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Today's
Stories
August 5, 2004
Peter Linebaugh
Doing Time for Political Crime:
Paul and Silas, Bound in Jail
August
4, 2004
Mickey
Z.
Two Traditions: WMD and Disinformation
Justin
Huggler
The Hunt for Bin Laden
John
Ross
Mexico's Dirty War Never Ended: Inside
Puente Grande Prison
August 3, 2004
Uri Avnery
The
Oligarchs
Ray McGovern
The 9/11 Commission Chimera
Jack McCarthy
Sexual Politics in Jeb's Florida
Eric Ruder
Meet Barak Obama: the Democrats' New Liberal Star
John L. Hess
Crying Wolf: Orange Alert!
Elaine Cassel
Civil Liberties Elections: 1800 v. 2004
Jules Rabin
The Man Who Didn't Walk By
Website of the Day
No Wall
August 2, 2004
Robert Jensen
Kerry's
Hypocrisy on the Vietnam War
Joshua Frank
Greens, Kerry and the Politics of Mendacity
Mike Whitney
The 9/11 Commission and Civil Liberties: "We Need an American
Police State"
Gary Leupp
Beyond
Good and Evil: Some Thoughts on Invasions
July 31 / Aug.
1, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Kerry:
He's the (Any) One
Merlin Chowkwanyun
Five Questions with Noam Chomsky: "The Savage Extreme of
a Narrow Policy Spectrum"
David Lindorff
The Shame of the DNC
John Chuckman
The
Disturbing Words of John Edwards
Brian Cloughley
All Slam and No Dunk; All Blame and No Responsibility
Christopher Brauchli
"Being Poor is a State of Mind": the Frowning Face
of Compassionate Conservatism
Fred Gardner
A World of Pain
Michael Donnelly
How Big Pharma Bilks the Elderly
David Nally
Genocide in Darfur?
Joshua Frank
Forest Battles Escalate in Oregon
Sam Bahour
Colin Powell and My Grandmother
Diane Farsetta
The IMF and the Indonesian Elections: The Invisible Hand in the
Voting Booth
Harold Gould
Was Iraq a Mutual Charade?
Van Bergen / Stephens
Election 9/11: Surreal Political Theater
Lee Sustar
A New Model for the Labor Movement?
Ron Jacobs
The Lost Art of Hitchhiking
M. Junaid Alam
An Interview with Palestinian-American Rapper, The Iron Sheik
Poets Basement
Albert, Ford, Krieger, St. Clair
Website of
the Weekend
Cross Cultural Poetics
July 30, 2004
Kolhatkar /
Ingalls
Shattering
Illusions: Kerry's Speech Tells Anti-War Activists They're Not
Wanted
Dave Lindorff
Murder
Not So Foul?
Bruce Jackson
Walt Whitman on the Sound of Wolf Blitzer's Voice
Fidel Castro
The
Pathology of George W. Bush
Maximilien Robespierre
Memo to Kerry and Bush: Why They Resist
Saul Landau
Bush
Charges Castro with Sex Tourism; JFK Rolls Over in His Grave
Sex, Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
July 29, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
Hail,
the Conquering War Criminal: What Kerry Really Did in Vietnam
Frank Bardacke
What
Michael Moore Left Out of F9/11
Tom Barry
Shallow and Formulaic: Kerry's Latin America Plan
Ron Jacobs
Kerry
and Lennon: Hawking the CounterCulture
Robert Fisk
The Unreported War
Lichtman /
Kellis-Borok
What Kerry Must Do to Win (But Probably Won't)
William S. Lind
The 9/11 Commission Report: Cashing in on Failure
CounterPunch
Wire
Doonesbury Onto John Kerry in 1971!
Website of
the Day
Jabbing JibJab: Copyright Madness
July 28, 2004
Robert Fisk
The
Occupation at 114 Degrees: Baghdad is Swamped in the Smell of
the Dead
Kevin Mink
Kerry's Misperception of Palestine
Ray McGovern
Israel and the Iraq War: How the 9/11 Report Soft-Pedals Root
Causes
United for
Peace & Justice
An
Open Letter to John Kerry: Winter Soldiers and Summer Patriots
Mike Ferner
Vets Demand End to Occupation: "Pull the Troops or Face
Impeachment Mvt."
Imraan Siddiqi
Turning Tricks with Ann Coulter
Alexander Cockburn
Candidate
Kerry
Website of
the Day
Iraq Vets Against the War
July 27, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Why
the Democrats Deserve Nader
Dave Lindorff
Back to the 19th Century: Globalization's Coming!
