Federal Prisons

What is Tox?

It’s an instant messaging protocol with applications available for all the most popular operating systems.

What are the benefits?

1. peer-to-peer: no central point of failure or interference
2. no metadata: related to point 1, no third party can see who you are messaging, when or from where
3. encrypted: content of messages are encrypted
4. perfect forward secrecy: each message is encrypted with a separate key, so that decrypting one message does not allow an attacker to decrypt your previous messages (this is an advantage over GPG encryption)

What are the shortcomings of Tox?

1. new/alpha software not all apps have full functionality (i.e. no group messaging on Antox for Android), and software can be buggy
2. untested related to it’s newness as well as the relative complexity of a full messaging app, the encryption/security of Tox is not as well tested as GPG
3. peer-to-peer: This is not really a shortcoming, but you should be aware that when you use Tox with someone, while no one else should be able to see where you are messaging from, the persyn you are communicating with has access to your IP address by default. This is much better than most other apps out there, and it can mitigated by running Tox behind the Tor network. Below are instructions for how to do this.

How to run TRIfA behind Tor on an Android device

1. install Orbot and TRIfA both are available from F-Droid repositories if you don’t have or don’t want to use Google Play Store
2. open Orbot
3. click the button to turn on “VPN Mode”
4. at the bottom where it says “Tor-Enabled Apps” click the little gear wheel on the right
5. on the following screen check the box for TRIfA and any other apps you want to be forced through Tor
6. hit the back arrow
7. in orbot click the big “Start” button.
8. once orbot has a connection to Tor open TRIfA app and follow instructions for setting up your account

How to install Tox messaging app in Tails OS

[NOTE: If you were already using Tox in Tails, you should back up your config files before installing Tox again. Go to Places -> Dotfiles, then hit ctrl-H, then go into .config folder and copy the folder named “tox” and all its contents to your Persistent folder as a backup.]

• In Tails set up Persistence for dotfiles, applications and personal data following directions here: https://tails.boum.org/doc/persistent_storage/configure/index.en.html#index13h2<
• reboot Tails

• at login screen, first set up administrative password 1) click the “+” under “Additional Settings”

         2) click "Administrative Password"
  
         3) enter a password you will remember in both boxes and click "Add"

• enter your password you set for persistence and click “Unlock”
• once it says “Settings were loaded from the persistent storage” click “Start Tails”
• go to Applications -> System Tools -> Synaptic Package Manager
• you will need to enter the administrative password you set above (not persistence password)
• Synaptic will load the list of available software - will take a couple minutes and requires network connection

• click the search button and type in “qtox” or “utox” depending on which client you want

  Which should i pick?

        qTox, because uTox seems to crash every time you change settings in Tails, however, uTox is the lighter one, so slow computers might prefer it
  
        https://github.com/qTox/qTox
  
        https://github.com/uTox/uTox
  
        NOTE: the versions available in the stable debian repos will often be older than the latest versions on github, you can install the latest version but this guide will not cover that

• right-click on the package you searched for and click “Mark for Installation”
• it will ask if you want to install additional required packages, click “Mark”
• click “Apply” button, then click “Apply” on the screen that comes up – it will now download and install tox packages
• you should get a Tails popup asking if you want to Install Every Time - click that and this will occur automatically next time you boot Tails
• you can close Synaptic
• Run qTox by going to Applications -> Internet -> qTox (or uTox)
• create a Tox ID - password protect it in settings->Advanced

• Set tox up to use Tor

          IN qTox: click the gear in lower left and go to Advanced settings
  
          1) uncheck enable IPv6 and uncheck enable UDP (probably already off)
  
          2) Proxy type: SOCKS5
              Address: 127.0.0.1
              Port: 9050
  
          3) Click "Reconnect" - wait a bit and the circle next your name should turn green when you connect (also probably in your top menu bar)
  
          IN uTox go to: settings->Advanced
  
          1) Proxy (SOCKS 5) Address: 127.0.0.1   Port:9050
  
          2) Force uTox to always use proxy
  
          3) turn off Ipv6
  
  4) turn off UDP
  
         NOTE: sometimes changing these seems to cause uTox to crash, the important setting is the proxy to make sure it's connecting to Tor
  

• Shutdown qTox/uTox IMPORTANT: must do this before the below!

In order to save any settings, including your Tox ID keys, and your friends, you need to copy the files automatically stored in your dotfiles to the permanent persistent folder. More background on how to save dotfiles: https://tails.boum.org/doc/first_steps/persistence/configure/index.en.html#index11h2

local/temporary dotfiles in RAM are found here: /home/amnesia/.config/ permanent persistent dotfiles folder is here: /live/persistence/TailsData_unlocked/dotfiles/.config/

These files/folders are probably hidden. To see them, if you are in the file folder view click on the icon with three horizontal bars at the top and check the box to show hidden files.

