On May 11, eight activists detained in Prairieland Texas were found guilty of “providing material support to terrorists” and sentenced up to a century in prison; and a combined 450 years in federal prison. Among the evidence the state used to argue that the detained activists were part of an “antifa terrorist cell” was the possession of left-wing literature. This decision is clearly intended to discipline the mass resistance to increasing militarization and state terror against the working migrant masses. It represents a direct attack on the entire class-conscious mass movement.
When federal agents raided the Sotos’ house, they acquired a printing press which prosecutors alleged was used to print anti-government literature including anarchist zines, and other literature for a reading group called the “Emma Goldman book club”; the materials were seized by the FBI. As the first case tried and convicted under the Trump regime’s Department of Justice’s “counter-terrorism” initiatives targeting “antifa”, a decentralized movement broadly united around opposition to fascism which has been labeled a “domestic terrorist organization”, this decision could have grave implications for anyone engaged in meaningful struggle, and opens the door for increased, and greater political repression.
The Trump regime openly declared its attempt to repress uprisings against increasing state terror and rising fascism in its so-called “counter-terrorism” strategy that lumps together broad and poorly defined categories of people such as anarchists, anti-fascists, so-called “violent left-wing extremists”, and adherents to “pro-transgender ideology” as targets of particular concern. This decision is clearly intended to force the mass movement into submission, and paves the way for increasingly severe attacks by the state against any resistance of the broad masses of exploited and oppressed people in the U.S.
The example of state repression against the Prairieland Defendants in the United States parallels the attacks against activists in Dehli in March of this year, in which the Indian Old State unlawfully detained and tortured human rights activists in an attempt to subdue the resistance of the oppressed and exploited Indian masses under the ludicrous pretense of eliminating the Maoist revolutionaries. The U.S.-backed fascist state in India, through the initiation of the Surajkund Scheme and the intensification of Operation Kagaar, continues to carry out violence against the Indian masses including the deepest and most oppressed sections, including in the form of openly genocidal attacks against indigenous Adivasi people in the countryside.
The Indian Old State has also increasingly passed anti-trans legislation deliberately intended to force trans women into a marginal and socially ostracized status through the maintenance of feudal social relations and caste. Activists across the United States, including the People’s Defense Committee put out a statement with the Forum Against Corporatization and Militarization, or FACAM, condemning the illegal detention and torture of activists in India. Activists within the class-conscious mass-movement in the United States mobilized to demand the end to Operation Kagaar and the Surajkund scheme in the spirit of proletarian internationalism.
As the reality of rising fascism, corporatization, and militarization in the United States continues to become more apparent due to the generalized crisis of U.S. Imperialism in decline, more hostile and direct attacks against any spontaneous resistance have become increasingly common, and will inevitably escalate.
Wherever there is repression there is resistance. The attempt to intimidate the masses into submission will inevitably be met with a more fervent will, as all those exploited and oppressed by imperialism become more conscious day by day of their conditions, and their historic role in the overthrow of U.S. Imperialism, the number one enemy of the people of the world.