Mike Whitney
Control Room: Inside Al Jazeera
Ali, Anderson, Bello, et al.
If We Were Venezuelan, We'd Vote for Chavez
Stefan Wray
Texas Plan to Grab Los Alamos Takes Hold, as DOE Shuts Down Labs
Louis Proyect
Reflections on Nicaragua: First Came the Contra Butchers, Then
the Sweatshops
Rick Giombetti
Faith in Freedom: the Challenge of Thomas Szasz
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
The
9/11 Report and Its Weak-Kneed Consensus: Dogding Israel/Palestine;
Blinkered on Causes of Terrorism
July 26, 2004
Todd Chretien
Green
Resistance: a Reply to Normon Solomon & Medea Benjamin
Robert Fisk
Terror
by Video
Richard Forno
Security
Theater in Boston: Security Expert Harrassed by DHS for Exposing
Flaws at the Fleet Center
Mitchel Cohen
Report from a Boston Demo: Arresting the Curious
Richard Moreno
Rockers
for Justice: an Interview with Tom Morello and Serj Tankian
Alexander Cockburn
Boston
Awaits a Dead Party
July
24 / 25, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
The Democrats and Their Conventions:
Part One
Dennis
Hans
Those 16 Words Still Smell, Mr. Bush
Patrick
Cockburn
The Struggle for Iraq is Only Beginning
Josh
Frank
The War Path of Unity: Dems Reject
the Peace Movement
Justin
E.H. Smith
Christianity and the Left: the Latin
American Experience
Tariq
Ali
What's at Stake in Venezuela
Fred
Gardner
The Politics of Pot: Year of the
Antagonist
Mark
Scaramella
There's Dope and There's Dope
Ron
Jacobs
The Weather Underground's Prairie
Fire Statement...35 Years On
July
23, 2004
Lee
Sustar
Revolution in Nicaragua: 25 Years
On
Dave
Lindorff
Battle for NYC: Bush 1, Protesters
0
Saul
Landau
Zaniest President in US History: Bush
Beats Reagan
Mike
Whitney
The 9/11 Whitewash: Blaming No One
Mickey
Z
Get On the Bus: 150 Years After Elizabeth
Jennings
Gary
Leupp
The 9/11 Commission and the Looming
War on Iran
July
22, 2004
M.
Junaid Alam
Ten Ways to Build a Better Democrat
Brian
McKinlay
Rusted On Down Under: Howard, Bush and Sharon
Jason
Leopold
Cheney Lobbied for Easing of Sanctions on Terrorist Regimes While
CEO of Halliburton
Chris
Floyd
Mob Rule: Ripping the Lid Off of America's Pious Myths
Uri
Avnery
Chirac v. Sharon
July
21, 2004
Paula
J. Caplan
The Emotional Casualities of War: Psychologists
Can't Heal All the Damage
Joshua
Frank
Nader Sleeping with the Enemy? Let's be Fair
Ron
Jacobs
American Exceptionalism
Reza
Ghorashi
The Elections, Iran and al-Qaeda
Amy
Martin
Will Congress Rearm the Guatemalan Generals?
John
Ross
Bush May Lose, But His Wars Will Go On and On
|
August 5, 2004
Doing Time
for Political Crime
Paul and
Silas, Bound in Jail
By
PETER LINEBAUGH
Dave
Gilbert, serving a life-sentence in New York, has just come out
with an important, wonderful book, No Surrender: Writings from an
anti-imperialist political prisoner, and Staughton Lynd, counsellor
to death row in Ohio, has just published the scathing j’accuse
of our times, Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising.
Forty years ago they were prominent in SDS (Students for a Democratic
Society), and around then they sang a song that had come up north
with the civil rights movement and which became as appropriate to
black power militants thrown into the penitentiary by COINTELPRO
as it had been to ‘the beloved community’ suffering
in the racist lock-ups of Mississippi.
Paul
and Silas, bound in jail
Had no money for to go their bail
refrain:
Keep your eyes on the prize,
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.
We
have shut up more than two million behind bars, with almost five
million on probation or parole. As the war and empire grow, so do
the prisons. The one lurches recklessly about the planet, insanely
flaying about like an ogre gone mad; the other swells behind green
berms interlaced with gleaming razor wire where ‘stress positions’
are studied by social scientists and death is dealt out by injection
needle. Empire and prison grow together in parallel. The ogre is
two-headed in the USA: one head has just grunted in Boston, and
during the pause before the other head starts to bellow in New York,
let us bend our ears to these voices from below, from inside the
belly of the beast.