To find these folders in a finder window: Click on Other locations at the bottom, then select computer. There you will see live and home folders

You need to move the tox folder and all its contents from the first location to the second. There should be two files in the tox folder: “tox_save.tox” and “utox_save”, then as you add friends files will be created for their info and your conversations if you choose to have conversations saved in the app.

The first time you do this copying over you will need to create the .config folder in the /live/persistence/TailsData_unlocked/dotfiles/ location if it’s not there already.

Command to use in terminal window when in the folder you want to copy TO: cp -r /home/amnesia/.config/tox /live/persistence/TailsData_unlocked/dotfiles/.config/

NOTE: Doing this using sudo (root user) will change file ownership to root. File ownership MUST be amnesia.

To check file ownership in Terminal:

 $ls -lah

To change file ownership in Terminal:

 $sudo chown amnesia:amnesia 

Connecting with others

To connect with others you must send them your Tox ID. This is not your name, your name is for display purposes only.

• click on your name/status in upper left
• you should now see your Tox ID as a long string of characters and a QR code, you can copy the long string into an PGP encrypted email and email it to your contact (if in persyn/on mobile they can scan the QR code, or you can send the image to them)
• if someone send you their Tox ID, in qTox click the “+” in bottom left and paste the code in “Add a Friend” -> Tox ID, similarly in uTox, paste your friend’s Tox ID into the Add Friend at bottom left.
• click “send friend request” and wait for their response - this is best done when you know the friend is online because you must both be online to exchange messages

Updating utox

Tails will automatically install the latest version available in the debian stable repo. Installing newer versions is beyond the scope of this guide.

Troubleshooting utox in Tails suggestions

• Delete the tox files from BOTH .config locations above
• Reinstall tox
• Run tox: it will create new files into your local .config folder
• Shut down tox. Move new tox_save.tox and utox_save over to persistence .config folder
• Try rerunning tox to see if your ID is persistent within a tails session. If so try restarting tails to see if it is persistent now.

Organizations in Occupied Turtle Island organizing under the label of Palestine solidarity take various tactics and ideological positions. A great portion of these efforts are negative, representing leftist organization-building and guilt-soothing for populations who benefit from imperialism.(1)

Still, there is much to be appreciated in Palestine solidarity organizing. The fact that as a class, U.$. workers are wedded to imperialism as a labor aristocracy(2) does not mean that select individuals and segments of the same class, such as youth, immigrants and members of oppressed nations, don’t have a righteous impulse to rebel against genocide.(3) Further, drawing the line between practicing manufactured discontent to gain social capital (for example, peaceful, permitted and policed “solidarity” marches, or gathering social media clout) versus genuine rebellion (involving significant self-sacrifice) can be a difficult strategic question and a complicated moral matter. It’s the job of communists to answer these questions, drawing those who can be allied in a united front under the leadership of the global proletariat.

In the United $tates, only small percentages of the country ever will protest for progressive causes, and usually only a few thousand people are liable to turn up at anti-imperialist protests, if we’re lucky. But even this small size of protest crowds can be confusing. We see large events put on in the name of helping Palestine and, ignoring the lack of ideological unity required for such crowds, perceive that there is a strong movement against genocide here. To move how? Against which genocide? You’ll find that the larger the event, the less likely it is for such questions to be answered.

Let’s examine one specific way this numbers game is lost among the U.$. left. A very common protest narrative goes something like this: X city/institution is partnering with Israel. That partnership uses funds which could otherwise be spent “on our community” (healthcare, jobs, public resources). Therefore, we must divest from Israel and invest back into “our community”. The messaging behind agitational work tells the organizers, audience and onlookers at protests the purpose and goals of the work: they represent the ideology pushing our practice forwards. Here, this oft-repeated messaging about divestment explains that everyone should join the cause to reclaim what is theirs from an immoral misappropriation.

This narrative about redirecting resources away from genocide and towards “community” can be found in endless settler-left slogans such as “build more schools, not bombs!” or “money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!” All such ideas revolve around the mythos of the Amerikan “community”: a fictitious multi-national concept in which, abstracted from the violence at the base of the Amerikan colony and the national conflicts therein, we can imagine harmonious and communal ways of life involving sharing our resources. This imagination goes back to the root of settler consciousness in Occupied Turtle Island which imagines a “Thanksgiving” where the colonists shared food with the First Nations rather than poisoning, raping and murdering them by the millions.

An almost identical narrative is wielded by referencing the “tax dollars” spent on Palestine-solidarity campaigns’ targets, begging Amerikans to rise up against a supposed misuse of money which is otherwise rightfully owed to them. This relies on the same conceptual basis as a “community.” If we believe this narrative then absent specific policy mistakes (such as funding Israel) there would exist the basis for peaceful redistribution of the spoils of genocide and imperialism, and this would be a righteous redistribution. At the base of these common yet mistaken ideas are 1) a genuine impulse towards fascism by U.$. citizens who wish to become even more wealthy compared to the Third World, and 2) ignorance regarding the source of global wealth disparity to begin with.

