Under Lock & Key

At the end of Orisanmi Burton’s Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt – a book USW cadre have been studying since its’ release in late October 2023 – Burton correctly labels the prison tablets supplied to the imprisoned lumpen by predatory prison communications companies like Securus and Global Tel Link(GTL)/ViaPath Technologies as “the cutting edge of carceral war.”(1)

Much has already been written by MIM and USW comrades about these tablets including the several areas Burton shortly discusses; the use of predatory pricing strategies that extract even more money from oppressed nation communities, expanding the surveillance state, and behavior modification/digital babysitters.(2) What has not been discussed in much detail is the use of the tablets as imperialist propaganda machines.

Of course, all of the content on the tablets is highly censored, with an extensive vetting process for orgs who want to place their content on them. On the GTL/ViaPath tablets we have at Main Jail in San Jose (Model VT-TABLET-5081S) the only app we have besides the GTL phone app is the free edu-tainment platform “Edovo”, which is – to no ones’ surprise – full of garbage content.

Shortly after the Palestinian resistance launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, smashing the Iron Wall and entering the rest of their homeland as a force to be reckoned with, there was an almost weekly upload of Christian Zionist and other Zionist propaganda pushed onto the platform. The first of these that I noticed was the feature film “Exodus: Gods & Kings” which details the Old Testament story of Moses leading the Israelites to Palestine, or as it is called in the movie, Canaan. This story, along with several other books of the Old Testament, are the basis for what Zionists today use as their claim to Palestine as their “ancient homeland”. And yet, as Palestinian hystorian Nur Masalha writes, “The Old Testament is not actual history but imaginative fiction, theology, sacred literature, ethics and wisdom.”(3) In short, the stories that Zionists base their land claims to Palestine on are myth narratives, not proven hystory.

Roughly around the same time, episodes of a Christian Zionist podcast started to be uploaded to Edovo. This podcast, called “Real Vida TV”, is put together by evangelists from Tyler, Texas who use their show to spread vaccine/COVID conspiracy theories popular among the Amerikan right, as well as anti-immigrant, queer & transphobic rhetoric alongside Bible verses.

Since October 7th they’ve been spreading the usual Zionist lies of mass rape, beheading babies, etc… that the imperialist media continues to propagate. They also have been tying everything occurring in Palestine and the Middle East into the strange and insane “end times” prophecies that are the main reason for the strong support of Christian Zionism, led mostly by Amerikan evangelists.

To understand this a bit better, let’s take a step back from the Zionist podcast and take a closer look at Christian Zionism, which, to my knowledge, hasn’t had anything substantial written on it in ULK.

Evangelical Christians, the bulk of Christian Zionists in the United $tates, take the writings in the bible literally. To get a numerical picture, there are roughly around 15 million Jews around the world today (which I’d like to note, a large percentage are anti-Zionist and completely reject the genocidal state of “i$rael”); in comparison there are over 70 million evangelicals who share the same “ironclad” support of “i$rael” as Genocide Goe in the United $tates. Christian Zionism also finds its roots in the Bible, but it is not because of some altruistic wish to “return” the Jews to the safety of their so-called “ancient homeland”. The return and consolidation of the Jews in the land of Palestine is supported so strongly by the Christian Zionists because they believe once this has been finally accomplished their “messiah” Jesus Christ will return, render judgement(punishment) upon the nonbelievers (which includes Jews as they do not believe Christ is the “messiah”), and then get into motion the so-called end-times prophecies of the Book of Revelation (which depicts Armageddon), where the non-believers will burn and the true believers will float up with Jesus to LaLa Land.

No, I am not making this up sadly.

Even more sadly, these views are being used by those who produce the podcast to justify the ongoing genocide and dispossession of Palestinian people, the actual indigenous inhabitants of the land of Palestine.

What’s worse, at least for Our comrades in Texas, is that these Christian Zionists go to and have access to all of the TDCJ gulags where they can spread this poisonous rhetoric, possibly making it even harder to shift public opinion in the units in favor of the Palestinian liberation struggle (I’d be interested to know the point of view of Our comrades in Texas on this). As the Zionists and their imperialist backers continue to spread their lies to try to sway the opinions of the masses toward support of their genocidal logic, We must counter them in every way We can, especially in the writing and dissemination of articles on Palestine in the pages of ULK, and by supporting/working on the USW Palestine campaign.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!

MIM(Prisons) adds: A USW leader in Florida wrote an article on the Biblical “history” of the Jewish people. We are not printing that article. But here is their explanation for the approach they took in that piece:

“I’m hearing pro-I$raeli comments in the quad and on the yard every day. Prisoners are completely swallowing and promoting the CIPWS zionist pro I$raeli narrative, ie., that the Palestinians brought the genocide upon themselves when they attacked I$raeli citizens, rather than settlers/invaders, on October 7, 2023, rather than in response to 70-plus years of CIPWS zionist occupation and oppression.

“I am surrounded by prisoners who hear the word”Israel” and automatically think “Jesus”. Prisoners see the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict and situation from a biblical point of view rather than a historical and U.$. imperialist political one.

“The average prisoner had never heard of Hamas, Zionists, Hizbullah, Houthi, etc. until recently. Prisoners identify with Israel mostly due to religion and all they are told is that Israel was attacked by Palestinians, and that Palestinians want Israel extinct, even as they see the total opposite happening with their own oppressed eyes. Even Muslims here, due to subliminal incognizance, do not support or identify with he Palestinians’ plight. They see the Palestinians, not as victims, but as terrorists, not as brothers.”

