Under Lock & Key

MIM(Prisons) preface: Below a comrade in United States Penitentiary - Tucson tells a story about how prison staff institute arbitrary mass punishment. Often such mass punishment comes in the form of lockdowns, which have seemingly become more common in recent years. All level IV prisoners in California are currently on lockdown, and had access to their tablets and phones taken away. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced this on 8 March 2025, calling it “modified programming” as it applies only to level IV prisoners.(1) They have ordered the lockdown in response to an alleged surge in violence, yet we know that these forms of group punishment, and the new form of punishment of taking tablets away, only leads to more violence. As always, this isn’t about safety, but about control. In addition, the Ashker settlement, which followed the biggest hunger strikes to ever occur in U.$. prisons, supposedly prohibits collective punishment. So this “modified programming” is a violation of the CDCR’s own rules and court orders. But no significant organization currently exists inside to hold the pigs to their words. And with communications locked down the CDCR will control the narrative through its agents in the prisons.

A comrade in Allred Unit in Texas reports how lazy staff use collective punishment:

“TDCJ has started something new where if anyone get caught smoking or think they were smoking they locking the whole pod down for 15 days and they take away phones, e-messages, music, law library, Pando app, visits, commissary and school. I am about to write my step 1 grievance. If you can please point me to an attorney on this issue because they are putting other inmates lives in jeopardy and then telling all prisoners to start snitching, when the laws are the ones bringing the drugs inside the unit. It’s a way for them not to run day room.”

Recently comrades in the North Carolina Department of Adult Corrections launched a campaign to combat the system of labeling prisoners Security Risk Group (SRG). We’ve begun to receive grievances from people held in conditions similar to those temporary measures by CDCR above, but for years or decades, as CDCR has also done historically; all because of who these prisoners allegedly associate with, not because they have committed any crime or broken any rule. These forms of group punishment date back centuries in this country in the form of national oppression, but today they are legalized in the form of gang injunctions and security threat group designations.

The oppressed nation of Palestine knows well the wrath of collective punishment it has faced for decades by the U.$. outpost known as “Israel.” While U.$. prisoners face torture, Palestinians are currently facing starvation as I$rael has cut off aid to Gaza for over a week, starting 2 March. This came in response to Hamas demanding that I$rael continue to meet the terms of the ceasefire agreement from 19 January. This has turned the month of Ramadan into more suffering and worrying rather than generosity and worship for Palestinians. Then on 9 March I$rael cut off electricity to Gaza, which will also prevent desalinization plants from providing the water which the people depend on. With Gaza’s official death toll at over 60,000 since the recent invasion by I$rael began, the genocide continues through the illegal denial of basic needs to the people.

As the comrade below says, such collective punishment is an international war crime. It is used to crush whole populations to the will of those in power. And just as it breeds resistance in U.$. prisons, it breeds resistance in the Palestinians suffering at the hands of I$rael, as well as millions of supporters watching the genocide unfold. The future of the oppressed nations around the world lies in uniting in a common struggle against imperialism.

Notes: CDCR High‑Security Areas Placed on Modified Movement

A Federal prisoner: The administration (Warden, Associate Warden, Captain) use frivolous excuses to apply mass punishment on prisoners. Officers abuse their authority and use excuses to “justify” punishment. It may sound better if I explain the situation:

18 December 2024 – I was in the Education building, doing some research. About 8:30 AM, there was an incident call, or what we call the “deuces”. This is when there is a situation, like a fight, happening somewhere on the compound. At the time, we were all outside or about the compound. It was outdoor rec for many, some were on the yard, some were indoors at the chapel, or indoor rec, or library.

But when the “deuces” are hit, everything stops temporarily. In this case, the officers all ran towards E Unit. We all looked to see if there was a fight; you’d hate to see a fight so close to Christmas, because the Warden and staff will use any excuse to lock us down over the holidays and claim “safety and security”.

As it turns out, the incident wasn’t an incident at all. Several guys heard on the hand units that they said, “Stand down, false alarm”. What that meant was that there was nothing to really worry about.

But, less than five minutes later, they called for everyone to leave the programs building. This was very frustrating to those trying to work. Many were in classes, some working on legal work. It is very frustrating when USP Tucson finds reasons to shut everything down. They have a very malicious history of doing this and are too incompetent to hold staff accountable for preventing us from programming.

So, I walk out, with everyone else, and heard that they will do a “Yard Recall.” That means everyone has to go back to their dorms. When I got outside, I asked a few guys that were on the yard: “so, what do we know?” They told me that it was a false alarm, but somebody may have said something to one of the female officers, and she felt “offended”, so she told the Lieutenant, who called for an entire recall.

I was frustrated. What did ANYBODY in the programs area have to do with ONE person on the yard with bad behavior? If what the guys on the yard said was true, then there was no reason to use mass punishment. I came out of the building and looked back and saw how many guys were coming out. They may have been over 100 people affected by this cowardly move by the staff. Guys in the chapel, who had nothing to do with the incident. Guys in indoor recreation that had nothing to do with what happened outside. Guys in GED classes and those in the library, who were nowhere near the incident. All being punished because staff “got in their feelings.”

What a cowardly act.

We were on the yard until 9 AM when they opened the gates and everyone went back to their units. I noticed there was no official “Yard Recall” as they should have done. While we were out there, I saw guys talking to one of the Lieutenants, asking why the severe action. I didn’t hear what he said, but I saw the extreme disappointment in the prisoners, as if the answer didn’t make sense.

Why shut EVERYTHING down for what one person did? This again is called Mass Punishment, and it is strongly frowned upon by most nations. The United Nations has what is called the Nelson Mandela Rules, and one of the elements is that they forbid mass punishment in prisons. Most nations signed on to this, but the United States never ratified it… explains why they still do it.

In 2024, there have been about 102 lockdowns on the compound at USP Tucson, compared to 118 in 2023. In 2024, there have only been SIX instances where the “deuces” were hit for altercations. In 2023, there were 25. This is a significant decrease in violence on the compound.

Since 23 May 2024 to the current date (December 18th), there has only been ONE incident regarding a fight. That was on September 22nd, and staff wrongly used that excuse to change to a “staff assault” so that they could punish the entire facility for at least 30 days on lockdown. They then punished us by decreasing the phone calls from 10 minutes with an hour wait to a five minute call with a 90 minute wait, making it extremely difficult to communicate with families.

Since we came off the lockdown of September 22nd, coming off in late October, there have been about 18 lockdowns… NONE of them were because of physical altercations. They were all “administrative”.

What I am showing is that, even though this is a prison and a penitentiary, the people here have done as much as they could possibly do to reduce the violent incidents in the prison. When a prison can go from 25 lockdowns because of fights to currently six, it shows that, for the most part, we know how to behave.

But, if we are going to be punished every time ONE person does something wrong, then staff has created a standard that nobody can hope to attain. The Warden is either a fool to think that every single day on a penitentiary should be hassle and violent free, or he is maliciously bent on punishment for the prisoners.

If the Associate Warden ignores the fact that the prisoners here have done all they could to stay out of trouble and creates excuses as to why we are being punished, it is clear that she has no interest in rehabilitation.

In all this, no prisoner was able to rehabilitate, because USP Tucson was so busy looking for another screw to put in the population. There was no security issue. It was a false alarm, but they found a reason to disrupt every single angle for rehabilitation. This is the perfect picture of mass punishment in prisons, yet staff all consent to it while hiding behind made-up policies that don’t exist.