David
Gilbert is a political prisoner. Staughton Lynd writes about prison
politics. Dave Gilbert is a lifelong staunch ally of the black revolutionary
movement. Staughton Lynd has been a civil rights worker, lo! these
many decades. Dave has long thought that the ‘white working
class’ was on the whole hopelessly compromised by the white
supremacy of the ruling class. Staughton shows that on ‘the
race question’ the prisoners of Ohio’s maximum security
prison – black and white - expressed themselves as “the
convict race.” Dave writes now from his tiny cell about the
whole world.
Staughton,
a peacenik of the world (Palestine, Nicaragua, South Africa, and
Youngstown), writes about eleven days in one prison down in Piketon
county along the Chillicothe River.
The
Dean of the University told the students “don’t go into
Harlem.” David did, and he listened to Malcolm X. So much
of his politics, the genius of his activism, came from the AfroAmerican
struggle. Dave linked the cry of “Black Power” to the
struggle of the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. Dave Gilbert
in 1965 founded the first anti-Vietnam war committee at Columbia
University. He welcomed in 1967 into SDS the first pure statements
of women’s liberation. He then helped lead the Columbia strike
of 1968. In addition to being an activist, David was a man of words,
a careful fighter in the battle of ideas, able to assemble convincing
argument and to express moral indignation with dignity and righteousness
without yelling, as I remember from editorial meetings of the graduate
student union journal, Ripsaw. He helped SDS to see that the USA
was an empire (Niall Ferguson, Michael Ignatieff, take note).
Dave
Gilbert helped form the Weather Underground. Without killing anyone,
the Weather Underground bombed military and corporate targets, during
the early 1970s. Another voice from Columbia University at the time
is provided by Barry S. Willdorf, Bring the War Home! A Novel About
Resistance to the Vietnam War and Racism in the United States Marine
Corps.
Only
thing that we did wrong
Was staying in the wilderness so long
refrain
Keep your eyes on the prize,
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.
Dave
Gilbert wrote, “any white movement worthy of the name ‘revolutionary’
had to take on the task of building an underground that could carry
on armed struggle against this criminal government.” This
is the writing of historical agency, but it is also writing from
too long a stay in the wilderness. What is a revolutionary? What
court could bring “this criminal government” to trial?
What is a “white movement”? These questions were not
answered, though they remain on the table. As for the meaning of
“underground”, and “armed struggle,” the
answers became clear.
What
David did wrong happened in 1981 when Thatcher and Reagan were in
power, and the prisons grew. In fact it was the year when the “golden
gulag” was placed around the neck of the republic, as Ruth
Gilmore shows. David Gilbert was arrested for his role as a driver
in a notorious attempt to expropriate a Brinks money truck in Nyack,
N.Y., in which two police officers and one Brinks guard were killed.
As an accessory he is now serving a life sentence in the N.Y. state
prison system, shunted about according to the whim and ways of the
Department of Corrections - now Elmira, now Attica, presently Dannemora.
At
the opening of his trial in September 1982 he said to the court
which he and his co-defendants, Kuwasi Balagoon and Judy Clark,
refused to recognize, “We are neither terrorists nor criminals.
It is precisely because of our love of life, because we revel in
the human spirit, that we became freedom fighters against this racist
and deadly imperialist system.”
We
may identify three types of political prisoner. The first is defined
well by Dave Gilbert. “A political prisoner,” he writes,
“is anyone whose incarceration is a result of his or her actions
taken, or positions espoused, on behalf of a political cause –
specifically a political cause on behalf of the oppressed and downtrodden
in society and against the powers that be.” He then proceeds
to identify different types of political prisoners, viz., prisoners
of war, resistance fighters, civil disobedience activists, and prisoners
of conscience.
Staughton
Lynd illustrates how prisoners may become political as a result
of incarceration. This is a second sort of political prisoner. The
prisoners learn to respect one another; the prisoners come to expect
respect.
The
story he tells began on Easter Sunday, April 1993, at the Southern
Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. A long train of abuses
on the part of the prison authorities included over-crowding, racist
double-celling, coaching witnesses, massive shakedowns, scrapped
programs, increased use of snitches, deal cutting, criminal misconduct,
and forced application of a type of TB tests which violated religious
taboo. As a last resort, the prisoners, mostly black, took hostage
from the mostly white guards, and over the course of the eleven
day occupation of the prison one correctional officer and nine prisoners
were murdered.