As members of United Struggle from Within (USW) have come out in strong support of the Palestinian resistance, we see this is not representative of the consciousness of the imprisoned lumpen as a whole. Thus the need for our leaders inside to continue this campaign to support Palestine in the realm of education and ideological struggle among the oppressed in this country. People who are suffering a lower level genocide through the prison system itself are somehow identifying with their own oppressor. If the national liberation struggles were stronger in this country, we would be seeing a lot more support for national liberation of Palestine here as well.

^{Notes:
(1) Burton, Orisami, “Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt”,(University of California Press, 2023),p.227
(2) Ibid. p.228
(3) Masalh, Nur, “Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History”,(I.B. Taurus, 2018) p.30}

“I held my gun so that the generations after me could hold a sickle…” -Palestinian song, Ahd Allah Ma Nerhal (By God We Won’t Leave)

“… [W]e have hope because we know, now more than ever, that these horrors in the name of upholding a racist settler-colonial occupation are not going to last forever. Anyone who ever thought it would will be astounded in hindsight.” -Rawan Masri, “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood Was An Act of Decolonization”

I, like most of Our comrades who contribute to and/or read ULK and organize behind the gulag walls, have been following the ongoing genocide carried out by the Zionist entity upon the people of Palestine with varied mixtures of feelings, with the number one emotion being unadulterated rage alongside an equal amount of awe at the steadfast courage of the Palestinian resistance and their allies throughout the Middle East.

You might think that the rage stems from the atrocious conduct that sadly has been par for the course of the Zionists since at least 1947 in the beginnings of what would become the Nakba carried out by the various Zionist terror organizations such as the Haganah, Irgun and LEHI who most infamously were responsible for the April 9, 1948 Deir Yassin massacre in which 250 defenseless Palestinians were slaughtered, including 100 wimmin and children, and then the village was looted and plundered. While I cannot deny that the daily depredations of the Zionist occupation forces raises my ire profoundly, the rage actually stems more from the stunning ignorance of the so-called “friends and supporters” of I$rael who voice their profoundly inaccurate, and most of the time entirely false statements, “history lessons on the so-called ‘conflict’,” (non)interpretations of the international law, and most importantly their insistence on not calling the Zionist entity’s actions and policies what they’ve been since the start of the ethnic cleansing under Plan Dalet beginning in April 1948: genocidal. Many of these people are probably of the opinion as well that the vast majority of other settler-colonist projects (such as the United $nakes, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, etc.) were also not genocidal from their beginnings, likely using the age old excuses of blaming the so-called “savages” for provoking the “reasonable” and “peace loving” settlers into defending themselves and the land they mistakenly believe they didn’t steal thanks to their belief that God gifted or promised it to them in perpetuity because “he’s God” and “what he says goes.”(1) These “friends and supporters” of I$rael will do absolutely no research into the validity of their statements, instead choosing to equate the Palestinian struggle to liberate all of the historic Palestine and finally be free to return to their lands with a genocidal Arab conspiracy to wipe out the Jews.

So in the interests of correcting the misinformation and lies, and cutting through the Zionist propaganda it stems from and in full solidarity with Our comrades across historic Palestine, in the diaspora, on campuses and in the streets, this article will attempt to deconstruct some of the most common discourse that is parroted in the mainstream media which has fueled this latest round of anti-Arab hysteria and Islamophobia and crucially, the pattern of Amerikan rejectionism to Palestinian Liberation and indifference to the crimes of its client state.

As communists or anarchists (as many of Our comrades who read ULK identify as), it behooves Us to study history, and studying the histories of what has become known as the Palestinian-I$raeli conflict and the principal actors and organizations is not an exception to this rule.

So in that context, I will begin with one of the Zionists’ more devious lies; the so-called I$raeli “purity of arms” and its common usage, that I$rael never targets civilians or civilian infrastructure. Although any cursory observation of I$rael’s conduct from the 1948 Nakba to the present day would prove otherwise, We can look to none other than Zionist hero and first prime minister David Ben-Gurion for the proof. In his Independence War Diary, he set down on paper the military doctrine that would become standard protocol throughout the history of the Zionist project.

There is no question as to whether a reaction is necessary or not. The question is only time and place. Blowing up a house is not enough. What is necessary is cruel strong reactions. We need precision in time place and causalities. If we know the family – [we must] strike mercilessly, women and children included. Otherwise the reaction is inefficient. At the place of action there is no need to distinguish between guilty and innocent.(2)

This specific entry was written on January 1, 1948, one day after the Haganah occupied the Palestinian village of Balad al-Shaykh, the burial place of Shaykh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam (one of Palestine’s most revered resistance leaders of the 1920’s and 30’s), massacring over 60 Palestinian civilians, men, wimmin, and children, most while they were asleep in their homes. This massacring of civilians in their sleep over 75 years ago lines up exactly with the countless stories told by survivors of today’s indiscriminate bombings to the doctors that have been working nonstop within the largely destroyed remains of Gaza’s hospitals.(3)

Let us also remember that when Ben-Gurion wrote those words, the Zionist leadership at the time was working on “Plan Dalet”, finalized on March 10, 1948, which was the military blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine.(4)

To illustrate before moving on to the next topic, lets look back at two of the lesser known massacres during the initial Nakba; “Lydda and Ramla” and “Safsah.”

On a blistering hot Ramadan day in July 1948, a Haganah general named Yitzhak Rabin (who would later become ambassador to Washington D.C., then I$raeli Prime Minister, then sign the Oslo accords on the White House lawn, then be assassinated for it by I$raeli reactionaries) descended upon the Palestinian towns of Lydda and Ramla with his unit and violently expelled approximately 50,000 men, wimmin and children.

