Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism: Martin Sostre, 1975

“The question now is: What are we going to do about this murderous fascism?”

One might not guess it from its title, but Martin Sostre ’s essay, “Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism,” is a nuanced, careful, and eloquent consideration of political strategy in the context of repressive, totalitarian rule. Published in 1975 in the magazine Black Flag: Organ of the Anarchist Black Cross , Sostre’s essay is partly a response to leftist critiques of the strategies of the controversial Symbionese Liberation Army, or SLA, whose acts of assassination, kidnapping, and armed-robbery were often deemed vanguardist, tactically-ill thought, and politically disastrous. Yet Sostre reads the theoretical manifesto of the SLA against the real-world political conditions in the United States, where in the 1970s, just as now, a set of “repressive fascist measures” were being implemented—from restoration of the death penalty to a system of total surveillance to “ infiltration, frame-ups, assassinations, brutalisations, de-humanisations, behaviour modification, and genocide.”

In this light, Sostre asks, what should the popular response to fascism look like? If the political rhetoric of fascism is white supremacy and its primal political program is violence, can it only be challenged via appeals to humanity, calls for reform, or prayers for peace, democracy, and non-violence? Sostre is also clear, however, that the fight against fascism demands not a single strategy, but a range of strategies: the anti-fascist response must be “multi-dimensional,” “complex,” and able to meet people where they are.

Born in East Harlem on March 20, 1923, Martin Ramirez Sostre , was an Afro-Puerto Rican revolutionary anarchist. After a short stint in the army and a longer period of hustling, Sostre opened the legendary Afro Asian Book Shop at 1412 Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo, NY. The bookstore became a political and pedagogical refuge for many during the urban strife and whitesupremacist warfare that rocked the city in the late 1960s. In 1967, Sostre and co-worker Geraldine Robinson were arrested on COINTELPRO fabricated drug charges. He was sentenced by an all-white jury to thirty to forty years in prison. Sostre spent the next decade in prison, often in solitary confinement, regularly humiliated and tortured by guards.

While incarcerated , Sostre became a successful “jailhouse lawyer” using legal appeals for his own rights. He also advocated for the religious and political rights of all prisoners and for the end of draconian policies of censorship, solitary confinement, and invasive bodily exams. As the editors of the North Carolina Central Law Review note in their introduction to Sostre’s 1973 essay “The New Prisoner” Sostre was also “the moving force behind the formation of a prisoners’ union in New York State and an advocate of minimum wages for inmate workers.” Sostre also introduced figures like Black anarchist Lorenzo Kom’Boa Ervin to anarchist theory and practice. Sostre was released from prison in 1976 through a combination of his own efforts and of the Free Martin Sostre campaign. He died on August 12, 2015 at the age of 92.

A visionary with a highly attuned sense of both justice and praxis, Martin Sostre had the mind of a political strategist. These qualities are demonstrated in his essay “Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism.” We reprint it below.

Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism

Martin Sostre

Sisters and Brothers:

The escalating repression by this predatory, racist and sexist capitalist system makes glaringly clear to all but the most politically backward that the dire predictions that U.S. capitalism would evolve into fascism have come to pass. Restoration of the death penalty, life sentences for drugs, recent supreme Court rulings upholding the denial of the right to live in communes, the right to privacy and human dignity (by granting police the right to arbitrarily invade peoples’ persons and homes and use as evidence in court anything seized during the illegal search), police electronic eavesdropping, infiltration, frame-ups, assassinations, brutalisations, de-humanisations, behaviour modification, and genocide are some of the repressive fascist measures now being implemented.

The question now is: What are we going to do about this murderous fascism? Shall we continue spouting revolutionary rhetoric without commensurate deeds and passively stand by like sheep while our comrades are framed by the gestapo police kidnapped off the streets and murdered one by one? Must we passively wait our turn to be led to the oppressors’ cages, brutalised or murdered? Or shall we oppose the choking fascist oppression which if allowed to continue encroaching on what is left of our personal freedoms will eventually convert us into de-humanised mindless robots? The answer is obvious. Indeed, to defend ourselves by all means necessary against the destruction of our human rights and personhood not only is the natural right to self-defence but a human duty.

By what means then shall we resist the fascist oppressors? The answer to this is determined by the means employed to press us. Our oppression is multi-dimensional. We are oppressed economically, legally, psychologically, culturally, physically and by all other means deemed necessary by the criminal ruling class to maintain themselves in power. Since oppression is multi-dimensional, does not common sense dictate that resistance to it be multi-dimensional with each level of oppression challenged by a commensurate level of revolutionary resistance?

For example, the fascist lies propagated by the controlled media press must be challenged with revolutionary truth disseminated by the movement press, tapes, films, books, pamphlets, leaflets, posters, etc. Not too many revolutionaries and militants will disagree with this. Only when the same common-sense is applied to opposing fascist violence with revolutionary armed resistance do many of them become horrified. Witness the reaction of most of the movement people to SLA’s [Symbionese Liberation Army] revolutionary response to fascist repression.

The current revolutionary action of the SLA is the correct and inevitable response to the countless kidnappings, frame-ups, brutalisations and murders perpetrated by the ruling class members upon resistors of oppression. At long last the individual members of this exploitative-racist-sexist system are being subjected to revolutionary justice. As Malcolm X said, “It’s a case of the chickens coming home to roost.” I extend my revolutionary love and solidarity to my SLA comrades and wish them every success.

Why then are so-called militants and revolutionaries so horrified when armed fascist repression is resisted by the armed might of the people? Do they expect the people to revert to the turn-the-other-cheek state of the 1950s and respond to fascist murder, sadistic brutalisation, frame-ups and tortures with passive acquiescence, love for our fascist enemies and cooperation in our own oppression?

Or is it that these horrified so-called militants and revolutionaries see the liberation struggle as one dimensional, to be fought solely on the level of consciousness they happen to be on? Surely they cannot be so politically retarded [sic] as to believe that in a liberation struggle the enemy should be fought on only one level – that approved by the enemy.

It is just as absurd to propose that everyone resist fascist oppression through peaceful means as to propose armed resistance for everyone. Just because I’m a revolutionary anarcho-communist who believes in armed struggle does not dogmatize me to propose that everyone arm and go underground. Nor would I denounce those who refuse to do so.

Paradoxically, though these leftists bitterly denounce all violence by US revolutionaries against the US ruling class, they highly praise as “heroic” the armed violence of the revolutionaries in Africa, Asia, Ireland, the Middle-East and Latin America. The rule seems to be that armed violence is an acceptable form of revolutionary struggle except when employed by US revolutionaries against the fascist ruling class of the US. In effect, it’s as if the role of these left groups is to protect the ruling class from violence and confine the liberation struggle to the boundaries of legal activities approved by the ruling class.