I’ve often said, “sometimes the worst people in prisons aren’t the ones behind the steel doors, it’s the ones coming out the parking lots of those prisons.” We simply cannot live with the program in USP Tucson. The Warden, Associate Warden, Captain and all the departments refuse to let us reform.

Damascus, the capital of Syria, fell to militia forces on 8 December 2024. The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s Ba’ath government in Syria is another setback for the resistance to U.$.-I$rael aggression in the region. The last half century has also demonstrated the limitations of bourgeois nationalism in the Levant. While Syria has been the center of meddling by the imperialists and regional powers for decades, the Ba’ath government’s failure is due to the bourgeois class’ nature as a self-interested minority that cannot fully represent the interests of the nation.

The current civil war started during the so-called “Arab Spring” in 2011. Popular protests that year led to state suppression of many of the more progressive forces. Meanwhile funding via U.$. proxies (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates) helped prop up extremist Sunni-affiliated militias. In the chaos that ensued, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria(ISIS) arose to control most of Syria, in terms of area, and parts of Iraq by 2014. At this point, the United $tates teamed up with the Kurdish nationalist movement in Syria to form the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to prevent ISIS from completely taking over Syria, while Hezbollah and Iran fought ISIS on other fronts. A decade ago, it was clear the Assad government could not sustain itself.

By 2024, the former al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, Al-Nusra Front, had evolved into Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). HTS led a coalition of militias from the Idlib region to take Homs and then the capital of Damascus soon after. At the same time, the United $tates rallied the Revolutionary Commando Army from al Tanf region near the Syrian-Jordan-Iraq border. Many of the 2000 U.$. troops currently in Syria are in al Tanf. Meanwhile, the Turkey-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) continues a war against the SDF in the North of Syria. The Syrian National Army has incorporated many former ISIS soldiers, and threatens to wipe out Kurds in regions bordering Turkey to serve Turkey’s interests in suppressing the Kurdish independence movement. But the U.$. sees SDF territory as theirs, so Turkey is limited by its NATO master on that front.

In coordination with the taking of the capital by HTS, I$rael immediately seized strategic territory in the Golan Heights and destroyed Syria’s military installments (reportedly 90% of their capacity). I$rael has seized the highest point in Syria and territory that was granted to Syria as a buffer zone in a previous war. I$rael is now closer than ever to Damascus, with no Syrian military to stop them. This means the ability of Syria to stand as an independent military force against the U.$./I$rael has been eliminated. This has led HTS to say they will not allow Palestinian militants to train in Syria anymore.

Over the last decade plus, hundreds of armed organizations have operated across Syria; a condition that is hard for us in the United $tates to imagine. The situation continues to be chaotic in Syria, and those much more familiar than us have a hard time knowing what is going on on the ground. It is clear that U.$. intelligence had a good sense of the balance of forces and was able to foster this takeover by HTS and others in very short time.

Short-term Impacts

Despite the reactionary nature of the Assad regime, which led to its quick collapse in December, Syria has served as a base of resistance for the region for over half a century. This is why, in the short-term, we see the fall of Assad as a bad thing for the anti-imperialist movement, despite being inevitable.

Syria was a transit corridor for resources from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon, this has been disrupted. Syria can now serve as corridor for I$rael to reach and attack Iran. The overthrow of Assad is another short-term setback in the resistance to U.$. imperialism in the region following I$rael’s successes in decapitating Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. The recent peace deal between Hezbollah and I$rael also indicated a victory for the U.$. camp.

Five days after taking power, HTS declared that all Palestinian resistance forces must demilitarize. Palestinian factions, including Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), the Saiqa, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) Martyr Ali Aswad Brigade, have had a presence in Syria as guests of the government for decades. The refugee camp “Yarmouk”, near Damascus, is the center of the Palestinian diaspora. Beginning with the Nakba in 1948, most Palestinians have been forced off of their land by I$raeli settlers, and therefore live in what are now separate countries like Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. With the peace deal in Lebanon, I$rael is trying to demilitarize Arabs there next. By cutting off the bases of operation of the Palestinian movement and the flow of supplies, I$rael is remaking the region for a complete suppression of the liberation movement.

After more than two years without a president, Lebanon’s parliament chose Joseph Aoun on 9 January 2025. This U.$.-backed candidate clinched the vote after the Hezbollah-favored candidate withdrew. Aoun, like HTS, has pledged to demilitarize any groups outside the Lebanese army. Hezbollah has long been the strongest military force in Lebanon, while participating in a multi-party government. According to the peace deal between I$rael and Hezbollah, I$rael had 60 days to withdraw from southern Lebanon. They have not done so as Hezbollah has also not demilitarized from the south as agreed to in the deal.

Sanction Wars

While the December events were swift, the overthrow of Assad was a U.$. operation dating back decades, through low intensity military and economic warfare. In 2002 Undersecretary of State John Bolton added Syria to the list of President Bush Jr’s “Axis of Evil” countries, justifying economic sanctions, which the Amerikans get their allies to enforce as well.

Sanctions are economic warfare. Just like when you drop bombs on a country, sanctions often result in suffering and death of the civilian population. The fear-mongering around Russian election interference is a joke compared to what the Amerikans have been doing for decades, starving people to force them to change their political allegiances.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Syria’s oil sales in 2010 would have been around $3.2 billion or 25% of the state’s revenue. But war and sanctions put an end to that within a year. Oil extraction in Syria was first done by an Amerikan beginning in 1956. By 1958, Syria was part of Nasser’s United Arab Republic (UAR), which seized the oil fields and machinery from the Amerikan company. When the Ba’ath Party took over a couple years later, with the dissolution of the UAR, they kept the oil fields nationalized. By 2013, ISIS controlled most of the oil fields and were using them to raise money. Assad stated that ISIS had two partners in stealing the Syrian oil since 2014, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey and the Amerikans. China has echoed Assad on this point. In November 2019 Trump said to the press that “We’re keeping the oil, we have the oil, the oil is secure, we left troops behind only for the oil,” referring to the SDF-controlled region of northern Syria.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_industry_in_Syria)

The U$ imperialists want to monopolize the global oil supply as much as possible and ensure that all major oil producing economies are selling their oil in U.$. dollars. This allows the U.$. dollar to maintain an inflated value in global commodity exchange (by forcing countries that need to buy oil from OPEC countries to have a stash of U$ currency on hand). A secondary effect is that it makes it harder for countries sanctioned by the U.$. to buy oil (forcing the use of proxies to access U$ currency and do business with OPEC). This allows the Amerikans to artificially control inflation of U$D, while currencies in other countries like Syria, or Nigeria, take on that burden.

The Revolutionary Commando Army, paid by the Amerikans, was making 12 times what the Syrian Army was paying, thanks to inflation crippling the value of the lira, or Syrian pound. This inflation can be blamed on the U.$.-imposed sanctions. However, it is also a characteristic of a capitalist economy. There is a reason why socialist China did not have inflation despite U.$. sanctions on the Communist Party of China.New China’s First Quarter-Century, Foreign Languages Press, Peking 1975 And there is a reason why inflationary forces and financial markets threaten the Chinese economy today, after 50 years of capitalism. Similarly, the Ba’ath economy was susceptible to these problems and more. Nationalist policies can slow the effects of capitalism, but cannot eliminate them like socialism does.

