An Open Letter to Other White Working People

To other white skinned working Americans:

As the election season of 2008 approaches, politics and the ramifications of those elections are topics that are on everyone's minds. I know that other white-skinned working class people feel the same way I do: 2008 could make it or break it for us. However, most people reading this may initially disagree with what I mean by that statement. Hopefully by the end of this letter, I can change some minds.

I start with the assumption that white skinned working class people are tired of living in poverty, tired of living paycheck to paycheck, tired of seeing the products of their hard efforts evaporate before their very eyes. The times are tough for many of us, where we don't know how we're going to survive. Politician after politician makes empty promises, and seemingly there's no relief for us, as white skinned working Americans. So we start to look around at who to blame, and it's easy enough... we blame black people, brown people... "illegals". It's simple enough. We're competing with these people for jobs and resources, in some cases it seems like a logical enough conclusion to come to.

Historically, we've always been at odds with immigrants and non-white peoples. We have seen our allegiance become an allegiance to whiteness, to being white. We can relate to other white people, no matter how poor or rich. They're white like us, and that's something we can identify with, come to terms with. So of course, our natural enemies become non-white peoples.

The only problem with this idea is that we've had it wrong for centuries. We've been kept blind to the true nature of what is afoot here, as to what's really going on. Look around us. Who fills the trailer parks with us? Who works in the factories or fast food restaurants with us? Who is beside us working in the fields, picking produce that we'll never really be able to afford? Is it rich people, especially rich white people? Hell no, it isn't. It's brown people, black people, yellow people. It's people who have different shades of skin than us. They are the people that are in similar situations to us, living paycheck to paycheck, suffering like we do. So why then would we view them as our enemy?

Allegiances, traditionally, are made amongst people who have common interests. In an historical sense, white skinned working people have overwhelmingly believed that our interests are based on skin color. We have to work for the betterment of the race, for our culture, for our identity. The truth, however, could never be further away. Whose interests do these beliefs really serve? White workers? In some sense, the answer may be "yes". Working for the advancement of the white race at the cost of other races does buy us relative privileges and even some luxuries. In the end, however, we're still poor, we're still being used to make other people money. And those people aren't non-white working people.

The true interests of white skinned workers lie with other workers, no matter what their race. This idea is simple enough, but will take much time to understand and really internalize. Other workers, of all races, are exploited. We are exploited. We work to barely meet our needs, while bosses and the people in charge profit from that labor. We are born and we die in squalor or relative poverty while the rich and the politicians live in the lap of luxury. Who are these rich people? Who are these politicians? The truth is that 95% of them are white. They are 95% male. They are 95% English speaking. They are 95% Christian (or at least pretend to be so). Tonight when we go to bed tonight in our overcrowded apartments, our small houses, or our tiny trailers, they are the ones who will go to bed in luxury, in comfort, with no worries at all.

The blunt reality is that for the last five hundred years on this continent, white working class people have been used by mostly white rich people to colonize for, kill for, work for, and then better the living standards of those same white rich people, all the while sacrificing our own needs, wants, aspirations, and even lives. It really is as simple as that. No one denies the history of what has happened at working people's expenses. Wars, poverty, homelessness, wage slavery... these are all ills created by someone, and perpetuated by us... the same workers who suffer these ills.

For some five centuries we've been used by the rich among our own race to promote their agenda and suffered because of it. Yet, somehow, we've still been convinced that our allegiance is to our race, to these same rich whites that would just as soon see us die as they would be to help us as racial allies. Let's get real, how often do these white rich racialists actually just give handouts to us poor white skinned folk? When does this actually happen? Do you really think they care at all about our well being? Where's the allegiance from them, the people that put us in the worst situations we face and also spew out the racialist, pro-white speeches at rallies and gun shows?

The heart of the matter is that for these five centuries, we've been too busy fighting the people who should naturally be our allies against these injustices. The rich whites have used our skin color against us, have used our human nature of fearing living beings different than us against us... they've used us against us. They've blinded us with these racialist ideas of "white supremacy" and "white pride" and "white nationalism" into fighting other working people of other races, while they sit on the sideline and laugh.

