counterinsurgency; all we have to do is not believe the smears against individuals like Ritter or against orgs like PCUSA, be principled in supporting anti-imperialist countries, and protect our mental health against the constant pressures our enemies try to apply to it. To survive the stage when our work gets criminalized on a more widespread scale than it’s already been, we’ll need to have the infrastructure to continue our operations after this obstacle has appeared.
Beyond operating in a clandestine way, we’ll have to ensure our members physically survive as more and more of us are targeted by the kind of terror campaign Finnegan has been subjected to. Anyone who’s committed to anti-imperialism needs to be advancing a fitness and tactical preparedness regimen; one that’s not individualistic, but applied to a group of people who are local to them.
If we can keep these types of cadres connected in the long term, we’ll have a means of keeping the struggle alive, even as many of us inevitably get incarcerated or exiled; as long as the others can avoid being murdered, our units will be self-sustaining. Such is the commitment that’s entailed within our present mission to defeat NATO’s narrative dominance: being willing to adopt a far more compromised lifestyle as soon as we get successful enough at weakening the state’s psyops, which is when the state will panic and come after us more directly.
This is about more than survival; it’s about winning. We anti-imperialists in the core must learn the same lesson that the arbiters of recent anti-hegemonic actions like Operation Z have: that it’s not enough to merely be reactive towards one’s enemy. There wasn’t hope for stopping Washington’s fascist puppet state in Ukraine from shelling the Donbass as long as Russia merely focused on defending the communities Ukraine menaced; Ukraine had to be demilitarized. Now Ukraine’s capacity to sufficiently operate armed forces without NATO’s assistance has been taken away—as evidenced by the failure of its counteroffensive—and the Kiev regime is waiting to become the latest abandoned U.S. imperial project. The more our struggle escalates, the more variables that we may not have previously considered get revealed, and the more we have to respond in new and innovative ways. To prevail, we must avoid letting the enemy take us by surprise; we need to turn the imperial state into the one with the reactive role in this relationship, so we may then bring about its final defeat.
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