Vol. 81/No. 44 November 27, 2017
US gov’t orders Russia Today to file as ‘foreign agent’
Faced with the possibility of up to five years in jail, a fine of $10,000 and confiscation of the news channel’s assets, “we are forced to choose registration,” said RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan.
Under the 1938 Foreign Agent Registration Act, RT will have to post a disclaimer on its material and periodically turn over to the government its financial records and to disclose the names of all its employees.
The Brookings Institution, a supposedly nonpartisan “think tank,” backed the thought-control move. “RT is not a ‘news service’ in any meaningful sense of the term,” it wrote. “RT has no regard whatsoever for basic journalistic values like objectivity or the pursuit of truth.”
But if disregard for pursuit of truth were the criteria for tossing aside the constitutional rights to freedom of the press, what bourgeois news media in the U.S. would still be in business?
The Foreign Agent Registration law was passed on the eve of the second imperialist world war, along with the Smith Act and other anti-labor, anti-political-rights laws, adopted by the propertied rulers as they prepared to attack the unions and groups like the Socialist Workers Party as an integral part of their war efforts.
Starting in 1940, the FBI began investigating members of the SWP under the Foreign Agent law, but never used it to concoct charges. Instead 18 members of the party and leaders of the Teamsters union were convicted and jailed on frame-up charges of “conspiracy to overthrow the government” for their activities leading the union in Minnesota and advocating a revolutionary perspective for workers to fight to take political power.
The rulers continued to use the Alien Registration Acts, including against the Communist Party, the growing movement against Jim Crow segregation and against supporters of the Cuban Revolution. In 1951 well-known Black historian W.E.B. DuBois was charged but acquitted on charges of failing to register as a foreign agent. He was accused because of his collaboration with the pro-Moscow Communist Party.
Cuban revolutionary Arnaldo Barrón, a founding member in New York of the July 26 Movement, was indicted and convicted in 1958 on charges of acting “as an agent of Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement of Cuba without having filed the registration statement required.” The law is written to allow accusations of acting as an “agent” to be based on ties to any person or group based outside the United States, not just foreign governments.
And failure to register as an “agent” of revolutionary Cuba was among the trumped-up charges Washington filed against Cuban revolutionaries known as the Cuban Five, along with false accusations of “conspiracy to commit espionage.” The Five served between 13 and 16 years in U.S. jails, for defending Cuba from violent attacks by Florida-based counterrevolutionary organizations.
The Militant has no brief for the political line of RT or Vladimir Putin’s rule in Moscow. But we join wholeheartedly in protesting the use of this witch hunt law against them and the precedent Washington hopes to set to use against the working class and revolutionary parties as the class struggle heats up in years to come.
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