However, the irrefutable truth is that a liberation struggle is revolutionary war. Revolutionary war is a complicated process of mass struggle, armed and unarmed, peace and violent, legal and clandestine, economic and political, where all forms of struggle are developed harmoniously around the axle of armed struggle. Anyone who by now has not grasped these basic facts does not know what liberation struggle is – or is trying to palm off reformism for liberation struggle.

A distinction must be made between reformists and revolutionaries. Reformists seek merely to reform through legal means, and not overthrow the existing fascist system. That’s why they panic when the people exercise their right to armed self-defence against the genocidal violence of the fascist ruling class. Revolutionaries seek the complete overthrow of the fascist system by all means necessary including armed struggle. Revolutionaries seek, moreover, to subject to peoples’ justice individual members of the ruling class for their many crimes against humanity.

The spreading of the East and West coasts of the philosophy of subjecting members and agents of the ruling class to people’s justice attests to how widespread this revolutionary concept has become. It can never be erased from the consciousness of the people, the revolutionary clock.

At long last the peoples’ armed force has emerged within the United States to oppose the gestapo of the ruling class. The balance of power has radically shifted. Gone forever are the days when fascists could prepare every conceivable crime with impunity. The price of oppression has been raised and shall soon become prohibitive.

The stolen billions of dollars possessed by members of the criminal ruling class shall soon become a liability. They’ll be forced to convert their mansions into fortresses protected by round the clock armed guards and electronic protective devices. Every venture outside the besieged fortress will require escorts of armed guards. Even this will not guarantee safety. For revolutionary justice shall stalk the fascist criminals at every turn. Already the people’s army has sent shivers of fear through the spine of the criminal ruling class who clearly recognise the signs as meaning: the beginning of the end.

Conversely, the people’s armed self-defence force has created new hope in the hearts of the oppressed – particularly revolutionary comrades held hostage in fascist prisons serving long sentences. Soon the fascist ruling class will be forced to free these prisoners of war in exchange for captured members of their own class.

The denunciation of the SLA by the movement press is indistinguishable from that of the ruling class. Indeed, some movement papers quoted statements from the controlled press to support their claim that the people rejected the kidnapping. The criminal ruling class rubbed their hands in glee and publicised how divided the left was over the SLA. Each left organisation seemed to be competing with the others for legitimacy by denouncing the SLA. It was utterly disgusting, reactionary and opportunistic.

Nor were the denunciations made in a spirit of constructive criticism by fellow comrades. No attempt was made by the movement press to publicise the SLA’s programme, analyse it and point out where it was erroneous. The criticism was deliberately hostile and designed to isolate the SLA by poisoning people’s minds against them.

Conspicuously absent from the denunciations of the SLA in the movement press is any discussion of the role of armed struggle. The impression given is that armed struggle is not an essential part of the revolutionary struggle, that revolutionary violence is something repulsive which should be shunned. The left movement press would have one believe that to overthrow the criminal ruling class we have merely to organise mass movements, demonstrations, protest and repeat revolutionary slogans. Even after Chile (the lates of a series of tragedies where thousands of defenceless comrades were slaughtered because of the criminal refusal of leftist leaders to arm the people against the armed might of the ruling class) the movement in the United States still follows the same ill-fated line of Allende – as evidenced by the bitter denunciations of the armed action of the SLA.

Most movement organisations are so busy following their dogmatic party lines, repeating revolutionary cliches and downing other movement groups that they’re unable to see the self-evident. Were their natural powers of perception and consciousness not stultified by party-lineism they would know that a revolutionary liberation movement must deal with the enemy concurrently on all levels, including armed violence. Otherwise when the inevitable showdown with the ruling class comes, the revolution will be left defenceless and the lives of our beloved comrades needlessly sacrificed.

The SLA is the armed resistance of the people to the exploitative, racist and sexist fascism which is now upon us. All resistors of oppression, on whatever level of conscience they may be, should rejoice at the SLA’s existence, at their successful deeds  and the fear they put in the hearts of the criminal ruling class. It’s therefore the duty of us all to support by all means necessary, our SLA comrades. We must close ranks with them and give them the support they need. Let’s not fall for the malicious lies spread by agents of the FBI about the SLA which are designed to isolate the SLA from the people to make it easier to capture and murder them.

I have carefully studied the Declaration of the Revolutionary War and the Symbionese Liberation Army and find it generally sound. It incorporates much of our historical revolutionary experience. I believe that the Symbionese Liberation Army has one of the most advanced revolutionary programmes for liberation in operation within the United States of America.

The SLA represents the greatest challenge to fascist power because it objectifies the nucleus of the people’s army which as history shows is necessary to deliver the death-blow to the military arm of the fascist parasitic class.

Your comrade in struggle,

Martin Sostre

Martin Sostre, “Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism,” Black Flag: Organ of the Anarchist Black Cross 4 no. 3 (August 1975)

source: Black Agenda Report

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=18127

Reviving Slave Hounds and Canine Crimes in Virginia Prisons — Kevin Rashid Johnson

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was right. Anyone who wants to determine a society’s level of progress only needs to look inside its prisons. This is because prisons are a condensed version of the society that produces them.

Indeed, as the U.S. Supreme Court has stated, the U.S. Constitution’s 8th Amendment, which forbids cruel and unusual punishment, is supposed to reflect “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” (1)

So, how far has Amerika evolved?

AMERIKA IS STILL A BACKWARD RACIST SOCIETY

Though it is forgotten in history, slave hounds or “negro packs of dogs,” were THE primary weapon of terror and brute violence used to repress Black slaves and compel their submission to a life of permanent humiliation, dehumanization and servitude. The use of these animals to maul and often kill slaves and hunt down those who fled captivity, was deemed barbaric and outmoded over 200 years ago and was deemed so outrageous that it led multitudes of people to unite in the struggle and ultimately a war that abolished slavery. (2)

A look inside Amerika’s prisons, in Virginia in particular, reveals that Amerika is still a very backward and racist society. Where the practice continues of use of attack dogs to maul prisoners, particularly prisoners of color and often for the entertainment of guards.

During July 2023, the Insider published a report on the use and abuse of attack dogs inside U.S. prisons. (3) The Virginia prison system was the main focus of the report, based upon the disproportionate use of attack dogs in its prisons, and the fact that no other prison system in the world uses dogs to attack prisoners inside cells. The report found that just between the years 2017 and 2022, Va prisoners had been attacked with dogs no less than 217 times, compared to only 15 times within the same period in the next highest recorded state of Arizona. The 217 identified dog attacks in Va prisons was NOT a complete listing, but simply what the Insider discovered from reviewing court and medical files. There were MANY more.

In fact when I was confined at Va’s notoriously abusive and racist Red Onion State Prison in 2023, I heard guards and medical staff frequently admit, that for years prisoners in Red Onion and its nearby sister supermax, Wallens Ridge State Prison, were taken to local hospitals for emergency treatment for dog bites more than all other medical conditions and injuries combined.