When you walk into your workplace tomorrow, where are the majority of the blacks? Or brown skinned people? Or women? Are they in positions of power over us? Sure, some might be. But where are the majority of those that are at our workplace? That's right: side by side with us, experiencing the same drudgery and wage slavery as us. So, logic might tell us that they should also be side by side with us in our fight for liberty and an end to oppression. Wouldn't that make more sense than working side by side with the same people that rob our paychecks and swindle us out of the products of our labor?

For far too long, the ignorant stooges of the rich within our race have thrown up a red flag to these ideas... have spewed words like "pinko" and "communist" and "terrorist" at white folks that may have finally started to awaken to the truth of what's really happening here. I'm not a communist. I hate Stalin. I hate Lenin. I hate Mao. I also hate Bush. I also hate Clinton. I also hate Carter. I also hate Paul. These people, all of them, are the ruling elites that I despise... who live in relative luxury while the rest of us work away our very existence to barely eat.

White skinned working people, the time is now to form the real alliances that will actually better our lives. It's time to see who our real allies must be.

For starters, we have to reject the ridiculous notion that mostly brown skinned immigrants from Mexico or other countries are our enemy, that they are somehow stealing our jobs, that they somehow really threaten us. Let's get real. Who's really stealing our jobs? Well, let's see, even a generous estimate of the number of illegal immigrants working in the U.S. is 6 million (notice I said working, not living). This stands in stark contrast to the conservative estimate that nearly 50 million jobs will have been lost to outsourcing by 2015 since NAFTA came into affect in 1994. Well, let's ask ourselves, who's really stealing our jobs? Poor Mexicans? Or Rich White CEOs?

We're fed ridiculous ideas of the "invading" brown hordes, and the rich whites that make up the upper echelons of organizations like the Minutemen and other similar groups salivate over our reactions. If we're busy fighting the Mexicans at the border, and busy trying to round up all the "illegals" then we're too busy to fight that real enemy, that one that keeps eluding us, those rich whites I keep talking about. Most of us that keep falling for these lines initially might mean well. Heck, we only want to defend our families and our communities... but in reality, we're weakening them even more, by fighting our real potential allies and diverting our attention from the real enemy, the "enemy within" (our own race).

And why are all these brown skinned immigrants coming here in the first place? Why is there this sudden rush in the last thirteen years to get into this country? 80% of all illegal immigrants have entered since 1994. Why is that? What happened in 1994 that affected working people in Mexico just as it affected us? The passage of NAFTA, a free trade program that benefits nobody but the rich people on both sides of the border! If the rich people on both sides of the border are united, despite what race they are, why are we still allowed to be divided and conquered?

The evolution of the creation of the identity of whiteness on this continent tells us everything we need to know about the situation we now find ourselves in. I think that David Gilbert explains this the best, in his essay "Looking at the Working Class Historically":

Up until the 1680’s little distinction was made in the status of Blacks and English and other Europeans held in involuntary servitude. Contrary to common belief, the status of Blacks in the first seventy years of the Virginia colony was not that of racial, lifelong, hereditary slavery, and the majority of the whites who came were not "free”. Black and white servants intermarried, escaped together, and rebelled together.

There were a series of servile rebellions that threatened the plantation system in the period preceding the transition to racially designated chattel slavery and white supremacy. In 1661 Black and Irish servants joined in an insurrectionary plot in Bermuda. In 1663, in Virginia, there was an insurrection for the common freedom of Blacks, whites and Indian servants. In the next 20 years, there were no fewer than ten popular and servile revolts and plots in Virginia. Also many Black and white servants successfully escaped (to Indian territories) and established free societies.

The 20 year period of servile rebellions made the issue of social control urgent for the plantation owners, at the same time as they economically needed to move to a system of perpetual slavery. The purpose of creating a basic White/Black division was in order to have one section of labor police and control the other. As Allen says, “The non-slavery of white labor was the indispensable condition for the slavery of black labor”.

A series of laws were passed and practices imposed that forged a qualitative distinction between white and Black labor. In 1661 a Virginia law imposed twice the penalty time for escaped English bond-servants who ran away in the company of an African life-time bond-servant. Heavy penalties were imposed on white women servants who bore children fathered by Africans. One of the very first white slave privileges was the exemption of white servant women from work in the fields and the requirements through taxes to force Black children to go to work at twelve, while white servant children were excused until they were fourteen. In 1680, Negroes were forbidden to carry arms, defensive or offensive. At the same time, it was made legal to kill a Negro fugitive bond-servant who resisted recapture.