The Limits of Bourgeois Nationalism

The weakness of the bourgeois Syrian state is also reflected in Russia’s unwillingness to get involved and Assad’s sudden fleeing of the country leaving his army with no clear leadership for resistance. If there was a way to maintain Ba’ath rule, Russia would have wanted that. Contrast Assad to Sadaam Hussein in Iraq who faced a trial, and was executed by hanging while calling for a united Arab resistance to U.$. imperialism and a free Arab Palestine. The Ba’ath parties in both countries come from a nominally pan-Arab and nationalist background. But we see how circumstance exposes them as inconsistent allies against imperialism.

When the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party emerged, about a third of the world’s population was living under socialism, most of them in the Soviet Union or China. The Syrian Communist Party was the other party with broad mass support. These influences pushed a pan-Arab line with pro-social economic policies in the early Ba’ath Party. Ba’ath was the radical alternative to Nasserism and originally mobilized the peasantry in Syria via land redistribution. The father of Bashar al-Assad led a coup that abandoned this path, and focused on serving the urban capitalist class. Today the national and regional economic projects of the 1960s are impossible as war and divisions have become dominant under imperialist influence.

The way the Assad regime folded was a sign of its own internal weakness. Of course, this came after 13 years of more or less constant imperialist meddling and instigating of civil war. But the resistance in Gaza has not folded after 75+ years, while the once stable and relatively powerful Syrian government folded in a matter of days. This speaks to the internal contradictions. While parties like Ba’ath and Hezbollah have served to suppress communist organizations, the conditions in Palestine have united the nation to the extent that communists and bourgeois nationalists are waging guerrilla warfare in conjunction against the occupiers just days before a cease fire is expected to begin. Now that Assad’s government has fallen, Syria faces greater chaos, allowing the imperialists to play forces off against each other.

Neo-colony of U.$. or Jihadist Caliphate?

While the general media propaganda in the United $tates has been to celebrate the takeover in Syria, the more thoughtful Amerikans are concerned that HTS is “former al Qaeda.” They see conservative religious views of such groups and lump them in with Christians in the U.$. government who are fighting against abortion rights and diversity. On top of that is the racialized view of Muslims as foreign, other, and dangerous. But for the proletariat “al Qaeda” is not necessarily a negative, and the network continues to capitalize on the perception that they are fighting U.$. (and allied) imperialism.

Some real red flags for the proletariat to look out for are things like doing your first interview on CNN within hours of taking power, moving to neutralize threats to I$rael, letting I$rael seize territories of the former state, and the number 1 red flag to look out for: courting positive business relations with U.$. imperialism. These are all things HTS leaders have already done.

Osama bin Laden is rolling over in his watery grave as these rebranded al Qaeda leaders of HTS have become the tip of the U.$. imperialist spear in Syria. But what appears to be the rise of a clear U.$. puppet, emerged from the anti-imperialist bourgeois nationalism that dominates the Muslim resistance today. Their bourgeois character ultimately comes into contradiction with their nationalist claims.

As Marxists we look at class interests, and class interests in the form of national interests, to determine who are our friends and who are our enemies. And the majority of people in the Levant are proletariat and peasantry. Palestine is clearly included in the proletarian camp, despite their economic structure limiting class development and perhaps being dominated by a lumpen-proletariat or semi-proletariat.

Much has been made of the foreign nature of HTS, that it is a transnational group of ragtag extremists. But this too just feeds into neo-colonial thinking. Expelling the foreigners is progressive when aimed at the imperialists. But this is a specific brand of foreigner. And the imperialists can easily pull together a group of born-and-bred Syrians that will be happy to run the country for their Amerikan sponsors. So the oppressed must guard against this form of narrow nationalism.

Syrian nationalism may turn against HTS, but it is not clear who will take their place and how they will be any better. The national question is not clear in a country whose borders were created by the U.$. and French imperialists in 1948. Like many political forces in the region, the Ba’ath Party came from pan-Arab roots, that see one Arab nation that is destined to dissolve the imperialist imposed boundaries. Syria even briefly formed the United Arab Republic by merging with Egypt towards this goal. More recently, ISIS united broad regions of Iraq and Syria for a short period, though against the will of many in the region. What is clear is that the Arab people of the region share a common interest, and should be working together to meet that common interest. Currently I$rael is crushing the attempts at doing so.

The New “President” of Syria

Abu Mohammad al-Julani is the leader of HTS, who united the various forces that fought to overthrow Assad. He has returned to using his birth name of Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa. While he indicated it would be up to four years before elections would occur again in Syria, National Public Radio quickly began referring to em as the “President of Syria.” The U.$. State Department also lifted the $10 million reward it had long offered for al-Sharaa’s capture on 20 December 2024, another indication of how the Amerikans are viewing the take over.

In 2021, al-Sharaa did an interview with Frontline where ey said ey was radicalized by the Palestinian Second Intifada, stating, “I started thinking about how I could fulfill my duties, defending a people who are oppressed by occupiers and invaders.” Then al-Qaeda’s attacks on 9/11 inspired em to travel to Iraq to fight the U.$. invasion in 2003 as a soldier with al-Qaeda. Ey was arrested by the Amerikans in 2006 and imprisoned for 5 years. Ey was released, coincidentally during the start of the Syrian revolution in 2011 and began immediately working to build al-Qaeda in Syria, which ey called Jabahat al-Nusra, or in the U.$. media referred to as Al-Nusra Front. Al-Nusra eventually emerged at the center of power plays between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. The differences between these groups may be mostly about power struggles and not ideology. However, ISIS was initiated by al-Qaeda affiliated people who thought they weren’t moving fast enough to liberate the land. Al-Nusra seemed to have a similar strategy, which is what led to confrontation with ISIS. In the end, HTS was militarily fighting both ISIS and al-Qaeda to govern Idlib province in the years prior to seizing Damascus, while benefiting from Turkish economic support.

U.$. State Department aide Jake Sullivan told Hillary Clinton that “AQ [Al-Qaeda] is on our side in Syria” in 2012, referring to the Al-Nusra Front.

State of Imperialist Forces

Russia’s lack of action in Syria, compared to years past, is a sign of their military over-extension with the war in Ukraine. They lost a strategic naval base in the Mediterranean Sea without a fight with the fall of the Assad regime. Like the United $tates, they seemed aware of the Syrian government’s inability to sustain itself and cut its losses, which were significant.

Recently a comrade wrote us asking about what are we waiting for to start the revolution here in occupied Turtle Island. Well a lot of things. From the Russian Revolution, Lenin taught us that a revolutionary situation is defined by the masses and the ruling class realizing the impossibility of continuing in the old way. In addition, an actual end to U.$. imperialism becomes possible when it finds itself over-extended militarily. This is clearly not the case as it is effectively exerting its interests on the other side of the world via proxies like I$rael, Ukraine, and militias in Syria. While the U.$. is footing the bill, they are doing very little in terms of providing their own military support and are not putting Amerikan lives in jeopardy to do so. This could be to avoid open conflict with Russian troops, but also avoids much of the backlash they faced while occupying Iraq.

The overthrow of Assad with only 2000 U.$. troops in the country is a victory for the imperialists, but we’ll see whether this is enough for them to establish a new client state in Syria. Syria has also been a success for the Amerikans in terms of global public opinion. Following the escalated genocide in Gaza over the last 15 months, U.$. public opinion has grown significantly to condemn I$rael, but less so Amerikkka, despite the recognition by most that I$rael is U.$.-funded. In Syria the connection is much less apparent, but the predominant sentiment is that the overthrow of Assad was a good thing. This is a big difference from the Amerikan regime change project that overthrew the Ba’ath regime in neighboring Iraq. During the invasion of Iraq, the U.$. was in the position I$rael is today. Today I$rael could fall, and the imperialist superpower lives on.