In Va, the violence that prisoners live in danger of suffering serious often crippling injury from is dogs not other prisoners.

ABUSES OF ATTACK DOGS IN DEFIANCE OF STATE LAWS

For decades, the abuses of these animals in Va prisons was kept secret from the public. I recall, back in 2006, questioning how the constant uses of these animals in Va was overlooked by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in its critical report issued that year on the use of canines in U.S. prisons. (4) That report came on the heels of the 2004 international scandal that erupted when photographs were leaked to the media of Amerikan soldiers torturing and using military dogs to terrorize detainees in Iraq.

The HRW report looked at several U.S. prison systems that used canines to intimidate prisoners. But it didn’t once mention Va’s prisons, where dogs were frequently used even then to ACTUALLY ATTACK prisoners.

It took decades of abuses of these animals in Va for the public to become aware and for the state to enact laws intended to limit the uses of attack dogs in its prisons.

The Insider report, came over 15 years after the HRW report, and was the first broad coverage of the abuse of dogs in Va prisons.

Ironically, the push for laws to limit the uses of these dogs didn’t come in response to the frequent maulings of prisoners. Instead, it happened after one of these animals was allegedly killed by a Va prisoner fending off an attack in Apr 2024. I wrote about this incident and the sympathetic media response to the animal’s death, compared to the total indifference to the frequent mutilations of prisoners by these dogs, demonstrating that prisoners in Va, like the slaves of the old South, are literally “treated worse than dogs.” (5)

In any case, during 2024 this law was enacted limiting the “use” of prison attack dogs in Va to incidents where officials believe they are immediately needed to protect someone against threat of serious bodily injury or death, or where approved by a ranking official to intervene in an altercation involving three or more prisoners. (6) Never mind that these animals themselves present the danger of serious injury and death.

At no point has this law been obeyed.

Not only are these animals used to physically attack prisoners in situations where no such dangers exist, but they are “used” to violently threaten prisoners on a continuous basis, which constitutes assault.

I have been housed at numerous Va prisons where these animals are present and used, both before and since this new law was enacted, including Greensville, Sussex 1, Red Onion and, now, Keen Mountain prisons.

At Keen Mountain, where I’m presently confined, multiple attack dogs are used to threaten and intimidate prisoners all day every day, particularly as we go about our daily activities, such as going to and from meals, outside recreation, work and so on.

No matter where we go, these animals are used to menace us. Their handlers incite (giving the animals commands) and cause them to rabidly bark, snap, and rear up on their hind legs and lunge at us with such force they often drag and jerk the trainers along behind them, often coming within a foot or less of our bodies. As Va prison officials have conceded in the media, the act of having these dogs intimidate prisoners by ‘presence’ constitutes their “use.” Prisoners who dare to protest or complain of this abuse are taunted by officials as timid or subject to retaliation in efforts to silence our protests.

One such prisoner was Antwan Whitten. Antwan was one of the victims of a malicious dog attack detailed in the July 2023 Insider report. On Oct 31, 2015 after an altercation with another prisoner, he followed guards’ orders to lay facedown on his cell floor.

After he laid down, an attack dog was brought into the cell and made to brutally maul him. His wounds made evident that he had been attacked while lying prone.

The dog bit and tore the flesh from the back of his head and shoulder and his back. To cover up the fact that the animal was brought to his cell and deployed on him after the altercation was over and the other prisoner had been taken away from the scene of the altercation, officials erased surveillance camera footage of the cell area that showed these activities and conformed reports lying about what transpired. Understandably, Whitten was traumatized and suffers PTSD and other psychological effects from the malicious assault and lying cover-up.

Here at Keen Mountain Whitten complained about the dogs being allowed to menace him and all of us wherever he went in the prison.

A week after he filed a complaint he was targeted with an infraction and thrown in solitary confinement, where he found much of his personal property had been stolen or destroyed. He was then transferred to River North where attack dogs are abused even more.

DAILY ASSAULTS WITH CANINES

At Keen Mountain these animals and their handlers sit inside the entryway to our housing units. We must pass them whenever we enter or exit the unit, at which times we are subjected to having them attempt to attack us, barking and lunging at us as described above.

They can be heard inside our cellblocks barking loudly, especially when the front door to the block is opened to allow prisoners or staff to enter or exit. The barking is often so loud we cannot hear our conversations on the telephones inside the block, and prisoners who must sleep during daylight hours such as kitchen workers are kept awake. Also, those workers who frequently come in and out of the unit such as Keith Fitzgerald and Tiqua Ubuntu, who push carts of food, laundry and other items through the prison, suffer having these animals lunging at and attempting to attack them throughout the day.

At River North, Askari Lumumba suffered and filed suit against the constant use of dogs to menace prisoners in the same way, but often with greater malice. At River North, prisoners moving throughout the prison are made to walk gauntlets with dogs on either side of walkways that they must walk down. The animals are made to lunge and attempt to attack the prisoners, coming within inches of biting them.

Lumumba complained of suffering panic attacks, fear for his safety, and often refused to leave his cell. He suffered taunts and repression by River North officials in response to complaints of these uses of dogs to terrorize him and others.

But, as in Antwan Whitten’s case, the physical abuses of these animals on prisoners, predominantly Blacks and Browns, is downright evil.

DOGS USED TO MAUL THE MENTALLY ILL

“On July 15, 2024 I had a psychotic episode. Other inmates tried to help but correctional officers thought it was a fight and I was OC’ed [tear gassed] and then the K-9 was deployed when I clearly posed no threat to myself, no officer, nor the orderly operation of the facility. This was just a racist attack and wantonly sadistic ploy to use old Jim Crow, proud boy tactics on me and cause me irreparable harm and violate my rights.” – Keen Mountain complaint #KMCC-24-WRI-01508

This statement is from the summary of a complaint filed on July 16, 2024 by Tremain Williams, a Black man imprisoned here at Keen Mountain.

As it states, on July 15th Tremain had a mental breakdown. His worst offense was to crawl beneath a table in his cellblock and, in a display of obvious paranoid fear, cling to the leg of the table. In response, a mob of white guards repeatedly tear gassed and openly beat him. He was handcuffed and taken out of the block, after which the guards sicced an attack dog on him. The dog mauled his leg including ripping his Achilles tendon.

The entire attack on Tremain was recorded on surveillance and guard body cameras, which he requested be preserved for litigation.

Tremain had to be rushed to the hospital where he received emergency treatment and now suffers a permanent crippling injury, for which he was prescribed rehabilitative care, which Va prison officials refuse to provide.