It
was one of the longest prison riots in U.S. history, yet it was
not publicized much at the time because Janet Reno, the lictor of
the Clinton administration, ignited the conflageration at the Branch
Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, where so many were consumed, white
and black. The flames of federal destruction were more attractive
to the media observers than the pathetic graffiti inside Lucasville
– “Black and White Together 11 Days,” “Convict
Race,” or hand-drawn press releases on bed sheets –
“The state is not negotiating,” “This administration
is blocking the press from speaking to us!!” Two members of
the convict race, a white one and a black one, stood shoulder to
shoulder in the middle of the yard, surrounded by the firepower
of the State of Ohio and ignored by media bullhorns.
Five
men are currently on death row for the murder of the correctional
officer. They are George Skatzes (Aryan Brotherhood), Siddique Abdullah
Hasan (Sunni Muslim), Jason Robb (Aryan Brotherhood), Namir Abdul
Mateen (Sunni Muslim), and Bomani Hondo Shakur whose name means
Thankful Mighty Warrior. These men are solid with each other.
There
is a point at which the welder’s torch becomes so hot, and
burns with such purity, that it’s flame is no longer yellow,
orange, or red, but burns blue. Then it is capable of cutting through
steel. Staughton Lynd has consumed the trial transcripts, he has
patiently endured the hysteria of the media, he has listened to
the men on death row for seven years, and he has lived the struggles
of the rust belt. His torch has illuminated all the evidence, it
burns well beyond heated anger and smoldering resentment, and by
cutting through the state-sponsored lies, threats, evasions, harassments,
racist provocations, snitching, and venality, it has attained the
efficiency of the blue flame of truth.
If
you want to understand the American gulag, if you oppose the death
“penalty” of innocent people, if you can imagine honor,
solidarity, and respect among the poorest and most degraded white,
brown, and black, if you can imagine Aryan Brothers, Muslims, and
Black Gangster Disciples in unity against a common enemy –
the wall – then you are ready for this j’accuse: “I
accuse the State of Ohio of deliberately framing innocent men.”
This is state-sponsored terrorism, pure and simple. The goal is
precisely to re-assert murderous race relations, for there are more
parallels than one between the Lucasville rebellion and the Waco
massacre.
Staughton Lynd explains that respect, derived as it is from the
Latin verb “to see,” is at the base of two of the world’s
profoundest political values, Satyagrah from the east, habeas corpus
from the west. Satyagraha is what Gandhi believed in. It means clinging
to the truth, and truth is the opposite of violence.
When
we recognize the truth of another person, when we refuse to overlook
them, then we respect them. Respect is tied also to the writ of
habeas corpus, “the foundation of the Anglo-American system
of justice, because it requires the state to produce the prisoner
in open court so that friends and relatives can see the prisoner,
and can confirm with their own eyes and ears that the government
has informed the prisoner of the specific crimes with which he or
she is charged.”
Marilyn
Buck who herself has served twenty years in prison for political
crime, writes of the difficulty of writing, “It is a never-ending
effort to get hold of reading materials and to keep them, or to
do research, much less to read, study, and think. Thought is constantly
disrupted; arbitrary rules and interruptions create a chaos in which
sorrow, discontent, and rage are the generalized response to and
currency of the harsh cruelty, brutality, and absences of imprisoned
women’s and men’s lives. Noise, stress, fear, even mental
breaks fill the time and space of the prison world.”
The
outstanding journalists in the American prisons are Paul Wright,
Mumia Abu-Jamal, Ray Luc Levasseur, Marilyn Buck, Sundiata Acoli,
Wilbert Rideau, Ron Wikberg,Jalil Muntagim, and Dave Gilbert, comparable
to the revolutionary 1790s in England when an extraordinary assortment
of ‘guests of His Majesty’ involuntarily gathered in
Newgate prison – radicals, democrats, commoners, abolitionists,
mutineers, Jacobins, vegetarians, Irish freedom fighters, union
organizers.
Let
us describe the virtues of No Surrender with the help of Ho Chi
Minh, also a prison poet.
The
body is in prison,
The mind escapes outside:
To bring about great things
The mind must be large and well-tempered.
David
Gilbert’s mind escapes outside, to the whole world. He describes
it in a nutshell. “Today’s world economy has evolved
into a colossal system of debt peonage, with some 70 nations and
billions of human beings in its cruel thrall. It’s a system
that brings unprecedented wealth to the superrich while, literally,
squeezing the lifeblood out of the people who can least afford it.”
