While many in this capitalist country appear shocked and awed at the revealing of abuse, torture, and death in Iraq, as a prisoner captive in the prison system of the U.S., I can tell my listeners that similar techniquest of sensory deprivation (limited exposure to sight, sound, smell, touch, taste) and R.E.S. (reduced environmental stimulation) have been taking place right here across the U.S. in the strategically placed concentration camps. As I write this there are over two million held in thirty-nine penal colonies. A significant portion or us are spending twenty to twenty-three hours a day locked in a mirrorless, windowless 8x10 iron and steel cubicle, receiving only ten hours weekly of fresh air and exercise. The dog pens, 8x10 gated cages that you see in use on Guantanamo Bay, have origins in and connections to the U.S. prison system. On top of being held, we are also being abused, tortured, murdered, and sadistically sexually attacked. While a circus of debate goes on about the colonial chiefs' power to detain suspected terrorists and material alleged supporters from all over the world as enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, I would call attention to the thirty-nine strategically placed Guantanamo's right here in the U.S.
Many here may be unaware of their existence because they are on the outskirts of major cities. As one who is tormented in one of them, I can tell you they are huge human warehouses designed with a dual purpose. First, as M.I.M. has correctly analyzed, they are social, political, economic, and genetic control centers. Those who are reeling from the photographs coming out of Iraq and believe it some new precedent are sorely mistaken. This has been occurring to the impoverished and criminalized in dungeons across the state in Avenal, Tehachapi, Chino, California Men's Colony, Corcoran (one of the hugest complexes and most notorious), San Quentin, California Women's Colony, Soledad, Susanville, Vacaville, Norco, Folsom, Calipatria, Chuckawalla, Tracy, Mole Creek, Pelican Bay, Donovan, Centinela, High Desert, Salinas, Wasco, Jamestown, Lancaster, Blythe, Coalinga, Chowchilla, and the latest, recently built at a 595-million-dollar price tag, Delano. There are no rehabilitative programs--just abuse, torture, and exploitation. These centers' main function is as a weapon, methodically constructed to torment, kill, and psychologically break the rebellious--and, as time will show soon, the masses themselves who resist capitalism and its vampirish exploits. "In a world of international deceit, speaking the truth is a revolutionary act." The quote is George Orwell.
Since my being sent to the camps as a third-strike offender, I've received the equivalent of a death sentence; to be held captive and abused is to be confronted with cruelty. MIM is aware of the sadistic acts and runs a section on it in the pages of "MIM Notes" called "Under Lock and Key." This is not some sensationalist speech to bring powerful speech and then to be forgotten tomorrow. Soon capitalist America is going to ratchet up its suppression of dissent, and many who may have good intentions idly voicing views will find themselves hauled off to the kamps to face horrific acts. How many of you have attended boisterous rallies of protest only to be confronted with jackbooted government-sponsored repression? In the minds of those who diligently serve this blood-sucking system and maintain its daily horror of operations, the kamps represent island-like battlegrounds of the homefront. Men and women believe they are protecting, but they are sustaining and sanctioning abuse, torture, and murder. The stigma constructed of the imprisoned as "subhumans" and criminals, or enemies of the State, has stuck to them. These camps are all over. How many more will it take before it's realized that it's time for the proletariat to rise to the demands of its time? Must I remind you of the coercion and consent that saturated Germany? The German Empire collapsed in 1918, and the Nazis rose to power from 1920 onward. Has the world forgotten the murdrous atrocities of the Third Reich? Today in capitalist America, Bush (and presidents following) are proceeding to bring about a totalitarian regime, just as Hitler did in Germany. Who does not see that churches, labor unions, and polticians (Democrats, Republicans, and Greens) are all organs of the State? Today every medium of communication--radio, newspapers, motion pictures, magazines, and books--are used to manipulate public opinion.