We cannot resolve #1, the fascist impulse among a majority here, without overturning imperialism and settler-colonialism entirely. To address #2 however, we can study how “communities” in Occupied Turtle Island are literally built and sustained off of genocide, slavery and imperialism, especially regarding the “average jo.” There are two main groups in the United $tates: the settlers and the oppressed nations. Euro-Amerikan settlers have been a consistently reactionary group for the past five centuries as their life here is founded on slavery and land theft.(4) They are the numeric majority of the U.$. population and have consistently subjected the First Nations, New Afrika and the Chican@ nation with oppressive, genocidal campaigns.(5)

These oppressed nations on the other hand vacillate between progressive and regressive tendencies depending on proximity to the spoils of imperialism. Independence movements among oppressed nations represent a progressive impulse wishing to sever connections with U.$. imperialism, whereas participation in DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) initiatives, reforming political parties and redistributing wealth to the oppressed nations represent an integrationist trend which serves to either enlarge the (petty-)bourgeoisie of these nations at the expense of their oppressed masses or incorporate swaths of the nation into the capitalist-imperialist world system.(6) Overall there are substantial parts of oppressed nations here who still face genocide while other portions steadily receive a bit more of the imperial pie.

To the extent that anyone here enjoys it, the First World lifestyle includes housing, food, medicine, transportation and extensive leisure-time bought from the blood of indigenous peoples and manipulation of global labor prices which under-pay workers in the Third World and deprives them of basic necessities.(7) An over-accumulation of profits in the United $tates has led to excess money supply and higher domestic wages: the surplus available to create a complacent consumer base beyond the settlers alone.(8) This is why wages here are approximately 10x normal wages in Palestine. Thus while some U.$. workers suffer under national oppression, they are almost all economic oppressors of the Third World.(9)

So if we convince the majority here that they are actually impoverished through imperialism, or would be enriched through its end, we are misrepresenting the facts and tarnishing the cause of Palestinian liberation. When imperialism inevitably falls, internationalist forces in the imperial core will probably be encircled by fascism: citizens here attempting to cling to lifestyles and social roles which can no longer exist, led by whichever elements of the bourgeoisie can rally them around new extractive outlets to replace old imperialism. The faster we can pull away from self-interested economic thinking here, the faster we will eventually construct socialism. The more here who search for their own best interest through the fall of imperialism, the longer such a task will take.

United front work in the imperial core on behalf of the global proletariat will involve grappling deeply with the labor aristocracy and the settler nation. We must investigate this majority’s interests as they unfold in street protests, unions, universities and even prisons. We shouldn’t reject them wholesale: we should condemn their economic gluttony while simultaneously uniting those who will commit to fighting on the behalf of the international proletariat. We must educate each and every Amerikan who will listen about how their wealth comes from genocide and how their lives will change when imperialism finally falls.

Having rejected the fantasy of an abstract, multi-national Amerikan “community,” we could instead support the many progressive causes belonging to the oppressed nations here who have suffered under genocide like Palestine. But such campaigns must be specific in their slogans and selection of organizing base, as well as how to relate to those with varying proximity to imperialism. Connecting progressive campaigns such as those against police brutality, which predominantly affects oppressed nations, to Palestinian sovereignty is a righteous cause. Trying to connect Palestine to the reactionary dissatisfaction of everyday Amerikan workers, especially settlers, is a recipe for fascism and genocide.

<sup>Notes:
1. A Million Tiny Fleas “The Anti-War Movement that Wasn’t” Substack, Jun 13 2023.
2. Cope, Zak “Divided World Divided Class” Kersplebedeb 2012, pg. 9.
3. The Dawnland Group, “A Polemic against Settler Maoism”, MIM (Prisons) website, June 2024.
4. Sakai, J. “Settlers: The mythology of the White proletariat from mayflower to modern.”(2014). Kersplebedeb.
5. Maoist Internationalist Ministry of Prisons, “Proletarian Feminist Revolutionary Nationalism” June 2017, pgs 96 – 108.
6. Labor unions from oppressed nations integrating with settler and imperialist labor unions is an important historic evidence of this trend. See: Sakai, J. “Settlers: The mythology of the White proletariat from mayflower to modern.”(2014). Kersplebedeb, pgs 152 – 174.
7. Jason Hickel, Christian Dorninger, Hanspeter Wieland, Intan Suwandi, “Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015,” Global Environmental Change, Volume 73, 2022.
8. Cope, Zak “Divided World Divided Class” Kersplebedeb 2012, pg 200.
9. Undocumented migrants, prisoners, homeless people, and the chronically unemployed lumpenproletariat are generally not economic oppressors.</sup>

i enjoyed comrade Grim’s article on Christian Zionism and the prison tablet propaganda. i wanted to comment a little since Grim asked for comments from TX comrades.