Axis of Evil - 25 years of Reshaping the Middle East

Following al Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, U.$. President George Bush coined the term “Axis of Evil” to refer to Iran, Iraq and North Korea in 2002. While these countries were not united in any way, Bush claimed they were all sponsors of terrorism and manufacturers of “weapons of mass destruction.” In reality their commonality was in their resistance to U.$. imperialism.

This “Axis of Evil” was coined while the “Great Satan” U.$. imperialists were invading Afghanistan, ostensibly for their harboring of al Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden. That invasion lasted until 2021, when the former governing Taliban finally returned to power. In those two decades, hundreds of thousands were killed and millions were displaced in Afghanistan. In 2011, the United $tates assassinated bin Laden in neighboring Pakistan. The 9/11 attacks also triggered the United $tates to launch an international prison network made up of CIA “black sites”, in which the Bush regime okayed the CIA to ignore Geneva Convention rules against torture.

After George Bush’s speech, Undersecretary of State John Bolton gave eir own 2002 speech entitled “Beyond the Axis of Evil” that included Cuba, Libya and Syria. In response to the “Axis of Evil” talk, people from these countries began talking about the “Axis of Resistance”, since resisting U.$. imperialist interests was the thing these countries had in common. Iran eventually took up this term around its informal alliance in opposition to the U.$. imperialist outpost of I$rael.

Before Syria’s takeover this month, Syria was the only state power, other than Iran, to serve as a training ground and supply source for the other members of the Axis of Resistance. Ansar Allah in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Palestine all participate in state power or at least dual power. Other members of this alliance include Shia militias in Iraq, other national liberation forces in Palestine, and now emerging militias in Syria that oppose the recent takeover.

In addition to opposing I$rael and the United $tates, the Axis of Resistance has generally opposed Salafist groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Salafism is a revival of Sunni Islam that attempts to connect to its “authentic” traditions by opposing things that didn’t exist in the times of the prophet Mohammed; a truly reactionary ideology that wants to take society backwards.

Despite Syria’s important role in supplying Hezbollah in Lebanon and resistance forces in Palestine and being on the U.$. “Axis of Evil” list, Syria actually served the U.$. imperialists in their “War on Terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq. The imperialists invaded Iraq (again) in 2003 under the pretense of weapons of mass destruction, which was later proved to be a complete lie. During this period CIA black sites were operating in countries across the world, including Syria. These “black sites” were a secretive international prison system focused on torture, interrogation and disappearances.

While some recent U.$. media coverage of the freeing of prisoners in Syria was proven to be fabricated, there were many people who suffered under the Assad regime who are understandably celebrating or at least relieved. While we criticized imperialist meddling against Assad and recognized the Ba’ath government as useful to the resistance in the region, its failure to serve the people led to its demise. As always, we join in the call of the resistance forces in recognizing the right to self-determination of the Syrian people and opposing all imperialist occupation of portions of Syria and imperialist meddling in the economy and resources of the region. Much struggle will be needed to make that a reality.

^{Note: Our citations for this article are not up to our usual standards, but we believe most of the facts here to be uncontroversial and easily verifiable.}

Yesterday, U.$. Presidents Trump and Biden announced a cease fire deal between their military outpost called I$rael and the Palestinian resistance, primarily represented by Hamas. Palestinians are celebrating in the streets for this potential respite from the 15 month onslaught that has turned Gaza to rubble and murdered 47,000 Palestinians officially and closer to double that in reality. Despite these heavy losses, the cease fire is a victory for the Palestinian resistance that has not folded after 15 months of fighting a much more heavily funded occupier. The United $tates says that the fighting forces in Palestine have increased in numbers since 7 October 2023.

At this writing, the peace deal has not begun and has not officially been signed by I$rael. I$rael has continued to murder Palestinians in recent days, including one reporter who had just announced the planned peace deal to the world. And the imperialists continue to spread lies about Hamas holding up the deal. Investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill says ey saw a deal signed by all of the Palestinian resistance representatives days before the deal was announced, when Biden was claiming they were waiting on Hamas.

The deal is a victory for the Palestinian resistance, in meeting their immediate demands, including a prisoner exchange that is supposed to release some who were sentenced to prison for life by the I$raelis. The deal will also involve I$rael’s withdrawal from and the rebuilding of Gaza. At this time no details are public.

I$raeli press has credited Trump with forcing the deal that has been drafted during the Biden presidency and is scheduled to begin the day before Trump’s inauguration. Trump had demanded a deal happen before he gets into office. The Trump administration has continued to call for the total elimination of Hamas, and the deal seems to also force a demilitarization of all Palestinian resistance in the Gaza Strip. While the majority of Amerikans opposed the bombing campaign of the last 15 months, they do not support a liberated Palestine. Trump seems to be willing to at least pause the slaughter that Biden supported and to appease the minimal demands of many Amerikans, but he is no friend of the Palestinian people. Those who demanded “Ceasefire Now!” may have their demand met, but this is not the first time Palestinians have celebrated in the streets after a deal is struck with I$rael. There is an antagonistic contradiction between the I$raeli settlers and the Palestinians of the land that is far from resolved. And indications have already been made that I$rael does not intend to see the deal through past the first phase. Only time will tell how the imperialists will behave in Palestine in the coming weeks and months. But the struggle for the national liberation of Palestine lives!

UPDATE: As ULK 88 goes to press, prisoner exchanges have begun, with the release of 90 Palestinian prisoners and 3 settlers, followed by 200 Palestinians and 4 settlers. Many Palestinians had been held without charges, and some were already freed by the resistance on 7 October 2023, but recaptured. The second group included many with life sentences.. Meanwhile, I$rael has launched a major military operation in Jenin in the West Bank, killing at least 10 people so far. I$rael has also issued administrative detention orders to imprison 85 more Palsestinians and has been targeting the families of released prisoners for harassment and repression.

Countering the Bourgeois Media

Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, where the Palestinian resistance factions (of which the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, was the largest) united in response to the continued occupation of their homeland by the Zionist entity, was launched on 7 October 2023. Since then, the brutal daily oppression by the occupation forces, and the continued desecration and assaults on Al-Aqsa Mosque atop al-Haram al-Sharif in occupied Al-Quds continues.(1) In the last 15 months, there have been many occasions to have political discussions and pass out literature regarding Palestine in the hopes of bolstering the support for Palestine among the imprisoned lumpen here in the South Bay. I would never assume this to be an easy task, and it hasn’t been, but slowly but surely more people are breaking from the miasma of post-9/11 anti-Arab/Islamophobic sentiments (which itself is an accomplishment as this has been deeply ingrained in the Amerikan consciousness since the beginning of the so-called “War on Terror”).

Here in the majority liberal South Bay, the main sources that prisoners get their news from is the San Jose Mercury News newspaper and the local news channel, Fox 2 News. Like all bourgeois media, both have been reporting on the genocidal Zionist war on Palestine from the general viewpoint of the Democratic Party, that is, a pro-U.$., pro-i$rael view (with some small exceptions, most coming in the form of re-prints of articles by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and the occasional pro-Palestinian letter to the editor, though they have never printed any that I persynally have sent).(2) So on that note, it has been of paramount importance to combat the repetitive assertions of the usual incessant line, “the war began when Hamas terrorists (sic) launched a surprise attack on southern Israel (sic) …”, which is taken as unquestionable truth in line with the discourse of post-9/11 hysteria plaguing the psyches of those here on Occupied Turtle Island.