Again, Bush, just as Hitler, is using concentration camps to silence dissenters, opponents, and alleged combatants. The war in Iraq is only part of the bloody imperialist agenda. This system and the Empire is has given rise to are rooted in global capitalism and imperialism. This system demands exploitation of markets, resources, and lives, and the military domination of vast stretches of the globe by a handful of powerful capitalist states. This blood-sucking system has $5 trillion invested overseas, does $2 trillion in foreign trade a year, and operates networks of manufacturing, finance, and commerce that ring the planet. I'm in solidarity with MIM, who has again stated that the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex will over-extend itself, inviting the rise of the oppressed within the belly of this nation. Some 500,000 U.S. troops are stationed at 700 military bases in 120 of the UN's 189 member states. The U.S. imperialists spend $450 billion a year on the military, more than any other nation. Just as Hitler geared Germany's economy to defense and expansion, so is the U.S. The bloody imperialist plans are to reshape the world by conquest, murder, and manipulation. Iraq is only the consistent pattern of the warhawks' plans. Today's camps, just as in Germany, are founded upon the function of terrorizing. Auschwitz and Birkenau not only became the largest concentration camps, but the largest death camps, though initially used for the benefit of industry, agriculture, and to clear bombing refuse. Who among the listeners recalls Germany's "SS Construction Brigades," where prisoners were marched out to back-breaking work, subject to malnourishment and murder? Recall the winter of 1943-33, when those who refused to work harder, or who simply could not, were executed in the streets. And what about the A4" Rocket Programme Assembly Lin at Peenemünde? In the A4" programme, thousands were worked to death in a futile endeavor--Russians, Germans, Polish, and French prisoners from Buchenwald. More people died in the production of the rockets than hit targets.
And what of corporations involved in enslavement and murder--IG Farben, Siemens, Daimler-Benz, Ferdinand, Porsche all used and exploited captives to death. And do recall Volkswagen Works, which established a camp called "Work Village." Volkswagen was anxious to become the main producers of the flying bomb, and Bayerische Motoren Werke (BMW) had profited and were making motors for aircraft. By 1939 BMW had a monopoly on air-cooled motors. And what of Krups, the steel company giant who had incessant demands for slave laborers? Camps bulged with Poles, Czechs, Norwegians, Frenchman, Belgians, Dutchmen, and Serbs. By 1942 camp numbers had increased to 100,000; by August 1943 (in spite of astoundingly high death rates in the camps), numbers doubled to 224,000; by August 1944, 528, 268; by January 1945, 714,211 (511,537 men and 202, 674 women). When Germany's war ended there were 700,000 in the camps, but some figures have it at 750,000. Death were staggering, the lowest total being 250,000. Larger camps, like the one at Treblinka, killed nearly one million; at Auschwitz, the death toll was well over one million. Trains shipped many of them to Auschwitz, while many met horrific fates in the gas chambers.
What is to stop the camps throughout the U.S. from taking on assembly-line methods of annihilation and extermination, from turning to a methodical dedication to killing its now-considered-useless eater who make up two million people currently? How many remember the McCarthyist arrival of red-baiting, and denunciations in Germany? Today in the U.S., Ashcroft and his cohorts have long since begun fanning the flames of xenophobia and paranoia. U.S. prisons are already taking shape as bottomless pools of slave labor. There is a continuing tension between the hope of exploiting the semi-colonies and the drive to exterminate us all. Life sentences have and are continuing to be handed down, and in the kamps, predatory economics is the order of the day. A portion of the bloody capitalist corporations have located themselves, their main offices of production in Mexico. In Mexico you find the production facilities of most of the U.S.'s top companies, often just a short walk from open sewers and cardboards shacks inhabited by many of their workers. The largest employer in Mexico's constructed private sector is Delco, the auto-electrics parts manufacturer. Close behind come General Motors, General Electric, Phillips Petroleum, Ford, Daimler-Chrysler, Sony, Levi's, Honeywell, Baldwin Pianos, and Johnson and Johnson.
This brings me again back to Hitler, who in eighteen days conquered Poland and in 1940 seized Denmark and invaded Norway, crushed Holland and Belgium, and overflowed into France, who surrendered. Hitler was Master of Europe and in 1941 tried to bomb Britain into submission--Germany also attacked the Soviet Union. Nazi-dominated Europe was a virtual slave empire under Hitler. Hungry populations toiled for Nazi overlords. Thousands of men and women were taken to Germany as slave laborers. The Germans, just as America is doing, created an efficient apparatus that rounded up and transported people to special extermination camps, many of them in Poland. There, prisoners were worked to exhaustion before being shot or gassed. From Treblinka, Belsec, Sibibor, and Chelmo, but especially to Auschwitz, the long, slow trains began to move, carrying their wretched human freight to destruction. Before the Nazi nightmare had passed, it's estimated that six million lost their lives, not including millions of non-Jews in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Russia, and Slavs who were also victims. Who among my listeners is wise enough to seee the direction of events today in the U.S.? In Germany, prisoners were herded aboard freight trains, seventy-five people to a car, destined for Auschwitz. Men, women, and children were separated. Those who were not gassed did not scream. They just were no longer there. The crematories smoked. Today you find almost all of the U.S. kamps are located next to railroad tracks, and the net continues to be cast wider to pick up more of those stereotyped through media and press as criminal or terrorist or even "asocial." The SS abandoned Auschwitz in February 1945 to escape the advancing Russians. Russians arrived to see inflamed building and few people, who moved like sleepwalkers, half-dead, numb to feeling anything, with emaciated, sunken faces and large eyes.
