Workers World Party's convergence with Russian fascists documented

Workers World Party and my former CLE friend Caleb Maupin get a nice mention in an encyclopedic blog piece about Red-Brown political convergence.

Excerpt:

The WWP And Fascists

The RKRP

The reactionary positions of the WWP include the party forging ties with hardline Russian Stalinist parties in the 90s, the most prominent one being the Russian Communist Workers Party (RCWP/RKRP-RPK) [archive] as notes Kevin Coogan. The WWP’s newspaper ran an article by Victor Tyulkin, the RCWP’s leader and Secretary of its Central Committee in September 3, 1992. Tyulkin and Victor Anpilov, another RCWP member as well as member of the executive committee of the Working Russia group, sent birthday wishes to Sam Marcy which were republished on the WWP’s newspaper in 1996. The WWP even contrasted the RCWP more favorably to the KPRF [archive] on its publication.

The RCWP however is a “left fascist” organization, being extremely homophobic, anti-semitic and anti-Black, and being described by the International Solidarity with Workers in Russia as a “pseudo-Communist anti-Semitic organization”[archive], Kevin Coogan suggesting this might be why the WWP did not devote more extensive coverage of the RCWP as it would alienate the WWP’s rank and file members. Victor Anpilov later left the RCWP and his Labor Russia party allied with the National Bolshevik Party of Eduard Limonov [archive] in a voting bloc in 1997 [archive], yet kept on being praised by the WWP’s paper until at least 2002 in an article where Eduard Limonov is also described as one of many anti-capitalist political prisoners [archive].

Borotba

More recently, the WWP has been involved as of at least 2014 with the organization Borotba, a Stalinist organization formed by a former member of the RKRP [archive] and Sergey Kirchuk, from various Ukrainian Stalinist groups. Borotba has been on record for trying to cannibalize direct action by Anarchists and attacking anti-authoritarian leftists by falsely labeling them as members of far-right group Right Sector while having itself worked with far-right groups associated with Right Sector before the Euromaidan protests, after which it aligned itself with Novorossiya.

Like the RKRP, Borotba has been extremely racist, homophobic and associates with far-right groups like Slavic Unity and Rodina. Borotba routinely publishes anti-Semitic imagery and its leadership is close to anti-Semite Israel Shamir while its ranks include Aleksey Bluminov, who had worked with Svoboda and the PSPU. Borotba has itself cooperated with the PSPU and far-right anti-Semitic group Oplot while attacking left-wing members of the Maidan, leading many members of the Ukrainian left (which has condemned the far-right elements within the Maidan protests) to openly condemn it.

Aleksey Albu, a member of Borotba, fled to Crimea in 2015 and set up a “Committee for the Liberation of Odessa” [archive] with Vadim Savenko and Aleksandr Vasilyev of Rodina and and Dmitry Odinov of neo-Nazi organization Slavic Unity, itself a branch of the neo-Nazi group Russian National Unity, and which has cooperated with Dugin’s Eurasian Movement.

Another example of Stalinists working with fascism is when Antiimperialistische Aktion, a German “anti-imp” group, collaborated [archive] with an organization which calls itself the “International Anti-Fascist Committee” to organize “International Anti-Fascist Conferences”. A closer look at the website of the “International Anti-Fascist Committee”‘s website (which features a Saint George’s ribbon, a military award during the Russian empire under the Tsar) shows Soros conspiracy theories [archive] and support for Donald Trump[archive] as well as claims the West wants to balkanize Syria quoting Michel Chossudovsky [archive], which clearly establishes this organization was not only anti-fascist, but explicitly fascist of the red-brown type and weaponizing “anti-fascist” rhetoric in the service of fascism in the same fashion as Dugin does.

The participants [archive] of the International “Anti-Fascist Conference” included:

Anti-Imperialist Action

Borotba

the Communist Youth of Poland

the Swedish Donbass Group

the KPRF

the Leninist Komsomol of the Russian Federation, the youth organization of the KPRF

the Vanguard of Red Youth of Labour Russia

the Communists of Russia

the United Communist Party

the International Anti-Fascist Committee

the Young Communist League of Canada, an organization close to the Communist Party of Canada with which it shares overlapping membership

the Center for Continental Cooperation, an Islamophobic[archive] Eurasianist organization following Dugin’s ideology[archive]. Its slogan is “From Lisbon to Vladivostok”, corresponding to Dugin’s ideology of a Eurasian state. Its president, Yuri Kofner [archive], is a leader of the Eurasian Movement of the Russian Federation [archive]. Kofner is also the president of Young Eurasia [archive] to which belongs Tanai Cholkhanov [archive], an imam who has been fighting on the side of Novorossiya and has been trying to undermine the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People [archive], the highest representative body of Crimea’s indigenous Crimean Tatar people, which opposed to the Russian annexation of Crimea and whose subsequent banning as part of repressive measures against opponents of the annexation is part of larger policies of discrimination Crimean Tatars have been facing since 2014