In Lydda, dozens of Palestinians were gathered and detained in the Dahmash mosque and church premises, all unarmed, and were subsequently gunned down. Afterwards the Zionists gathered an additional 20 to 50 Palestinians to clean up the mosque and bury all of the bodies. After they had placed the bodies in their graves, they themselves were slot into the open graves and left there to bleed out and die. In total between 250 to 400 Palestinians were massacred in Lydda. An additional 350 more died after being expected and forced to march to the frontlines of the Arab armies in what would become known as the Lydda Death March.(5)

As a sidenote, the events that occurred at Lydda and the subsequent death march after, were a formative event in the life of a young George Habash, who was from Lydda, and in 1948 at age 19 left the American University in Beirut, Lebanon where he was a medical student and returned to Lydda during the war to help his family. The Haganah attacked the town soon after, and in the subsequent death march, without water or food, during Ramadan no less, his sister died before they reached the Arab army’s frontlines. This could possibly be one of the reasons which fed his uncompromising leadership and opposition to the Zionist regime as a pivotal leader of first the Harakat al-Qawmiyyin al-Arab (Arab Nationalist Movement) and then of the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Lastly, we come to the massacre at Safsaf during the initial Nakba. Though this is one of the lesser known atrocities of the Nakba, it is vital to the overall understanding, as a quarter of the 12 well documented instances of rape by the Zionists were recorded here (though many more may have occurred, lost to history but not to the long memory of the people and the land of Palestine).

The Zionists started by cleansing the town by using their “patented” strategy of surrounding the town on 3 sides, firing into the air and into the sides of buildings in the hopes of driving the population out of the fourth, open side of the town. Then they entered the town, gathering up all of those who still remained in their homes, initially shooting and killing 12 young men. The remaining 52 men were caught, then tied together and thrown into a pit the Zionists dug, then subsequently shot and killed. Seeing this, the remaining wimmin of the town came and asked the Zionists for mercy. The Zionists, not being satisfied with the massacre they had just committed, told several of the wimmin to go and fetch water to the town. Once they moved away from the others, they were followed by the militiamen and raped, two of the wimmin being killed in the process. The womyn who survived was a child of fourteen years old.(6) These are just a few of the massacres of civilians by the Zionists during the initial Nakba. If we line them up alongside others, for instance, the October 1953 massacre in the West Bank village of Qibya by Ariel Sharon’s (another past war criminal made prime minister) infamous unit 101 of the I$raeli Defense Forces (IDF) special forces, the October 1956 Kafr Qasim massacre, the full IDF support given during the 1982 Lebanon war to their proxies, the Christian Phalangist and Maronite militias, to massacre 2,000 civilians in the Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila (which in hindsight was probably the last time there was mass protests within I$rael by Jews over their regime’s crimes against Palestinians), to the more recent wars, like today’s war, but also ones such as during “Operations Cast Lead” in 2008-09 which the UN’s fact finding report (Goldstone report) called a “deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorize a civilian population”, a certain pattern starts to emerge; one of the ethnic cleansing and genocide, funded and with political cover by Amerika.

Genocide & Denial

Genocide, the word as well as the action hangs heavy over Amerika and I$rael, so much so that it has stopped many from speaking out and acknowledging the Zionist regime’s actions against Palestine as genocidal.

A comrade over at Slingshot Collective in Berkeley, CA wrote an article for their latest newspaper issue, trying to elaborate on the reasons behind the silence during an active genocide, and though I agree with many of their conclusions (not wanting to sound “anti-Semitic”, general Amerikan apathy and indifference to the suffering of others and not wanting to split the Democratic Party base leading to a Trump victory this election year), I think there are other, deeper explanations for this, as well as outright genocide denial.(7)

When most Amerikans and I$raelis think about the word genocide, it is inevitable that they will first think of the Holocaust. The mass shootings carried out by the Einstatzgruppen and the gassing and immolation of millions of Ashkenazi Jews are rightfully called genocide; and yet many of these same Amerikans and I$raelis forget the genocide of approximately half of the 2 million Sinti and Romani peoples (Gypsies) of German occupied Europe known as the Porrajmos in the Romani language, nor do they seem to remember the systematic massacres of Slavic, gay, and disabled peoples along with many political dissidents during the same time period by Nazi Germany.(8) And so, the benchmark for both countries for some act to count as genocide is something which looks like the Holocaust; a massive extermination of people in a relatively short amount of time.

And yet, the Nazi genocide and Zionist genocide do not resemble each other structurally or in any other meaningful way.

Like the settler colonial regimes of the United $nakes, Canada, New Zealand and Australia among others, the genocides that took place upon the indigenous First Nations have taken place over many decades, a small act here, a large act there, and this is what the genocide of the Palestinian Arab people by the Zionist regime has looked like and continues to look like to this day.(9)

As this practice of genocide continues against the people of Palestine, so too does Amerika continue this practice upon the internal semi-colonies of New Afrikans, Chican@s, and the First Nations here on occupied Turtle Island. Amerika also has a very interesting, as well as appalling, history relating to the UN Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that bears mentioning.