Comrade Grim was spot on with what was said about the ideas and ideals driving Christian Zionism generally and as it manifests itself in the prison tablet space.

Regarding the group Grim mentioned by name, Real Vida TV, i was able to work closely with Real Vida while organizing on behalf of Texas T.E.A.M. O.N.E. At the time their line on solitary confinement was that they saw it as torture and that it should be shut down in its totality. This matched Our own line on solitary confinement and Real Vida was willing and did assist us in spreading Our message, connecting us with interested groups and opening their platform up to us and our supporters. At the time it was only an audio radio show, not a podcast, and there were no tablets. They also acted as communication assistants helping us make important contacts with each other from plantation to plantation as we organized a state-wide hunger strike against solitary confinement. All this is to say that at the time we had a working relationship, regardless of their Christian Zionist beliefs.

However, this changed after Operation Al-Aqsa flood. Personally speaking i couldn’t even listen to the garbage they were spewing let alone look past it. Ties were severed. To me the question of the Third World proletariat and the Palestinian nationalist struggle far out-weighs the U.$. prisoner class-based struggles.

They’re the most reactionary manifestation of the christian prison ministries and also one of the most popular. A lot of their videos are widely discussed afterwards and i’ve had more than a few disputes and even fisticuffs surrounding the B.S. they spew. The cold truth is that as MIM(Prisons) says, not all prisoners are swayed by this garbage. But the Palestinian struggle has unearthed the reactionary, patriotic amerikkkan spirit among the lumpen here. What i observe is that only the most politically and socially conscious prisoners side with the Palestinian struggle, and this is the minority.

The tablets play a role in that they have very limited selection of voices and ideas, particularly on this sort of issue. Pando App dominates the landscape and prior to March 2024, when podcasts were uploaded onto all tablets, Pando was basically the only source of entertainment. i have filed complaints concerning discrimination in content that is available on the KA Lite app, which is an education app that has a wide variety of scientific and hard historical factual knowledge, but the prison admin has to allow permission to download content. My complaint came after observing that there was no content concerning Africa, the Black Liberation struggle, and anti-colonial revolutions. Although these videos have been made by the app creator, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) has not allowed us access to the content. i also filed a complaint on the podcast platform for similar reasons but pertaining solely to Palestine.

The final comment is that outside comrades have to begin to get their content on the music and/or podcast platforms. i sent a previous note to MIM(Prisons) on how to do that with the Securus people.

Firewater of USW also responded: Grim, read your article in ULK 86. I totally agree with you about the Christian religion and these “evangelists” supporting mass murder and exploitation around the world. The people at Real Vida are real nice folks, but they are brainwashed and misguided like all Christians. We need to be able to copy what they do only for our revolutionary work.

We need to be doing what Real Vida is doing but like you said the Christian Zionists have a monopoly on these tablets and it needs to be broken up! I was in medium and high security and all we could watch was “Pando App”, which is nothing but Christian Evangelists and we have an FYI App that is run by TDCJ and is all Jesus all the time!

TDCJ is run by these Christian Chapels and they oppress other religions such as Muslim, Native American, Eastern religions, etc. The Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF) Unitarian Universalists’ Prison Ministry said that the “PANDO” App would not allow the CLF to participate. Probably because the PANDO folks are right-wing evangelical kooks and the CLF and UUA are extremely liberal organizations.

Grim is right on when ey talks about the genocide of Turtle Island and the raping and pillaging of Mother Earth’s treasures. They love to tout capitalism as the greatest engine of wealth ever created. But it’s like Orwell’s Animal Farm, where the farm animals are ruled by their newly formed governance of PIGS!

Let The Memory of Marcellus Khaliifah Williams, A New Afrikan Poet and Revolutionary, Reaffirm Our Commitment to the Struggle

Marcellus Williams, also known as Khaliifah ibn Rayford Daniel, was murdered by the amerikkkan state on 24 September 2024. He was a proud Muslim New Afrikan, a poet, an advocate for Palestinian children, and a prison imam at Potosi Correctional Center. Despite a vast quantity of evidence showing that Williams did not commit the crime of which he was convicted -

“Williams was convicted of first-degree murder, robbery and burglary in 2001 for the 1998 killing of Felicia “Lisha” Gayle, a 42-year-old reporter stabbed 43 times in her home. His conviction relied on two witnesses who later said they were paid for their testimony, according to the Midwest Innocence Project, and 2016 DNA testing conducted on the murder weapon “definitively excluded” Williams.”

The state nevertheless passed the decision, with the approval of the Supreme Court, to murder him in cold blood.