The Community for Qaddafi and his People, an organization close to the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (which I explored below in this post). Its activists Pyotr Rybakov and Elena Gromova visited Syria in solidarity with Bashar al-Assad in November 2011 [archive] and participated in a ceremony at the Syrian Embassy in Moscow in December 2011 [archive] together with activists from Planet Antiglob (the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia’s newspaper) at the invitation of the Syrian Abmassador. Elena Gromova and Sergey Dondo, the editor-in-chief of Planet Antiglob, gave an interview on Jamhariyya Radio in Dcember 2011 [archive]. In December 2011, Elena Gromova, Pyotr Rybakov, Sergey Dondo and Aleksandr Ionov, then a representative of the Anti-Globalization Movement (Ionov was once a campaigner for The Community for Qaddafi and his People), took part in a rally in support of Bashar al-Assad together with members of Anpilov’s Labor Russia[archive].

Videos of their conference [archive] show that Pavel Gubarev was present at the conference, and Greg Butterfield from the Workers World Party participated in one of their conferences in 2016 [archive].

Antiimperialistische Aktion has also collaborated with Italian ska-punk band Banda Bassotti (which has organized numerous “Anti-fascist Caravans” in support of Novorossiya) and the Trade Union of Lugansk Republic to organize events as well [archive] in 2017 [archive].

Novorossiya

It is not surprising then that the Workers World Party has supported Russia’s annexation of Crimea and openly aligned itself with Novorossiya, published translations of Aleksey Albu[archive] in 2016 and quoted the Committee for the Liberation of Odessa on its website [archive] while repeating Russian state media narrative of a “Kiev putsch junta” opposed to “anti-fascists in the Donbass”, even as Anarchists in Ukraine paint a different picture, fighting against Nazis in Kiev, condemning the leaders of Novorossiya as Russian fascists whose fake calls to fight fascism echo those of Dugin and Limonov and condemning the right-wing elements of Euromaidan, the Kiev government’s alliance with fascists and the fascist Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (a position also expressed by Russian Anarchists, who condemned the war in the Donbass as being fought by fascists on both sides and a way for Putin to divert attention from the economic crisis in Russia). Which means that is is not a surprise either then that SSNP flags and Saint George’s ribbons are appearing at protests organized by groups like the WWP and Code Pink. This is not isolated to American Stalinists, with some Spanish leftists having claimed to have fought side by side with Nazis for Russia in Ukraine.

Multiple Workers World Party articles have quoted Fort Russ (example 1 [archive], example 2 [archive], example 3 [archive], example 4 [archive], example 5 [archive]), a pro-Novorossiya website on whose front page are links to multiple National Bolshevik websites and, listed on the “Fraternal Sites” section, are linked Aleksandr Dugin’s think tank Arktogaia and Open Revolt, the website of National-Bolshevik and Eurasianist group New Resistance.

Chossudovsky

The WWP has been quoting Michel Chossudovsky since the 90s [archive] to defend Milosevic [archive], and acknowledged[archive] being reshared [archive] by the Centre of Research on Globalization, and worked together with WWP to defend Slobodan Milosevic [archive]. Sara Flounders (who is also a member of the International Committee for the Defence of Slobodan Milosevic) was listed by the Centre as one of its writers [archive]. Chossudovsky himself was one of the signatories of the founding charter of the ANSWER coalition when it was initially founded by the WWP. In 2013, Chossudovsky was a speaker [archive] at a conference[archive] in North Korea [archive] which included Ramsey Clark, Brian Becker and former WWP member Kiyul Chung.

Kiyul Chung

Kiyul Chung, who was formerly associated with the WWP, is a visiting professor at the state-owned Tsinghua University in the People’s Republic of China [archive], is Editor in Chief of the 4th Media, a confusionnist media outlet on whose board isMichel Chossudovsky as chairman and WWP organizer Abiyomi Azikiwe, who himself operates a blog named Pan-African News Wire which quotes [archive] and reshares[archive] conspiracist [archive] Global Research [archive] articles [archive] regularly. 4th Media itself regularly shares material by Engdahl [archive] (who is a visiting professor at the Beijing University of Chemical Technology [archive] and Meyssan [archive], as well as conspiracies [archive] in line with LaRouche’s [archive] and Dugin’s [archive] ideologies. Chung was awarded with a honorary degree for his “information service” by North Korea in 2014 as result.

