Yesterday, I wrote about a trial in U.S. District Court in Tampa in which federal prosecutors are keeping us safe by prosecuting and hoping to jail members of a group called the African People’s Socialist Party and its related “Uhuru Movement.” (Uhuru is Swahili for “freedom”). The government is alleging that the defendants have been secretly working as Russian agents to sow discord and conflict among the American people. So, they’re going after them for not registering with the federal government as secret agents of the Russian government.
To launch its case, the federal prosecutors called an expert witness named Dr. Brian Taylor as their first witness. He is a professor of political science at Syracuse University who has worked with the Justice Department in the past as an expert witness. According to the website of 10 Tampa Bay, prosecutors had him “give a broad overview of the adversarial relationship between Russia and the U.S., which took hold during the Cold War.”
Now, I ask you: What does the Cold War, which ostensibly ended in 1989, have to do with the prosecution in 2024 of members of a black organization who failed to register with the federal government as supposed secret agents of Russia?
Well, actually everything! In fact, the decision by federal prosecutors to open the Tampa trial with an exposition of the Cold War is very revealing about what is going on here.
The Cold War was one of the biggest rackets in U.S. history, one that was intended to justify the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state. Remember: In every national-security state, fear is the coin of the realm. The national-security establishment has to keep people agitated and afraid so that it can continue to expand its power and control, with the help of ever-increasing amounts of taxpayer money.
To ensure that the American people remained in a state of constant fear after the defeat of the Nazi regime in World War II, U.S. officials immediately came up with a new official enemy, one that, ironically, had been the partner of the U.S. during the war. That new official enemy was the Soviet Union, whose principal member was — Russia! The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! That’s all we heard throughout the Cold War. The dominoes were falling. Look under your bed to find a Red! America was in serious danger of being taken over by the communists. The federal government was converted to a national-security state, with omnipotent powers, and the anti-communist crusade was launched to protect us from the commies. And there were also the hot wars, as in the U.S. invasions of Korea and Vietnam to stop the Reds before they got to American shores.
It was, of course, all a crock. The Russians, Chinese, North Koreans, North Vietnamese, Cubans, and other Red regimes were never coming to invade and conquer the United States. In fact, after years of telling us that American servicemen were killing and dying in Vietnam to prevent the Reds from getting to America, the U.S. government lost the war and exited the country. Yet, contrary to all the fear-mongering propaganda, the Reds never arrived on American shores.
Then, after almost 45 years of this massive racket, the Cold War suddenly and ostensibly ended, much to the shock and chagrin of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, the three principal components of the U.S. national-security state. That’s when a bit of panic set in. The national-security state had no official enemy to immediately replace “godless communism” and the Soviet Union in order to maintain and continue its racket.
That’s when they went into the Middle East with their Persian Gulf intervention and began killing massive numbers of Iraqis, not only with their undeclared war but also with their brutal sanctions that killed untold numbers of Iraqi children. When the inevitable retaliation came on 9/11, they had their new official enemy — terrorism, or Islam and Muslims — and their new racket — the much-vaunted “war on terrorism.” Claiming that the terrorists just hated us for our “freedom and values,” they were off to the races again with the deep fear of terrorism, Muslims, Islam, and Sharia law that their propaganda inculcated within the American people and, of course, the ever-increasing power, control, and taxpayer-funded largess for the national-security establishment.
But here is the kicker, which was indirectly revealed by the decision of those federal prosecutors in Tampa to launch their inane prosecution with an exposition of the Cold War: The Cold War never ended, at least not for the U.S. national-security establishment. They were not about to let go of their anti-Russia cash-cow so easily.
So, they used their old Cold War dinosaur NATO to begin moving eastward, contrary to promises they had made to Russia to never do that. Absorbing former members of the Warsaw Pact and then threatening to absorb Ukraine, their plan was to reinvigorate Russia as America’s old/new official enemy and to re-instill fear and agitation among the American people. Of course, the plan has worked beautifully, with many American public-school graduates now desperately afraid that the Russians are going to manipulate their malleable minds and influence them to vote for political figures who are actually serving as secret Manchurian candidates.
And so it’s déjà vu all over again. The Reds are coming! The Russians are trying to influence our elections. They are sowing conflict and discord among the American people, who should instead be unified behind the U.S. national-security state and its own propaganda and indoctrination.
And so the U.S. national-security state is going after a black organization that has had the temerity of opposing U.S. interventionism and imperialism for some 50 years, including their NATO provocations with respect to Ukraine. That’s what this prosecution is all about — putting black people down for daring to oppose the U.S. killing machine, just like they did during the Cold War with Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King. The federal prosecution of members of the African People’s Socialist Party and its related Uhuru Movement reminds me of the words of Pastor Martin Niemöller:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.