Re: The lunatic left

[jonathan flanders <jon_flanders@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I share Lou's amazement at the Militant's position. Appended below is the
editorial from the Militant website.

Notably absent is any recommendation for some other way Elian could have
been extricated from his kidnapper's house.

I also find tendencious the claim that those who support the government's
action think that bouquets should go Clinton and Reno's way.

Jon Flanders



INS assault in Miami strikes blow to the working class
In defense of the Cuban revolution, in defense of the working class!
Since the day last November when then five-year-old Elian Gonzalez was
rescued from the water off the coast of Florida, the Militant has
campaigned against the Clinton administration's refusal to immediately
return him to Cuba.

We have pointed out that he is one of many thousands of victims of the
decades-long U.S. government policy codified in the 1966 Cuban Adjustment
Act. That policy is designed to entice Cubans into the dangerous Florida
Straits on flimsy rafts and rickety skiffs with the knowledge that if they
survive, unlike other immigrants, they will be welcomed with aid and
citizenship papers in the reputed "land of plenty," the world's wealthiest
capitalist power.

EDITORIAL

The Militant has insisted, moreover, that the top echelons of the U.S.
government, with brutal indifference to the consequences for an innocent
child, quickly came to see how unanticipated developments surrounding this
case could be played to advantage. Elian Gonzalez could be used to help the
U.S. ruling class polish the tarnished image of la migra, its largest and
most hated federal police force, and to strengthen the executive powers of
the imperialist state. These are strategic goals that rank high with the
U.S. rulers, as they prepare their arsenal for use against working people
at home and abroad.

The April 22 Miami commando-style operation carried out in the wee hours of
the morning by heavily-armed special forces of the Immigration and
Naturalization Service provides striking new confirmation of the Militant's
assessment. That raid dealt a stunning blow to the right of every U.S.
resident to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,
against unreasonable searches and seizures," as provided by the Fourth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights codifying
space wrested by the toilers over more than two centuries of struggle.
Every class-conscious worker is obligated to take a clear and unambiguous
stand against that police action, which, in addition to all else, was
accompanied by chauvinism and anti-immigrant prejudice against the
population labeled "Miami Cubans."

That's why the Militant, whose masthead proudly declares it is "published
in the interests of working people," is campaigning with the headline this
week: "INS assault in Miami strikes blow to the working class."
Condemnation of the raid is all the more incumbent on those who for more
than 40 years have been the most consistent and intransigent defenders of
the Cuban revolution.

Following months of unprecedented publicity, the police action in Miami
removed a Cuban child from the home of relatives who, with no legal custody
rights, were parading him before the world as a trophy of the
counterrevolution. For that reason, the operation is being hailed by a
layer of activists in the Cuba solidarity movement as a "victory," for
which U.S. top cop Attorney General Janet Reno and U.S. president William
Clinton should be sent bouquets of flowers and letters of commendation.

Nothing could be more dangerously false. What's at stake is a working-class
line of march in defense of democratic rights and political space won by
working people in the United States through two revolutions and numberless
bloody battles in the streets. It is along that road that the Cuban
Revolution, the first dictatorship of the proletariat in our hemisphere,
will be effectively defended as well.

Never was there greater need for clarity that the government of the most
dangerous and brutal imperialist power in the world does not act for "us."
"We" and "they" are two irreconcilable classes.

Clinton strengthens police powers

Since taking office more than seven years ago, the Clinton administration,
with bipartisan backing in Congress, has been steadily pursuing a course to
strengthen police powers while restricting political space for the exercise
of democratic rights. This is the rulers' considered need, an anticipation
in face of slowly growing political polarization and intensified resistance
by broadening layers of workers and farmers to the conditions of their
exploitation and oppression. The following are just a few of the measures
taken by the White House, Congress, and the courts:

Under the banner of "the fight against drugs," Clinton's 1994 Crime Bill
assaulted Fourth Amendment protections against illegal search and seizure
in private homes, and the courts have virtually eliminated such rights in
automobiles.