What followed 1680 was a 25 year period of laws that systematically drew the color line as the limit on various economic, social, and political rights. By 1705, “the distinction between white servants and Black slavery were fixed: Black slaves were to be held in life long hereditary slavery and whites for five years, with many rights and protections afforded to them by law.”

We can infer from these series of laws that white laborers were not “innately racist” before the material and social distinctions were drawn. This is evidenced by the rulers’ need to impose very harsh penalties against white servants who escaped with Blacks or who bore them children. As historian Philip Bruce observed of this period, many white servants “...had only recently arrived from England, and were therefore comparatively free from... race prejudice.”

The white bond-servants now could achieve freedom after 5 years service: the white women and children, at least, were freed from the most arduous labor. The white bond servant, once freed, had the prospect of the right to vote and to own land (at the Indians’ expense).

These privileges did not come from the kindness of the planters’ hearts nor from some form of racial solidarity. (Scottish coal miners were held in slavery in the same period of time.) Quite simply, the poor whites were needed and used as a force to suppress the main labor force: the African chattel slaves. The poor white men constituted the rank and file of the militias and later (beginning in 1727) the slave patrols. They were given added benefits, such as tax exemptions to do so. By 1705, after Blacks had been stripped of the legal right to self-defense, the white bond servant was given a musket upon completion of servitude. There was such a clear and conscious strategy that by 1698 there were even “deficiency laws” that required the plantation owners to maintain a certain ratio of white to African servants. The English Parliament, in 1717, passed a law making transportation to bond-servitude in the plantation colonies a legal punishment for crime. Another example of this conscious design is revealed in the Council of Trade and Plantation report to the King in 1721 saying that in South Carolina “Black slaves have lately attempted and were very nearly succeeding in a new revolution – and therefore, it may be necessary to propose some new law for encouraging the entertainment of more white servants in the future.”

We can see the evolution of the creation of whiteness, or a racial identity for white skinned peoples in the Americas, that stood in contrast to the identity of non-white skinned peoples. This created the us against them mentality. Once our allegiances stopped being to other impoverished and servile peoples and were instead changed to allegiances to white people of all classes, we lost track of who the real enemy was. We're still there. The rich people among our own race have us so confused that we'd rather be on the border hunting for brown skinned working people (be honest here, if this was about securing our borders, why aren't we talking about illegal immigrants coming from Canada, or even talking about any white skinned illegal immigrants?) than actually fighting those people that create the social conditions that we all collectively suffer in.

Our blind hatred of non-white people will continue to be the nails in our coffins. Other nails in our coffins will be the continued ridiculous attitudes we show toward women, people with different sexual and gender identities, people with disabilities, and people of different religions.

The rich have been very keen on dividing us up as much as they can, by distorting and magnifying existing divisions and differences among those of us that suffer at their hands. We would rather vote somebody in office that stands against abortion and gay marriage that will still steal our money and exploit us economically than someone we perceive to be on the opposite sides of these issues.

We consistently get used and thrown to the side, just to expand the power of those already above us. We'd rather fight against abortion while we and our five kids go hungry at night than actually organize for better pay, or fight back against those that use us.

It's a sick reality, and yes, the stakes are high in 2008. They're high every year. And deep down, we all know that no matter who of these rich assholes wins this election, we're still going to be screwed, and we're still going to be ranting about the "illegals" stealing our jobs, or the blacks being too criminal, or these crazy hippie liberal lesbians being allowed to marry, while ignoring the rich, white, Christians among us that rake in the profits and power. Wake up! We've fallen for this crap for far too long! No Mitt Romney or Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul or John Edwards is going to save us! Only we can do it... together, as people of all races and backgrounds that are sick of living like this!

This is an open call to all pissed off white skinned working people. This is an open call to ignore the baiting of the Minutemen, to ignore the racialist allegiances that the rich whites try to get us to buy into, to ignore the illogical and ridiculous calls among the ignorant among us! This is a call to reject the idea of whiteness, that is, to reject the idea that our allegiance is somehow determined by what skin pigment we have, no matter whether our real life situations are so different. This is an open call to no longer ignore the fact that our real allies are not determined by skin pigment, but by our social conditions. Our real enemies are mostly white English speaking Christians. Our allies are people of all colors who are forced to work for a living.