Tremain’s experience is common in Va’s prisons. The malicious use of attack dogs to maul Black prisoners. The infliction of severe, often crippling injury. And the denial of needed medical treatment for those injuries. These incidents occur with especial frequency in Va’s remote high security prisons, like Red Onion, Wallens Ridge, River North and Keen Mountain, that are located in rural segregated white communities where the staff are almost totally white, while the prisoners are near totally Black and Brown. In any case, inherent in the very presence of the dogs is the fact that they will be and are abused, and on an extreme level.

DOGS USED TO MALICIOUSLY MAUL PRISONERS

On Dec 31, 2023, at Wallens Ridge, Ekong Eshiet, a Black man, was involved in a minor fist fight with a white prisoner. Both prisoners followed guards’ directions to stop fighting and lie face down on the floor.

Moments after both were lying down as ordered and restrained, a dog was brought into the unit and the handler pulled the animal on top of Ekong and had it tear into his leg.

On July 23, 2023, at Red Onion, Jaeon Chavis, another Black man, was also mauled by an attack dog while he was lying restrained on the floor.

The attack on Jaeon came in response to his having a heated personal telephone conversation in his block. Guards entered the unit and ordered him to place his hands against a wall. He raised his hands. Instead of restraining him, a guard rushed up and punched him. Others swarmed, tackled and piled on top of him. Despite that Jaeon never resisted, a dog was brought in and thrown on top of his exposed legs and caused to rip out the back of his calf. He suffered numerous puncture wounds and nerve damage.

As also commonly occurs in dog attack cases, Jaeon didn’t receive necessary medical treatment for his bite wounds. An open hole was left in his leg that should have been sutured closed. The hole became septic and led to nerve damage.

Worse still was the case of Walter Kissee, yet another Black man, who was attacked and permanently crippled by a dog at River North on Apr 13, 2024.

Walter was attacked, tear gassed and beaten by guards. After he was left lying blind and handcuffed and leg shackled, a dog was brought into the cellblock and caused to rip a softball-sized chunk of muscle out of his right calf. The bite force he suffered nearly shattered his leg bone which was left exposed.

In an effort to hide him and the assault he suffered, Va officials had him transferred to remote Red Onion, where he was denied hospital ordered treatment which caused his wound to become infected, and his leg to almost require amputation. He underwent several surgeries, one to clean the wound of the infection. Walter has since the assault been confined to a wheelchair, being permanently crippled, and held at Red Onion, which is not a wheelchair accessible prison. Despite skin grafts and multiple surgeries, Walter has a huge scar on his leg measuring 3″ × 4″.

To add insult to injury, while at Red Onion he was again beaten by guards on Oct 16, 2024, because he couldn’t kneel due to his injuries, when he was taken to solitary confinement because of protesting a cell move. He actually had a medically issued “no-kneel” pass because of his injuries.

Then there was Jamaal Shivers. On Feb 1, 2025 at Keen Mountain, he was involved in an altercation with another prisoner. By guards’ own admissions, he was the target of an attack caused by their leaving the area where the altercation took place unattended and several security gates unlocked. He was struck several times with a heavy object, yet the dog was used on him.

Jamaal nearly suffered castration as the handler allowed the dog to bite him between the legs. He still endured serious injuries from the dog bites.

In another case, a dog was maliciously trained on a prisoner’s groin, who wasn’t even involved in a fight. This prisoner, Carl Hughes, was targeted in this manner at Sussex 1 prison because of being transgender.

Carl had been punched by another prisoner and never fought back. Two dogs were sicced on Carl by two guards, McCray and Gonzalez. McCray taunted Carl as he directed the dog to attack Carl’s groin, stating that Carl didn’t need male genitals anyway since they were transgendered.

Carl was bitten seven times suffering numerous deep tear and puncture wounds requiring dozens of sutures, including to their penis, ear, forearm, bicep, wrist, calf and inner thigh.

Then there was Curtis Garrett, a Black man who also had two dogs sicced on him. On Christmas day in 2018 he was involved in a minor fight with another prisoner. After which he retreated into his cell where guards secured him locking the door.

Two canine handlers brought their dogs to his cell, and, instead of cuffing him when he turned his back to the door to allow them to do so, they had the cell door opened and sicced their dogs on him as they beat him. At times Curtis had the two animals hanging on his upper body by their teeth tearing into his flesh as the guards assaulted him.

As a result he suffered severe nerve damage and deep wounds causing paralysis in his leg and hand.

As was done to Walter Kissee, Curtis was transferred to remote Wallens Ridge where he was denied hospital ordered treatment causing greater suffering and injury and his wounds to become infected. He was only taken to a hospital to receive care including for the infected wounds because he laid down and played dead in his cell.

Not long after his dog attack Curtis was released from prison. He ended up being committed to a mental health facility because of suffering a mental breakdown from the abuse he suffered.

LEGAL PROTECTION OF ABUSE OF DOGS

Attacks like those described above are the daily norm in Va’s high security prisons, where these animals are used. As I’ve pointed out in several articles, Va’s high security prisons are concentrated in rural segregated white communities and staffed almost totally by whites, while the vast majority of prisoners confined in them are Black and Brown. This alone creates a culturally and racially hostile environment that has always fostered violent and racist abuse. (7)

This culture of abuse is further encouraged by the general indifference of federal courts to the dog attacks despite that the constitution is supposed to embody and enforce principles of an evolving and maturing society; making clear that racist abuse is still the norm in Amerika, hundreds of years after canine attacks on people were widely deemed inhumane and barbaric.

Numerous Va prisoners have tried to sue officials for these abusive attacks, but have been told by Va federal judges that these dog attacks are not against the 8th Amendment.

Yet the use of canines was criminalized during the Civil War, when Confederates used their slave hounds on Union Army soldiers. This standard came into being only when the dogs were used on whites.

Confederate leaders like Henry Wirz were even sentenced to execution for the practice. (8) But, this standard came into being only when the dogs were used on whites. Hence, today mauling Black and Brown prisoners in Virginia is accepted practice.

ABUSING THE DOGS

As the Insider report revealed, these dogs are not only abused against prisoners, the animals are often the victims of abuse by their handlers. This is often the case because many of the animals resist being taught to attack people or become rabid and unstable in response to this training. In one case reported by the Insider, a Va prison dog handler choked his dog to death at a veterinarian’s office when he could not control the animal.

Here at Keen Mountain, I and other prisoners witness handlers manually choke and literally hang their dogs (snatching them off the ground and suspending them in the air by their leashes for extended periods) on a near daily basis, in response to the dogs resisting them.

On Mar 16, 2015 Keen Mountain prisoner workers Tiqua Ubuntu and Keith Fitzgerald witnessed one of the dogs turn on and bite his handler in response to such abuse. The handler in turn slammed the dog to the ground and manually choked him while screaming into the animal’s face.

But the abuses of Va attack dogs have also been the victims of sexual abuses by handlers.