Being that the events of 11 September 2001 (9/11) are the main source of today’s generalized sentiments in a large portion of Amerika’s collective psyche, I believed it to be fitting to begin my organizing work by passing out and making available copies of Ward Churchill’s wonderfully insightful 2001 essay “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens (Some People Push Back),” which echoes a quote made by Malcolm X shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963. I chose this essay because it, more than any other short and concise work on the subject, blows out of the water the commonly accepted reasons, propagated by the U.$. government, on the causes of 9/11. Churchill centers the reasons firmly on the shoulders of Amerikan imperialism and neocolonial exploitation and oppression of the Arab world.

I paired this essay with copies I made of AIPS comrade Lila’s equally insightful and engaging article “What is Hamas?” (see Under Lock & Key No. 85). USW comrade Da Pale One’s October 2023 article “A Brief History on Palestine” from ULK No. 84 was also very helpful for laying a basis for those willing to challenge their preconceived notions on Palestine, and those who had no previous opinion on the region and its indigenous inhabitants and wanted to learn more.

The conversations I had regarding the above writings led to much more interest into what the actual truth is behind the Palestinian people’s valiant struggle against the ideology of Zionism and its settler-colonial project, and why it seems that Amerikan media has over the decades either been completely silent or ambivalently acquiescing to the will of the Zionist entity, protecting its blatant aggression and genocidal mentality towards the Palestinian people and its denial of their legitimate claims to the hystoric land of Palestine.

Who Supports Palestine vs. I$rael?

Though it is probably obvious, those who are most against Palestine in this jail are most of the Euro-Amerikans, as well as the bible-thumping Christians. On the flip side, the people I have been working with and who I have persynally found to be most interested are: the Vietnamese prisoners and the Samoans/Pacific Islanders. There are large communities of both in San Jose and, just like the New Afrikan neighborhoods and the Chican@ varrios, they are also subject to brutal occupation and surveillance by SJPD pigs and at times also catch the ever-watching gaze of the FBI, which has a main field office in the largely gentrified town of Campbell, west of downtown.

I have had many interesting conversations with Vietnamese prisoners, not just on Palestine, but also on the the genocidal Amerikan war against the people of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. I get a general feeling from these discussions that, though they are fiercely proud of their peoples’ decisive victory against the world’s #1 bully, imperialist Amerika, they are also troubled by the largely unanswered and undiscussed questions of, “What went wrong? What happened to our peoples’ beautiful vision of a future communist nation?” I am glad to see them attempting to answer these questions, decades after many of their family members fled the atrocities of the Amerikan military and their South Vietnamese puppets.

On a final note, both the people of Vietnam and the people of Samoa have had firsthand experience with European colonialism and Amerikan hegemony. The fact that they are able to connect their peoples’ struggles to the relatable struggles of the people of Palestine is a success that I am willing to celebrate.

Prison Tablet Propaganda Continues, With a Victory

A barrier that those organizing for Palestine behind the walls, have had to deal with since Al-Aqsa Flood is the Christian Zionist prison ministries whom, as comrade Firewater noted in ULK No. 87, “have a monopoly on [the] tablets … [that] needs to be broken up!”(3) I want to thank both comrade Firewater and comrade Triumphant very much for their insights on this topic in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ). Before writing my original article on it, comrades in California began submitting multiple complaints related to the education app on Our tablets, “Edovo”, which allows ministries like the right-wing evangelists who produce the “Real Vida TV” podcast from their studio in Tyler, TX, to continue to upload content that radiates conservative Christian or Christian Zionist rhetoric and beliefs. Much of this messaging is equal parts antisemitic, anti-Arab, Islamophobic, queer and transphobic and anti-immigrant. Thankfully, in apparent response to this deluge of complaints, Edovo removed all of Real Vida’s content from their platform, which is as much of a win as We could have hoped. A more long-term goal would be to get MIM content on our tablets for a refreshing counterpoint to Our enemies’ propaganda.

This removal of Real Vida from Edovo does not account for the fact that on other tablets and apps in other states’ jails and prison systems, Real Vida continues to be available as Triumphant and Firewater have noted from the Texas prison system. In research I conducted after reading both comrades’ responses, I found out several things. Firstly, the tablet app called “Pando” is indeed, as Firewater suspected, created and maintained by “right-wing evangelist kooks” as I was able to ascertain from watching a podcast interview with the main creator of the app, Isaac Holt.(4) I further learned that the apparent go-to excuse for Pando refusing content from providers is because “they only want to upload high-quality Christian content”(4), which apparently means refusing content from Christian organizations and denominations with a more liberal/progressive worldview like Unitarian Universalists.

I also heard a radio show/podcast that our TX comrades are likely familiar with called “The Prison Show” (which airs every Friday night from 9-11 PM central on KPFT 90.1 FM out of Houston). They recently uploaded about 50 of their previous episodes to Edovo, from December 2023 to November 2024. In several episodes they discuss the ridiculous game of stringing along and avoidance that both TDCJ and Securus Technologies played with David Collingsworth (the current producer of the show) for over four years in the shows quest to get on the tablets so everyone across TDCJ and in other states could tune in. He also spoke about their meetings with Pando executives who asked them to sign a mandatory contract, that states that in order to be allowed to upload content, you must agree that all content will emphatically “preach the word of Jesus”.(5) This ridiculous prerequisite should tell you all you need to know about Pando, its CEO Jake Bodine and what they and the TDCJ are trying to promote: an endless cycle of brainwashed evangelic “field ministers”, of which I’m told TDCJ already has a great deal of.

Origins of Zionism and Christian Zionism

Central to the understanding of the land of Palestine and the Palestinian liberation struggle is understanding the twin ideologies of Zionism and its mostly Amerikan cousin, Christian Zionism.

Both ideologies are antisemitic in nature and began that way from their respective origins. Zionism, like any other settler colonial project, is based in the genocidal erasure of the indigenous inhabitants of a land, in this case the Palestinian Arab people, and the self-indigenizing of the settlers. The strange thing about Zionism is that far from being helpful to the Jews, both ideologies are grounded in antisemitism. This can be hard to grasp for people, as one would think that something supposedly in favor of the Jews couldn’t possibly be antisemitic. The truth however, as with most things, lies in its hystory.