Chung is on the Scientific Committee of Duginist magazine Geopolitica along with Chossudovsky, Engdahl and Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, whose editor is Tiberio Graziani, a member of the High Council of Aleksandr Dugin’s International Eurasian Union who has worked with representatives of the Italian embassy of the People’s Republic of China [archive].

[Note: Engdahl and Aleksandr Dugin are on the Scientific Committee of Eurasianist magazine Eurasia, edited by Claudio Mutti. Graziani has also worked with Eurasia. Mutti is also associated with Stato e Potenza, a Third Positionist group funded by the Economic Club of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Italy-Mongolia Association, the International Academy for Mongolian Studies, the Italy-North Korea Friendship Association, the Belorussian State Economic University. Another group Mutti is involved with is the Centre for Mediterranean and Eurasian Studies, which is partnered to Leonid Ivashov’s Academy of Geopolitical Problems [archive], Dugin’s Journal of Eurasian Affairs and Mutti’s Eurasia [archive], and promotes the New Silk Road initiative [archive] supported by both LaRouche [archive] and the Duginists [archive].]

Chung is also the Editor in Chief of The 21st Century, which appears to be an offshoot 4th Media [archive], and which lists among its “specialists” [archive] numerous regulars of confusionnist media and of Russian and Iranian state media: fascists and reactionaries such as William Engdahl, James Petras, Thierry Meyssan, Mahdi Darius Nazamroaya and Paul Craig Roberts, as well as WWP members and affiliates such as Sara Flounders, Margaret Kimberley of the Black Agenda Report, Abayomi Azikiwe, and Brian Becker.

The presence of WWP members and associates in organizations tied to the network of conspiratorial fascists including Lyndon LaRouche, Aleksandr Dugin and Thierry Meyssan might explain the WWP’s recent stance on the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar [archive], blaming the crisis on US and Saudi attempts to oppose Chinese investment[archive], which echoes Thierry Meyssan’s claims (published a few days before the WWP’s) that the West was [archive] arming jihadists in Myanmar [archive] and Sputnik’s similar claims blaming George Soros for it [archive] (sourcing a member of the same Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Institute of Sciences which publishes the Engdahl-affiliated New Eastern Outlook journal). Similar material [archive] appears[archive] on Katehon too [archive]. Global Research posted similar articles by the New Eastern Outlook journal [archive], the Land Destroyer Report [archive] (a conspiracist [archive] blog [archive] with far-right leanings [archive] affiliated to the New Eastern Outlook and linking to Webster Tarpley’s and William Engdahl’s websites [archive]) and by Mint Press News[archive] (a confusionnist website publishing Holocaust denier Anthony Hall [archive], National Bolshevik Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya [archive] and the fascist New Eastern Outlook[archive], Rothschild conspiracy theories [archive], Soros conspiracy theories [archive], HAARP conspiracy theories[archive], 9/11 Trutherism [archive], anti-Semitic 9/11 conspiracy theories which quote white nationalist Breitbart[archive] among others, while attempting to brand itself as a progressive news outlet, and its list of staff members and contributors is itself a strange red-brown list of fascists and leftists [archive]) around this same time.

Caleb Maupin

Another strange WWP member is Caleb Maupin, who has been involved with Webster Tarpley’s Tax Wall Street Party more than once [archive]. He has been writing for the New Eastern Outlook journal affiliated to Tarpley’s associate William Engdahl since June 2014, and spoke [archive] at the Third International New Horizons conference in Tehran. Among the attendants and speakers of the conference were leftists like CodePink founder Medea Benjamin, and Cambodian genocide denier Gareth Porter as well as fascists (most of whom were invited by Hamed Ghasghavi [archive], a contributor to many far-right websites like Veterans Today, Cercle des Volontaires and Katehon) such as:

Kevin Barrett

Wayne Madsen

Kenneth O’Keefe, a former anti-war activist who became an anti-Semite and associate of David Duke and Gilad Atzmon

Thierry Meyssan

Gilles Munier, the leader of the pro-Saddam Hussein French-Iraqi Friendship Association, who is also close to Dieudonné’s and Soral’s Égalité et Réconciliation