He
describes it in the round. He writes about extraordinary Sandinistas,
twelve women in Nicaragua; he writes about young Palestinians and
Israeli human rights activists during the intifada in Gaza; he writes
about the trafficking of Burmese women and girls into brothels in
Thailand; he writes with unalloyed admiration of the restrained
testimony of Japanese American women; he writes about the disappeared
in Guatemala and the deterioration of human rights in East Timor;
he writes about the dirty war in Columbia and the democratatorship
in Bogotá; he writes about Chico Mendes and the empate, or
stand-offs, of the Brazilian rubber-tappers; he writes about the
organ cancers of Navajo teenagers and ecological “sacrifice
zones” of New Mexico; he writes with lyricism and fellow-feeling
for the Zapatistas of Chiapas; he is open-minded about the Sendero
Luminoso in Peru and distills a useful set of criteria for noticing
when a revolutionary movement is going badly astray; he writes with
passionate intensity about the eboli virus in Zaire and the prevalance
of AIDS in Africa.
Indeed
on that subject though the “body is in prison” it could
as well be in Africa. He pioneered the system of AIDS education
known as “peer counseling,” against bureaucrats of health
as well as the bureaucrats of punishment. In this, he was like his
forbears, Dr. James Parkinson, the English Jacobin who diagnosed
shaking palsy and was a revolutionary democrat during the 1790s,
or Dr. Che Guevara for whom the health of the body politic was foremost
and whose clinic straddled the Atlantic to include Africa and America.
Dave Gilbert has ‘brought about great things.’
David’s
mind has become large and well-tempered. He grapples with some of
the thinkers on the outside who also aspire to do great things.
He thinks with, rather than against or upon, Barbara Kingsolver,
bell hooks, Manuel Castells, Walter Rodney, and Christian Parenti,
in essays that are independent appreciations in respectful, intelligent
conversation.
His
essays on other political prisoners like Leonard Peltier or Mumia
Abu-Jamal are tributes of intelligence and honor. His recollection
of his comrade, Ted Gold, who died in the townhouse explosion on
11th street in New York on March 1970, and his tribute to his comrade
Marilyn Buck doing twenty years in California prisons, are written
with ardor and passion. His three haiku poems to Mumia I can compare
only to E.P. Thompson’s homage to Allende. He reaches out
to his fellow internationalist, the Belfast freedom-fighter of the
IRA, Joe Doherty, who did nine years in the U.S. gulag quoting his
poem,
Some
say soon, my walls will fall
In the dust I’ll dance to the chorus of Mankind.
Joe
Doherty was released as part of he Good Friday Agreement off 1998.
Gilbert
is liberal with praise, and though criticism is always direct it
is always gentle. His letters to his son, like Gramsci’s letters
from prison to his son, are pure fancy, pure delight. The two of
them, father and son, engaged in an epic creation on successive
long-distance phone calls which, like the blind bard who told the
story of Troy, they had to do so sightless. They call it “The
Vortex.” As an introduction to the feeling of the Weather
underground organization nothing exceeds the courage, cunning, suspense
and righteous adventure of “The Vortex” except perhaps
the South African novelist, Neil Gordon’s The Company You
Keep.
But
David Gilbert was a Weather person, and doesn’t he deserve
to suffer? This is the tune of the New York Times whose fulsome
pleasure greets the surfacing of these revolutionary militants from
the cold underground with odious little pills of hate setting in
motion, as Wordsworth put it under similar circumstances, “the
insinuated scoff of coward tongues.”
Radical
chic to identify with the outlaws; social banditry became the icing
on the cake; and of course it is easy to scorn these postures and
pretensions are deservedly scoffed. The postures – “We
are all outlaws”- claimed the Berkeley radicals, Up Against
the Wall Motherfuckers. Are all prisoners political prisoners? No,
but we held that all prisoners could become political prisoners,
since inherent in times of change is the view and the experience
that human beings can change, our sympathies may enlarge, our consciousness
can be raised. Later, after the times changed, well then, we separate
the sheep from the goats, and any fool can see that you were a sheep
all along, and you, why you were born a goat!
At
some moments in history it is not yet clear what is going to happen,
we already know that our own actions help determine the outcome,
we have a full sense of historical agency. It is not the times that
are a-changing, it is we who change. It is the revolution which
makes the revolutionaries. On the other hand, realism is the cry
of repression; it clangs shut with a metallic finality, and we turn
away, shoulders slightly sunk, scratching our heads sadly. If we
look back in that mood feeling only “the melancholy waste
of hopes o’erthrown” (Wordworth again), we begin to
prepare the ground for apostacy. Realism is a mask that protects
us from both. That scholarly stance is well represented by Cummins
in his account of the California prisoner movement.
