US president Donald Trump’s new counter-terrorism strategy has been published. Authored by a far-right Brit, it puts socialists, antifascists and trans people firmly in the crosshairs of the increasingly erratic and aggressive US security state. Fascism, in case anyone is in any doubt, is here.
The strategy was written by Sebastian Gorka. Gorka is a far-right British-Hungarian former army reservist and longtime ally of the US president.
Here is the key passage:
In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national CT activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.
The far-right doesn’t feature in the new strategy for the blindingly obvious reason that they wrote it. Simply put, they are in power in the US. The strategy falsely claims that ‘antifa’ is an actual organisation, rather than just a conveniently vague umbrella term for anyone Trump and pals decide they don’t like.
The US government pledges to:
use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.
We will do the same with the state sponsors of such groups and those governments undertaking lethal plots on U.S. soil or against Americans anywhere.
Trump wages war on human solidarity
Additionally, the document names five major threat groups. Cartels, China, the Houthis and so on. But it (nonsensically) singles out and conflates two of the groups it hates the most — Muslims and left-wingers — into a single othered blob:
“a new and deepening alliance between the far-left and Islamists, i.e., the “Red-Green” Alliance.
You can take this to mean several things but it certainly refers to the relationship between anti-imperialist movements in the West and the innocent Muslims in places like Gaza and Iran being slaughtered by Israel and the US.
In short, Trump means to make human solidarity a terror offence…
Only one other country’s security is given as high a priority as the US itself (author’s bold):
America will always have core interests in ensuring that Gulf energy supplies do not fall into the hands of an outright enemy, that the Strait of Hormuz remains open, that the Red Sea remains navigable, that the region not be an incubator or exporter of terror against American interests or the American homeland, and that Israel remain secure.
Journalist Ken Klippenstein has followed the rise of US fascism alongside a mutated US security state, powered by War on Terror.
He said on 6 May:
The White House declared war on the American people today, labeling its political opponents as terrorists, including “Left-wing extremists.” The new label also claims that there are “deepening alliances” between “the far-left and Islamists” — or pro-Palestinian protesters.
Unsurprisingly, he traces the term ‘red-green alliance’ back to a network of Israeli thinktanks who have worked to popularise it:
The “Red-Green alliance” term has been pushed by Israeli think tanks like the Reut Group — which defines the term as “the nexus between radical progressive groups to Islamist organizations” — and picked up by right-wing U.S. news outlets.
Here’s a very important line:
The framing is designed to recast pro-Palestinian activism as a front for jihadism.
This is the new state of play in the US. In the UK, Reform UK are polling well ahead of the May council elections. And Reform’s links to US fascism are clearer by the day. The British electoral far-right will certainly look to recreate similar laws and norms if it gets near state power. The next UK general election is in 2029 — and the clock is ticking.
Featured image via the Canary
By Joe Glenton
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