In 2009 a media scandal erupted when five canine guards at several Va prisons were arrested for animal cruelty for sexually abusing their attack dogs. (9)

NO GOOD USE OF ATTACK DOGS

In no context or situation is the presence of dogs in prisons justifiable nor humane. As demonstrated in sampling just the few cases given here, officials will always abuse and create pretexts to falsely justify the misuse of these animals. And they will often abuse the animals as well.

The use of these carnivores in Va prisons is explicitly racially targeted. They are deployed only in the state’s high security prisons, which are strategically located in remote white segregated communities and peopled almost exclusively by Black and Brown prisoners. This racial and cultural contradiction of arming rural whites to police absolutely voiceless and powerless people of color creates the basis for racist abuse and impunity. Officials know what they have created. It is a dynamic that replicates the racial and power disparity of the slavery and Jim Crow eras that fueled and now fuels racist abuse. Adding attack dogs to the equation only ensures that the abuse take on the most barbaric forms.

As was recognised over 200 years ago, only animals consider it an acceptable practice to have carnivorous animals rip and crush the flesh and bones of humans.

These animals must be removed from these prisons – those that walk on four legs and two.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!

All Power to the People!

_____________________
Endnotes:

1. Rhodes v. Chapman, 452 U.S. 337, 346 (1981)

2. T.D. Parry, “Slave Hounds and Abolition in the Americas,” PAST AND PRESENT, number 246 (2020) http://academic.oup.com/past/article/246/1/69/57722095

3. Hannah Beckler, “Patrol Dogs are Terrorizing and Mauling Prisoners Inside the United States,” THE INSIDER, Jul 23, 2023

4. Jamie Fellner, “Cruel and Degrading: The Use of Dogs for Cell Extractions in U.S. Prisons,” HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, Oct 2006. https://www.hrw.org

5. Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “Prisoners Treated Worse Than Dogs” (2024) http://rashidmod.com/?p=3644

6. See, Code of Virginia section 53.1-39.3 (Use of canines in state correctional facilities; prohibited acts; policies and regulations made public; incidents of use of canines reported; exception.)

7. Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “Parallels Between Slavery and Jim Crow and the Operations of Virginia’s Prisons Today” (2025) http://rashidmod.com/?p=3676

8. Larry H. Spruill, “Slave Patrols, ‘Packs off Negro Dogs’ and Policing Black Communities” PHYLON, Vol 53, No. 1, pp. 42-66 (Summer 2016) http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/phylon1960.53.1.42

9. Matthew Stabley, “Corrections Officers Take ‘K-9 Handling’ Too Far: Five Face Animal Cruelty Charges After One Was Filmed Masturbating a Dog,” Oct 29, 2009 https://www.nbcwashington.com

David Reutter, “Virginia DOC K-9 ‘Training’ Results in Animal Cruelty Charges,” PRISON LEGAL NEWS, Apr 15, 2010

source: Kevin Rashid Johnson

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=17631

Nuestra América and the Black Radical Peace Tradition

The Revolutionary Foundations of Our Americas

On April 8, 1804, a few months after leading Ayiti (Haiti) to independence after a bloody 13- year revolutionary war against European enslavers and colonists, the new nation’s leader, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, articulated the most radical vision of freedom in history. In the proclamation, ‘Liberty or Death,’ Dessalines pronounced “I have avenged America,” decrying the barbarity and violence of racist Europeans. At the same time, he delineated a vision of a new Ayiti, and the world, based on sovereignty, dignity, and respect.

On January 1,1891, 87 years after Dessalines’s proclamation of an independent Haiti, and exactly 62 years before the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, José Martí published his famous work : Nuestra América or “Our America.” In this, Martí called for Latin America to unite against ongoing colonialism and in protest of U.S. domination through the Monroe Doctrine .

On December 10, 1963 in Detroit, Michigan, Malcolm X delivered his “Message to the Grassroots” speech where he criticized the Civil Rights Movement’s appeals to U.S. white supremacist foundations, individualism over grassroots organizing, and the failures of Black/African peoples in the U.S. to unite with the anti-colonial movements of the Global South. Significantly, Malcolm demanded more than “civil rights” for Black/African peoples in the U.S.; he called for true and complete human rights that would be the basis for the liberation of all African peoples globally. In this sense, Malcolm also urged us to reject the idea that the political identity of Black/African people is tethered to the U.S. settler project, proclaiming “[we are]… not ‘Americans’. We are victims of Americanism.”

All three of these visionaries died waging the struggle for liberation in the Americas. Dessalines was betrayed and assassinated two years into Haiti’s independence, a victim of the unresolved contradictory ideologies that fractured the nascent nation with tragic consequences. Martí, the writer and organizer, would die in battle in the struggle for Cuban independence. While Cuba would win flag independence in 1902, it would not escape the direct neocolonial chokehold of the U.S. and its corporate vultures until the revolution of 1959. Malcolm was slain by reactionaries and counterintelligence operatives in 1965, crippling the movement for Black/African liberation within the U.S.

In the ensuing years, and despite continuing resistance through individual and mass struggles, the promise of liberation has yet to be realized. Moreover, Malcolm would likely be disappointed with our failures, especially in the U.S., to carry on the vision of a Black/African struggle that is anti-colonial, Black nationalist, and internationalist.

Yet Malcolm’s words on that cold December day in Detroit still ring true. Like Martí, who called for Latin American unity, Malcolm argued for unity against a common enemy, calling for a revolutionary anti-colonial struggle of all African and colonized and oppressed peoples against white supremacy and imperialism:[1]

We have this in common: We have a common oppressor, a common exploiter, and a common discriminator. But once we all realize that we have this common enemy, then we unite on the basis of what we have in common. And what we have foremost in common is that enemy — the white man. He’s an enemy to all of us…In Bandung back in, I think, 1954, was the first unity meeting in centuries of Black people. And once you study what happened at the Bandung conference, and the results of the Bandung conference, it actually serves as a model for the same procedure you and I can use to get our problems solved…These people who came together didn’t have nuclear weapons; they didn’t have jet planes; they didn’t have all of the heavy armaments that the white man has. But they had unity….They began to recognize who their enemy was. The same man that was colonizing our people in Kenya was colonizing our people in the Congo. The same one in the Congo was colonizing our people in South Africa, and in Southern Rhodesia, and in Burma, and in India, and in Afghanistan, and in Pakistan. They realized all over the world where the dark man was being oppressed, he was being oppressed by the white man; where the dark man was being exploited, he was being exploited by the white man. So they got together under this basis — that they had a common enemy.

It is this perspective that would, towards the end of his life, push Malcolm to form the Organization for Afro-American Unity, a Pan-Africanist revolutionary project.

Malcolm’s understanding of militant grassroots struggle, self-defense, and uncompromising principles are key to the Black Radical Peace Tradition that underlies the work of the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP). While we take inspiration from the struggle of these heroic ancestors, we know that this struggle is far deeper and broader than the actions of individual men. This work is fundamentally about building collective power to oppose and defeat the militarization, repression, destabilization, subversion, and permanent war against our peoples. As our ancestor, and former Black Panther and political prisoner Safiya Bukhari reminds us , in order to engage in the battle against imperialism and build a new society, we must also revolutionize our collective practices and consciousness through our political programs.

