Sunday, July 14, 2019
Saturday, July 13, 2019
Top Assange Defense Account Deleted By Twitter
by Caitlin Johnstone
July 12, 2019
One of the biggest Twitter
accounts dedicated to circulating information and advocacy for WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange, @Unity4J, has been completely removed from the site.
The operators of the account report that they have been given no reason for its
removal by Twitter staff, and have received no response to their appeals.
Any Assange supporter active
on Twitter will be familiar with the Unity4J account, which originated to help
boost the wildly successful Unity4J online
vigils in which well-known Assange defenders would appear to speak out
against his persecution. As of this writing, the account has been gone for
a day and a half.
“About 8:45am CST on Thursday
July 11, one of our Unity4J Twitter team members went to retweet on the account
and noticed that the account was no longer accessible,” reports pro-Assange
activist Christy Dopf, one of the operators of the account. “When each of us
also attempted to access the account we all received the same message ‘Account
Suspended’. Twitter did not send us a reason or violation for the suspension.
So an appeal was submitted. We did receive correspondence that Twitter got our
request and the case is currently open. Unfortunately we do not have a timeline
on how long this could take.”
Speaking for myself as a vocal
Assange supporter on Twitter, I can say that I’ve been following the @Unity4J
account closely since its earliest days and I’ve never once seen it post
anything other than highly professional-looking advocacy for Julian Assange.
I’ve certainly never seen it post anything that could be construed as abusive,
misleading, or otherwise in violation of any of Twitter’s posted rules.
The main Twitter account
defending Julian Assange, and therefore press freedom & freedom of speech,
has been suspended.@Unity4J -
suspended for defending a hero.#Unity4J
This account’s deletion is
just the latest in a long string of apparently biased actions against WikiLeaks
and Assange by the immensely influential social media platform. That bias was
made abundantly clear with Twitter’s ridiculous refusal
to verify Assange while he was posting from his own account despite
his undeniably being a significant public figure, and despite the fact that
Twitter was well
aware that the account was authentic. The platform has been receiving consistent
complaints among Assange supporters of using shadow bans to marginalize
their voices, as well as unfair posting
locks and restrictions.
“It seems that Assange
supporters have been targeted for suspension over the last few days and weeks,
including the suspension of individuals (Yon Solitary, Monique Jolie) as well
as accounts like Unity4J,” Unity4J co-founder Elizabeth Lea Vos told me today.
“All of these suspensions are unacceptable, but I find the Unity4J suspension
especially egregious because it was an amplifier of events across the board,
not only actions run by Unity4J. It never broke the twitter rules and it
was an activist account supporting a journalist who’s been silenced or
‘disappeared,’ so this suspension is an extension of that suppression. Assange
asked us to become his voice, and platforms like Twitter appear to be actively
working against the possibility of that effort.”
Pro-Assange activists have
been speaking out on Twitter against @Unity4J’s removal.
“The main Twitter account
defending Julian Assange, and therefore press freedom and freedom of speech,
has been suspended,” tweeted comedian
and Redacted Tonight host Lee Camp. “@Unity4J – suspended for
defending a hero.”
“HELP!! Twitter suspended
@Unity4J The global #FreeAssange supporters account!” tweetedAssange’s
mother Christine Assange. “Its a central point for updates, interviews and
actions re my son politically persecuted journalist JULIAN ASSANGE! Please
demand @TwitterSupport and @Jack re-instate it. Many thanks #Unity4J”
“I have no doubt that
@Unity4J’s twitter account was suspended because it was a hub of useful
information on solidarity events and actions in support of Assange, WikiLeaks,
Chelsea Manning and more. Horrendous censorship to suspend the account,
@TwitterSupport,” tweeted Elizabeth
Lea Vos.
“If @Unity4J is not restored,
it is proof that Twitter would have sided against the Free Mandela movement,
and every other mass liberation movement of a ‘terrorist’ turned Nobel
nominee,” tweetedUnity4J
co-founder Suzie Dawson.