The
course of Michel Foucault through this time had a similar starting
point in the general strike of Mai ’68 and an apparent similar
conclusion in the incarceration of its ultras by 1971. That year
he formed Groupe d’information sur les prisons, whose methodology
was to have those who suffered speak for themselves. In September
was the Attica massacre, in December a prison mutiny at Toul, France.
In November 1971 he shocked Noam Chomsky in debate by declaring,
“The proletariat doesn’t wage war against the ruling
class because it considers such a war to be just. The proletariat
makes war with the ruling class because, for the first time in history,
it wants to take power.” It’s a point.
In
contrast to the Marxist tradition which puts the concept of Value
at the center of its critiques, Foucault put the emphasis on Power.
This corresponded to a late 60s discourse that emphasized ethnicity
in the Third World revolutions, black, and brown and red. In those
days the word “nation” among revolutionaries carried
much the same freight that the term “commons’ does today,
a locus of collective resources, a place of cooperation, mutualism.
Unlike the commons whose borders remain contested, the ‘nation’
was an ethnic, a racial construct.
In
weakness we create distinctions, then
Deem that our puny boundaries are things
Which we perceive, and not which we have made.
The
study of the labor theory of value leads to the understanding of
the global nature of capitalism without the puny boundaries. This
has become clear with neo-liberalism. The second significance of
this concept of value is that in raising the problem of the transformation
of value into price, it enables us to understand the re-distribution
of surplus-value as rent, interest, and profit, and the continuous
struggle for unity within the capitalist class.
Five
years after the massacre Foucault visited Attica concluding, “Attica
is a machine for elimination.” Prison was a place of exclusion
and marginalization. In contrast to ‘workers,’ it contains
‘plebeians.’ This was a distinction that ran parallel
to a Marxist contrast between ‘proletariat’ and the
‘lumpen-proletariat.’ In England at the time the Warwick
School distinguished ‘social crime’ from ‘crime
without qualification.’ I don’t think either the French
scholars nor the ones in England fully absorbed American experience,
which, as Gilbert points out, is the experience of slavery and genocide,
the preconditions for the economic and technological base of the
continent and the cultural and political superstructure of the regime.
In America the prison was seen in continuity with the plantation,
while in Europe its progenitor was the workhouse. In America simplification
gave us white and black rather than pleb and prol or worker and
lumpen. Foucault’s microphysics of power became totalizing,
and petrified in American academia. Hence, Foucault’s epigones
were seriously flawed.
Hence,
also, as Staughton Lynd implies, the fallacy of essentialist whiteness
studies which the ‘convict race’ overthrows.
Foucault’s last lectures were on Diogenes, the ancient Greek
slave philosopher, who faced with imperial warfare sought to serve
the cause, or reflect it back to the citizens, by incarcerating
himself in a barrel. Truth is always embodied.
At
the end of Huckleberry Finn Tom Sawyer makes a game with Huck about
the escape of Jim. “I was studying over my text in Acts Seventeen,
before breakfast.” Tom Sawyer is such a jerk - his reference
to scriptures should be to Acts Sixteen, and he is such a white
jerk, right out of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” But
Acts sixteen records a serious liberation episode.
But
about midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns of
praise to God, and the prisoners were listening to them; and suddenly
there came a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison
house were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened, and
everyone’s chains were unfastened. (Acts 16: 25-6)
It
is not just the apostles or the political prisoners who were freed,
there is no sharp distinction here between the political prisoner
and the other kinds.
There
is a third meaning (I think) to political prisoner, in addition
to the one Dave Gilbert defines or that Staughton Lynd describes.
The prisoner may be freed, or released, or amnestied, as a result
of political changes. The act of freeing the prisoners, the opening
of the jails, may be an act which in itself politicizes prisoners
at the instant that they cease to be prisoners, and it is not an
attribute of individual. This we could call the jubilee moment.
Isaiah (6:1) explains, “he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the like opening of the
prison to them that are bound.” Later when the carpenter’s
son returned to his birthplace, he preaches to the poor the very
words, “he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach
deliverance to the captives, and the recovering of sight to the
blind, and set at liberty them that are bruised.” (Luke 4:18)
Later we learn that this particular son of man will separate the
sheep from the goats:
“when
I was hungry you gave me nothing to eat, when thirsty nothing
to drink; when I was a stranger you gave me no home, when naked
you did not clothe me; when I was ill and in prison you did not
come to my help.” (Matthew 25: 42-4)
How
can we contribute to the climate of opinion which will look upon
amnesty favorably? We must be prepared to discuss regime change
at home. How do we get Diogenes to come out of his tub? We have
some inspiring experience. For instance, Staughton Lynd concludes
his j’accuse with a chapter on Attica and amnesty.