Williams was convicted in 2001, by a jury consisting of 11 white men and one New Afrikan. According to Al Jazeera, a New Afrikan juror was improperly dismissed from the jury, with the justification that they would not be objective.

Prosecutor Keith Larner said that he had excluded a potential Black juror because of how similar they were, saying “They looked like they were brothers.”

In a country that supposedly grants everyone the right to a “trial by their peers”, the fact that a New Afrikan on trial for the murder of a white woman was not allowed a jury of his peers – of New Afrikans – makes it clear that amerikkka cannot be “reformed” into “accepting” the New Afrikan nation, no matter how much surface-level anti-racist rhetoric is in the media nor how many bourgeois New Afrikans are elected to positions of power. For skewing Williams’s jury towards white men the judge would owe blood debts to the oppressed nations and the proletariat far greater than any average criminal under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Ey was right about one thing – a jury of New Afrikans, of Williams’s peers, would have been more likely than a jury of white men to consider his innocence. That is why more than half of the people with death sentences in the United $tates are Black or Latin@ according to the Prison Policy Initiative.

Williams’s conviction, for the murder of a white woman, shines clarity on why it is necessary to have a proper analysis of the gender hierarchy in the First World. The trope of a New Afrikan man murdering or “raping” a white woman has been used to stir up the most vile representations of national oppression ever since New Afrikans were imported as a permanent underclass and oppressed nation, from Emmett Till to Marcellus Williams. The rapidity at which the criminal injustice system will commit atrocities against New Afrikans accused of violence against white women makes it clear that the question of “gender oppression” is far more tied up in national and class oppression than pseudo-feminists would have one believe. Since time immemorial, the oppressor-nation men and women both have been spurred into action by the suggestion of a New Afrikan acting violently towards a white woman; Williams’s case is no different.

“From 1930 to 1985, the white courts not only executed Black murder and rape convicts at a rate several times that of white murder and rape convicts, it executed more Black people than white people in total.”(2)

Hours before ey was executed, the Supreme Court reviewed Williams’s case, and denied the request to halt or delay his execution. This is despite millions of signatures on a petition, and a great deal of social media activism around the case. The righteous anger of millions was not enough to save Williams’s life. True radicals, not reformists nor revisionists, need to look past the idea of incremental reforms, of politely asking the amerikkkan state to consider the humanities of those it has deemed worthless. If the time and energy that had been put into the (nevertheless righteous) cause of petitioning for Marcellus Williams had been put into studying, organizing, and building towards a movement of New Afrikan liberation, or towards an overturn of the amerikkkan empire and its justice system, not only would Williams’s life have likely been saved (as he would have been granted a true trial by his peers), but the lives of many others convicted (wrongfully or not) of crimes that pale in comparison to the crimes against humanity committed by the First World bourgeoisie and its lackeys would have been saved as well. Any justice for Williams can only be attained when we feed this righteous outrage into such systematic solutions.

Many of the narratives from supporters surrounding his death would have the reader believe that the only reason he was undeserving of death was his lack of culpability. Undoubtedly, the murder of an innocent man is something that will tug at the heartstrings of many, and can be used as an agitational opportunity. But as communists, we recognize that the use of the death penalty by the bourgeois state, and especially a jury of euro-amerikans deciding the fate of a New Afrikan, is always murder. So too are the deaths of New Afrikans at the hands of the police; so too are the deaths of the Third World proletariat by starvation, natural disaster, or oppression by paramilitaries serving as U.$. attack-dogs. Whether or not Williams was guilty of his crime, whether or not the hundreds of others on death row are innocent, the system will never prosecute those who uphold the world order that leads the oppressed into a life of crime, will never order the lethal injection of those with the blood of millions of oppressed-nation proletarians on their hands.

Williams was a devout Muslim and served as an imam for those in prison. The topic of religion has been covered many times before in Under Lock and Key, but this case serves as an example of how religion serves as a liberatory force for many in prison – helping them to transform themselves, and to find allies among all those fighting against amerikkka and the capitalist system throughout the First and the Third World alike. Williams’s last words were “All praise be to Allah in every situation!!!”; the author sees this as an example of why, rather than condemning religion as some pseudo-“Maoists” and chauvinists will do, we recognize religion to be, as Marx explained, the sigh of the oppressed people. Islam brought Williams a sense of comfort and cosmic justice as he headed to his death, without keeping him from organizing and speaking out against the moribund and oppressive priSSon sySStem.

Let Marcellus Williams’s death remind all of us that this country’s injustice system doesn’t care how much people protest, or petition. Ultimately, polite pleas to higher authority will go ignored. The only thing that will keep such high-profile injustices like this, as well as the more covert violence against New Afrikans and other oppressed nations, from happening again, is freedom from the amerikkkan state, won through struggle and revolution. And we must remember, unlike so many of the liberal activists who took up this cause, that we fight for Marcellus not only because the evidence shows he has a higher chance of being innocent than most people on death row, but because the oppressive and racist amerikkkan empire should not have the right to decide whether a single New Afrikan lives or dies.