Following adoption of the White House-initiated Illegal Immigration Reform
Act in 1996, deportations hit a record high over the next two years. La
migra's hated powers to seize and deport suspected "illegal aliens" without
right to judicial review or appeal have been expanded.

The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act signed into law by
Clinton in 1996 permits the INS to jail immigrants using what it calls
"secret evidence." It also broadens government powers to use wiretaps and
hold individuals without bail in "preventive detention."

The U.S. prison population today is some eight times what it was in 1971,
and nearly twice its level when the Great Jailer took up residence in the
White House in 1992.

Appeal and parole rights have been further restricted, while mandatory
minimum sentences, longer terms, and even prison labor for the "free
market" have all become more common.

During the seven-year administration of the Great Executioner, the annual
number of state-sponsored electrocutions, hangings, and deaths by lethal
injection have tripled, while the number of defendants charged with federal
capital offenses has tripled since adoption of the Clinton-initiated
Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994.

The White House has stepped up heavier and more deadly arming and equipping
of police forces. Between 1995 and 1997 alone, the Clinton administration
gave police departments 1.2 million pieces of military hardware, including
73 grenade launchers and 112 armored personnel carriers. Use of
self-repeating handguns with large clips has been encouraged and expanded.

In the name of preempting "terrorist" attacks, the Clinton Pentagon has
established, for the first time in U.S. history, a de facto "homeland
defense command," preparing the way for the U.S. armed forces to openly
conduct police operations?now prohibited by law?against residents of the
United States.

Mailed fist and imperial arrogance

Official sanction by the Clinton administration for escalated police
violence has led with increasing frequency, from one end of the country to
the other, to cold-blooded murders by cops. The roster of names that have
prompted outpourings of anger and demands for justice in recent months
alone is long and well-known?Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond in New
York City; Willie James Williams in Valdosta, Georgia; Tyisha Miller in
Riverside, California; and many others. But we should remind ourselves that
the pattern of domestic police violence does not stand in isolation. It
goes hand-in-hand with the sharpening interimperialist conflict and U.S.
military aggression throughout the world, from Iraq, to Yugoslavia, to the
Sudan, to Korea.

They do at home what they do abroad. Foreign policy is always ultimately an
expression of the real trajectory of domestic policy. Their course and
objectives have nothing to do with the "rule of law." They have everything
to do with the mailed fist and imperial arrogance of the world's one
"indispensable nation," as William Clinton likes to call the United States.


The INS raid in Miami, as Harvard constitutional law professor and liberal
Establishment attorney Laurence Tribe has pointed out, was carried out in
violation of the fact that under the U.S. Constitution "it is axiomatic
that the executive branch has no unilateral authority to enter people's
homes forcibly to remove innocent individuals without taking the time to
seek a warrant or other order from a judge or magistrate." No judge or
magistrate "had issued the type of warrant or other authority needed for
the executive branch to break into the home to seize the child."

The INS, with its enhanced powers under the 1996 Immigration Act, can
secure warrants to search workplaces for illegal aliens and "to search,
interrogate and arrest people without warrants in order to prevent unlawful
entry into the country," Tribe added. "But no one suspects that Elian is
here illegally." (To the contrary, we would add: the U.S rulers' Cuban
Adjustment Act is designed to entice the maximum number of "Eliáns," all of
them "legal.")

La migra's justification for the firepower deployed in Miami was the
all-too-well-known claim of "intelligence" reports of weapons in the house
or crowd. (How often have workers in the United States been victims of
"secret intelligence," offered by the FBI and other police agencies,
informers, and provocateurs to justify murderous acts?)

The timing of the predawn raid, prohibited by the terms of most search
warrants; the battering down of the front and back door; the refusal to
seek or obtain a court order obliging the family to turn over the child
(the INS architects of the "dilemma" claim their powers are not subject to
judicial review); the wanton "collateral damage" inflicted on the home of
the child's relatives, to whom the administration had originally "granted"
custody; the pepper gas sprayed on the crowd outside the home; the assault
on the NBC camera crew?all are elements of the violation of the
constitutional right to safety and security in our own homes that U.S.
residents consider among our most precious guarantees under the Bill of
Rights. All were intended to teach a class lesson about what "the rule of
law" really means to those who would resist the advance of the imperial
power that William Clinton and Janet Reno serve.