Claudio Mutti

Claudio Moffa, a Holocaust denier and associate of French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson

Anthony James Hall

Mateusz Piskorski, a member of Polish fascist group Niklot, associate of Aleksandr Dugin and vice-director of the German Center for Eurasian Studies [archive]

Manuel Ochsenreiter, a host of Russian state-owned channel RT who was revealed to be the editor of a neo-Nazi magazine and the director of the German Center for Eurasian Studies [archive]

Imran Hosein

Leonid Savin, member of the Duginist International Eurasian Movement, chairman of the Ukrainian Eurasian Youth and editor of Geopolitica.ru, a Duginist journal, who once attempted to infiltrate the leftist anti-globalization  People’s Global Action [archive].

It is with no surprise then that in 2016 Maupin wrote a book called Satan at the Fountainhead: The Israeli Lobby and the Financial Crisis, a book which blames the 2008 financial crisis on the Israeli lobby, which closer to the coded anti-Semitism of the likes of Kevin Barrett and LaRouche than a legitimate criticism of Israeli policies or a Marxist analysis of the crisis.

Maupin left the WWP that very same year, in 2016, and his present website features Lionel and lists the white nationalist American Free Press as part of its network.

Caleb Maupin’s synthesis of Jew-hatred and anti-communism

....As capitalism’s slow-burning international depression in production and trade continues, and world disorder begins to pose the fight for workers power, we will see more of Maupin’s brand of Jew-hating historical falsehood against the international working class movement and its communist vanguard.  This is not an academic question; the ability of the working class to think socially and act politically, to organize itself as a class, includes rejecting this brand of poison. 

Full article here.

Uighur nationality does not exist for Workers World Party leader

Xinjiang region of Western China

A new star has arisen in the anti-terrorism punditry firmament:

The Chinese province of Xinjiang has recently become the site of an episode of violent terrorism. A suicide bombing has killed 39 Chinese people in a market place, and in addition, 29 were stabbed to death at a train station.  The response of the Chinese government has been swift, with 113 people being sent to prison.

As the world watches China’s noble attempt to keep this violence from spreading, a question remains unanswered: Is the United States involved, this time?Currently, the United States is sponsoring terrorists all over the world. The violent insurgents in Syria, who behead, torture, and murder on a daily basis, are receiving US funding and support. These terrorists have bombed schools and hospitals. In addition, they actively recruit children as young as 11 and 12 to join their ranks. Despite these activities that fit any basic definition of “terrorism”, these terrorists, many of them being imported to Syria from other countries, are receiving direct US support.

The US is also supporting terrorists in Venezuela, who seek to remove the elected government led by the United Socialist Party (PSUV). The US is coddling the People’s Mujahadeen, a group violent extremists who seek to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran.

US funding of violent extremists takes place in order to destabilize, weaken, or overturn regimes that are not obedient servants of Washington. The US has sponsored terrorism in China for over fifty years. While this track record is largely unknown or unacknowledged in the US, the Chinese people know it very well....

This is the opening of Workers World Party leader Caleb Maupin's article "Terrorism in China: Is the US involved, this time?" published on the website New Eastern Outlook.

It might seem strange for a Marxist-Leninist defender of Sam Marcy, Kim Jong Un, Raphael Correa, Dilma Rousseff, and Nicholas Maduro to have their articles appear in such a venue.  New Eastern Outlook is a bourgeois website that supports capitalist regimes in countries like Russia and Iran. But NEO can also be seen as a new and slick headquarters for what Workers World Party leaders call the "global class war."  Hence its appeal as an outlet for Maupin.

What is "global class war"?  It is a post-World War 2 ideological rationalization for Popular Front and social democratic middle class left politics in countries around the world.  Its purpose was and is to deflect, disorient, and demobilize struggles for independent class political action by workers and farmers.  Our class was led to countless defeats before and after World War 2 as a consequence of this treacherous politics. 

Support for regimes and organizations that work to shut down political space for independent working class political action is the sine qua non of Popular Front and "global class warfare" politics.

In the fun-house mirror worldview promoted by these forces, it is not just the promotion of particular social democratic leaders as worthy of our trust.  It is the deliberate support of governments in capitalist states like Iran and Russia, and in workers states like China and North Korea, that use cop methods to shut down workers struggles.  They brand protests and militancy by workers as fascist cabals organized by NATO, the International Monetary Fund, the "neocon conspiracy" and the CIA. They then let loose their dogs of war. 

