“Tribune Of the People” Slides Ever Further Into Delusion
So, in response to a piece that I’ve written for People’s Voice News, where I’ve critiqued their opportunism, racism, and transphobia, they responded with an objectively awful tirade accusing me, personally, of being a provocateur and of “performing police work” by breaking through their phony veil of “autonomous organizations” and addressing them as a milieu. They begin by claiming that the article was libelous — libel is something that is not true, defined as “a published false statement that is damaging to a person’s reputation; a written defamation.” For one, nothing that I wrote was untrue, if there is any falsehood I challenge them to correct me. For two, complaining about being libeled and then proceeding to call someone to whom you’re responding a “provocateur” is pretty disconnected and ludicrous. Of course, these are people who believe that there is still an active people’s war raging in Peru in the year 2021, so I suppose we can be a bit charitable.
Secondly, Tribune enjoys playing on their readers’ intelligence. I, for one, fancy myself a decently intelligent person, and most other people do as well. Tribune reports on the work of organizations that they support and organizations which support Tribune send reports to this online blog to be republished for internal consumption, or read at study groups. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but there is something wrong with putting up a phony veneer of disconnectedness when everybody knows that your organizations support each other. Tribune does not publish materials from ILPS, from FTP chapters, or from Maoist Communist Group, because they do not support these organizations. They publish materials from UNDM, the various European Gonzaloite sects, and the Brazilian pMs because they support these projects. You’re not clandestine, you’re not in the middle of a people’s war, you’re a few people that have decided to go to a few protests, wheatpaste some flyers about the peasant struggle in Brazil, and try to organize tenants. Furthermore, the police already know who you are, they have red squads whose job is to keep track of Communists. The NSA is a thing. If you want to be clandestine, get off the internet. Tribune wants to use this semi-clandestine nonsense and a faux concern for security culture like every other cult does — to avoid accountability for internal bullshit and avoid criticism that they can’t just blow off. Huey Newton exposes them in On the Correct Handling of a Revolution:
“Many would-be revolutionaries work under the fallacious notion that the vanguard party should be a secret organization which the power structure knows nothing about, and that the masses know nothing about except for occasional letters that come to their homes by night. Underground parties cannot distribute leaflets announcing an underground meeting. Such contradictions and inconsistencies are not recognized by these so-called revolutionaries. They are, in fact, afraid of the very danger that they are asking the people to confront. These so-called revolutionaries want the people to say what they themselves are afraid to say, to do what they themselves are afraid to do. That kind of revolutionary is a coward and a hypocrite. A true revolutionary realizes that if he is sincere death is imminent. The things he is saying and doing are extremely dangerous. Without this realization it is pointless to proceed as a revolutionary.
If these impostors would investigate the history of revolution they would see that the vanguard group always starts out aboveground and is driven underground by the aggressor. The Cuban Revolution is an example: When Fidel Castro started to resist the butcher Batista and the American running dogs, he began by speaking publicly on the University of Havana campus. He was later driven to the hills. His impact upon the dispossessed people of Cuba was tremendous and his teachings were received with much respect. When he went into hiding, the Cuban people searched him out, going to the hills to find him and his band of twelve.”
Tribune doesn’t want to be secret, if they wanted the activities of their “support groups” to be secret, they wouldn’t be having people photograph their graffiti and take a picture every time they put up a flyer. Tribune wants to use clandestinity as a weapon to avoid criticism for objectively fucked up shit, again, just like any other cult. Psychologist Steve Eichel lists characteristics of such organizations:
“Be wary of any leader who proclaims him or herself as having special powers or special insight. And, of course, divinity.” (Gonzalo as immortal scientist, leader of the world revolution, etc. etc.)
“The group is closed, so in other words, although there may be outside followers, there’s usually an inner circle that follows the leader without question, and that maintains a tremendous amount of secrecy.”
“The group uses deceptive means, typically, to recruit new members, and then once recruited will subject its members to an organized program of thought reform, or what most people refer to as brainwashing.” (front groups)
“Typically cults also exploit their members….mostly financially. Within the group, they’ll exploit members financially, psychologically, emotionally and, all too often, sexually.”
