Siddique Abdullah Hasan is on Death Row in Ohio. If I didn’t know anything else about him, I would be able to tell something about the quality of Siddique’s character just because Ohio has condemned him.

The reason is, this “State of Ohio” has never met a kind, peace-loving, honest, capable person it didn’t want to kill. That’s a historical fact:

Ohio’s settlers ignored the Northwest Territory Ordinance and violated the property rights of tribal people who owned this land, flooding into Ohio at a rate of 10,000 per year. They engaged in the first recorded instance of biological warfare in human history, deliberately delivering small-pox infected blankets to tribal people and wiping them out, killing at least 100,000 innocent people in order to get their land for free. This genocide would later inspire the policy of liebensraum (“breathing room”) developed by Adolf Hitler for expanding into enemy territory and exterminating “racial inferiors.” He would admit in his book, Mein Kampf, that the genocide in Ohio inspired him.

Rather than defend the property rights of Native Americans and the legal principles of U.S. law, General Josiah Harmar and then General “Mad Anthony” Wayne began the military extermination of the peace-loving, law-abiding tribal people who lived in Ohio.

They were in the way of “progress.”

“Progress” is a euphemism for “death machine.”

Tecumseh, a Shawnee warrior, attempted to unite the tribes to defend their collective right to exist. He became one of the endless thousands murdered by colonizers orchestrating an armed invasion.

“Mad Anthony” Wayne negotiated the Treaty of Greeneville, which set aside most of Ohio as Indian Territory. This treaty did no more than the Northwest Territory Ordinance to stop the lawless seizure of land from its rightful owners. Seven years after the treaty, with most of the surviving owners marched off to death camps, a group of 35 white men led by Thomas Worthington founded the “State of Ohio,” drafting the Ohio Constitution, securing basic rights exclusively for land-owning white men.

It is within this context we must view the case of Siddique Abdullah Hasan. He has been called a criminal by a criminal racket that perfected terrorism and theft; he has been condemned to die as a murderer by an irremediable mass-murderer so heinous and reprehensible that Hitler viewed it as a role-model. The fact that Ohio wants him dead speaks to the character and integrity of Siddique Abdullah Hasan, just as it spoke to the character and integrity of Tecumseh.

As a white guy, I have the luxury of saying something everyone knows to be true but politely hesitates to say it: The slaughter of people of color by white colonizers is part of the DNA of Ohio, soaked into the psyches and soil by the gallons, and when a uniformed, white colonizer guard died at Lucasville, the established order that has always defended the rights of white men had to teach the savages their place. Had Siddique been white, and had Siddique used a musket to crush the skulls of dark children in order to save bullets, he would have a street named after him. But Siddique spoke up for the voiceless and oppressed, and so has earned the animosity of Ohio’s established order.

Siddique’s struggle, just like Tecumseh’s struggle, points to the truly inimical and sociopathic character of this common enemy of us all, a common enemy called “The State of Ohio.”

If the protection of the public really mattered, Siddique would be free and “The State of Ohio” would be rudely strapped to a table and lethally injected.

I join with considerable numbers of others to call for Siddique’s life to be spared, but not just that: I call for sparing the life of the next Siddique, and the next one, and the next; the life of the next Tecumseh, of you, of me. But I don’t call on this “State of Ohio” to spare all of those future victims; we know it just cannot help itself. The future victims of “The State of Ohio” can only be spared by the abolition of “The State of Ohio,” and we know this “State of Ohio” will never abolish itself.

That duty falls to all of us.

So long as this common enemy exists, all of our children are wrapped in small-pox infected blankets, just waiting their turn.

Free Saddique Abdullah Hasan.

Abolish “The State of Ohio.”

Freedom,

                                                                     Sean Swain

                                                                    Political Prisoner

                                                                    Mansfield Correctional

                                                                    Mansfield, Unceded Indian Territory

                                                                     April 13, 2012