The government frequently accuses us of advocating the violent overthrow of itself as a justification to censor our newspapers and magazines, especially in prisons, at the borders of foreign countries and sometimes in the post office. As a result, our newspaper MIM Notes is the most censored newspaper in North Amerika.

In actual fact, MIM has opposed undertaking armed struggle in the imperialist countries since MIM formed in 1984. This point has been stated several times in our publications, but the point of the ruling class has always been not to read our publications but to censor them.

Saying MIM knows that communism will not be achieved without armed struggle is not the same thing as advocating violence right now. What Mao really said on this subject for countries such as the United $tates--known as imperialist countries--is available elsewhere on our web page. Mao on armed struggle in imperialist countries

The censors should also consider if the one who discusses violence and its causes is the one responsible for it. Was it Abraham Lincoln's fault to have to think about and discuss violence and the possible overthrow of the government, including, eventually his own? Should he have been thrown in prison or censored for talking about it before he became president? Is it MIM's or Lincoln's fault that the governments of several states had to be overthrown with violence just to abolish slavery and establish a modicum of dignity for Blacks? It is ridiculous to blame the individual for the overthrow of governments.

The countless prison administrators (mostly state government administrators who share a lot in common with Confederate state governments) who censor MIM would surely have to censor Abraham Lincoln, the most beloved or second-most beloved president of the United States. Below are some quotes from him.

Abraham Lincoln

"Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it."

President Abraham Lincoln, "First Inaugural Address" (available at http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html)

"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable,---a most sacred right---a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government, may choose to exercise it."

(Speech in the United States House of Representatives, Jan. 12, 1848)

One last point, is that usually the people asking the question at the top of this page have not considered the violence already going on all-around them. Instead, they consider only their own relatively peaceful middle or upper-class circumstances free of most violence except for environmental violence and the constant threat of war. They do not understand that the world's oppressed and exploited have tried peaceful methods under capitalism for centuries and suffer tens of millions of deaths each year, such that communism is elementary self-defense for them. The example of the U.S. Civil War is instructive.