Williams’s poetry is a beautiful and striking example of proletarian-internationalist art, in how it captures the revolutionary consciousness of New Afrikans in the United $tates, and in how it draws the link between New Afrika and Palestine.

^Note: 1. Elizabeth Melimopoulos, 25 September 2024, Why was Marcellus Williams executed? What to know about the Missouri case, Al Jazeera.
2. see MIM Theory 2/3:Gender and Revolutionary Feminism for more on the intersections of nation and gender*^

I have received two much-needed documents from you: “How to Form an Effective Study Group” and the “Revolutionary 12 Step Program” during the holy month of Black August. During Black August (B.A.) there were three young neophytes who also embarked on the journey of Kebuka (remembrance) by studying the works and examples of ancestors, comrades and many of the beautiful souls that sparked the momentous flow of resistance.

Prior to B.A., I was invited to a think tank class where the serious minded men here can come into a space to talk, think and reflect on solutions to problems that plague the prison population and society at large.

After attending a few of the sessions I realized the class lacked a starting point to build and grow on.

However, I shared the 12 Step Program with the facilitator, and the brothers all agreed that the layout was a great format and that the five principles of the United Front for Peace in Prisons enumerated on page 2 of ULK should be the pillars that hold this class.

Thanking you for all the tireless work that’s being put in.

28 September 2024 – Protestors gathered across the world to mourn the killing of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, a founding member and leader for 32 years of Hezbollah (the Party of God) in Lebanon.(1) We know some readers in U.$. prisons will be mourning as well. Nasrallah was the strongest anti-imperialist voice among world leaders for a generation. And the recent killings of Lebanese and Palestinian political leaders have been significant victories for I$rael, at least in the short-term.

Over 1,000 people have been killed, including Hezbollah’s top leaders, and 6,000 injured by a series of attacks by I$rael on Lebanon in the last couple weeks. These included exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, as well as massive bombing strikes. Amidst these attacks, the Communist Party of Lebanon has called for national unity to focus on fighting I$rael, at a time when Lebanon faces its own crisis in government. They pledged to not let I$rael (and the United $tates, we’d add) separate the struggle of Lebanon in support of the Palestinian struggle.(2)

Hezbollah, however, has been the lead party defending Lebanon and Palestinians from I$rael for decades. They have proven there is still a progressive role for bourgeois forces to play today, even in our highly-developed imperialist world.

Nasrallah had a clear analysis of U.$. imperialism:

“America itself is the decision maker. In America, you have the major corporations; you have a trinity of the oil corporations, the weapons manufacturers and the so-called ‘Christian Zionism.’ The decision making is in the hands of this alliance. ‘Israel’ used to be a tool in the hands of the British, and now it is a tool in the hands of America.”

The Samidoun Palestinian prisoner solidarity network commented on Hezbollah’s role in the liberation of political prisoners of I$rael:

“Sayyed Nasrallah’s leadership and struggle was also directly connected to the prisoners’ movement and the liberation of the prisoners of the Zionist regime. From the liberation of Khiam prison by the victorious Lebanese resistance in 2000, liberating the torture dens of the occupiers and their collaborators and turning it into a museum of honour for those who struggled and sacrificed there, to the repeated prisoner exchanges achieved by Hezbollah, the Lebanese Resistance, including the 2004 prisoner exchange, which liberated 400 Palestinian prisoners as well as 23 Lebanese, five Syrians, three Moroccans, three Sudanese, one Libyan and one German-British prisoner jailed by the Zionist regime. These exchanges, in which Sayyed Nasrallah himself played a major role, illustrated once again that the only viable mechanism available to liberate the prisoners in occupation jails is to liberate the land and to achieve an exchange.”(3)

Hezbollah arose from the 1982 I$raeli occupation of Beirut. MIM founders organized to oppose that 1982 occupation at a time when MIM was just emerging.(4) The war in 1982 also forged the Joint Leadership, in which the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine joined forces and attempted to further unite the Palestinian liberation movement away from conciliation.(5) During the 2006 war between Lebanon and I$rael, MIM condemned RCP=U$A, various alt media, and the U.$. state department for attacking Iran and Hezbollah using gender.(6) In 2024, the imperialists are circulating clips of Nasrallah making comments calling for punishment for adultery and homosexuality. We salute the “Queers for Palestine” in the United $tates who recognize the children being bombed in Gaza and now Lebanon are a lot more gender oppressed than any of us are here in the belly of the beast.