HELP!! @Twitter suspended @Unity4J
The global #FreeAssange supporters account!
Its a central point for updates, interviews & actions re my son politically persecuted journalist JULIAN ASSANGE!
Please demand @TwitterSupport & @Jack re-instate it.
Many thanks #Unity4J
The global #FreeAssange supporters account!
Its a central point for updates, interviews & actions re my son politically persecuted journalist JULIAN ASSANGE!
Please demand @TwitterSupport & @Jack re-instate it.
Many thanks #Unity4J
Many other Assange supporters
have been flagging
the attention of the Twitter Support account and Twitter CEO Jack
Dorsey objecting to the unjust silencing of a perfectly legitimate activist
account, to no avail thus far.
The censorship of political
speech on online media platforms is a large and growing problem. Twitter has
been better about this than the far more sycophantic Facebook and Google, but
the discrimination against anti-establishment political speech is undeniable at
this point. I myself was removed
from the platform last year just for saying the world would be better
off without warmongering US Senator John McCain in it, and was only restored
after protests from high-profile Twitter users.
In a corporatist system of
government, in which there is no meaningful separation of corporate power and
state power, corporate censorship is state censorship. With giant Silicon
Valley corporations aligning
themselves with shady state-funded propagandistic think tanks like the
Atlantic Council, being admonished on
the Senate floor that they must help quash political rebellion, and
being targeted
for narrative control influence by the US military, there’s
vanishingly little difference between what’s happening more and more to political
speech with these tech giants and what happens in overtly totalitarian
governments. The only difference is the stories people choose to tell
themselves about it.
The time to speak up about
this silencing is now. Your voice is next.
The Most Important Black Radical You’ve Never Heard Of
BY
Hubert Harrison was one of the
first black socialists in the United States, a fierce champion of racial
equality, and a pioneering analyst of how capitalists use racism to divide the
working class. He deserves to be remembered.
Hubert Henry Harrison is the
most important black radical you’ve never heard of. While other leading figures
in the black
freedom movement, from W.
E. B. Du Bois to Ella
Baker to Malcolm
X, have been honored with everything from street names to postage stamps,
Harrison remains in the shadows, largely unknown except to specialists in black
history. In his day, however, Harrison was a figure who stood alongside giants
like Marcus
Garvey, Ida
B. Wells, and A.
Philip Randolph.
Harrison was also one of
the earliest
black socialists in the United States. In his time in the Socialist
Party, Harrison developed an analysis of how capitalism produces racial
inequality and pressed the labor movement to directly confront that inequality.
A supporter of the party’s radical left wing, Harrison was pushed out during
factional struggles before World War I. He went on to form his own newspaper
and lead the black radical upsurge in Harlem that followed the war.
Throughout his brief life,
Harrison insisted on linking the fight against racial oppression with the fight
against capitalism. His life’s work is a vital resource for radicals today
attempting to join those two struggles.
Linking Anti-Racism to
Socialism
Harrison was born in Saint
Croix, a small Caribbean island, in 1883. By the age of seven, he was working
as a domestic servant. When his mother died in 1898, Harrison immigrated to New
York, finishing high school there and taking a job in the post office. He
quickly established himself as an intellectual leader, organizing political
discussion groups among his coworkers and throwing himself into New York’s
vibrant scene of street lectures and debates.
A fierce advocate for racial
equality, Harrison soon ran afoul of the most important black political figure
of his generation, the accommodationist Booker T. Washington.
Harrison had written a letter to the New York Sunin response to
Washington’s recent contention that “the Southern States of the Union offer the
Negro a better chance than almost any other country in the world.” In his
reply, Harrison excoriated Washington for his silence about the outrages of
American racism and accused him of holding his position as race leader “by
grace of the white people who elect colored people’s leaders for them.”
Washington never deigned to
respond to Harrison in print, but instead replied with action. Using his
position as a distributor of patronage jobs to black Americans as part of the
Republican Party machine, Washington had Harrison fired from the post office.