Until we get these simple ideas into our head, then we're doomed. Doomed to repeat everything that's happened for the last centuries. We'll still be here trying to climb out of the squalor we find ourselves in, and our children will inherit that destiny as well, and their children after them, and so on... until finally, a generation of white skinned working people realizes that we've been tricked. That we've been used. And by people of our own race. That damned "enemy within".

To meet other white skinned working people (and working people of other skin pigmentation too) who really want liberty and a life worth living, you can reach us at: johnbrowngunclub@gmail.com

Hurry. There's no time to lose. We've been losing for too long.

Signed, respectfully and hopefully,

D.J.

John Brown Gun Club

Lawrence, KS: Indigenous Community takes on Columbus Legacy

by Dave Strano, Kansas Mutual Aid

On a clear October Monday in Lawrence, Kansas, the streets of downtown were filled with nearly 200 people protesting the celebration of Columbus Day. Most of the marchers were students of Haskell Indian Nation University, the only 4 year native college in the nation.

Initially founded as a boarding school for kidnapped native youth, the school served in a broad campaign bu the U.S. Government to break native youth of cultural and traditional beliefs and values in favor of embracing whiteness and white culture.

Though still run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the school has become a place for native youth from across the country to discover a shared cultural identity, and in recent months, has become a hotbead of anti-colonialist organizing within the Midwest.

The march on October 8 was a product of the organizing and effort of several Haskell related clubs and organizations that have demanded that the celebration of Columbus Day ends, and is instead replaced by the celebration of "Indigenous Peoples Day", a celebration already practiced in parts of California and the entirety of South Dakota.

Spearheaded by Haskell's American Indian Studies (AIS) club, the march was also actively supported by other local social justice organizations, including the Kansas Mutual Aid anarchist collective and the Lawrence Coalition for Peace and Justice.

The day started with a rally in South Park, with speakers that included elders and native leaders, Haskell faculty and students, and key organizers within the local native community.

After the gathering in South Park, the streets became alive with with sign, banners, chants and drums. The march proceeded down the length of the downtown economic corridor, along Massachusetts Street to chants of “We will never go away, this is Indigenous Peoples Day” and “Fight imperialism, fight genocide, no more Columbus Day.”

The march was escorted by police officers and agents from the Department of Justice. Police Chief Ron Olin, a long time anti-leftist that teaches counter-terrorism courses at the local University of Kansas was on hand to observe the march as well as several undercover police officers. They included Detective Warren Burkett, a local police officer that has been admittedly assigned to collect information on local anarchists, anti-imperialists, and other radicals. Obviously, the march and related events were taken very seriously by law enforcement at the local and even national level.

Haskell senior Jimmy Beason, local anti-colonialist organizer, said of the event, “It’s a time for celebration. We’re still here, we’re still resisting.”

The day’s events concluded at Haskell, where participants took part in “teach-ins”, film showings, presentations, a potluck and discussions concerning the demonstration and the march.

The march and related events had three specific goals:

To bring enlightenment to the atrocities of Columbus, not the storybook version mainstream education teaches

To educate the public that the government is constantly trying to negate the responsibility it has toward Native peoples

To work toward a permanent change in Lawrence from Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day

Nearly a week before the march, members of the AIS club had presented a proposal to the Lawrence City Commission to proclaim Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples Day. The City Commission denied all accountability to the native community by ignoring the request and failing to take any action. Mayor Sue Hack commented, "I think you are exactly right about the history, but our policy has been to not use proclamations to make a political stand or do something that the state should change.”

This statement came despite Mayor Hack herself signing over a dozen proclamations about the names of days and weeks to be celebrated in Lawrence, including a proclamation signed by her to proclaim Tuesday May 15, 2007 as "Peace Officer's Memorial Day.

The name change move wouldn't have been unprecedented. In 1992, the city declared it American Indian Day, but the tradition didn’t stick. The move is less likely to occur today, at a time when the City Commission is dominated by pro-development candidates representing local developers and their interests.

