by Andrew Grossman
The federal government convicted 4 activists of “conspiracy to act as agents of a foreign government”, Russia, on a ruling handed down September 12 in a Florida court after a one-week trial which was originally set to last one month.
Convicted were Omali Yeshitela, the 82-year-old Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party, as well as Penny Hess and Jesse Nevel of the affiliated Uhuru Movement, and Augustus Romain Jr, formerly of the APSP.
The prosecutors sought two charges: acting as unregistered agents of a foreign power and conspiracy to act as agents. While the former, which carries a heavier sentence, was dropped in a blow against the reactionaries, the defendants were found guilty of the latter, which carries a sentence of up to 5 years in federal prison. Sentencing dates have yet to be announced and the defense plans to appeal.
The prosecutors said during the trial that the African People’s Socialist Party and its Uhuru movement were acting under Russian state direction while staging protests in 2016 denouncing the US genocide of Black people and spreading a petition to the UN for reparations to Black people from the US government, and that their opposition to US support for the lackey Zelenskyy regime in Ukraine benefited Russia and undermined the US electoral farce.
The basis of the charges, according to the State, is the Uhuru movement’s relationship with a handful of Russians in the “Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia” which the State claims has ties to Russian intelligence services. Part of the flimsy evidence is that Yeshitela traveled to Russia to speak at an international conference, for which he received a travel stipend from Moscow and, according to the Feds, expressed support for the Russian-backed separatists in Eastern Ukraine.
In response to the verdict, Yeshitela said: “The most important thing is that they were unable to convict us of working for anybody except Black people….I am willing to be charged and found guilty of working for Black people”. An Uhuru leader replied to the verdict saying that it is based on the racist idea that Black people cannot think or act for themselves and so must be directed by a foreign power. For its part, the defense argued that the defendants had no knowledge of the AGMR’s links to Russian intelligence and that the charges were an attack on the right to free speech.
The FBI raided Yeshitela’s house, APSP headquarters, and other APSP members’ houses multiple times in the last few years in Florida and Missouri, most recently in 2023 to prepare for this trial. The state has been attacking and attempting to repress the APSP for decades, often around participation of the Party in local Florida elections.
The convictions mirror the accusations brought against revolutionaries in the US for a 100 years, based in anti-communism and national chauvinism, that activists were agents of the Soviet Union and the racist slanders against Black revolutionaries as being stirred up by the spectral “outside agitator”.
Further, the imperialists’ electoral farce is more and more desperate for legitimacy, and blaming discontent and disillusionment on foreign intervention is a tried-and-true tactic to distract from and conceal the prime mover: contradictions internal to society. The Feds claimed the 4 were “planning to sow discord and inflame American political tensions at the behest of Russia”. Russia does not need to sow discord or inflame the political tensions in the USA—the general crisis of imperialism, the economic crisis, reflected in the political, moral, and cultural crises, do that well enough.
The Democrat mafia have recently been ramping up this well-worn chauvinism, predicated in the inter-imperialist contradiction between the US “top dog” and the Russian “skinny dog”. This contradiction was heightened in the monopolists’ political sphere during the 2016 and 2020 elections with wild speculation that “Russians”—Vladimir Putin, etc.—were interfering in the US presidential elections via social media campaigns and media manipulation, and this has continued in a heightened form for the 2024 elections. As the farce develops, so do the conspiracy theories: that Russia is backing Cornel West and Jill Stein’s election campaigns to pull votes from Vice-Genocidaire Kamala Harris, according to the DNC who recently called Stein a “useful idiot for Russia”. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also recently called Stein’s candidacy “predatory” for attempting to participate in the electoral farce—a cynical term coming from the mouth of a genocide-supporter.
photo: Omali Yeshitela speaks at a rally after the convictions in Florida, HandsOffUhuru.org