After its founding convention in San Francisco in 1945, the United Nations set about sponsoring the creation of an international legal instrument for the prevention and punishment of genocide. The job for drafting this document was handed down to the Economic and Social Council of the UN General Assembly (GA) which retained several international legal consultants foremost among them Dr. Raphael Lemkin; an exiled Polish-Jewish jurist who had in 1944 coined the term ‘genocide’ in his work “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.” Lemkin, who authored most of the draft, submitted it in June 1947, and a month later it was rejected by several member states of the General Assembly, foremost among them the United $nakes, because of “important philosophical disagreements.” It was edited and then finally adopted by the GA on December 9, 1948. By 1951 enough countries had ratified it to afford it the status of binding international law; except for a partial ratification (with conditions and edits) in 1988 by the Reagan Administration, the U.$. has still not ratified the convention in its entirety.(10)

First off, lets look at what the parts of Lemkin’s draft were so “philosophically disagreeable” to the United $tates. Lemkin was extremely thorough in the draft document, where he included linguistic and political groups under currently protected groups of racial, national, and religious groups. Also importantly, he included to the list of punishable acts (enumerated in Article 3 of the current convention) engaging in a number of “preparatory” acts such as developing techniques of genocide and setting up installations for the purpose of committing genocide.

Already we can see that if the above made it into final draft, both Amerika and I$rael would have been in the ‘hot seat’, so to speak.

Lemkin also included preventing the “preservation or development” of the above groups as a punishable act as well as policies that would bring about the disintegration of the political, social, or economic structure of a group or nation (author’s note: Settlers & Neocolonialists Beware!).

Lastly and most crucially, Lemkin detailed 3 distinct and specific forms of genocide: physical, biological, and cultural. For physical genocide he included “slow death” measures such as the “subjection to conditions of life which, owing to lack of proper housing, clothing, food, hygiene and medical care… are likely to result in debilitation or death of individuals”, as well as “deprivation of all means of livelihood by confiscation of property, looting, curtailment of work, and denial of housing and supplies otherwise available to the other inhabitants of the territory concerned.” Biological genocide, apart from compulsory abortion and sterilization, included segregation of the sexes and obstacles to marriage. Cultural genocide included forced and systematic exile of individuals representing the culture of a group, as well as the destruction of a groups historical or religious monuments and the destruction of a group’s historical, artistic, and religious documents or objects.(11)

If one looks to the UN Genocide Convention today, it would be entirely accurate to say it no longer resembles in any meaningful way the original intentions of the author(s).

One might ask what the consequences of this are, and though there are many, I’ll only go into one.

Consequently, it has continued to further obfuscate what constitutes genocide, further allowing imperialist and reactionary regimes to continue policies of genocidal oppression, domestically as well as in the Global South. Yet as a direct result of this in the case of I$rael, many countries in the Global South have had enough of the genocidal Zionist regime. Most importantly South Africa (where the Zionists supported the apartheid regime before its collapse) charged the Zionist entity with genocide at the ICC in the Hague. Many Central and South American countries, like Chile and Honduras, who both had to deal with genocidal reactionary regimes propped up by the support of both Amerika and I$rael, have both said enough is enough, and recalled their ambassadors to I$rael over the Amerikan funded genocide.(12) And also extremely important, and as a great way to segue into my last topic of this article, it has set off an explosion of support for Palestine from within the belly of the imperialist beast, in the U.$. but also all across Europe; vital to this effort has been Our comrades on college campuses across Turtle Island.

Student Activism and U.$. Attempts to “Silence the Intifada”

When the first encampments and building occupations were setup, from Columbia University to campuses across Turtle Island all the way to UC Berkeley, though I wasn’t surprised, (and forgive me for my emotional subjectiveness) tears of joy and pride sprang to my eyes as I watched the moving images on CNN move across the screen. Not since the Vietnam War and organizations like Student for a Democratic Society (SDS) have we seen the anti-war movement, nor the BDS movement since South African apartheid, consolidate into such a huge outpouring of love, rage, and solidarity on college campuses.

I was sadly also not surprised when the Pro-Zionist reactionaries sent the pigs in to silence the movement, nor have I been surprised at the Zionist propaganda campaign attempting to label the entire Palestinian solidarity movement “anti-Semitic” and “violent”, even going so far (a la Stop Cop City activists) as calling all protesting for Palestine “terrorists” and “supporters of terrorists”. Here in the Bay Area, there have been lies spread saying that the BDS strategy is no longer viable or legally possible for UC Board of Regents to boycott/divest from the Zionist entity, which has been uncovered as a lie to get Our comrades at Berkeley to abandon their camp and goals. Whether divestment is possible, we can look to the success of the BDS movement in 1986 at Berkeley to finally pressure the UC to divest $3.1 billion from companies doing business with apartheid South Africa.(13) Aside from this it’s also been insane to watch the bipartisan effort, from genocide Joe to the outer reaches of the far right, to attempt to get the masses concerned with some of the alleged rhetoric of individuals on campus and the violence (which from numerous sources have been proven to be incited by Zionist counter-demonstrators and the pigs) at the encampments, to try to get everyone to somehow forget his “ironclad” support of I$raeli genocide. Sadly for Genocide Joe and his Pro-Zionist rabble in Congress, students on campuses across Turtle Island have dug in and refused the false images the imperialists and their media have tried to paint of them, and have let the imperialists know 3 things: We are NOT going anywhere, We will NOT be silenced, and PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!

As the college term wraps up for the summer and many in the Palestine Solidarity Movement, on and off campus, set their sights this summer on an explosive confrontation at the Democratic National Convention alongside many other avenues for protest and action, I’d like to give one bit of advice if any students or other outside comrades may be reading: I think aside from the also important avenues of protest and actions here in the belly of the imperialist beast, it would be extremely beneficial to send as many comrades (students or otherwise) to the West Bank this summer, to live and learn among the Palestinian people themselves. Mao himself called attention numerous times to the importance of this, as did Huey P. Newton which led him to visit revolutionary China. SDS and what would become the Weather Underground Organization (WU) also saw the importance of this in the 60’s and early 70’s meeting with revolutionaries from Cuba, Vietnam, and other countries to learn about them, their life and their struggle from their own points of view and in their own voices.