Yet if Washington’s intent was
to silence Harrison, his plan failed miserably. Less than a month after losing
his position, Harrison found work again, this time as a lecturer and organizer
for the Socialist Party.
The Socialist Party was
a formidable
organization, particularly in New York, when Harrison joined it in 1911.
Across the country, socialists were winning election to city councils and state
assemblies; in Wisconsin, socialist leader Victor Berger even secured a seat in
Congress. The party was less successful organizing black workers, despite
considerable debate since its founding over the “race question.”
Harrison’s task was to change
that. Brought on as an organizer in the middle of the 1911 municipal campaign,
the young intellectual’s remit was to help the party build support among black
voters. He proved extremely effective, pioneering the use of socialist campaign
materials directed at black Americans. When the results came in, the party’s
vote total had jumped by six thousand since the last contest, driven in part by
an increase in support among black voters. The party, clearly impressed with
Harrison’s acumen, hired him as a full-time speaker and organizer “for the
purpose of establishing a nucleus of an organization among the colored people.”
Harrison got to work
immediately, helping set up a “Colored Socialist Club” in the city and writing
a string of articles on “The Negro and Socialism” in the New York Call.
The five-part series laid out an analysis of racial oppression in the United
States more sophisticated than anything yet produced by American socialists.
Harrison’s was a materialist understanding of racism, holding that it resulted
neither from “natural” race prejudice, nor from the bad ideas of whites, but
from “the fallacy of economic fear,” by which “economic competition create[s]
race prejudice.” It was “in the interests of the capitalists of America,” he
wrote, “to preserve the inferior economic status of the colored race, because
they can always use it as a club for the other workers.”
And it was in the interest of
the Socialist Party (SP) to divest them of that club. The party, Harrison argued,
had to take up the cause of “all sections of down-trodden humanity,” and reject
the suicidal policy of excluding black workers (as many unions in the American
Federation of Labor did at the time). For Harrison, socialists and black
Americans needed each other:
If the overturning of the
present system should elevate a new class into power; a class to which the
Negro belongs; a class which has nothing to gain by the degradation of any
portion of itself; that class will remove the economic reason for the degradation
of the Negro. That is the promise of Socialism, the all-inclusive working-class
movement. In the final triumph of that movement lies the only hope of salvation
from this second slavery; of black men and of white.
Unfortunately, just as
Harrison was publicizing his pioneering analysis of racism, larger events in
the party were working against him. Factionalism between the left and right
wings was coming to a head, largely over attitudes toward the revolutionary
unionists of the Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW).
The IWW embraced
class-struggle unionism and scorned both cooperation with employers and the
“pure-and-simple” unionism of the AFL. Crucially for Harrison, the IWW also
actively organized black workers. The right wing of the party, meanwhile,
prioritized its alliance with AFL unions and viewed the IWW as wild-eyed
revolutionaries. They reserved special contempt for IWW leader Big Bill
Haywood, a member of the party’s executive committee. In 1912, the right wing
successfully booted Haywood from the SP, leading many left wingers in the party
to leave with him.
Harrison’s strong support for
the party’s left put him in a precarious position in New York, where one of
Haywood’s chief enemies, Morris Hillquit, helmed the SP. The party leadership
in the city began restricting Harrison’s work, forbidding even his own branch
from scheduling him as a speaker. Harrison, never one to back down from a
fight, sent off a short note to the city executive committee, telling it to “go
chase itself ,” and adding, “By the way, if my color has anything to do with it
this time I should thank you to let me know.”
The local found Harrison in
contempt of the executive committee and suspended his membership for three
months. By the time his punishment was up, Harrison had moved on from the
Socialist Party.
A New Militancy
After leaving the Socialist
Party, Harrison became an independent radical, making his own way through New
York City’s vibrant left. He gave lectures on subjects from atheism to birth
control, developing into one of the city’s most respected street speakers.
When World War I broke out,
Harrison saw in it a new opportunity for black advance. While he opposed the
war, he echoed analysts like W.