If you do not see the parallels, look around you! Is not jackbooted fascism and military-style type operations the new phenomenon? While the media, politicians, and press misinform you, the technocrats keep the masses as hamsters on a wheel with "silent weapons for a quiet war" (Materialism and Artificiality). All who embrace and get joy in these are chasing fleeting contentments. These inventions and items are to keep you in a class mold and subservient to government authority while the U.S. Government continues its onward bloody capitalist/imperialist treachery, the latest being the monstrous atrocities and crimes carried out in Iraq--its indoctrination, just as in the Third Reich, diabolical treachery for men to be carrying out fascist crimes for the governing corrupt elite. The Iraqi people's struggle against imperial forces of capitalist greed is a just one. In the early centuries, such exploits were called conquering, saving, and ruling; now it's cloaked under "bringing Democracy." How many more countless lives will have to be lost before the Proletariat rises up with the Vanguard to end the capitalist imperialist monstrosity? Countless countries have been bombed since 1945. For those not knowing the horrific campaigns: China was bombed 1945-46; Korea 1950; Indonesia 1958; Cuba 1959-61; Guatemala 1960-69; Vietnam 1961-73; Congo 1964; Peru 1964-65; Laos 1965-73; Cambodia 1969-73; El Salvador 1980s; Nicaragua 1980s; Grenada 1983; Lebanon 1983-84; Libya 1986; Panama 1989; Iraq 1990 to the present; Somalia 1993; Bosnia 1994-95; Sudan 1998; Bulgaria/Macedonia 1999; Pakistan 1998; Afghanistan 1998 to the present. Today, amid scandal, continuous deception through progaganda is assertively being used. Enjoy yourself, listen to your government. Be on guard for a terror alert. There is a War on Terror going on.
Truth is, the real War on Terror hasn't even begun, although people are beginning to imagine a world where classism is abolished and the capitalist/imperialist death grip is no more. We must do more than imagin--we must advance the Vanguard Party, MIM. Today on the average ABC, NBC, and CBS stations, the propaganda apparatus is like an orchestra on a sinking ship which keeps on playing enthusiasticaly. The challenge of overthrowing this order is upon us. "A new colonial chief won't change the agenda." A Vanguard Party is needed, and a special type of country to rise up against these merchants of death. The world under their terror will be untold countless bloodbaths. And stop and think a minute, about your assumed, long since taken-for-granted privileges and what it costs the world in lives to produce the material items that we here in the U.S. find so comforting and cheap. If this country exploits, murders, and plunders abroad, what will happen when it turns its teeth inward on those who oppose its bloodthirsty agenda? This is why attention must be paid to the powerful potential frontline fighters housed in the U.S. dungeons. The New World Order is jackbooted and it's a combat boot stomping a face. In Amerikkka today the coordination--excuse me, the new Nazification of the country--is taking place in stages, and soon groups perceived as anti-American organizations, be they political parties etc. etc. will be deemed materialist supporters or, as protestors, will find themselves enemy combatants. How many people are prepared to live with the ideas now fashioning themselves (police state surveillance society)? At every level there is much popular support for expanding the missions of the new Gestapo police (watch Homeland Security). Through an extensive political science maneuver, citizens believe that police are putting away people that need to be. The cheer-on campaign continues, as fascist police encroach into ever more areas of social life. This whole new thrust is geared toward expelling or excluding wider areas os people who are not productive of sustaining this system. This kind of terror is being used as a ruling strategy to govern and control this whole nation and aimed at eliminating those on the margins.
Read MIM Notes! Don't be fooled by those in the mainstream press who tailor what they say to aid the government. Some things latent or only partially articulating themselves will give way to fully express themselves. Police prerogatives are already taking precedence over the courts and the rights of the people. In no way should the images coming out of Iraq bring temporary outrage: these depictions should spur one to action. Join MIM's platform to shut down control units called SHU's (Security Housing Units). If we had cameras here, images similar to those coming out of Iraq would have flooded the public years ago, to know what's going on and to join in the advance of socialism and eventually communism upon capitalism's, imperialism's, classism's, sexism's, and patriarchy's death. The conclusion is this inescapable: without active collaboration (coercion and consent), it would be impossible to bring about these ongoing methodical methods of destruction and death. In closing, the universe inclines toward order, not disorder; and certainly the victimizer is only as strong as the victims are weak, and the manipulator is only capable of manipulation so long as the masses will themselves to be manipulated.
--A California prisoner, July 2004
See MIM's line on fascism in Amerika