Duped Yet Again

Various illegal immigrant groups are calling for a boycott to protest the immigration bills working their way through Congress, to build on the protests of two weekends ago and build movement power.

But how many of these people understand they are dupes of International ANSWER? ANSWER is the front group behind the anti-war protests of the past three years. The first year's protests were large, but just two years later and the protests were miniscule, barely newsworthy. ANSWER, seeking ways to undermine and discredit the Bush administration, realised they needed something new to get attention for themselves and latched onto the illegal immigrant issue.

You can read about ANSWER here. They have as a major founder and activist one Ramsey Clark. You've seen him on television news, invariably described as "former Attorney General." Never mind that was forty years ago, and for only a few years. Never mind that he was hired as AG in order to force his father off the Supreme Court to make way for a Johnson pick. Never mind that Clark resigned because he thought the Johnson administration not liberal enough.

Clark has also been in the news the past three years, if you look closely, as the paid, official lobbyist for Saddam Hussein in Washington, DC. He went to Iraq just before the invastion to stand in solidarity with Hussein before fleeing back to safe soil when the invasion started. Clark is now on the legal team defending Hussein in his trial. You've noticed that Hussein has had hunger strikes, fainting spells, court outbursts requiring his removal, etc., etc. lately? That's Clark's doing, because he learned his tactics from the Sixties radicals and the children since.

As I said, ANSWER is an organising front group. They work in the background to mount protests and then claim credit for the work of others to promote themselves. They are a front for the Workers World Party, a full-on anti-imperialist, anti-West, pro-Stalinist radical Communist group:

Ideologically, the WWP is an interesting fusion of Trotskyism and several other branches of communism. WWP continues to make available the writings of many historic communists including Trotsky, Stalin, and Mao. The inclusion of Stalin and Mao along with Trotsky in a communist party is unusual, and is possibly unique to WWP. Most Trotskyist organizations seek out international affiliations, but WWP has organized solely in the United States....

Within the U.S. communist movement, WWP's politics are extremely unusual and controversial. Politically, the WWP agrees with Trotsky's description of pre-1991 Russia as being a "degenerated workers' state," and their political line extends that description to countries such as Cuba, North Korea and China. But members of the party also use the term socialist to describe those states, and they often support these states more energetically than do most other communist parties. The WWP also supports Iraq and Libya as countries they consider victims of U.S. imperialism — though it should be noted that WWP does not describe either of those two states as being socialist. The party also has a controversial position regarding the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, which it describes as "a battle, not a massacre."

Most controversially of all, however, the WWP has defended Slobodan Miloševi? and Saddam Hussein against attacks from both the right and the left. Notably, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, founder of the International Action Center, is in Iraq as of December 2005 acting as a consult to Hussein's defense team. Clark also spoke sympathetically of Miloševi? at his funeral in March 2006, telling the crowd, "History will prove that Slobodan Miloševi? was right."

This is the group powering the group that's organising the protests against immigration. I doubt 5% of the protesters are even aware of this.

It's not for nothing that they chose May 1, or May Day, as the day of the protests. It's the international worker's day, and was widely celebrated as the day of victory for worker's revolutions in the former communist countries. It's a Monday, the beginning of the news week, and not Friday, Cinqo de Mayo, the popular Mexican holiday at the end of the news cycle.

Go to the Web -- and not cable or network news, which will be scrubbed of such distractions -- to get pictures from the marches. You will see a lot of anti-Bush posters, anti-war posters, in the crowd. You'll also see lots of red and yellow, the flag colors of communist countries. Watch for Casto and Hugo Chavez on posters, as well as Che.

Something else to watch for will be the odd spread. The biggest protests will be in the Southwest and in California. Florida will seem strangely quiet. That's because most Florida immigrants are from Cuba, deep in South America and the Hispanic Caribbean, and are anti-communist and pro-capitalism, not anti-American.

Watch also in New York, where the protests will be smaller than elsewhere due to the influx and dominance of Puerto Ricans (or Nuyoricans, as they call themselves) and Caribbean Hispanics and blacks. Those protests will, I'd guess, be much more anti-Bush political than elsewhere, too. ANSWER's political base is strong there.

It's very sad that this group gets almost no attention in the national press or media coverage, given how important they've been to organising and how explicitly anti-American their agenda is. But now you are armed and prepared to examine what's going on critically.

Don't let the mainstream media fool and brainwash you. Be prepared.

INSTANT UPDATE: You can read more on ANSWER's role in the protests in this story from today's Washington Times, and learn a bit more on their background (from 2003) here.