The march and other recent events illustrate a new trend within the radical movements in Lawrence, a notable alliance growing between the mostly white working class anarchist movement and the native decolonization movement. For the past months, the local movements have co-hosted events, met together frequently, and offered each other much needed support on programs and initiatives being organized locally.

As the lines in the sand are drawn even more clear between those in power and those struggling for dignity and survival in Lawrence, the work of organizers in the local native community as well as the alliance and overlap now being fostered between the native and anarchist movements will continue to grow and become more potent.

This movement of movements is not likely to recede until self determination, dignity, and liberty come to all peoples.

Why celebrate a life that we hate?

Our lives encounter minimal moments of comfort and pleasure. Most of our time is spent working for a boss that couldn't care less about our dreams, wants, or happiness. We exist to make someone else a buck, while generally being able to barely afford to keep ourselves and our families fed, clothed, and sheltered. Our minimal needs are barely met week after week, while the business owners and bosses enjoy more commodities than any of us will ever see in our entire lives.

When the drudgery and stress of work is over, we come home with barely enough time to watch television, get drunk, and try our hardest to forget what we had to endure while working. And this is if we even are able to hold down a job. Layoffs, business closings, and mass terminations have made it hard to even keep a secure job.

Those of us that work in this society celebrate any holiday we have off. We try our best to reconnect with our friends and families during these times. The Fourth of July is no exception, and we are quick to light up our grills and crack open a cold beer, while watching fireworks and having passing conversations with loved ones we barely know because we spend most of our time at our workplace.

This is the reality that the majority of us face. This is our life. A life of stress, pain, boredom, and physical, mental, and emotional suffering. And this is the country where we have it good! Imagine what it must be like in South America, Africa, or Asia!

Why do we tend to celebrate an existence that most of the time we curse? Maybe it's because we are afforded so few chances to actually enjoy life that we have to force ourselves to celebrate even when there is nothing to really be happy about.

So why is it that the vast majority of us will never really be able to enjoy life, while a small minority will continue to get richer at our expense? Do our lives really have to be like this? Is this all we have to look forward to, the same “clocked in” existence with a boss breathing down our neck most of the hours of our life? Can we see better days? Or will we continue to drudge away until our retirement days? Can anyone really afford to retire anymore anyway?

Our day to day existence is one that is controlled by others, true. However, we are the ones who ultimately have power over our lives. The trick is to get that power back. We have an undeniable right to life and happiness. It's time we fight for both. Starting tomorrow, after the holiday has ended, will we just go back to our normal lives? Or will we assert our rights, as humans? Will we work to ensure a say in our lives at work as well as back in our communities? The answer is democracy, surely. But democracy that is direct. Where everyone is on equal footing, and we all have the same power, where the lines between boss and worker, student and teacher, police officer and citizen no longer exist.

Tomorrow, when we go into work, let's all insist on being paid a living wage. Let's all ensure that our workplace is safe. Let's all tell our bosses what we really think of them. Let's keep what we produce, and give it directly to our community. If we act tomorrow, we will never have to relive yesterday.

From Lawrence to Iraq: American Freedom Marches On

On July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was signed. When the ink dried on this document, it sealed the collective fate of not only the people residing in North America, but of people all over the world. In the two hundred and twenty-nine years since dozens of men that owned other men signed that document, the world has come to know the true meaning of American-style Freedom.

From Native Americans to Black Slaves, from Chileans to Iraqis, from working class mothers to prison inmates, the ordinary people of this world have continually suffered while the rich back in the United States profit. Since this country's founding by slave owners and rich colonialists, nothing has changed. The relatively small percentage of people with real wealth in this country still control the rest of us.

Today, with the United States engaged in two ongoing deadly wars halfway across the globe, the people of Lawrence and the rest of this country feel the burden. While our social programs have their budgets slashed, the United States military continues to get the billions of dollars necessary to murder more and more Iraqis, while also getting more and more Americans killed in the process.

In Lawrence, hundreds go hungry every night. Thousands will never be able to attend college, or will receive a substandard education. Most families will struggle to ensure that their children have their basic needs met. Many more will never have health insurance. While it is we, the people of this city and of this country, that make the products, transport the goods, keep communication running, serve the food, and clean up the mess, the few of this country will reap all the benefits of our work. We will die, with barely pennies to show for our hard work, while others will have more products and commodities than they could use in hundreds of lifetimes.