In building collective power, we see it as critical to link the unifying compass of Martí’s “Nuestra América” with the militant struggle of the Black Radical Peace Tradition, and the fire of Dessalines call to avenge the Americas. “Nuestra América” is the call of revolutionary forces in the Americas to rally all the historically oppressed peoples of the region against colonialism and imperialism by claiming one contiguous land mass stretching from Canada to Chile. In understanding the political, social, and economic position of working class Black/African peoples in the United States as united with the working peoples of the Caribbean and Latin America, we take inspiration from “Nuestra América” and push for the liberation of “Our Americas”.

Our first step is to recognize that working class Black/African and Brown peoples of Latin America, the Caribbean, and within the U.S. have a common enemy that seeks to exploit and dominate the region. Our joint struggle is to defeat this enemy by attacking its various forms of domination – (neo)colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism. The second step is to organize ourselves to build meaningful alternatives to this domination that are based on popular sovereignty, collective self-determination, and human dignity. Both steps require an Americas-wide consciousness toward collective, grassroots, anti-imperialist struggle.

De facto Colonialism in the Americas

In the first month of Donald Trump’s second term as President of the United States, he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio proclaimed that U.S. will recapture the Panama Canal and annex Greenland and Canada; publicly threatened Mexico, Colombia, and Canada with tariffs; and all but declared war on Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua – calling them “enemies of humanity” for refusing to capitulate to U.S. interests. Rubio also visited Panama, El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic on a tour aimed to strong-arm these nations into strengthening ties with U.S. corporate and military interests and severing developmental agreements with China.

But the brute tactics of the Trump regime, in trying to ensure U.S. “Full Spectrum Dominance” in the region, are not exceptional. “Full Spectrum Dominance” is the bipartisan doctrine articulated clearly in the Pentagon’s “Joint Vision 2020” paper that commits the U.S. to exercising military, political, and economic control across the globe to protect imperialist investments and interests – a stance that requires aggressively countering any threats, real or imagined, to its dominance. Trump’s regime, therefore, is building on the foundation laid by the U.S. duopoly’s economic and political agendas of exploitation and domination.

It was not Donald Trump who initiated the current U.S.-led occupation and anti-democratic transition process in Haiti, or who recognized (for a second time) a sham President of Venezuela , or who provided U.S. military support to the right-wing narco-capitalist government of Daniel Noboa in Ecuador. These violations of national sovereignty in our region, and more, occurred through the Biden White House and Blinken State Department. Just as it was also not the Trump regime that oversaw the repression of the Stop Cop City movement and the Student Intifada in response to the U.S.-Israeli genocide on Gaza. Again, this was the Biden-Harris regime and the mayors of the U.S.’s largest cities, almost all of whom are Democrats. Even Trump’s decision to send deported immigrants to Guantanamo Bay, a military base which the U.S. has occupied in Cuba since 1903, is just making good on a thr eat that Biden issued in 2024 . And Biden’s declaration was simply a revival of Bush Sr. and Clinton’s use of Guantanamo to hold captive Haitian migrants.

Nevertheless, the current actions of the Trump regime have a different character. The U.S. has reverted to its brazen call for colonialist expansion, including full military control of the hemisphere, aggressive economic coercion, and divide-and-rule tactics – all wrapped up in vulgar white supremacist nationalism. The U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination is now more open and defiant!

The tools of this Axis of Domination are clear: military domination through the U.S. Southern Command (Southcom); economic warfare through sanctions, tariffs and other unilateral coercive measures; continuation of corporate extractivism over national development; and usurpation of state sovereignty through policies as the Global Fragility Act. And, of course, U.S. imperialism also depends on a captured class of neocolonial compradors (e.g., William Ruto in Kenya, Luis Abinader in the DR, Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador) who work to uphold its Full Spectrum Dominance. Indeed, the Americas region remains under de facto colonial rule. And, despite years of anti-colonial resistance throughout the hemisphere, the current bold articulation of U.S. power seems calibrated to accelerate this full spectrum dominance while simultaneously attempting to paralyze and demobilize legitimate united resistance.

Black Struggle in the Heart of Empire

We understand that Black/African communities in the U.S. hold a unique position in the heart of empire. With a long and relentless history defined by enslavement, economic exploitation and underdevelopment, political subjugation, environmental degradation, and state violence, these communities suffer the brunt of domestic white supremacist domination. Black/African organizers and scholars have described the Black/African condition in the U.S. as akin to a colonial relationship. Robert Allen, for example, understood the colonial relationship in these terms: “[the] direct and over-all subordination of one people, nation, or country to another with state power in the hands of the dominant power.” In this case, white supremacist, capitalist power with direct control over Black/African peoples and communities. Economist William Tabb agreed with this and outlined the conditions faced by Black/African people in urban ghettos in the 1970s: a lack of labor freedom, suppressed wages, disposability and vulnerability of labor, and dependency on external aid (welfare) and political power (patronage) at the price of comprising collective needs.

This analysis of the internal colonization of Black/African people comes from a long and rich tradition of struggle and scholarship, outlined comprehensively by many including Harry Haywood and later Claudia Jones , Kwame Ture , and Robert Allen , as well as organizations as diverse as the Communist Party USA, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Africa, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. As scholar Charisse Burden Stelly details in Black Scare/Red Scare, Haywood and other Black communist organizers conceptualized the Black Belt Nation Thesis in the 1920-40s, understanding Black peoples predominantly residing in  the U.S. South (the “Black Belt”) as an internal colony with the right to national self-determination. After the second imperialist world war, Jones laid out the distinctions between Black populations in both the North and South, while furthering the analysis that all Black people represented a nation within the borders of the U.S. – a community of people with common language, economic life, and culture – all under assault by the racist U.S. state.

While the “internal colony” model is an important way to understand the position of Black/African communities in this white supremacist country, we must also acknowledge how class dynamics of the U.S. Black/African communities have continued to shift over years. Bruce Dixon, for example, asked us to come to terms with the reality that, “Today there are thousands of actual black people in the actual US ruling class…There are black lobbyists and corporate functionaries…the two dozen or so black admirals and generals…There are black media figures…and black near billionaires success stories are built on low wage viciously exploited black labor…”. We agree with Dixon in recognizing the Black compradors aiding and abetting U.S. white supremacist domination. Nevertheless, we think it imperative to assert that the majority of our Black/African communities are poor and working class, and bear the brunt of the domestic side of U.S. imperialist terror.

