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[Organizing]
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Fighting from the Ninth Ground

Greetings from the graveyard! We salute MIM(Prisons) as our foundation of awareness and revolutionary consciousness from the teachings of the greatest revolutionist in our century, comrade Mao Tse-Tung and his principles of applying the science of Marxism-Leninism. Every day prisoners tell me how this literature has helped to make them free even though they may be shackled and entombed physically in these concentration camps. It has awakened their minds. We are studying and upholding the five principles from the United Front for Peace. History is our guide for a new future. The oppressors have all the weapons of mass intimidation, these include fear, ignorance, and apathy which creates inactivity which fosters despair and self-hatred. But we’ve got heart and life and I believe that now is a time for the kind of quality self-leadership, vision, and sacrifice that inspires those around us to really begin thinking in a new way.

Sun Tzu, in the Art of War, mentioned “put them on dying ground and they will live.” The Ninth Ground, a term derived from the ancient military text The Art of War, refers to the last of the nine grounds being the dying ground. If someone were trying to kill you, would you use every means at your disposal to defend yourself? And if someone took everything you owned would you start the process of rebuilding? Well, your response to being sentenced to a long prison term, life, or even death, should be the same as your response to defending yourself from attack or great loss. You should fight comrade!

We view the prison environment as dying ground and “fighting” as a metaphor for self-determination. One of the biggest mistakes many prisoners make when coming to prison is that they don’t initially comprehend the extremity of their circumstances. Instead we jump into the flow of the environment and fail to productively utilize those first crucial three to five years in prison for acquiring knowledge and building the necessary foundation that will sustain us for years to come.

Self-determination should never be relegated to “just getting by.” From the moment we step into the prison system we need to begin a program that organizes our energy toward productive goals. We have to kick start the growth process. In prison our back is even more up against the wall than ever, so it’s important to immediately see the place for what it is - Dying Ground. Since prison culture is a gross extension of the street culture most of us come from, there’s a tendency to merge with it even though the pitfalls are so obvious. We have to begin to think strategically as if we are always on the battlefield. When we take this type of approach to our situation we stop wasting time and move with a profound sense of mission. Our life in prison doesn’t have to rotate around waking up and hanging out. It should involve the total employment of all of our faculties geared toward enriching our lives. It doesn’t matter where we find ourselves be it in prison or free, we should engage life, not retreat from it, we should become even more committed to learning, taking the initiative, building resources, and never giving up.

A life without purpose and direction is the life of a walking corpse. Comrade Mao Zedong said “The correctness or otherwise of the ideological and political line decides everything. When the party’s line is correct, then everything will come it’s way, if it has no followers, then it can have followers, if it has no guns, then it can have guns, if it has no political power, then it can have political power.”

Liberation & Freedom. Long live MIM. The Black Mass Army will help build Maoist revolutionary nationalists and people’s army!


MIM(Prisons) responds: Those looking to expand their educational opportunities in prison should work with MIM(Prisons). We offer political literature in exchange for political work or stamps/money, and we run study groups through the mail. These are tools you can use to form your own local study group and help spread knowledge while also advancing your own education.

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[United Front] [Virginia]
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Black Mass Army Joins United Front for Peace

I’ve written this missive on behalf of the Black Mass Army. We represent a multicultural group of individuals that is committed to destroying the weapons of mass destruction: imperialism, fascism, racism, police brutality, ignorance, and mental slavery. We support the United Front for Peace in Prisons Statement of Principles. Our political philosophy “to cure the sickness to save the patient” is our goal by liberating one prisoner at a time through education, revolutionary science, human psychology and self-defense.

Oppression is worse than slaughter and this hellish reality of mass incarceration is the culmination of U.$. state power and its constitution. We believe and practice the ideology of Ho Chi Minh. We use revolutionary science and this means we take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them thru study, then turning them into concentrated and systematic ideas. We then go to the masses and reproduce, spread info and explain these revolutionary ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and translate them into action and test the correctness of these revolutionary ideas in such actions.

We will stand together with you and defend ourselves from the repressive, tyrannical, draconian, ruthless, unjust dictatorship of imperialism of U.$. bureaucracy. This is what we want and this is what we believe so that the oppressed will have a revolutionary knowledge of his/her self and this spirit must never be suppressed or repressed for the exploitation of others because the human whole is geometrical; “the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts.” This means that The Black Mass Army wants freedom, liberation, security of our communities so that we can determine the destiny of the world’s oppressed people against the controller, thereby uniting the mind with the body.

Because of the United Front for Peace in Prisons Statement of Principles the U.$. prison industrial complex cannot be victorious. The walls, bars, and guards cannot conquer or hold down an idea. We sign on and you have our support 110% x 110%. We are a movement within the Virginia State Prisons.

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