The history of the anti-imperialist united front in the region is beyond the scope of this article. But the region has certainly demonstrated the expediency of uniting classes on the basis of national liberation to fight imperialist occupiers. Hezbollah has remarked in the past that their alliances are closer to some Marxist groups than certain Islamist groups. This shows the emptiness of those in the imperialist countries who want to pit Marxism against Islam on principle. Nasrallah also wrote that Muslims have the duty to provide charity support to any Palestinian taking up armed struggle – Marxist, nationalist or any other shade.(7)

A Hamas spokespersyn responded to the death of Nasrallah saying that it will not make I$rael any safer:

“Is Israel’s problem with armed groups with limited agendas that can be eliminated by killing their leaders, or with peoples who have rights that they have been striving to achieve for decades and have not stopped or surrendered despite the killing of many leaders? Has any resistance group disappeared after the assassination of the leaders?”(8)

Despite these recent losses by the oppressed nations in the Middle East, Hezbollah won the war with I$rael in 2006, killing as many soldiers as I$rael did without all the civilian deaths caused by I$rael in Lebanon. Just as the war on Gaza, one year out, has not been an easy victory for I$rael, further escalations into Lebanon will certainly not be either. Hezbollah and Ansar Allah (Supporters of God) in Yemen continue to be the front line of the struggle against genocide in Palestine and against U.$. imperialism in general.

You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill the revolution!

<sup>Notes:
1. The New York Times, 28 September 2024, Protestors Mourn Nasrallah’s Death Around the World.
2. Omar Deeb, 25 September 2024, Transcript of interview on SSawt al-Shaab Radio.
3. Samidoun, 28 September 2024, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah: The martyrdom of a great international revolutionary leader of our era.
4. MIM, 2007, Substantial Hezbollah book appears finally.
5. Interview of Habash and Hawatmeh on the Joint Leadership and PLO (Draft Translation)
6. MIM, 2006, Six percent of Amerikans support Hezbollah’s side in Lebanon
7. Nicholas Noe ed., 2007, Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, London: Verso, p. 269
8. Tom O’Connor, 27 September 2024, Hamas Warns Killing Hezbollah’s Nasrallah Will Not Make Israel Safer, Newsweek.</sup>

We hope those who have been following our series of articles this week have been both angered by what is going on inside U.$. prisons and inspired to action. (see campaign link below to read previous articles)

MIM(Prisons) is in a period of growth, after some setbacks. In recent years we’ve gradually reinstated each of our 3 different levels of correspondence study courses for prisoners. Just this summer we put out a long-planned Reference Guide that contains historical timelines, maps and a glossary to provide background for many of the things we talk about regularly. We’ve released the Revolutionary 12 Steps Program and Power To New Afrika, both written by prisoners, in the last couple years. We continue to put out Under Lock & Key every three months. And we’ve updated a number of other study packs and resources. And we do it all out of our own pockets and volunteer time. So if you can spare some money or some time to support us it can go a long way.

By the time this series of articles reaches most of our readers inside, in Under Lock & Key 87, the holiday season will be approaching. In that spirit and inspired by all this talk about banned books, we are pledging to mail out more books this winter than any other winter in the 2020s so far!

Please see our get involved page for ways to donate and other ways to help out. Outside supporters can help us make this happen by sending cash or stamps, helping acquire in demand books like dictionaries, Black Panther Party, or Marxist classics, or by volunteering in various ways. All of the new publications listed above have been censored in various prisons, even the Reference Guide was censored in Michigan’s Thumb Correctional Facility for being more than 12 pages long! So continued campaigning and legal support is much needed.

Prisoners can help us get more books out by taking the steps to join our Serve the People Free Political Books to Prisoners Program. Get others to sign up for a subscription to ULK or become a distributor of ULK in your prison. Let us know what organizing work you are doing, what your local study group is discussing, what questions are coming up for you and your comrades. By doing these things you can receive books to help with your local work and studies. We have books on Black/New Afrikan studies, Chican@ studies, First Nation studies, gender, economics, history of Chinese socialism, the Soviet Union, books by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao and more.

Sergeants here are not doing rounds and when they do they’re not signing grievances, so my grievances don’t get signed and they expire. We have to hold the shower or yard down just to get someone down to sign something. Even that doesn’t always work.

The Lieutenants and Captains feel they’re too high in rank to sign grievances, and they don’t make their Sergeants do anything. My question to you is what do I do? I’ve wrote it up and all they do is deny my allegation and find it without merit. I have a paper trail on the same issue though.

Also, our due process is being violated at Disciplinary Court. 1) The Serving Officer is refusing our court appearances because she doesn’t like us or is trying to get done early; 2) The Disciplinary Hearing Officers are not even trying to see if the prisoner is not guilty. You can’t use the camera as a witness but they can to find you guilty. They’re putting “staff eyewitness is accepted” but policy states they cannot just put that, they have to list all “evidence relied upon.” Finally, policy states you have to sign a waiver if you refuse court, but they’re getting away without that.