In 1969, Robert Allen predicted that, after the Black revolts of the late 1960s, a “neocolonial re-direction” would occur that would continue to subjugate the majority of Black people in the U.S. This re-direction would replace direct white rule and power over the internal colony with Black comprador intermediaries (e.g., national politicians, mayors, corporate executives and managers) who would be more palatable to the people they dominated. This follows the analyses of Kwame Nkrumah , Amilcar Cabral , Stephanie Urdang , and others on neocolonialism on the African continent. Allen argued that regardless of colonial or neocolonial rule, only a true and comprehensive anti-colonial struggle could lead to liberation for Black people in the U.S. This would require an economic program on a national level and the proliferation of international solidarity with ‘Third World’ peoples to defeat imperialism. For Allen, like for Malcolm, this would be a Black struggle that is anti-colonial and internationalist[2]:

[T]his struggle would aid materially in breaking black dependency on white society…The establishment of close working relationships with revolutionary forces around the world would be of great importance. The experiences of Third World revolutionaries in combating American imperialism could be quite useful to black liberation fighters. For the moment, mutual support between Afro-American and Third World revolutionaries is more verbal than tangible, but the time could come when this citation is reversed, and black people are well advised to begin now to work toward this kind of revolutionary, international solidarity.

In this sense, we link the struggles of the Black/African poor and working masses both to other marginalized communities in the U.S., and to all colonized and marginalized peoples’ globally.

This means the need to join the other liberation struggles of the colonized in the U.S., including Native peoples and lands, as well as the people of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The framework of internal colonialism helps us see that the Black/African liberation struggle is not simply against racism or a pursuit of state-sanctioned civil “rights.” Instead, together with the global majority, we are engaged in a struggle for self-determination and sovereignty against a common enemy. We have a common struggle of liberation against empire.

For BAP, like for Malcolm, ours is a struggle for liberation, comprehensive human rights, and dignity – or what we call People(s)-Centered Human Rights [3]. This is, for us, an anti-colonial struggle, and a movement of solidarity, and collective resistance.

Where do we go from here?

In outlining necessary actions for Black radicals in 1969, Robert Allen asserted that “the continuing main task for the black radical is to construct an interlocked analysis, program, and strategy which offers black people a realistic hope of achieving liberation.” Any road to liberation requires challenging, disrupting, and defeating imperialism, domestically and globally. In terms of building a program to support radical and revolutionary struggle in “Our Americas”, we learn from freedom fighter Assata Shakur and the BLA who knew that any revolutionary struggle in the U.S. must engage in meaningful material solidarity with the struggles of the peoples and nations of the Global South.

In this moment, we aim to help advance this solidarity and struggle through the development of the U.S./NATO Out of Our Americas Network – a mass-based, people(s)-centered, anti-imperialist structure to support the development of an Americas-wide consciousness, facilitate coordination of our unified struggles and build from the grassroots a ‘Zone of Peace ’ in Our Americas. Along with BAP’s recently inaugurated North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights , the Network and the broader Zone of Peace campaign are efforts that consciously joins the Black/African liberation movements with the struggle for true popular sovereignty, self-determination, and decolonization in the Americas and globally.

This Network is a component of the collective Campaign for a Zone of Peace in Our Americas , which calls for an activation and coordination of grassroots movements and organizations to expel from our region the structures of U.S.-led imperialism that generate war and state violence—colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism. This campaign’s vision of “Peace” follows BAP’s principle of the Black Radical Peace Tradition :

Peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by popular struggle and self-defense of a world liberated from the interlocking issues of global conflict, nuclear armament and proliferation, unjust war, and subversion through the defeat of global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.

Achieving a lasting, durable peace in Our Americas requires deepening our coordination, internationalizing our grassroots struggles, resourcing our efforts toward effective solidarity, and growing our capacities for resistance.

We know that advancing the revolutionary consciousness of the people of Our Americas is a necessary foundation for the grassroots struggle for our sovereignty, self-determination, and dignity. We know that struggling in Nuestra América through the Black Radical Peace Tradition necessitates centering the ongoing resistance of the people of Haiti, defeating the neocolonialism that has co-opted unity and integration in the Caribbean, and supporting those nations fighting to assert their sovereignty and determine their destinies, particularly Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. We know that we can establish the collective power to oppose the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination.

For our own survival, and the survival of the oppressed masses of the world, we must avenge Our Americas. The time is now.

[1]El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz [Malcolm X]. (1963). Message to the Grassroots. BlackPast. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/speeches-african-american-history/1963-malcolm-x-message-grassroots/

[2]Allen, Robert L. (1969). Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytical History. DoubleDay, New York.

[3] “People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHR) are those non-oppressive rights that reflect the highest commitment to universal human dignity and social justice that individuals and collectives define and secure for themselves and Collective Humanity through social struggle.” https://peoplescenteredhumanrights.com/

source: Black Agenda Report

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=17502

If We Abandon our Political Prisoners we Abandon Ourselves: —PalestineShows us Why

“Most of the time, the people inside the banks weren’t afraid at all,” former political prisoner Jihad Abdulmumit tells me, describing the experience of doing ‘bank expropriations’ to gain funds for the Black Liberation Army during the 1970s.

“In fact we would receive rounds of applause and cheers a lot of the time from the bank customers, sometimes the bank tellers too,” Abdulmumit says. “One time I remember we dropped some of the cash and a customer on the ground eagerly helped us put it back in the bag!”

The Black Liberation Army (BLA) emerged as an underground organization, waging guerilla warfare in response to the U.S. imperialists’ bloody assault on Black liberation. Composed of former Black Panther Party and Republic of New Afrika members forced to take their work underground, the BLA was a logical response to the FBI’s monstrous COINTELPRO operation, which waged brutal, bloody, all-out war on every aspect of the Panthers’ movement.

As Panthers across the country were being assassinated, framed, incarcerated, maligned in the media, and hunted by armed agents of the colonial state, the extreme violence by the imperialists had to be met with a material response—not victimhood.

“In the Panthers, I helped form a free community health clinic in Plainfield,” said Abdulmumit. “We had free breakfast programs, distributed newspapers, and helped run the gangs and drug dealers out of the neighborhoods. This is what the government was so afraid of, why they went to war with us.”

Jihad was just 16 years old when he joined the Black Panther Party in Plainfield, New Jersey, during an explosive political climate that resembled our contemporary moment: militancy permeated the air from the Plainfield Rebellion of 1967, massive anti-Vietnam War protests swept cities, coupled with nonstop Black, Indigenous, and Chicano uprisings. Images of strong Black brothers and sisters in leather coats and berets toting weapons strongly contrasted the colonial oppression, victimhood, and daily state violence that otherwise surrounded them. Jihad like many more only wanted to be one thing: a revolutionary.

One of the tactics the BLA developed was to rob banks, more accurately called ‘bank expropriations’, in order to fund the underground movement. “We knew that the money in those banks was built off our backs anyways, and if we could use it for the liberation of our people, then we had to try.”