“A very important aspect of cult is the idea that if you leave the cult, horrible things will happen to you. This is important, and it’s important to realize. That people outside of a cult are potential members, so they’re not looked upon as negatively as people inside the cult who then leave the cult.” (see how the Gonzaloites act towards non-Gonzaloite Maoists and revolutionaries in general who criticize their outlook)
Tribune goes further, claiming that PVN “published a rant which criminalizes activists and left wing press”. Firstly, again, this was written in the same article which seeks to label me a provocateur, secondly, the article never accused anybody of any crimes as an organization. Once again, Tribune seeks to use the “Maoist” equivalent of “cancel culture” (which they posture as despising — in line with their phony hatred of whatever they think postmodernism is) to score rhetorical points, yet it doesn’t measure up to real definitions of real words. For whatever reason they seek to bring up a fiction piece that I wrote (we need more Leftist fiction) in which I inserted a character resembling myself (most authors of fiction do this), and mention my YouTube channel and Facebook page. In typical Gonzaloite fashion they focus on the individual, and in racist fashion they seek to portray me as being narcissistic and self-centered. Black organizers and revolutionaries who criticize and expose dangerous trends in the so-called Left are often subjected to this type of abuse. This behavior can also count as attempted doxxing of a pretty well known Black Communist (me), not that I particularly care, since Che said that the revolutionary is already a doomed man. They once again accuse me of “repeating the lies of the police” and “linking independent groups together”. Your groups are already linked together, once again, Tribune only republishes report backs from groups that it supports. This is not police work, this is common sense. As for my social media behavior being “disturbing”, I’ve had several organizers and activists credit my YouTube channel as being one of the factors which radicalized them, and I’ve also received credit for criticizing the Gonzaloite delusion as well and helping steer a more correct course for the Maoist movement in the United States. The Tribune milieu is known in progressive circles as the people that threw red paint on some social democrat and who attacked an old man while “struggling against revisionism”.
They proceed to compare my article to the position taken by the head of the Austin Police Association. This individual said: “Please watch this video. This is the guy that lost his life last night. He was looking for confrontation and he found it. The Feux [sic] Mike Ramos Brigade needs to be stopped. The only people out of control during this incident was the Feux [sic] Brigade.”
I said: “The main ‘work’ done by the milieu is: self-promotion, forming generated organisms (usually around protest movements, which conduct a couple bombastic actions which get a few people arrested and then collapse), and conducting adventurist stunts which do nothing to advance the movement.” Once again, we see wilful misinterpretation — nothing that I said can be compared to what the APA head said because he is a pig and I am not. This is a fairly blatant snitchjacketing attempt very similar to tricks played by Tom Watts as exposed by the RIBPP.
Tom employs the sort of dirty tricks that V.I. Lenin criticized the renegade Karl Kautsky for using in his debates; namely, of inventing patently foolish positions and claiming them to be ones that his opponent took, then refuting them as if responding to something the opponent actually said.
Tribune closes by taking a cherrypicked Facebook post from my Black Like Mao page to claim that I am an agent provocateur. For one, this post never said anything about Tribune or “Gonzaloites”, even though they do have a habit of acting as if they are somehow more militant than everybody else at home and abroad, and have even had the colonial audacity to attempt to lecture a Party that is actually waging a People’s War. Hit dogs holler, I suppose. Secondly, it is obvious from my post that I was critiquing those who posture as militants and denounce others for perceived lack of militancy while sticking to exclusively legal activity themselves. Why, because it’s posturing and cowardice. This is not provocateurism, a provocateur is one who is paid by law enforcement to enter a subversive organization, latch on to impressionable people, and attempt to get them to commit crimes in order to assist the police in making cases. Mocking a group of wolf-ticket vendors and armchair generals who, as Assata said of the 1960s version of Gonzaloites, “couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag”, is not provocateurism. The most famous provocateur was Malinovsky, who wormed his way onto the Bolshevik Central Committee and was a paid agent of the Okhrana, or the secret police under the Tsar. Ironically, this is similar behavior to that of PSL when members of the CRCPUSA milieu broke up one of their little get-togethers in Austin. PSL proceeded to lambast the RGs as pseudo-COINTELPRO operatives. This is a familiar tactic across revisionist/Dengite Twitter and Facebook. Revisionists are known for hollering COINTELPRO whenever they are called on their bullshit and abuse, and it seems that the Gonzaloites have taken a page from their enemies, which is quite amusing.
The Filipinos call these people anarchists and infantile pseudo-Maoists for a reason. If you respond like this to a relatively mild critique of you literally banning the words “cisgender”, “nonbinary”, “white privilege” and “misogynoir”, you probably are not in possession of the Communist philosopher’s stone. You’re just a moron who learned a few pretty words.