One prop in this process is the punditry of left figures like Maupin, who seek to speak with authority in the name of communism.  Across a variety of new and old media, Maupin brands supporters of Ukraine's national struggle as fascists, and confidently proclaims Bashar Assad's poison gas attacks against Damascus workers districts as a "false flag" provocation perpetrated by US-backed Muslim extremists. 

No smear of workers and farmers is too outrageous when it comes to discrediting our struggles.  

Maupin deliberately obscures the fact that workers and farmers, be they in the imperialist countries or the countries oppressed by imperialism, are the biggest enemies of imperialism. 

The "terrorism crisis" in China

Maupin writes:

It is interesting to note that the terrorist campaign in Xinjiang, that has already resulted in scores of deaths, is reported to be led by Sunni muslim extremists. The US has funded Sunni Muslim extremists in Syria in an ongoing attempt to overthrow the Syrian Arab Republic. In addition, the US funded Sunni Muslim extremists in Libya to overthrow Gaddafi, and dismantle the top oil producer on the African continent. Currently, the US is indirectly funding the Sunni Muslim extremist ISIS organization in Iraq, through the proxy regime in Saudi Arabia.

The US has a long record of funding extremists and terrorists who seek to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party. The US is currently funding extremists of the same variety as in Syria and elsewhere, as those just arrested in China. The question before us now is: What role is the United States playing the current unrest in China?
Are the Anti-Chinese terrorists the same as the terrorists in Syria, Libya, and Iraq, and who are receiving the backing of Washington and London?
The deal for a natural gas pipeline between Russia and China is the latest event, in the gradual changing of the geo-political landscape. The US and European billionaires seek to have the world economy centered around them, and to have all the peoples and natural resources of Africa, Asia, and Latin America as theirs for the taking. The want no viable competitors, and they want scarcity of resources, in order to keep the prices high.

This kind of reductive obscurantism is deliberately dishonest. The abstraction called "terrorism " has been used by bourgeois political commentators to discredit every political action and organization of the working class since the French Revolution, and Maupin knows this all too well. 

Who are the "Muslim extremists" Maupin insinuates are a bought-and-paid-for Fifth column of the CIA in Xinjiang province?  Maupin refuses to name them. He refuses to apply the apparatus of scientific socialism  to explain their motivations.  His inexhaustible store super-historical abstractions and the-enemy-of-my-friend-is-a-terrorist justifications fall into line with the authors of books like Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorism.  

In 2009 U.S. communist Cindy Jaquith did explore the question:

....Uighurs are an oppressed nationality in China and also exist in some Central Asian countries. There are large Uighur concentrations in China’s westernmost province, Xinjiang. They speak a Turkic language, written with Arabic script, and are predominately Muslim. Most Uighurs are farmers living in rural areas.

Following the fall of the Qing dynasty in China in 1911, there were several attempts to form independent Uighur republics. Uighurs fought for independence and in 1933-34 an Islamic Republic of East Turkistan existed. In 1944 Uighurs favoring independence, backed by the Soviet Union, established the Second East Turkistan Republic.
After the 1949 Chinese revolution, the Chinese Communist Party came to power and Beijing declared Xinjiang a Chinese province. It was later classified as an “autonomous region” in 1955. Although the Chinese constitution identifies Uighurs as an official ethnic group whose language and religious rights are protected, discrimination against Uighurs by employers, the government, cops, and the courts has persisted.

Uighur students began organizing in the 1980s as part of the rising struggles among youth in China for democratic rights and against corruption. In the 1990s small groups of Uighurs, including some favoring secession, carried out armed attacks on Chinese government targets.

The Beijing bureaucrats initially labeled Uighurs who oppose their policies “splitists,” although not all favored independence. Today dissidents are more likely to be branded “terrorists,” based on alleged ties between a Uighur organization called the East Turkistan Islamic Movement and al-Qaeda.

In the 1990s Beijing went on a major campaign to develop the resources of, which contains a third of the country’s oil and natural gas and 40 percent of its coal. This was part of the deepening evolution of the Stalinist regime’s course, from bureaucratic state ownership and planning, and forced collectivization, toward promoting privately owned capitalist enterprises and foreign investment....

Today Beijing forbids Uighurs from  practicing their religion, and has outlawed fasting at Ramadan.  In service to such affronts, Uighurs are forbidden even the right to be called Uighurs in Maupin's article.

Beijing's statements blaming Uighur terrorists for attacks this year in Xinjiang Province echo smears from 2009.

