Eight people — Gerri Gaines, Yaasmyn Fula, Asha Sundiata, Eve Rosahn, Bernardine Dohrn, Alan Berkman, Shaheem Jabaar, and John Crenshaw — are currently imprisoned for refusing to collaborate with a RICO (Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) grand jury in New York City.

We believe that the cases of those imprisoned deserve both more attention and more support than they have thus far received. In the hope of encouraging that support, we would like to examine why the government has chosen the particular people who have been subpoenaed and subsequently imprisoned and why it has chosen to characterize its investigation as one into a conspiracy.

The second question has an easier answer than the first. The "conspiracy" angle gives the government both legal and political advantages. In the first case, if the government does proceed with indictments and trials, the conspiracy charge (especially as it is interpreted in the RICO statute) is a somewhat easier one to fabricate a case around. But the political advantages are substantial as well. The charge of conspiracy conjures up images of shadowy figures hatching terrorist intrigues — images that fit in rather well with the notion of a world-wide terror network.

One of the primary reasons for the government's attack is to justify its repressive policies — whether to criminalize CIA revelations, to restrict the Freedom of Information Act, to break down doors and terrorize people in the Black community, or to secure convictions in the cases of those already indicted. But, given the still considerable support for civil liberties on the one hand and the remarkable resilience of white-supremacist hegemony on the other, the targets of the grand jury have to be chosen quite carefully.

The eight people in jail have either been activists in the Black liberation movements or white people who are supporters of those movements. What they have in common is not membership in an organization or even necessarily agreement on all political questions, but instead a conviction that the struggles by Black people are central for the future of the society we live in and a refusal to cooperate with a government that has shown time and again the lengths to which it was prepared to go to defeat those struggles.

We need to remember that repression, like so many other aspects of state policy, is applied unequally and selectively. Only some people are subject to state terror and/or political imprisonment. The left, as a whole, is undoubtedly infiltrated, informed on, and provoked. But it is not treated in the same way as members of the Black Panther Party or the Republic of New Afrika were or as the members of Black August are being treated today. For that matter, white activists have seldom been subject to the kind of repressive tactics that have been used against the broad movements of Black and other people of color. This differential repression is not based on the existence of an immediate, serious threat to the state's overall power — but rather on a perception by the state of the potential threat embodied in the movements of oppressed peoples.

The ability of the struggles waged by peoples of color within and without the borders of the United States to challenge people's loyalty to the system of social, economic and political power has, most dramatically in the cases of Viet Nam and of the Black movement throughout the '50s and '60s, contributed to a definite weakening of the imperial center. The state has been determined to eliminate that set of possibilities and used COINTELPRO internally and CIA operations externally to attack those movements. The direct attacks, whether they employed bullets or courts, represented only one part of the government's strategy. A wellorchestrated campaign has been conducted to portray the partisans of national liberation as terrorists and their politics as illegitimate.

With COINTELPRO exposed and the Black movement weakened (although in some ways resurgent), the government has developed a strategy of preventive detention for some political activists. Grand jury subpoenas issued to people whom the government knows will not collaborate is a U.S. version of political internment. The irony is that those who are subpoenaed, as well as those who have been indicted on federal charges, represent a politics that has, at the moment, little of an organized movement corresponding to it. What is being imprisoned is not an actual conspiracy, but instead a particular approach to politics.

The principal reason why there is so little spontaneous support for those who have been imprisoned is that the white left, by and large, has accepted the government's definition of legitimate politics and has kept its distance from the politics of autonomy for oppressed groups, of community self-defense and of armed struggle. This is not to argue that the white left has always made these choices self-consciously. They have far more often been made in the language of practicality and effectiveness — as those were defined by the prevailing attitudes in white communities.

In this light, it is interesting to contrast the characteristic responses of the white left and the Black movement in the aftermath of the attempted robbery of the Brinks truck last October. The typical published comment from the white left excoriated those presumably responsible and those whose politics were seen as sympathetic as being motivated by illusion or delusion. We can take it for granted that the initial private responses of most of those in the white left were not so different. On the other hand, the Black movement (especially in New York) rallied quickly to issue public statements denouncing the government's attacks on Black people and to defend the political and civil liberties of Fulani Sunni Ali when she was kidnapped from Mississippi.

We are not suggesting that the Black movement in New York was therefore giving its political approval to the attempted robbery. So far as we know, the Black movement has not, as a whole, taken any public position on that particular event. What positions, if any, organizations in the Black movement take will, of course, be decided by those organizations themselves. What we are trying to emphasize, though, is how different the approach taken by the Black movement was from that of the white left.

The predominant politics of the white left has been characterized for more than a decade by a withdrawal from the politics of support for the Black movement and by a playing down of the significance of racism. That withdrawal has not only damaged the potential for organizing among white people to support the struggles of people of color; it has also created a political vacuum, especially among young people, that has been filled by a resurgent right wing and a revival of fascistic racism. If that fascism is ever triumphant, it is doubtful that it would be as careful in its choices of candidates for terror and imprisonment as the government is now. We can see a rather dramatic illustration of this possibility in the Klan murder of the five members of the Communist Workers' Party.

The white left will not be persuaded to support those in jail by a version of the "You're going to be next" argument that seems almost automatic in these situations. The government has made it quite clear that those parts of the white left that keep their distance from the politics of Black liberation have little to fear from the government's repressive agencies.

Instead, we would argue that those in jail should be supported because they represent, however partially and imperfectly, a political challenge to racist, bourgeois hegemony and rule. We must insist on the political character of the links between those imprisoned — as opposed to the attempts on the left and the right to characterize those links as criminal, conspiratorial or bizarre.

The wisdom of the old proverb that "An injury to one is an injury to all" has to be understood as meaning that it does not matter how close anyone else is to being subpoenaed or imprisoned. The imprisonment of eight is an attack on the movement and should be resisted as such.

It is often difficult to agree on estimates of priorities for political work. Few would suggest that the grand jury attacks are the burning issue of the day. Nevertheless, our movement is weakened and impoverished so long as the government remains able to continue the imprisonment of those subpoenaed thus far and to persuade so much of that movement that it should not be concerned. We believe that the effort to defeat this grand jury demands widespread support.

And what of those individuals arrested and charged in connection with the attempted robbery itself? Our starting point is the essential righteousness of any effort by the oppressed to gain their freedom. It is inevitable that Black revolutionaries will attempt to create a liberation army, which is, after all, an instrument of organized violence, and to finance its operations through expropriations that themselves entail violence — and it is inevitable that some-people-with white skin will help them. One does not have to hail the attempted robbery as the highest form of struggle yet reached in this country, as some have done, or agree on the wisdom of the particular line of defense chosen by the majority of those on trial, in order to recognize the political character of the action and respect the decision of those who have chosen to take a prisoner of war stance as well as those who have chosen to present a more conventional defense. Given present realities, it may be beside the point to call for the release of the Nyack defendants; yet there still remains for revolutionaries the more important task of understanding and explaining the character of the attempted robbery as a political, not a criminal, act, and insisting that those on trial be judged by political, not criminal, standards.