E. B. Du Bois and Vladimir
Lenin, who viewed the conflict as fundamentally about which European powers
would dominate the colonial world. He hoped by its end that “washed clean by
its baptism of blood, the white race will be less able to thrust the strong
hand of its sovereign will down the throats of other races.” In the meantime,
as the imperialists fought amongst themselves, the colonized must rise up. The
1916 Easter
Rebellion exemplified the kind of action Harrison hoped to see spread
throughout the colonial world. “The Negro people of America would never amount
to anything much politically until they should see fit to imitate the Irish of
Britain,” he wrote.
Harrison took it upon himself
to begin that imitation. On Christmas Eve 1916, he delivered a talk entitled
“When the Negro Awakes: A Lecture of ‘The Manhood Movement’ Among the Negro
People of America” that both analyzed and catalyzed a new militancy among black
Americans. In the wake of the talk’s success, Harrison founded the Liberty
League, an organization dedicated to black struggle against white supremacy and
the first group identified with the nascent “New Negro Movement.” The meeting
collected funds to establish a newspaper, the Voice, to be edited by
Harrison. The new paper focused in particular on armed self-defense against
lynching and anti-black riots, which had both spread as the war economy drew
African-American workers out of the rural South.
The Voice quickly
took off, frequently boasting circulation numbers of ten thousand per
issue. It also drew the attention of Harrison’s political competitors.
Fred Moore, one of Booker T. Washington’s lieutenants, dismissed the Voice,
claiming that “the representative Negro does not approve of radical socialistic
outbursts, such as calling upon the Negroes to defend themselves against the
whites.” Representative or not, black Americans were buying and reading
the Voice.
As with the Socialist Party,
however, more conservative elements worked to undermine Harrison’s political
activity. Harrison’s competitors pressured his printers, interfering with the
paper’s ability to come out in a timely fashion. Harrison also refused, on
grounds of racial pride, to take advertising money from the large industry of
hair straighteners and skin whiteners that provided crucial financing for other
black-edited papers. His personal behavior didn’t help either — always
disinterested in financial questions, Harrison handled money poorly. By
November 1917, the Voice had ceased publication, a mere five months
after it began.
Harrison also soon found
himself with formidable competition for leadership of Harlem’s politically
restive black citizens. Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican-born printer, had come to the
United States in 1916 and begun building his black nationalist organization,
the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Recruiting many of Harrison’s
early supporters, the UNIA grew into a massive organization, rapidly building a
membership in the tens of thousands. By 1920, even Harrison himself would take
a job editing Garvey’s paper, The Negro World.
A Legacy of Radicalism
Harrison died of an
appendicitis operation in 1927 at the age of forty-four. His death was not
widely noticed, despite his prominence just a decade earlier. In the years
after 1920, he had continued to contribute to New York’s radical political
culture, but never with the influence he held as either a Socialist Party
member or a leader of the New Negro Movement.
Almost a century later,
contemporaries of Harrison’s, like Garvey and A. Philip Randolph, remain better
known than the black radical, even though Harrison was much more established in
Harlem’s leftist politics much earlier than either. Harrison’s obscurity —
heroically combated in recent years by the scholar Jeffrey Perry — is
partially a function of his lack of success in institution-building. While
Randolph’s paper, the Messenger, published for a decade, and Garvey’s UNIA
placed its stamp on a generation of black politics, Harrison’s efforts were
more short-lived. As a result, his considerable influence and originality has
not received its due.
Yet his contribution remains a
vital one. Particularly in the Socialist Party, Harrison articulated a clear
vision of the role of racism in dividing the workers’ movement and the
necessity for socialists to attack racial oppression wherever it was found. And
while Harrison grew disillusioned with the SP, particularly its conservatism
around questions of race and labor, he never abandoned his belief that only
socialism would bring liberation to black Americans.
Today, Harrison’s work remains
unfinished. To realize the ideals of equality and democracy that guided him
still requires, in his words, “a revolution . . . startling
to even think of.”
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