What is it that we're celebrating today? With each firework that explodes in the sky, another life is lost in Iraq. With each burst of color, another child will go hungry here in this country. With each oooh and awww that we shout out during this spectacle of a pageant, our chances of ever seeing what freedom really looks like shrink ever smaller. The patriotism we show today will only be a reminder to those in charge of our fates, just how easily we can be used. How easily we can become their under-paid work force, or the cannon fodder needed for their next offensive.

Our blind allegiance makes this horror that fills our lives possible. Only our collective refusal will make that horror go away. In 1775, after the first draft in this country's history took place (one might wonder why people would have to be drafted to fight in a revolution...), a major riot of workers and the poor took place in Boston. Fighting against the draft, the workers yelled at the rich “patriots” gawking out their windows, “Tyranny is Tyranny! Let it come from whom it may!”

Whether tyranny is called Fascism or American Democracy, it still remains tyranny. What is it that we are celebrating? When we celebrate today, we celebrate our own betrayal and our own suffering. When we celebrate American Freedom, we ensure American Tyranny.

The Next Battle of the Social War: Nine Black Panthers and State Repression

by Dave Strano

January 23, 2007 should be a day that lives in infamy within the movements for social justice in North America. On that date, the nearly four decades long war on the Black Panthers was shown to still exist. Nine individuals, most identified as being members of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, were charged with murder or murder related crimes by officials in California. The incident in question involved the killing of a police officer inside the police station in which he worked in 1971. Over 35 years later, the struggle that the killing of the officer symbolizes is alive and strong.

By 1971, the resistance movements of the late 1960's had started to go underground. A large scale low intensity war was being fought by armed clandestine militants against the mechanisms of state and capitalist power. One of those groups was the Black Liberation Army.

The Black Liberation Army was formed by former members of the Black Panther Party that had left the Party due to a variety of reasons. The members of the BLA saw the Party being torn apart from infiltration, state sponsored chemical warfare (the purposeful influx of drugs by the government to black communities), infighting caused by CoIntelPro, and power struggles amongst the leadership of the Panthers.

The BLA came to represent some of the most committed of the Black Panther Party, with members including Sundiata Acoli, Assata Shakur, Dr. Mutulu Shakur, and Ashanti Alston. The BLA existed to continue the fight the Party had started.

A feeling pervaded amongst the membership of the BLA that they had to go underground even to survive. With pressure coming from sectarians active within the Black Panthers on one side, and the government on the other, the BLA went underground in 1970.

On August 29, 1971, according to police reports, several men crowded into the Ingleside Police Station in California and fired a shotgun through a hole in the counter glass. A civilian file clerk was wounded, while Sgt. John V. Young was killed.

Later in 1973, among thirteen black militants arrested for the crime, Black Panthers John Bowman, Ruben Scott, and Harold Taylor would all be targeted as being the men that had killed Sgt. Young. In New Orleans, the three would be arrested. San Francisco police officers that were working with the FBI to solve the killing, Frank McCoy and Ed Erdelatz, were flown to New Orleans to aid in the questioning of Bowman, Scott, and Taylor.

The three Panthers refused to cooperate with the investigation. They then faced days of torture at the hands of New Orleans police officers, including physical abuse and mental and emotional manipulation. In 1975, when the matter finally went to court, a federal judge threw out the charges citing that all the evidence against them had been extracted through the use of torture.

In 2003, the case was reopened with the use of a grand jury. The two SFPD police officers that had been responsible for the torture of the three Black Panthers were put back in charge of the investigation. They were deputized by the federal government and started to work side by side with the FBI on the investigation.

When the original grand jury had ended with no indictments, the State of California opened another one in 2005, bringing five former Black Panthers to be questioned. Hank Jones, Ray Boudreaux, John Bowman, Harold Taylor, and Richard Brown all resisted the grand jury and were eventually jailed and released.

Now, in late January of 2007, all of those that appeared before the jury, save John Bowman who died of liver cancer on December 23, 2006, are among the nine militants now being charged with the killing of Sgt. Young. The others being charged in the case are Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim (both currently imprisoned political prisoners on charges of killing a different police officer in New York), Francisco Torres, Richard O'Neal, and Ronald Bridgeforth. Bridgeforth is currently the only suspect not in custody and his whereabouts are unknown to the government.