Armed
forces of the state, governed by Rockefeller, killed 29 prisoners
and 10 hostage guards on September 1971. Within a mere five years
scandal broke out in the prosecutor’s office, and amnesty
was declared to all concerned. Since the scandal of prosecutorial
misconduct is as serious in Ohio as it was in New York, Lynd can
call for amnesty for the Lucasville Five on death row, innocent
of killing.
The
very moment we thought we was lost,
Dungeon shook and the chains fell off.
refrain
Keep your eyes on the prize,
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.
In
the middle ages it was an aspect of kingcraft: opening the jails
at coronation! In the coronation charter of Henry I for instance
5 August 1100 he pledged, “I forgive all pleas and all debts.”
Also, “I remit all murder-fines which were incurred before
the day on which I was crowned king.” The world celebrates
14 July, Bastille Day, when the hated prison of the French monarchy
was opened by the sans-culottes in 1789. At the beginning of that
decade Newgate prison in London was opened up by the London crowds.
The first long poem of the American Revolution was a poem about
POWs and the British “prison ships.” In 1796 when Paul
became Tsar of Russia he opened the prisons releasing all the captives
including Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the Polish patriot and one time artillery
officer for George Washington. In the February revolution in 1917
when the Tsar fell, Lvov freed the political prisoners in St. Petersburg,
and the proletariat of the city completed the work he began by opening
the prison doors for all. Thus, the dungeon can shake!
In
a December 1990 meeting in New York of former political prisoners,
Dorubha, the former Black Panther, took a race line, and began to
“mau mau,” or berate, the predominantly white audience
concerning the inherent racism of the white working class. We sat
in silence. Who wants to defend the white working class? In the
following months, however, here’s what we noticed.
With
the downfall of Duvalier, Fort Dimanche was opened in Port-au-Prince
just a few days before Titid was inaugurated president. The Free
Mandela campaign had vast planetary effort which opened the door
for him in 1990. In 1991 April three dozen more political prisoners
were released from Roben Island. Then the Birmingham Six were released
in England . In June 1991 a guerrilla attack freed 131 people incarcerated
in San Salvador’s largest prison: dynamite blew a hole in
the wall, guards and guerrillas battled for an hour, with four guerrillas
and two soldiers killed. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 between
Britain and Ireland provided for the release of prisoners. Thus
the chains may fall off!
So
much of American history takes place in the prison, the plantation,
or the factory. Dave Gilbert has been inside too long, listening
to the discussions outside without being part of them. His politics
is expressed sometimes in a kind of shorthand or formulas which
derive their meaning only from a living context . He often laments
the absence of the “mass base.” Once such shorthand
was necessary in the heat of the times. However, the context has
cooled considerably. The formulas are left, like fossils. We find
them, beautiful in their detail, embedded in rock at various strata.
We
have to deduce their context, and think to ourselves, for example,
something like: ‘ah, there must have been an ocean here once:
must have been zillions of beautiful critters: looks like something
came down on them heavy, seems that over here it was sudden, over
there it was gradual. The compression is the result of the weight
of time and the heavy toll of repression – COINTELPRO, assassination,
cocaine, betrayals.
“To
be buried in lava and not turn a hair, it is then a man shows what
stuff he is made of,” Samuel Beckett wrote. Let the lava be
white supremacy of the ruling class. Then the steadfast hair may
be John Brown, or George Skatzes, or David Gilbert. Anyone who has
taken this journey has met such living fossils, tiny signs, which
as soon as you get used to looking, seem to be everywhere. History
is moved forward by such exceptions. At the time of the Roman empire,
I think the number of exceptions was twelve, though most of them
turned a hair when the heat came down. When Gandhi visited with
the King of England he did not wear trousers, and I do not believe
that a single hair on his spindly legs turned either.
Not
lava, but an eroding mudslide was provided by William Bennett’s
Book of Virtues which we search in vain for an entry on “love,”
or one on “generosity,” or on “solidarity,”
or on “hospitality.” These are some of the virtues of
Dave Gilbert’s book. Jason Robb on death row in Lucasville,
Ohio, provides Staughton Lynd with the “Noble Virtues”
and the “Nine Charges” of the Aryan Norse which begins
with the oath: “to maintain candor and fidelity in love and
devotion to the tried friend: though he strike me I will do him
no scathe.”