As the Zionists have only continued the ramping up of repression in the West Bank since operation Al-Aqsa Flood, you could also play an integral role in getting the stories of Palestinians there back to the masses here in the U.$. as well as help in the already ongoing humanitarian efforts going on there. Just something to think about as we move into the summer.

In case you weren’t aware, We behind the gulag walls admire your unshakable and uncompromising support for Palestine’s liberation, and your unwavering courage in the face of wave after wave of attacks by Zionist reactionaries and their pig helpers. You inspire us behind the wall and We can’t wait to see what you do next.

From the river to the sea,
Palestine will be Free!

MIM(Prisons) responds: Wimmin and children have fought bravely in the resistance to Zionist occupation. There is something concrete to seeing the murder of children as more egregious in terms of the immiseration of a people via genocide by destroying its capacity to produce for the nation and build the future. But to treat wimmin’s lives as more precious or needing additional protection feeds into the patriarchal thinking that lets I$rael use myths of rape to rally support for bombing thousands of more Palestinians. To the extent that it is true that grown men are doing more of the fighting for Palestine, this only demonstrates the value their lives have for the nation.

MIM talked about genocide as one of a number of forms of “absolute immiseration” today:

“there is a sociology discourse claiming that Marx’s ideas of”absolute deprivation” are incorrect, because supposedly absolute immiseration of the proletariat has not happened under capitalism since Marx’s time. …To avoid talking about [examples of absolute immiseration like] militarism, the environment and prison, the bourgeois social scientists talk about “relative deprivation” …Genocide is a matter of absolute immiseration. There can be nothing worse.”

It is no mystery that Palestine is a key contradiction in the imperialist system today. It is not because Palestinians play an important role in value production, but because of the absolute immiseration they face at the hands of U.$. imperialism in its attempt to maintain a foothold in the part of the world they happen to inhabit.

<sup>Notes: 1. Patrick Wolfe, December 2006, “Settler Colonialism and the elimination of the native”, Journal of Genocide Research, 814
2. Noam Chomsky, “The Fateful Triangle – The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, ( Haymarket Books, 2014), pp. 200
3. Irfan Galaria, February 23, 2024,”Doctor in Gaza sees only annihilation”, San Jose Mercury News
4. Noam Chomsky & Ilan Pappe, “Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on the U.S. Israeli War on the Palestinians” (Haymarket Books, 2013), pp.69
5. Nur Masalha, “The Palestinian Nakba: Decolonizing History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory” (Zed Books, 2012), pp. 86
6. Adel Manna, “Nakba and Survival: The Story of Palestinians who Remained inn Haifa and the Galilee, 1948-1956” (University of California Press, (2022), pp. 75-80
7. Kermit, “Watching and Waiting?: On Speaking Out & Being Silent During Genocide”, Slingshot Issue 140 Summer 2024, pp. 2-3
8. Ward Churchill, “A little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present” (City Lights Books, 1997), pp. 36-49
9. Patrick Wolfe, December 2006, “Settler Colonialism and the elimination of the native”, Journal of Genocide Research, 814
10. Ward Churchill, pp. 363-364
11. Ward Churchill, pp. 265-366
12. FP Explainers, 3 May 2024, After Colombia, now Turkey: Which other nations have cut ties with Israel over Gaza war?, FirstPost.com
13. DD, “Resisting the Neoliberal University & Unethical Investment”, Slingshot Issue 140 Summer 2024, pp. 5
14. MC5, March 1999, On the Internal Class Structure of the Internal Semi-Colonies, MIM Theory 14: United Front, p.57-58.</sup>

Re: “Prisoner Put in Solitary for Organizing Political Education in Ohio”, by an Ohio Prisoner

Greetings comrade,

While I wish I could do more to help you combat the political repression you are experiencing within the Ohio gulags, I am sending MIM a leaflet in hopes that it may help you as a replacement for your “self help litigation manual” that you mention was (intentionally) lost. Comrades @ Midwest Books to Prisoners have formatted Columbia University’s “Jailhouse Lawyers Manual” (JLM) into zines (one chapter per pamphlet) and will send you 3-5 per request, for free. I hope these pamphlets will help you get around the pigs not allowing you to order books from the SHU.

|1321 N. Milwaukee Ave | PMB #460 | Chicago, IL 60622

Re: “Prisoners Punished for Drug Problem in Texas” by a Texas Prisoner

Though I will not pretend to know what goes on within the oppressive behemoth that is the TDCJ (being that I am going on 3 years here in a county jail in the Bay Area), I read recently after receiving ULK 83 a news snippet within the newest edition of the anti-authoritarian/anarchist website ItsGoingDown’s newsletter “IN Contempt #34” that might shed some light on the reasons behind the Sep. 6th lockdown for Texas’ gulags. I copy it verbatim:

The Texas-wide prison lockdown that began in September has now been lifted [this newsletter was posted Nov. 2nd 2023]. The lockdown was officially described as an effort to combat drugs, but some prisoners have questioned this and suggested it was actually an attempt to suppress prisoner unrest after a particularly brutal staff beating at Coffield Unit. From a Texas Tribune article:

“On Sept. 5 an inmate [sic] at the Coffield Unit stabbed a correctional officer [sic] in a high security unit. TDCJ officers [sic] responded to this incident with excessive force and prison system spokesperson Amanda Hernandez told The Texas Tribune established protocols were not followed. After an internal review of that incident, seven correctional officers [sic] were fired and another six officers [sic] resigned….”