Just as in December of 2005 when over a dozen environmental resistance movement members were arrested and indicted on charges related to "Operation Backfire", the movements of social justice are under attack. We must view these new arrests in the historical context in which they were conducted.

In the 1960's and 1970's the U.S. government waged an open war on the resistance movements that had grown against White Supremacy, the war in Vietnam, Patriarchy, and the entire capitalist system. Using many tactics, the government was able to destroy and subdue most of the organizations and factions involved within these movements.

Fast forward three decades later to 2007, where a rising tide of anti-capitalist momentum in the form of organizing and movement building is flooding the world. From Oaxaca to Olympia, organized social movements are again gaining strength and taking the state and global capitalism head on. As public opinion shifts strongly against the "War on Terrorism", and new forms of social resistance are starting to rise, we've seen an increased attack on members of resistance movements in the U.S.

The U.S. government would not have reopened this case if it did not intend on sending a message to all those who resist. As we've seen with Operation Backfire, the arrests in Auburn, California, FBI harassment of members of the Great Plains Anarchist Network in 2004, and in many operations in the last ten years, the government is trying to send a clear message. "Don't dare stand up."

As cases like that of Eric McDavid and Brendan Walsh illustrate, we have not handled ourselves well as a movement under this type of attack. The former has been languishing in a prison cell for over a year awaiting trial, and the latter is a young anti-war militant who has been imprisoned and nearly forgotten for the last three years.

Add to these incidents the sudden news that all of the remaining captured defendants of Operation Backfire have pleaded guilty, and we start to see that we need to come up with better ideas of how to support members of our movements when they are attacked by the state.

For years, prison struggle and prisoner issues have been on a back burner within the larger anarchist milieu. Small groups of anarchists have done what little they knew how to support political prisoners and those reeling from repression. We cannot afford to ignore these issues as a larger movement any longer. We are under attack. If we don't defend ourselves now, with innovate new methods, then we will falter and we'll just watch as nine more comrades are imprisoned.

Our movement has to go beyond signing petitions, raising legal funds, and calling prison administrators and government officials. We have to create a movement based on real revolutionary solidarity. When the government attacks, we need to be offering support to families of those they have attacked. We need to be organizing with community leaders in those communities that are targeted to link our mutual struggles. We need to be ready to "turn up the heat" and intensify what may already be intense local efforts.

For a movement short on answers, I don't have many either. This has been an issue I've been grappling with for years, trying to figure out what more I can do to help those that are imprisoned or are facing prison. One thing has been blindingly clear, however: our current models don't work. Pressure on economic and political interests that comes from a community social movement will always work better than trying to fight our battles through petitions and courtrooms. So what the hell does that mean exactly?

The answers seem so much easier when you are reading a book about social movements in the 1970's that hijacked helicopters or broke into prisons to free their captured comrades. Now in 2007, those options seem so far removed from the reality of our movement that is still healing after going into near extinction following September 11th.

One thing is certain in this era of unanswered questions: we must place the struggle to free these Panthers, Eric McDavid, Brendan Walsh, and all other political prisoners at the forefront of our work. We must learn how to connect the new and old generations of political prisoners with the work we're doing in the streets. We need to make sure that every damn person in our cities knows who these people are. We need to ensure that when we are organizing against the war, we are also organizing to free those that resisted war. We need to ensure that when we're working to save the earth, we are working to free those that have been imprisoned fighting for it.

We have to be able to view our movements in the context of a history of social movements in the U.S. that dates back to at least 1492. We need to ensure that we do not leave people like Eric McDavid to sit in a jail cell for a year without massive actions demanding his release. We need to ensure that we don't allow them to imprison these Panthers.

We need to ensure that we don't act like we always have, and forget. We as a movement have forgotten those that fill the prison cells and those that face them. Let's remember. And never forget. Let's never leave those facing imprisonment hanging ever again. When they face those cells, let them face them with a strong movement beside them.

Freedom for the Panther 9! Freedom for all political prisoners! For the abolition of all cages!

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Dave Strano – Kansas Mutual Aid