Zionism, began as a political ideology, grounded in the antisemitic belief that the Jews did not belong in Europe and therefore should be removed from Europe to some other locale. The land of Palestine was also not the first place that Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, proposed to remove all of the Jews to, as Herzl considered locations in Uganda in East Afrika and South America before landing on Palestine.(6)

This removal to Palestine was of course fully backed by Britain, culminating in the oft-cited Balfour Declaration of 1917 written by Lord Arthur Balfour, himself an antisemite, with strong backing from other British and Amerikan antisemites like Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, and Harry Truman. Britain was the major imperialist power vying for control of the region at the time, with France a close second.(7) This is the same Arthur Balfour who was quoted as writing in an August 1919 memorandum, “The four great powers are committed to Zionism, and Zionism be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire or prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs [the actual number at the time was at least several hundred thousand more] who now inhabit that ancient land. In my opinion that is right.”(8)

Having an ostensibly European outpost in the Arab world was also thought by the Amerikans and Western Europe to be a strong tool for holding the spread of both Islam and communism at bay.(9)

As the horrors of the Nazi genocide became apparent and as European Jewish refugees continued to flood out of German-occupied Europe aside other groups singled out by the Nazi regime, instead of accepting these refugees into U.$.-allied countries, they were vehemently refused and forwarded on to seek refuge in the New Yishuv (in Hebrew: settlement/community) created by the Zionists in the land of Palestine.(10)

The Old Yishuv of Jews had been living in Palestine long before the creation of Zionism and the First and Second Aliya (Zionist-sponsored immigration waves of Jews to Palestine beginning in 1882). It bears mentioning that the Old Yishuv was, until the end of 1945 and WWII, majorly against Zionism and the hopes of the Zionists of creating a Jewish state on top of and instead of Palestine. However, this mostly changed after the world was made fully aware of just what the Nazi regime planned and carried out in regards to their so-called “Final Solution” to the so-called “Jewish problem”.

Finally, after the initial 1948 Nakba (“the catastrophe”, or ethnic cleansing of Arabs) and into the present day, the Zionist entity has supported, partnered with, trained the military forces and death squads of, and aligned themselves with some of the most genocidal and virulently antisemitic regimes and individuals in recent decades. These range from Somoza and the Salvadoran and Guatemalan generals and Central American dictators (11) to recent interactions in late 2023 and 2024 between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other i$raeli leaders and Elon Musk, a purveyor of antisemitic and white supremacist rhetoric and conspiracy theories, all in the name of Zionism apparently.(12)

The ideas behind Christian Zionism were around long before Herzl’s ideology in Christian Europe. Christian Zionism, like its cousin Zionism, is predicated on antisemitic tropes about the Jews which date back to the Christian belief that the Jews (in the biblical form of the Pharisees, an ancient Jewish sect) are responsible and to blame (and to be hated for eternity) for the death of Jesus. As I’ve discussed previously in ULK, Christian Zionism is led in Amerika primarily by sections of the Christian Right, mostly consisting of right-wing evangelists.(13) These evangelists descend from the Protestant sect of Christianity that seceded from the Roman Catholic Church during the Reformation and adhered to the doctrine of Martin Luther, a staunch antisemite who authored the antisemitic work, “On the Jews and their Lies”, in 1543.(14) Hitler and the Nazis were admirers of Martin Luther, as exemplified by a 1933 Nazi propaganda poster that read, “Hitler’s fight and [Martin] Luther’s teaching are the best defense for the German people.”(15) Today the Trump administration supports Netanyahu, includes Evangelical Christians and the richest man in the world Elon Musk who gave a Nazi salute at the inauguration.

Christian Zionists see the Jewish people as simply a pawn in their deranged so-called “End-Times prophecies”, believing that the only Jews who are “redeemable” in their eyes are those who accepted Jesus as the “messiah” and their “lord and savior”, thus converting to Christianity and leaving their own religious beliefs behind. They call these converts “Messianic Jews”. According to these “prophecies”, those who do not convert will burn in hell with the rest of the non-believers, as the true believers ascend in “glorious rapture” with their “messiah” Jesus Christ to the pearly gates of Lala Land. In short, those “washed in the blood of Jesus” are worthy and all others are the scum of the Earth.

The largest specific grouping of those who hold these hateful and outrageous beliefs in the United $tates are known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a right-wing Christian nationalist movement of around 3 million Pentecostal and evangelical Christians whose ideology also commands adherents to capture the so-called “Seven Mountains” of societal influence – education, religion, family, business, the government and military, the arts and entertainment, and the media.(16) They are an organization that we, as revolutionaries, should keep an eye on, especially in lieu of the “Oompa-Loompa Man” and his MAGA fanatics taking control of the presidency and both houses of Congress this year.

Groups like the Proud Boys have been relatively inactive since the Capital riot on 6 January 2021, mostly due to fracturing after their leadership was locked up. In addition, other white supremacist/nationalist formations, like the “White Lives Matter” crowd, the virulently antisemitic Goyim Defense League, Identity Evropa, Patriot Prayer, Blood Tribe, Nick Fuentes and the “Groypers”, the so-called “Active Clubs” and many others (some of which have been reported as trying to worm their way into the Palestine solidarity movement with antisemitic signage, chants and pseudo anti-Zionist discourse, i.e. anti-Jewish rhetoric masquerading as being pro-Palestinian or anti-i$rael) may feel they have some wiggle room to recruit and organize after Genocide Joe leaves office and MAGA becomes the “law of the land”. These concerns stem from discussions I’ve had with some of my outside comrades that have been active in the Palestine solidarity movement recently in college campus “Liberated Zones” and in the streets.

Concluding Thoughts

As the Palestinian resistance continues on, steadfast in their struggle for liberation and return and in fierce opposition to the genocidal logic of Zionism and settler-colonialism; as the Lebanese resistance takes time to restructure their leadership apparatus in lieu of the aggressive Zionist assassination operation of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and the majority of the political and military leadership of Hezbollah; as the brave members of the Yemeni Ansar Allah party continue their assault on the Zionist entity and their widely successful operation to throw innumerable monkey wrenches into the gears of the imperialist war machine and a global capitalism in unshakable support of the Palestinian people and their resistance; and as uncertain possibilities open up in Syria, all of Our eyes should continue to be firmly focused on Palestine and the Levant. The Christian Right’s “stand-in messiah”, Trump 2.0, is threatening there will be “hell to pay” if the Palestinian resistance doesn’t return the i$raeli citizens taken during Al-Aqsa Flood. Trump may also take revenge against the Islamic Republic of Iran for allegedly plotting to assassinate him before the election.

May we all continue to learn from the steadfast courage of the Palestinian people, and may they find swift victory against the Zionist entity in the coming year.

Glory to the Marytrs

Freedom to the Prisoners

Healing to the Wounded

Revolution until Victory

<sup>Notes:
1. Hamas Media Office, January 21 2024, “Our Narrative… Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”, www.palestinechronicle.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/PDF.pdf
2. Nicholas Kristof, November 24 2024, “Warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest also implicates United States”, San Jose Mercury News
3. Firewater and Triumphant, October 2024, “Christian Zionism Tablet Propaganda Helps Keep Support for Palestine Small”, Under Lock & Key 87 (Fall 2024)
4. Inside Out Podcast, Season 1 Episode 7, “The International GPT Version”
5. The Prison Show, September 27 2024, KPFT 90.1 FM
6. Edward W. Said, 1992, “The Question of Palestine”, Vintage Books, pg. 23; and Ilan Pappé, 2022, “A History of Modern Palestine” (3rd Edition), Cambridge University Press, p.47-48
7. Noam Chomsky, 2014, “The Fateful Triangle - The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians”, Haymarket Books, p.96-97
8. Said, op. cit., p.16-17
9. Ibid, p.29
10. See generally, David S. Wyman, 1984, “The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945”, Pantheon Books
11. Chomsky, op. cit., p.29-31
12. Shane Burley and Ben Lorber, 2024, “Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism”, Melville House, p.219-220
13. Grim, July 2024, “On Christian Zionism and the Prison Tablet Propaganda Machine”, Under Lock & Key 86 (Summer 2024)
14. Burley and Lorber, op. cit., p.82
15. Facing History and Ourselves, June 2022, “Nazi propaganda depicting Martin Luther”, https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/nazi-propaganda-depicting-martin-luther
16. Burley and Lorber, op. cit., p.160 and p.163-164</sup>