I’m not 100% sure what the spokesperson for TDCJ meant by “established protocols were not followed”, but from the expansive reporting of Texas TEAMONE and others within TDCJ, we know that “excessive force” is standard operating procedure for Texas pigs.

MIM(Prisons) adds: We too distribute chapters of the PLM through our Serve the People Free Political Books to Prisoners Program. See page 2 for more info on how to to get books. Also see the other response regarding the Texas lockdown for more info on what was behind it.

“I hold that it is bad as far as we are concerned if a person, a political party, an army, or a school is not attacked by the enemy, for in that case it would definitely mean that we have sunk to the level of the enemy. It is good if we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves that we have drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves. It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves but achieved a great deal in our work.”

-Mao Tse-tung (1)

Behind the walls of Amerika’s gulags there will come a time when every serious revolutionary (whether ey are organized in a cell or party structure, or in a small collective or political study group with eir comrades) will draw the eyes of the pig surveillance apparatus for eir political activity and organizing. Some, those that are well read and practiced in security and counter-surveillance, will no doubt last longer than others without scrutiny; but with all simple channels of communication under heavy surveillance – from audio equipped security cameras, to monitored, recorded, and archived phone calls, to mail room pigs sticking their hideous snouts into your mail (not to mention those dealing with smart communications/TextBehind/etc.) – the pig administration and rank and file can and will monitor, censor, obstruct, and otherwise engage in their reactionary low intensity warfare against political agitation and those that would dare to educate and unite the oppressed masses against Our common enemy: the state, its lackeys, and all they stand for. So, in a very real sense the gulags of the United $nakes are exactly that: WAR.

As the contradictions between the oppressor class and the oppressed are inherently antagonistic in nature, and playing out in a myriad of ways upon this particular front. This is not to say, however, that these antagonistic contradictions with the enemy are solely resolved in isolation from the larger struggle against imperialism and U.$. hegemony and capitalistic exploitation. Indeed, these struggles are one and the same; inter-related with each other.

Thus, Our efforts to educate, organize, and mobilize the masses toward socialist revolution are viciously repressed by the imperialists and their lackeys. Though, as Mao stated in the above quote, it would be bad if the enemy weren’t making a concerted effort to attack Us. The simple fact that they are engaged in the assault against Us means they are worried if not downright fearful, that We may succeed in realizing Our and Our countless fallen comrades’ lifelong goal and dream that We’ve all been struggling and striving for: the destruction of patriarchal capitalist-imperialist empire through social revolution and the ushering in of communism throughout the world.

And yet, as Mao correctly warned Us,

“The imperialists and domestic reactionaries will certainly not take their defeat lying down and they will struggle to the last ditch.”(2)

In so doing, they will utilize all available tactics to sabotage Us and Our efforts. Within the gulags in Amerika, the oppressor has a wide range of tactics to quash dissent. Indeed, the U.$. gulag archipelago is itself a tool used currently and hystorically against communists, anarchists, and all those the oppressor sees as a threat to the status quo. Other familiar tactics used against the politically active range from blatant assassination (George Jackson, San Quentin Aug. 21, 1971), assassination by pig proxy (The Aug. 12, 2015 assassination of Hugo “Yogi” Pinell by white supremacist prisoners Jayson Weaver and Waylon Pitchford at New Folsom Prison (3)), (in)definite solitary confinement, snitch-jacketing, targeted mail surveillance and censorship, etcetera, etcetera ad nauseam.

However, these tactics cease being their main focus once they understand (and they obviously do) a key fact; as Steven Biko so succinctly put it, “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” The pigs are fully aware, as are the imperialists, that a docile, unquestioning mass of sheeple is easier to control than an angry, educated, politically-conscious mass of revolutionary militants. To that end, they do everything within their power to reproduce these brainless sheeple in mass quantities: pigs engaging in widespread chemical warfare upon the imprisoned lumpen by introducing and pushing mass quantities of drugs while simultaneously banning publications like MIM(Prisons)’s “Revolutionary 12 Step Program”(4); amassing huge lists of banned books, often for ridiculous reasons, and more often as an extension of political repression; small, if any portions of gulag facility budgets spent on books for the library (and nearly all mind-numbing selections at that); the introduction of tablets for use, along with TV’s, to zone out on and isolate, ignoring the world and the problems around you in sheer ambivalence; and finally (though not conclusively) the lack of truly helpful classes/programs offered, while offering Eurocentric, status-quo affirming programs to get those foolish enough to take them “all ready to head back to ‘minimum security’ (the so-called ‘free world’) to re-acclimate to the oppression and exploitation ey had sadly been content with living under anyway.”

Much to the dismay of the imperialists and their pig lackeys, there are those of Us that see through their attempts to incapacitate Us, Our movements, and Our struggle for a better world. And we are multiplying, regardless of what they throw in Our way, and no matter how many times they try to divide Us. No matter what the oppressor tries, they will be out maneuvered again and again by Our overflowing revolutionary love for the People. All because the oppressor cannot grasp a simple truth that was reiterated again and again by Our beloved comrade Fred Hampton before he was assassinated by Chicago pigs and the FBI on December 1969, that still proves true to this day: “You can kill a revolutionary, but you can never kill the revolution.”