Again, Jaquith in 2009:

....The latest round of fighting was sparked by rumors that Uighurs were stabbing Hans with syringes filled with poison or HIV virus. On September 3, 10,000 Hans demonstrated in the city of Urumqi, the provincial capital, saying they were not getting police protection and demanding the firing of the provincial Communist Party chief. Five people were killed.

....Hans are the dominant nationality in China. But they are relative newcomers in Xinjiang Province, a traditional homeland of the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people who practice Islam.

Most Hans have migrated to Xinjiang in the last 50 years for jobs in the oil, natural gas, and coal industries and on state-run farms, where they are favored over Uighurs for employment. A similar migration of Hans to Lhasa, Tibet, has been encouraged by the Stalinist bureaucracy in Beijing with the aim of ensuring its control there.

In Urumqi, Hans now outnumber Uighurs by three to one. As Beijing has developed the western region, increasingly by capitalist methods over the last two decades, the inequality between Hans and Uighurs has become more glaring. Most Uighurs are farmers in the countryside. Their average “disposable income” is about one-third that of residents of Urumqi, who earn about $1,800 a year, according to Reuters.

The government has announced that 25 people are charged with syringe attacks. Police have threatened to impose the death penalty for those convicted, reported the Chinese news agency Xinhua. The report added that those who “deliberately concoct and spread false information” about needle stabbings risk five years in jail.

But many questions remain about what actually happened and to what degree the alleged needle incidents were political in nature. According to Xinhua, one of those arrested was a Uighur drug addict who allegedly fought off arrest with a syringe. Two others are accused of attempting to rob a taxi driver, threatening him with a needle.

“Days after reports of the attacks in the state media, credible evidence seems in short supply,” wrote the September 8 Toronto Star. “The government said more than 500 people claimed to have been attacked, but only 170 show any signs of injury.”
“Some of those who said they had been stabbed actually suffered from mosquito stings,” reported Xinhua.  

....Beijing routinely accuses Uighurs who protest their oppression of having connections to a small Uighur organization called the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, which Beijing says has ties to al-Qaeda.
In June a rumor that Uighur factory workers in Guandong Province had raped a Han woman led to an attack by Han workers. Two Uighurs were killed. The rape story turned out to be false.

When Uighur students organized a march in Urumqi to condemn the factory killings it turned into several days of fighting between Hans and Uighurs, leaving at least 186 dead. More than two hundred people, mostly Uighurs, are awaiting trial on charges stemming from that incident.  

Labor conscripts 
More has surfaced on the programs begun in 2002 that send Uighurs from Xinjiang to factory jobs in Guandong Province and other industrial areas. Beijing presents these programs as a kind of affirmative action, promising Uighurs they will earn much more than they can farming in Xinjiang. The July 15 Washington Post reported that the program is not voluntary, however. In the villages around the city of Kashgar in Xinjiang, “residents said each family was forced to send at least one child to the program—or pay a hefty fine,” wrote reporter Ariana Eunjung Cha.

Cha interviewed Liu Guolin, the Han owner of a textile plant in Hebei Province that has been hiring Uighurs. The 143 women workers sent to his plant were accompanied by a cop from Xinjiang Province, who kept the women from praying in the factory or wearing headscarves. “Without the policeman, I assume they would have run away from the very beginning,” Liu said.

Meanwhile, Beijing has stepped up joint military exercises with Moscow supposedly aimed at “terrorists” in Central Asia.  

US imperialism is trying to curb China's rising power.  At the same time, both the U.S. and China continue their efforts to curb the growing militancy of workers and oppressed nationalities within their borders.

*   *   *

Uighurs once held at Guantanamo as terrorists

Maupin's course as an expert anti-terrorist is leading him to a convergence with bourgeois politics.  Rationalizing China's oppression of the Uighurs by labelling Uighurs as Muslim terrorists is on a parallel track with Washington labelling its working class opponents terrorists as well.  These actions all flow from use of national oppression to divide and disorient workers and farmers.

There is a concrete convergence today between Maupin, New Eastern Order, and Washington in smearing Uighurs as terrorists and Muslim extremists.  Until 2013 Washington had Uighur "terrorists" imprisoned without charge in Guantanamo.  They have now been dispatched by the U.S. to Albania.  I'm sure Beijing appreciates this, and if Maupin is not careful, he will soon approve of it, too.

Anti-terrorists make strange bedfellows.

Did The Militant and the U.S. SWP publish anti­-OWS screeds?

I compiled this in April 2012.






  Did The Militant and the U.S. SWP publish anti­OWS screeds?  A look at the documentary record.   Prepared b...