Just a few months ago we reported on the ongoing illegal funding of I$rael by the United $tates, with a recently announced $8.7 billion funding package. As Biden prepares to leave office later this month, it has been reported that another $8 billion is being sent to fund the imperialist outpost in the Middle East. Axios reports:

“The State Department has notified Congress ‘informally’ of an $8 billion proposed arms deal with Israel that will include munitions for fighter jets and attack helicopters as well as artillery shells.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) responded in part:

“Only racists who do not view people of color as equally human, and sociopaths who delight in funding mass slaughter, could send Netanyahu even more bombs while his government openly kidnaps doctors, destroys hospitals, and exterminates the last survivors in northern Gaza.”(1)

The Palestinian resistance has drawn the line in the sand, and are continuing to expose the racism of Amerikans and others in the imperialist countries who support this ongoing genocide. But it is especially the people in the United $tates who benefit from the funds feeding the military industrial complex, as most aid to I$rael is spent here.

In further support of militarism on his way out of office, Biden has once again begun direct bombing of Yemen by U.$. war ships despite a pledge to end the war on Yemen when campaigning for the presidency. As part of Operation Prosperity Guardian, U.$. aircraft carriers have been in the Red Sea for over a year to safeguard international trade in general and shipments to I$rael in particular. Recently, the Amerikans bombed both the only airport in Yemen, killing six and injuring 40, and the main port that serves as the lifeline for getting supplies to Yemen. This port was already largely damaged in the ongoing war with the U.$.-backed Saudi regime. The airport attack was timed by I$rael to happen while the World Health Organization General Secretary was there, though ey was not injured.(2)

Despite over 22 years of continuous U.$.-sponsored attacks, the people of Yemen stand strong, and Ansar Allah are clear they will not stop rerouting ships in the Red Sea and attacking I$rael until genocide in Gaza stops.

There is no hope of the U.$. imperialists cutting off I$rael on their own volition, and everything in our power must be done here in the heart of empire to stop the funding of genocide and the expansionist settler colonialism spreading across the region. Palestine, Yemen and others in the region are at the front lines fighting imperialism and oppression.

<sup>Note:1. CAIR, 4 January 2025, CAIR Calls Biden Admin’s New $8 Billion Arms Sale for Israeli Genocide ‘Racist, Sociopathic’.
2. Democracy Now! 3 January 2025.</sup>

This past summer, we gathered commentary from our readers on the student uprising against the genocide in Gaza, which is now expanding across the region. These articles were used in a pamphlet that many USW comrades received, and were all printed in Under Lock & Key 86.

Comrades on the streets distributed the pamphlet and ULK 86 to students (and non-students) in a number of regions across the country. We attended rallies and speaking events, visited the remnants of encampments and shared publications at conferences.

In general, the response was enthusiastic to the articles written by prisoners, especially regarding solidarity with Palestine. Anti-Imperialist Prisoner Support (AIPS) maintained a presence at Socialism Conference 2024 which took place in Chicago during the end of August. Over 100 copies of ULK were handed out at the conference, while also agitating against prisoner repression.

At a New York hacker conference, audience members eagerly grabbed copies of the Palestine pamphlet at a talk on prison surveillance. The speaker exposed most of the issues we discuss in our Prison Banned Books Week articles. Ey also exposed how Securus has a patent to use the phone numbers of prisoner contacts to track their spending data. And Securus already provides location data to Correctional Officers by phone number! We hope comrades can understand why we’re sticking to snail mail. This also happened to be the only talk at the conference where the speaker shouted “Free Palestine!”

At a southern California Palestine solidarity event comrades were able to give out ULK 86 to a large group of students and noticed that others would grab a copy on their way out. Reactions were mostly positive with one criticism being that it may have been too tough on the students. This was presumably referring to the critique written by an outside comrade involved in the student movement.

Comrades have communicated with a number of student groups to solicit responses or statements for this issue of Under Lock & Key. While at least one group expressed interest, we did not get any reports from students on the ongoing legal struggles and political repression they are facing for this issue. It is clear more work is needed to strengthen a connection between the prison movement and the student movement. But progress is being made.

Decades ago, Under Lock & Key was a section in the newspaper MIM Notes put out by the original Maoist Internationalist Movement and its party in the United $tates. For a time, MIM distributed newspapers on the streets at 20-30 times the amount they sent to prisoners, and their paper came out every 2 weeks. Since MIM(Prisons) launched Under Lock & Key in 2007, it has always been a primarily prisoner newsletter. Though in the past we’ve estimated our online readership to be bigger. A couple years ago we set the goal of distributing as many newspapers on the streets as we do in prisons. While not quite there, ULK 86 was by far the closest we’ve gotten to reaching that goal.

If you want to help expand ULK distribution on the street, send us $55 in cash or postage stamps with a return address and we’ll send you 100 copies of the next ULK we print. ULK currently comes out at the beginning of November, February, May, and August.

As we go to press, the prospects of an inter-imperialist war loom heavy once again. The upcoming U.$. presidential election contributes to the uncertainty as various forces posture and attempt to exert influence. What is clear is that U.$. imperialism is set on backing its Zionist outpost in the Levant (Middle East) while the majority of the world stand in opposition, and even most Amerikans want their government to stop sending arms to I$rael.(1)

Despite public opinion, the imperialists are offering no presidential candidate that will slow aid to I$rael. Military aid also continues despite the United $tate’s own laws.

“ProPublica has revealed USAID and the State Department’s refugees bureau both concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza, but U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other top Biden officials rejected the findings of the agencies even though they’re considered the two foremost U.S. authorities on humanitarian assistance. Blinken’s decision allowed the U.S. to keep sending arms to Israel. Under U.S. law, the government is required to cut off weapons shipments to countries preventing the delivery of U.S.-backed aid. Days after receiving the reports, Blinken told Congress, quote, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

“On [24 September 2024], the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, called for Blinken’s resignation, accusing him of lying to Congress.”(2)

I$rael received at least $12.5 billion in U.$. aid as of May 2024.(3) And as the 2024 fiscal year comes to a close, they just announced another $8.7 billion in military aid to I$rael in an aid package that also includes $17 billion to “reimburse U.S. operations in response to recent attacks.”(4) This came in the midst of increased attacks on Lebanon and the killing of the leadership of Hezbollah.

“Most of the aid—approximately $3.3 billion a year—is provided as grants under the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program, funds that Israel must use to purchase U.S. military equipment and services. …U.S. aid reportedly accounts for some 15 percent of Israel’s defense budget. Israel, like many other countries, also buys U.S. military products outside of the FMF program.”(3)

Israel gets 78% of its arms imports from the United $tates.(3) This circulation of capital into the U.$. economy is one reason why the imperialists won’t offer an anti-war candidate. Meanwhile, family members in Gaza send photos of bombs and military equipment used against them stamped with “Made in USA”.

An April 2024 Pew Research poll showed much lower opposition to sending military aid to I$rael among Amerikans than other polls, but its breakdown by age reflected who is out in the streets, and who is putting their bodies on the line to stop the genocide here in the United $tates. While 45% of 18-29 year olds opposed U.$. aid to I$rael according to Pew, this number decreases with age, getting down to only 22% of Amerikans 65+.(3) This conflict between the young and the old has been reflected in the anti-imperialist movement for decades, and we see this as the principal contradiction within the Amerikan nation where class contradictions and the contradictions between male-bodied and female-bodied people are generally not antagonistic.