<sup>Notes:
1. Mao Tse-tung, “To Be Attacked by the Enemy Is Not a Bad Thing but a Good Thing” (May 26, 1939), First Pocket Edition, pg. 2.
2. Mao Tse-tung, “Opening Address at the First Plenary Session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference” (September 21, 1949).
3. Nate Gartrell, 14 September 2023, “Aryan Brotherhood pair charged in fatal stabbing”, San Jose Mercury News.
4. See: Triumphant, November 2022, “TDCJ’s Repression of its Political Prisoners Leads to Devastating Effects Among the Wider Prison Population,” ULK No. 80. and Texas Prisoner, March 2021, “TDCJ: Your Staff are Bringing in the Drugs, and it Must Stop,” ULK No. 73.</sup>

On Sunday, 28 May 2023, Santa Clara County Main Jail went on full facility lockdown shortly after pill call when evening program (out of cell time) began.

This is not all that unusual by itself, as Main Jail goes on lockdown on average 10 times a month, often more, as it is facility policy to lockdown the entire complex for ANY disturbance, almost as if they fear a replay of the Attica uprising in September 1971 or the Lucasville uprising at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in April 1993 (which I could see being a distinct possibility).

Yet what was different about this lockdown was the guard taking off at a sprint out of our unit after screaming “lockdown!”, before making sure we all were in our cells locked down (which is against operations protocol). We could see out our unit door to the 7th floor control booth where the guards rushed by into the elevator to get to wherever the incident occurred (our Main Jail is a tower complex).

After getting back to my cell, the guards who came by to do their hourly checks were extremely close-lipped and stone-faced which they usually aren’t after their usual “reindeer games” of hosing down with O.C. spray and prying apart lumpen-on-lumpen conflicts (they’re usually giddy after getting their adrenaline fix).

The next day we knew something “big” (at least in the pig administration’s eyes) had occurred when all GTL tablets were confiscated from prisoners without a word as to why or when they would return.

Persynally, this was only a minor inconvienance, as the only thing I really use my tablet for is to use the phone app in the privacy and quiet of my cell, as the “edutainment” platform “Edovo” on them is full of bullshit and bourgeois drivel aside from several collected works of Marx and Engels though even those are contained within a course with video lectures from the bourgeois perspective of a Yale professor.

It wasn’t until after reading an article in Wednesday, 31 May 2023’s San Jose Mercury News(1) and hearing whispers gleaned from the looser lipped pigs that the full picture started to come together.

A prisoner in one of the protective custody units on the 6th floor had taken his tablet, busted it down, and out of the smashed wreckage was able to make a “crudely made knife” as the article called it, and with said knife assault two pigs with it.

Of course the bourgeois media reported the usual drivel from the sheriff’s office, that it was a “shocking and unprovoked attack”. Knowing the hystory of Main Jail in recent years, from the 3 pigs who beat mentally ill prisoner Michael Tyree to death in his cell, to the recent report of the mistreatment of another mentally ill prisoner Juan Martin Nunez at the hands of pigs and medical staff in the psychiatric unit on the 8th floor of the jail which in the aftermath left the prisoner paralyzed, this seems highly unlikely.(2) Oh and don’t forget their usual closing line, “Our correction deputies (sic) play a critical role in maintaining law and order within the correctional facilities and this attack serves as a stark reminder of the risks our deputies (sic) face daily.” The lumpen can see these for the fearmongering lies they are.

In the aftermath many crafted grievances to attempt to get eir tablets back, which I decided finally against as the assaulting of 2 pig guards along with the problems comrades across the California gulag archipelago (as well as across occupied Turtle Island) are having with their facilities’ worthless grievance systems made a win highly unlikely.

Instead, I spent the time trying (actually with some success!) to get my collection of revolutionary literature (by comrades George, Mumia, Maroon, etc and all my MIM literature) out to the masses of New Afrikan, Chican@, white, and Asian/Pacific Islander comrades who suddenly had nothing to occupy their in cell time. Many finished books/zines from my collection, some only read an article or two from ULK, but it was all-in-all a positive outcome.

On 21 June 2023, the tablets were returned, with the pigs now lording over them and having to fill out a checklist every morning and night to make sure all tablets given out are returned to the charger carts at night. Yes, it took them almost a month to come to this “brilliant” idea.

While many have gone back to eir program of zoning out on their tablets all day, I am happy that at least a few have had eir interests piqued and luckily just before another organizing opportunity, Black August.

^{Notes:
1) Austin Turner, 31 May 2023, “Sheriff says inmate attacked 2 deputies”, San Jose Mercury News.
2) Robert Salonga, 12 May 2023, “Jail report angers county leaders”, San Jose Mercury News.}

The Bay Area is the latest site of Our all out legal war against digital-mail prison profiteer Smart Communications. San Mateo County, located on the peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose, instituted the MailGuard system used by Florida-based Smart Communications in late 2021 in its county jail. The county had the second lawsuit to date brought against it for its use of the system. The first was filed last fall, which alleged (validly I’m sure) exposure of private communications between attorneys and their clients to correctional guards.

The new lawsuit filed last week by an extremely influential legal coalition including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Social Justice Legal Foundation and Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute aims to get a judge to declare the mail system has violated its subjects’ First and Fourth Amendment rights. Ultimately the aim is to order the county to stop using it and purge all retained electronic mail records. Record requests by San Jose-based civil rights group Silicon Valley De-Bug have shown scanned mail is retained and able to be accessed by jail staff for seven years according to the contract, even after a persyn has been released from jail.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an exciting addition to the legal team involved in the assault on this totalitarian surveillance system. Formed in 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor, this international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, CA got its original financial backing from Mitch Kapor and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. The EFF has handled (and won) many high profile cases against companies like Google and Facebook, but its most famous case (its first, that also led to its creation) preserved forever in historical hacker lore, happened in early 1990 against the U.$. Secret Service for its illegal raid/search and seizure operation of Steve Jackson Games. This was one case of many happening at the time across the United $tates against alleged hackers spurred along by a state and federal task force code-named Operation Sundevil.