As if the point needed to be reinforced, two days after the INS raid in
Miami, the New York press reported that cops "in battle gear?backed up by
search dogs, helicopters and rooftop sharpshooters?blocked off streets" for
hours in the Edgemere section of Queens. They were "acting on a tip" that a
man wanted in connection with a series of shootings was in an apartment in
the area. He was never found, but others in the neighborhood were detained,
manhandled, and grilled. Get the message?

Next target: Puerto Rico

Immediately following the Miami raid, the U.S. government announced it
would soon begin operations with U.S. marshals and other federal police
agencies to clear the Puerto Rican island of Vieques of the protesters
permanently camped there to prevent the Pentagon from resuming use of the
island as a weapons-testing site.

The chauvinist, anti-Cuban, anti-immigrant and anti-working-class prejudice
that has been used to bolster support for the police commando operation in
Miami is one of its most pernicious aspects. High levels of support for the
INS raid among African-Americans polled in South Florida is one register of
the successful attempt to bolster decades of resentment against many in the
Cuban community for reactionary ends.

The pen of leading New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman drips with
venom as he repeatedly refers to the perfidious role of "the Miami Cubans,"
as a bloc, undifferentiated by class or other distinction, except to
identify some among them as "extremists." As a people they bear a
collective guilt. Whether as residents or citizens, they have fewer or
lesser rights than "Americans."

In the aftermath of the INS raid he enthusiastically supported, Friedman
gloats that one can only hope "the Miami Cubans" have been reminded "that
they are not living in their own private country, they cannot do whatever
they please and that they may hate Fidel Castro more than they love the
U.S. Constitution?but that doesn't apply to the rest of us." This from a
near-hysterical advocate of tearing up the Bill of Rights for all of us, so
"the Miami Cubans" can be taught a lesson.

Blanket references to Cuban-Americans living in Miami as gusanos, or as the
"Miami Mafia" (almost more powerful than the imperialist state)?references
that often crop up among supporters of the revolution in the United States
(see letters page)?are of a similarly reactionary and petty bourgeois
character. Events surrounding the Elián González affair confirm what the
Militant has long argued: with every passing year Cubans and
Cuban-Americans living in the United States are more and more marked by the
same class divisions and political polarization as other residents. The
Cuban bourgeois layers who dominate the Dade County political machine are
more integrated today, not less, with their class brothers and sisters
nationally. The role various of them played in "negotiations" throughout
the Elián case bears testimony to this.

Cuban workers in the United States are likewise more homogeneous with their
class.

End of an era

Even the relatively small size and elevated average age of the crowds that
held vigil in the streets around the González home in Little Havana should
be noted. The virtual absence of the armed counterrevolutionary
organizations that in earlier years would have furnished a cadre and played
a weighty role in events such as those of the last five months is further
confirmation that the Elian Gonzalez case will be recognized as the end of
an era of reactionary hopes to influence U.S. politics.

Imperialist publicists like Thomas Friedman notwithstanding, it is not
"hard-line" Cubans who have "kidnapped U.S. policy on Cuba for all these
years," and now must be taught a lesson by the real Americans for whom he
speaks. The space enjoyed for many years by forces such as the
Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF) derived from the fact that they
served the interests and policies defended by Washington. Even the
typically chauvinist image of Cubans as uncontrollable extremists has been
useful to the U.S. rulers and continues to play into their hands. As the
political advantage of keeping Elián González in the United States
diminished in Washington's eyes, however, the reality of CANF's reputed
power was exposed.