When the people know without a doubt that your acts of resistance are on the behalf of their liberation, he tells me, then they will support you. This is why his comrades and him would receive ovations of applause inside the banks. Jihad would eventually be caught and serve 23 years in federal prison, but he “thought of escape, revolution, and liberation” every single day.

The problem, however, was that Jihad and his comrades were not the illusive “perfect victims” as Mohammed El-Kurd explains in his new book, Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal. As El-Kurd illustrates the many ways that Palestinians must make appeals to “humanity” and fit into a narrow category of ‘perfect, peace-loving citizens’ to be humanized, these Black liberation fighters, too, failed the categories of victimhood.

As such, they received virtually no support from the wider movement around them. There were no legal defense teams ready to work pro bono for their release, no sweeping movements in the streets to demand the liberatory bank robbers’ freedom, and few comrades of the movement, even, that wanted to associate with the image of an armed insurgent cast behind bars. Contrasted with the popular global outcries for academic temporary political prisoner Angela Davis, the framed Panther 21 in New York, and other ‘above ground’ activists, Jihad says that many BLA comrades were on their own those initial years of imprisonment.

“Palestinians must denounce certain affiliations, determined by the West, to be considered worthy of living,” El-Kurd writes in the third chapter of his book. Discussing the insidious logic of ‘innocence’ and the implications of even well-meaning “liberals” distancing themselves from armed Palestinian resistance in order to make appeals to the humanity of the colonizers, El-Kurd illuminates the shortcomings of this approach: “Bombs do not discriminate on the basis of political ideology.”

Like Palestinians who are forced to perform absolute innocence to receive any ‘condolences’ or sympathy, our political prisoners are often abandoned if their resistance doesn’t conform to colonizer-approved methods of struggle. Last month, I watched as the West Bank erupted in crowds of celebration when 90 Palestinian hostages were freed in the first prisoner exchange, a result of the ceasefire agreement the Zionists have now broken dozens of times.

Photos of loved ones emerging to tender crowds, strong embraces, and Palestinian flags waving contrasted with just how battered many appeared. Palestinian scholar and PFLP leader, Khalida Jarrar, emerged from the Zionist dungeons appearing as if she’d aged a decade in just one year, while others who had spent decades inside were finally freed. Stirring videos of the resistance fighters receiving teary hugs and admiration have also filled popular social media feeds and international news, though little is shown across U.S. media.

This process has not only been about individuals coming home from Zionist gulags, though that is probably the primary cause of excitement. This was a display of a community reaffirming their commitment to their freedom fighters in every sense of the term: those in the prisons, those on the frontlines, and the many more simply caught in between a colonial system designed for their destruction and a liberation war.

What Palestinians fundamentally understand, from children to elderly, is that the movement does not abandon its own. The fight doesn’t end at the prison gate — prison is a continuation of struggle, not a conclusion — and the futures of those outside are deeply connected with those behind colonizers’ bars. And perhaps most important is the clear example of rejecting the perfect victimhood that we in the West often require of our solidarity, support, and movements.

Black organizers and revolutionaries in the U.S. must witness this dedication and take it to heart. Last August in Atlanta, the Black Alliance for Peace hosted the first CurbFest for Political Prisoners in Atlanta, a national event to raise awareness for our incarcerated fighters. Plastered across walls stood images of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Kamau Sadiki, Imam Jamil Al-Amin, Leonard Peltier, and others. But where were the crowds? Where was the eruption of community support that Palestinians show for their imprisoned every day?

Ruchell Magee spent almost all of ages 16 to 83 incarcerated, only to die from brutal prison conditions a mere 81 days after his release in 2023. Black Liberation Army warrior and acupuncturist Mutulu Shakur spent 37 years in imperialist dungeons, surviving only 8 months after his 2022 release. Brother Jalil Muntaqim spent 49 years locked down, and upon his release in 2020, must witness a Black “movement” quicker to mobilize against puppet presidents than for his locked-up comrades.

Whether longtime fighters like Ahmad Sa’adat, youth defying U.S. weapons by throwing rocks, or countless others swept away in mass arrests, Palestinians show us how to refuse letting prison walls disappear their people. Their names are spoken. Their stories are told. Their freedom is demanded at every turn, on every tongue and in every chant.

Even in the absence of their successful freedom, the narratives of their extreme resistance from the inside fill the voices of Palestinians. I was filled with emotion the first time I learned about Walid Daqqah from a comrade of mine, who shared that despite him being imprisoned, he’d smuggled out his seed, to have a daughter with his wife and carry on his legacy. Such resilience is baked into the DNA of how Daqqah is memorialized, and is the substance of aspiration for those of us on the other side of the prison walls.

Under a fundamentally racist, colonial, and genocidal system, the conditions of imprisonment are inherently political. If we don’t build a movement strong enough to bring them home, we signal to the state that its war on Black liberation has worked—that prisons have broken our backs and souls. What the Palestinians have done, above all, is to make the prison struggle a popular struggle; one that saturates the mainstream and the popular consciousness of most Palestinians. We have ultimately failed to do the same.

The Palestinian movement also makes it clear: a revolutionary movement that abandons its political prisoners abandons itself.

The Palestinian movement also makes it clear: a revolutionary movement that abandons its political prisoners abandons itself. Struggle brings repression, and for those who truly dare to fight for freedom, prison is perhaps as inevitable as death. It is suicidal to not see ourselves reflected in the faces of our political prisoners and organize accordingly.

Today, Jihad Abdulmumit is the National Co-Chair of the Jericho Movement for Political Prisoners, an organization founded in the 90s by former political prisoners themselves, Jalil Muntaqim and Safiya Bukhari. It is one of the only legacy organizations in the U.S. that has carried the fight for political prisoners, and all prisoners, as its chief mission for almost 30 years now. Before it, no such organization truly existed in its form.

The support we give to the Jericho Movement today is the support we build for ourselves and our comrades tomorrow; the infrastructure for freeing our political prisoners, for popularizing their struggles, is also the infrastructure we build for ourselves as revolutionaries. Our loud denunciations of the targeting of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network are rehearsals for defending our own organizations, defending our own solidarity networks. Every community event that you hold to write letters to and raise funds for political prisoners, builds the muscle memory for when we might need those letters and funds ourselves. And the people we rally to the streets may become the acid that melts away the prison bars that we would otherwise die behind.

We have allowed our political prisoners to become ghosts, within a movement claiming to want radical exorcism of oppressive systems. Until we rectify this, learning from our Palestinian siblings the need for a popular movement, we impair our ability to walk forward. The path ahead is clear: we must reject the “perfect victim” narrative that has caused us to abandon our most dedicated fighters, which leads us to leave our most voracious freedom fighters unspoken, and instead build a movement that, like Palestine’s, fights as fiercely for those behind the walls as for those in front of them.

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=17447