Steve Jackson Games was raided due to complete incompetence by Secret Service personnel who thought a handbook for a role-playing game by Steve Jackson Games called “GURPS Cyberpunk” was actually a handbook for computer crime, sort of a hacker’s version of the Anarchist’s Cookbook. The winning of this case started EFF’s promotion and defense of computer and Internet-related civil liberties.

While the case against San Mateo County’s use of Smart Communications mail system has not been decided yet, We the imprisoned lumpen can only hope that the plaintiffs which number 5 prisoners at San Mateo County Jail, several family members, and Oakland-based artists collective ABO Comix, pass up on any instantly gratifying concessions offered in settlement like what happened in the Ashker settlement in the aftermath of the California Hunger Strikes and see this lawsuit through to its glorious conclusion.

MIM(Prisons) adds: We have published a series of articles in recent years addressing this new trend in complicated digital mail systems that just make communications with the outside world more difficult and more censored. Across the board the main reason given for these systems is to prevent drugs from entering prisons. A recent report from a comrade in Hughes Unit in Texas on the continued rise in fentanyl deaths from K-2 brought in by staff reiterates the hypocrisy of this claim. Meanwhile Hughes Unit remains one of the biggest censors of mail from MIM Distributors in the state of Texas.

We appreciate the focus of these organizations on the importance of connection to family and community and welcome them in the battle against Smart Communications, JPay and other digital mail vendors profiting off of prisoners and their families while imposing a surveillance state on all of us.

This report is to inform other comrades of the new law that was passed called the Keep Families Connected Act in California and to expose the sneaky tactics the state is using to bastardize it. The Keep Families Connected Act states that as of 1 January 2023 all calls between Us (the prisoner class) and our families and friends will be provided at no cost to Us or our people outside.

Here in the South Bay there was no fanfare for the Act’s passing, no bulletin from jail administration stating this, or message on our tablets, which have the phone app most use to call home. After further research, i was informed by a Lieutenant pig that Keep Families Connected Act only gives free calls in CDCr facilities, and county jails like Main Jail North are not included. Seems California doesn’t actually give two shits about keeping families connected.

The tablets we have in California are already used to record your voiceprint (individually distinctive pattern of certain voice characteristics, spectographically produced) and facial biometrics (measurement and analysis of unique facial features, especially for verifying personal identity) which to even use the tablets you must agree to as part of the Terms of Use.

As is so common the case, anytime the oppressive elite pigs give us something, it’s usually poisoned, warped, and deformed to suit their means. To utilize these free calls your people must download an app first (for iPhone it’s GTLConnect, for Android it’s GTL Phone App). As a former hacktivist in the early days of the Anonymous Collective, i believe these apps could be infected with many different types of viruses, keyloggers and spyware included. This is true for the iPhone, despite many peoples’ false notions that Apple products cannot be hacked into.

It also should come as no secret that the Amerikan government does in fact spy on its people, as was exemplified by the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden, and the revelations of the FBI’s COINTELPRO of the 1960s and 1970s.

But downloading an app is not all your family and friends must do. Once downloaded they must make an account, which if they use their real information, now puts a name, date of birth (and with this DMV records can be looked up, background checks administered) and thus every recorded conversation now has a face they can put it to. This is my speculation and by no means proven fact, yet we should always be wary and skeptical of anything handed to Us from the bloody paws of the capitalist-imperialist fucks whom oppress us.

We should learn from our past experiences through study to better identify such reforms for what they really are: Band-Aids for bullet wounds.

MIM(Prisons) adds: This week President Biden signed an Act to require the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to ensure reasonable rates for any kind of voice or video calls made from jails and prisons in the country. To date, families and friends of prisoners have paid ridiculous prices for phone calls to their imprisoned loved ones. This profiteering discourages the maintenance and development of positive relationships in the community that are important for re-integration upon release. As such, we welcome these reforms, though they are a small drop in the bucket of the extreme forms of social isolation and torture imposed on hundreds of thousands of people in U.$. prisons.

We also share the concerns of our comrade above. Though communications into and out of prisons have always been assumed to be monitored, the technology to do so is at another level now. And instead of extorting families for phone fees, they are now strong-arming their persynal and biometric information out of them, extending the arms of the surveillance state into not just those convicted of a crime, but all who wish to relate to them. It is hard enough to get people to avoid such surveillance technology on the streets where people have choices.

In the early days of Corrlinks, we could use email to communicate with some of our subscribers. While we recognized the potential downside of surveillance, all mail is potentially surveilled as well. However, now that the model has developed they seem to uniformly charge money for electronic mail to prisoners and require the installation of spyware and giving persynally identifying information to the company and the prison. So if you’ve tried to email us through these services and we don’t respond, that is why.

We have been covering the topics of the distribution of computer tablets among prisoners in this country along with the digitization of mail that they enable. These developments strengthen the totalitarian control of the state, and often further limit communications with the outside despite the political messaging. Following in the footsteps of the phone companies, the new brand of prison profiteers are these mail processing companies like TextBehind and the old-timer JPay. As depicted in the artwork above, TextBehind has created a barrier for letters from organizations like ours from reaching people imprisoned in North Carolina.