Beginning from the moment decisive action was taken in February 1996 by the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba against the Brothers to the Rescue
abortive overflight provocation, and culminating with the frustrating
failure of the campaign to "keep Elian Gonzalez in the 'free world,'" any
pretense that there is a politically homogeneous Cuban-American
organization, let alone an armed group, weighty enough to substantially
influence Washington's policy towards Cuba has been shattered. The fiction
of a monolithic, non-class-divided Cuban community, kept in line by a
powerful rightist cadre, backed and pandered to by Washington, has lost
credibility. The self-serving notion that Miami is not subject to the same
laws of class struggle as the rest of the United States has been further
weakened.

The issues surrounding the INS raid in Miami are of vital importance to the
workers movement. Millions of working people feel nothing but outrage at
the rulers' trampling on our most basic rights and political space, our
livelihoods, our very life and limb. The regressive burden of the
bourgeoisie's tax policies; the inevitability of banks and government
agencies foreclosing on small farmers squeezed by the ever-increasing
weight of giant monopolies; the brutal indifference to human life
symbolized by the deadly police assault on the Branch Davidian compound in
Waco?if the only voice working people and worse-off layers of the middle
classes hear speaking out against such indignities are those of reaction,
if no angry and determined working-class voice is heard pointing a
class-struggle way forward, then the radical siren song of fascist
demagogues will gain an ever more receptive ear.

Our battle to return Elián González to Cuba is not yet over. It would be
futile to predict how much longer it will take. But with each passing day
it becomes clearer that the U.S. ruling class in its majority has become
convinced that the gains from preventing the boy from going home has been
exhausted. His use value to them has been exhausted. The "caring president"
has moved on to other priorities.

The people of Cuba have won.

The massive mobilization of ordinary Cubans, day after day, month after
month; their determination to prevent the arrogant imperialist power to the
north from stealing a child; the spotlight of publicity around the
world?that is what finally made it impossible for the U.S. government to
sweep the increasingly embarrassing affair (their own creation from the
beginning) under a rug. "One day longer"?the battle cry of workers and
farmers everywhere?is the banner under which the Cuban people marched.

Cuba's unforgivable offense

As many times before over the last 40-odd years, the U.S. rulers are
arguing among themselves over how to continue punishing the working people
of Cuba for the unforgivable affront of creating the first free territory
of the Americas. The propertied families are divided, as always, over how
best to advance their objective of overturning the revolutionary state
power on U.S. imperialism's doorstep. There is no truce, even for a day.
But by drawing a line in the sand, the people of Cuba have shown the U.S.
rulers they have misjudged the moment in history. Not for the first time.

As we share the sweet taste of victory with our cocombatants in Cuba,
however, communists and class-conscious toilers in the United States must
be both clear and intransigent about the class political issues
involved?the character of the U.S. imperialist government and its armed
agencies. Our future?in fact the future of the world?depends on it.

The muddle-headedness?at best?in facing these class questions within what
is broadly thought of as the Cuba solidarity movement is a mortal danger,
including to the Cuban Revolution itself. Every step taken by the U.S.
ruling class to close political space for working people within the United
States?to restrict the exercise of democratic rights temporarily wrested
through bloody struggles?is a blow against the Cuban Revolution as well.

When the victorious October Revolution was obliged by the unfavorable world
relationship of forces in 1918 to sign the rapacious Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk with German imperialism in order to buy time to save the
state power of the workers and peasants?a very special period in the young
Soviet republic?V. I. Lenin led the fight within the Bolshevik leadership
to take that necessary step. Parliamentary deputies in Germany calling
themselves socialists voted to ratify that same treaty in the German
Reichstag, arguing there was no reason not to do so since the Bolsheviks
themselves had signed the onerous terms.

The Bolsheviks' unforgettable reply to them?as recorded by Leon Trotsky,
organizer of the Red Army and Lenin's chief negotiator at
Brest-Litovsk?was: "You swine. We are objectively compelled to negotiate in
order not to be annihilated, but as for you?you are politically free to
vote for or against, and your vote implies whether or not you place
confidence in your own bourgeoisie."

For the working-class movement in the United States today, the same class
principles are at stake.
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