The military-industrial complex (MIC) ensures politicians represent economic interests by massive investments in lobbying:

“Lobbying expenditures by all the denizens of the MIC are even higher—more than $247 million in the last two election cycles. Such funds are used to employ 820 lobbyists, or more than one for every member of Congress. And mind you, more than two-thirds of those lobbyists had swirled through Washington’s infamous revolving door from jobs at the Pentagon or in Congress to lobby for the arms industry.”(5)

Weapons manufacturers have bigger budgets than those in charge of the wars, and more influence than any other industry. In 2020, Lockheed Martin received more money from the U.$. government than the budgets of the State Department and the Agency of International development combined. Meanwhile, more than 75 percent of the top foreign-policy think tanks in the United $tates are at least partially funded by military contractors. These weapons manufacturers are also deeply involved in Hollywood movie production. This is why we think it is misleading to use terms like “prison industrial complex” or “non-profit industrial complex”. The size, influence and importance to the U.$. economy of military production is not comparable to such theories.(6)

According to statistics gathered by the National Defense Industrial Association, there are currently one million direct jobs in arms manufacturing compared to 3.2 million in the 1980s.(4) But we all benefit indirectly in this country, and the east coast dock workers agree:

“Dating back to World War 1, the ILA was always proud to note that ‘ILA Also Means Love America’ when it came to its “No Strike Pledge” in handling U.S. military cargo at all its ports,” said ILA President Harold Daggett, who served in the U.S. Navy and saw combat duty during the Vietnam War. “We continue our pledge to never let our brave American troops down for their valour and service and we will proudly continue to work all military shipments beyond October 1st, even if we are engaged in a strike.”(7)

While it is not clear exactly what the U.$. strategy is for I$rael right now, two things remain true: 1. I$rael is an outpost for U.$. interests in the Levant (which is rich in fossil fuels), and 2. weapons production is a key prop to the U.$. economy by continuously increasing the circulation of capital.

France announced it has ceased any military aid to I$rael to be consistent with their calls for a cease fire. The United Nations called on I$rael to withdraw its military from Palestine and Lebanon and evacuate settlers from lands occupied since 1967 (124 countries voted in favor, 14 against, 43 abstained). Weeks later, I$raeli troops fired at 3 UNIFIL positions in southern Lebanon, injuring a number of UN peacekeepers. Countries continue to join the International Court of Justice case against I$rael, including Chile, the Maldives and Bolivia most recently. Meanwhile, Nicaragua, an early signatory, has just cut off diplomatic ties with I$rael.

I$rael has killed an estimated 8% of the population of Gaza after one year of war and displacement.(8)

<sup>Notes:
1. a June 2024 CBS poll had 61% opposing sending weapons to I$rael and 37% who wanted an end to all military actions in Gaza; a majority of Amerikans have consistently opposed sending arms to I$rael since 7 October 2023
2. Democracy Now!, 26 September 2024, U.S. Gov’t Agencies Found Israel Was Blocking Gaza Aid. Blinken Ignored Them to Keep Weapons Flowing.
3. Jonathan Masters & Will Merrow, 31 May 2024, U.S. Aid to Israel in Four Charts, Council on Foreign Releations.
4. Laura Kelly, 26 September 2024, Israel says it secured $8.7 billion military aid package from US , The Hill.
5. William D. Hartung and Benjamin Freeman, 9 May 2023, The Military Industrial Complex Is More Powerful Than Ever, The Nation.
6. Wiawimawo, April 2016, The Importance of Militarism Under Imperialism, and Why Prisons Aren’t So Much, Under Lock & Key 50
7. International Longshoremen’s Association, 25 September 2024, press statement.
8. Ben Norton, 13 October 2024, Global South denounces genocide in Gaza, Nicaragua breaks relations with ‘fascist’ Israel, Latin America supports Palestine, Geopolitical Economy Report.</sup>

I have been trying to follow the Palestinian liberation struggle for some time now, well at least in the best ways I can behind enemy lines: piecing bits and pieces of information together from the various media sources that make it in here.

What strikes me the most at this juncture is the dialectic between New Afrikan youth and Palestinian youth. Over here in the Amerikkkan empire, New Afrikan youth, particularly New Afrikan male youth occupy very unfortunate spaces in the Amerikkkan oppressor nation’s mental. These youth dwell in the danger zone, spaces that are purely a figment of the “white” imagination. This criminal Black youth label. This “hyper-reality” is no more real than the emperor’s new clothes, analogous to the rapist who takes the mentally ill patient back to the scene of the crime, back to the moment of trauma, when the delusions began. It is within the dark interiority of this lived nightmare, the womb of the unforgiving chattel slavery regime enclosed within old style colonialism that the New Afrikan male youth was conceived. This is critical and informative for understanding mass imprisonment in New Afrika.

This process of marking New Afrikan youth as criminal prisoners essential to the functioning of mass incarceration is a mechanism of social control operative under national oppression. For this repressive institution to succeed, New Afrikan youth must be branded as criminal before they are formally subject to this mechanism of control. This is essential, for forms of explicit colonial control are not only prohibited but are widely condemned. Capitalism evolved.

Both New Afrikan and Palestinian people are entrenched beneath the boot of their colonizers without a state that is theirs to foster, nurture, and facilitate their respective national liberation struggles to actualize control over their destiny. Both face the repressive arm of mass imprisonment to undermine and destroy their resistance efforts and thus fine comb their national oppression nightmare.

The I$raeli colonial project is a direct extension of U.$. imperialism. The U.$. penal system being the first and largest experiment in humyn bondage, it is only fitting that this institution of social control finds its way into the Palestinian lived experience under I$raeli occupation.

Palestinian youth are the only youth that are formally subject to a “military” court/detention system. Palestinian youth are not privy to a civil court; that means when they go before a judge they are not entitled to a lawyer, nor a translator even though the entire court proceedings are in Hebrew – a non-Arabic language. And if they remain silent, that means they plead guilty. So no civilian proceedings for any Palestinian youth at all.

Many of these oppressed youth are taken during night raids from their parents or adult supervisors to further facilitate intimidating interrogation techniques. These parallel a lot of New Afrikan juvenile situations as the school-to-prison pipeline. The harsh penalties for simple offenses that are the rule, just the whole criminalization process of entire neighborhoods/locations mirror U.$. law enforcement imposition of gang injunctions/occupational patrolling of predominantly New Afrikan neighborhoods in the United $tates of Amerikkka.

The I$raeli settler occupation project parallels Amerikkkan national oppression of New Afrika with the language and practical application of the tried and tired excuse of blaming the so-called “savages” for provoking the “reasonable” and “peace loving” settlers into defending themselves and the land “God ordained” them to have thus dehumanizing and criminalizing a whole nation. The zionist regime’s actions against Palestinian youth are nothing short of genocidal.

In the current news, it is important to note the essential role played by the Palestinian youth, mostly under 18. The resistance movement there is mobilizing their youth to stand up and struggle forward. This is very important to glean lessons from, particularly within the historical and contemporary social dynamics encircling settler colonialism and national oppression in Occupied Palestine. This is good for an application to the Amerikan empire. As ULK aptly notes: the Black Panthers were mostly teenagers.

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>