These
values can help us recover from ‘Vietnam syndrome.’
We have tried increasing the number of capital punishments, only
to learn that it leads to more war. We have tried increasing the
number of prisoners as a means of combating crime only to become
more frightened. The ‘Vietnam syndrome’ is the result
not of defeat, for in truth, we (you and I, dear reader) were not
defeated. The corporate, ruling class was defeated. A ‘syndrome’
is a cluster of pathological symptoms. In this particular syndrome,
dread and shame are outstanding components, to wit, the shame of
the criminalization which we have perpetrated within our own class,
and the dread that some time, some way, we will be held to account.
“While there is a soul in prison, I am not free,” said
Debs.
Huge
amounts of social complicity and political denial are required to
be ‘good Americans.’ It happened two hundred years ago
at the time of the French Revolution; let us call it ‘the
Jacobin syndrome’ which Wordsworth diagnosed:
…
mid indifference and apathy
And wicked exultation, when good men
On every side fall off, we know not how,
To selfishness (disguised in gentle names
Of peace and quiet and domestic love,
Yet mingled not unwillingly with sneers
On visionary minds) … in this time
Of dereliction and dismay
The
‘Vietnam syndrome’ cannot be overcome with more wars
(Grenada, Panama, Kosovo, Iraq). The wars are prepared - we are
softened up - by the exercise of capital punishment. At first just
one or two - the hood is placed over our eyes - like Ricky Ray Rector,
(you will not find this death in Clinton’s My Life), but then
with legislative sensitivity making more capital punishments possible,
as in the 1996 Effective Death Penalty Act - the electrodes are
attached to our fingers - until the possibility is realized by the
Governor of Texas who kills more than one hundred - we are placed
on a little box and told that an abyss awaits us. We ignore the
judicial slaughter, the lord high executioner then becomes President,
and the public - hooded, electroded, pushed to the edge, and now
suffering itself to be barked at - is sufficiently softened to be
taken to war, cowering, stunned, and ever so soft, only to find
… the Hard Site at Abu Ghraib. There one of the imperial torturers,
one of the softeners up, had learned his trade as a guard at S.C.I.
Greene where Mumia Abu-Jamal had been locked down.
From
Pennsylvania to Baghdad! From the Alleghenies to Mesopotamia! O
my people!
Regime
change in the USA? ‘Regime’ does not mean government
or administration. ‘Regime’ means the set of conditions
by which the system is maintained. This helps us understand our
tasks. While imperialism runs on oil it is not driven by it; while
a gang of neocon free marketeers usurps the government, it does
not control the capitalist regime or the production of surplus value.
The death penalty and the growth of the gulag have been essential
to the form and function, the soul and spirit, of the global empire.
Our movement must free our political prisoners and abolish the death
penalty, two preconditions of the regime to come. Otherwise, we
may tumble uselessly in our tubs.
Only
thing that we did right
Was the day we begun to fight!
refrain
Keep your eyes on the prize,
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.
Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University of Toledo.
He is the author of two of CounterPunch's favorite books, The
London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The
Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.
Linebaugh asks that any readers who have cases and stories of amnesties,
and getting out of jail, by all the variety of means, contact him
at: plineba@yahoo.com
FOR
FURTHER READING
Daniel
Burton-Rose, Dan Pens, Paul Wright (ed.), The Celling of America:
An Inside Look at the U.S. Prison Industry (Common Courage Press:
Monroe, Maine, 1998)
Richard
Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison
Movement (Stanford University Press: Stanford, California, 1994)
Michel
Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage:
New York, 1979)
Michel
Foucault and John Simon, “On Attica,” Telos 19 (spring
1974)
David
Gilbert, No Surrender: Writings from an Anti-Imperialist Political
Prisoner (Abraham Guillen Press: Montreal, 2004)
Ruth
Wilson Gilmore, “Globalization and US Prison Growth: from
military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism,” Race
& Class 40, 2/3 (1998/9).
Neil
Gordon, The Company You Keep (Viking: New York, 2003)
Lee
Griffith, The Fall of the Prison: Biblical Perspectives on Prison
Abolition (Eerdmans Publishing Company: Grand Rapids, Michigan,
1993)
Staughton
Lynd, Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising (Temple
University Press: Philadelphia, 2004)
Barry
S. Willdorf, Bring the War Home! A Novel About Resistance to the
Vietnam War and Racism in the United States Marine Corps (A Gauche
Press: San Francisco, 2001)
Christian
Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis
(Verso: New York, 1999)
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