We can’t get a notary here, no problem solver, so most guys end up “bucking” and ultimately they lose. I know Arkansas is a little better than other prisons, but it’s not all green down here. We’re one of the few states that still do “hoe squad” for free, prisoners don’t get paid to work in Arkansas. I’m here to fight and spread the word!

MIM(Prisons) responds: It sounds like the people held at Tucker Max Unit have tried a number of different tactics to get grievances heard and have begun to assess which ones work when and how they might be improved. In that sense, you are in a better situation to answer your question of “what do I do?” than we are.

We can offer some advice for how to approach this problem. All of the tactics you mention above should be on the table. Tactics are things that we must choose day-to-day based on specific situations, and there will not always be a “right” answer. Strategy however, is our overall approach, and this can decide whether we succeed or fail. Strategically, we must rely on the masses to win. In other words, your real strength comes from collective struggle, whether that’s holding down the yard or filing 100s of simultaneous grievance petitions to state officials.

As this comrade recognized in their letter to us, there are often no quick solutions. The grievance petitions that prisoners have developed and that we distribute cannot solve the problem of oppression in prisons. They can be a tool in getting state officials to support your ongoing collective struggle.

As we recently reiterated, freedom from oppression can’t be won through the courts. The law is a tool of the oppressor. Keeping paper trails is part of the struggle to hold them to their word, which can sometimes be done, and should be done to advance the struggle of the oppressed.

Please continue to send us updates on the struggle there. We will print them on our website and maybe in ULK. This is one more tactic to expose what is going on and to share lessons with others struggling in similar situations.

As a person who has been the target of long-standing censorship campaigns, i would like to give my voice to the discussion around censorship in this time of organizing against this tool of counter-insurgency.

Recently, in Texas’ prison system, an anthology that speaks to the torture of solitary confinement was censored. The reason given is that it purportedly contains content that threatens the security of the prison by encouraging prisoners to engage in disruptive behavior such as strikes, etc. i took part in this anthology and to be clear there is not any language speaking to the disruption of the prison system. There is language that speaks to the dismantling of long-term/indefinite solitary confinement, which is illegal in many places, is considered torture internationally, and which the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) itself admits may cause harm or damage to the mental health of the affected person. So the thinking of the thought police is that it is a threat to security to speak out against torture, but it is not a threat to security to maintain torturous conditions. What sense does that make?

This censorship is of the second volume of this anthology series called Texas Letters (see: texasletters.org). Volume one, which contains the same sort of content from many of the same writers, is approved. So what happened between the time of January 2023 and May of 2024, the respective release of each volume? A one word answer: Success. The first volume was released at the beginning of the last state legislature session. A session where a coalition of people were behind House Bill 812 (HB812), a bill intended to end indefinite solitary confinement. As a way to increase the popularity of the bill the book was distributed to all the law makers. Ultimately the bill didn’t pass, however the promotion of the direct letters and experiences of those incarcerated in solitary confinement in Texas grew. The prolific female writer Kwaneta Harris, who has been in solitary confinement for years, was featured in various high profile publications including The New York Times, speaking to the experience of solitary confinement in Texas, particularly how it is in prisons designated for women. Al-Jazeera and NPR featured interviews on the book and the experiences of Texas solitary confinement. Advocates continue to build momentum and public opinion against the use of solitary Confinement, and it is upon this back drop that when Texas Letters Volume 2 appeared, it was censored throughout the state prison system.

This is a move tyrants use to quell social discourse; to control the narrative and therefore evolution of the system never comes. This is a move to quell any form of resistance. Even that which is peaceful becomes a “threat to the security of the institution”, those who take part in such actions become “threats to the security of the institution” people known for “organizing and influencing other inmates” and therefore are confined in solitary confinement or held in said confinement if already there.

This process of events is no surprise. It is a reflection of the practices coming out of the highest level of government in the state, directly a representation of the tyrannical regime Greg Abbott desires and runs himself.

See, in Texas, the Governor appoints the Executive Director of TDCJ, the Texas Board of Criminal Justice, and the parole and pardons board. The Director’s Review Committee (DRC) is the body that governs censorship inside the prisons. This committee is appointed by the Director. So what We end up with is a DRC of political appointees, appointed by a political appointee, a gang of political careerists, all kissing the ring of the top man, the governor of Texas, all falling in line with his neo-confederate agenda. As such We have a prison system that is over saturated with Christian fundamentalism, stale reforms, faith-based programs, and because any volunteer program has to go through the chaplaincy department there is no secular, dissident voices, programs or activities. All because TDCJ is in the business of cultivating ZOMBIES, those who talk when and how they’re told, walk when and how they’re told, think when and how they’re told. This is considered reform and anything outside of that is a threat to security worthy of censorship.

This type of tyranny should be important to everyone because We should want to stop this sort of government over-reach before it becomes too extreme. Tyranny only becomes emboldened with time and a lack of resistance of its subjects.