Statement prepared for the 26 October 2013 Running-Down-The-Walls, Hamilton, Ontario
I wake up every day with a shotgun in my face. The pig establishment’s hired thug would gladly pull the trigger and put a slug in my brain pan, leaving me limp and dangling in the concertina wire if I ever had the audacity to act upon the principle that I am above the State, rather than the State being above me. If I ever attempted to take my freedom, the freedom I know I deserve, that pig would kill me for union-scale wages and a mediocre dental plan.
So that’s my situation. Let’s talk about yours for a moment.
You wake up every day with a shotgun in your face. It may not be so close that you can smell the gun oil. You may not see the perimeter truck rolling slowly around the borders of your world. But it’s there. The same pig with the reflective sunglasses and leather driving gloves, itching to punch an entrance wound through my spine, is watching you through the satellite imaging. He’s tracking your movements and purchases. He’s flipping through your e-mails and listening in on your phone calls.
He’s got a shotgun trained on you at all times.
Ask Edward Snowden. Or Chelsea Manning. Or Barrett Brown. Ask them about freedom.
Ask me. I came to prison in 1991 for defending my own life in my own home. I killed an intruder in self defense.
He was the nephew of the Clerk of Courts.
A relative of a court official died. I didn’t. I clearly didn’t know my place.
We have a prison industrial complex that serves social, political, and demographic agendas for those who assume the right to rule us, sure. But the primary purpose served by the system is to terrorize the population-at-large to keep them in their places while brutalizing and re-socializing any perceived “threat” through deprivations, isolation, and torture.
They’re going through your e-mails. They’re listening to your calls. They’re monitoring your radical sources of news online.
They’ve got a shotgun in your face.
Don’t go entertaining the wrong ideology. Don’t go demonstrating funny ideas about human freedom’s primacy or proper limitations on government intrusion or control. Don’t post anything anywhere about anything.
You have the right to shut up.
You have the right to go back to your assigned seat.
Exercise both of those rights and do not get the notion that any other rights exist, or you will see that perimeter truck, and you will see that shotgun leveled at your head, up close ad personal. You will be removed from the program.
I am a noncriminal–not that it matters to the State. I write this from Ohio’s super max facility. So naturally, the question must arise–what could a noncriminal have done to go to a super max facility?
I wrote an article critical of a prison policy that illegally outsourced the private information of 750,000 people without their consent–a policy that would enrich a multi-billion-dollar corporation through state-approved identity piracy.
Criticism equals terrorism.
Prison officials tortured me. Under advice of the FBI, they created a full-spectrum state-terror program to harass every aspect of my life, to make existence intolerable, attempting to disassemble my personality and my mind.
I am now held at a super max facility, admittedly and expressly for my “ideology.” Having an “ideology” is an offense. Written words are “violence.”
Strange definition of violence, from an entity holding a shotgun in our faces, an entity whose declassified documents explain in great detail the solitary confinement conditions experienced by me and by tens of thousands of others existing in what the U.S. government describes as, “the simple torture situation.”
Yes, the sociopaths who employ “the simple torture situation” to silence critics of their violent criminal agenda, propose to lecture me, a critic, about “violence.” Telling the truth about State-terrorists is “violence”…as defined by state-terrorists.
And keep in mind, what they employ on me, they perfect on you. I am the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Consider how police defeated Occupy through use of crowd control and riot response tactics and strategies perfected over decades of quelling prison uprisings; or how controlled movements at public demonstrations resemble the controlled movements of prisoners to the chow hall or prison yard, or how the monitoring programs of the NSA exposed by Edward Snowden resemble an expansion of the prison mailroom to monitor the entire human population, and it’s pretty clear: what state-terrorists do to me, they will soon do to you.
So what can we do about it? We can picket and march, protest, boycott, and vote–the same tired strategies that got us into this position, the same tired strategies that have never resulted in any remarkable or long-term development in the struggle for human liberation.
No. We have to recognize that our true enemy has the inherited wealth from ancestors who committed genocide on the inhabitants of the Americas, and who kidnapped a labor force and exploited them for brutal profit. For true liberation to occur we must develop strategies to divest those criminals of their ill-gotten gains. I’m not advocating the robbery of banks and multi-national corporations, I’m advocating “expropriation.”
What we cannot take we must destroy. We cannot leave our enemy with infrastructure to use against us. I’m not talking about terrorism. No. Terrorism is the purposeful bombing of Iraqi water treatment facilities with the aim to increase water-borne diseases, deliberately increasing dehydration deaths of children. What I’m talking about is called “controlled demolitions,” the destruction of standing structures that are in the way of human liberation. We can tear down a WalMart….and build a future. We can burn down a bank…or a courthouse…or a legislature…and build an ecosystem.
I’m not advocating terrorism. I’m discussing priorities.
In this struggle for liberation it may become necessary to apprehend the true enemies of the people, those doing the most harm, whose policies of pathology continue this social disorder. I’m not talking about kidnapping corporate and government officials and issuing demands to force those corporations and governments to address the maldistribution of wealth and power in the world; I’m not talking about negotiating an exchange, Senators or judges in exchange for the release of Mumia Abu Jamal or Marie Mason. No. I’m talking about “arresting” the most heinous and most dangerous criminals who have disturbed our peace and dignity, and demanding clear demonstrations that they have been “rehabilitated.”
If we are serious about liberation, it is time to start living and to stop dying. That may mean we will have to shoot the enemy before the enemy shoots us. I’m not talking about selective assassinations. I’m talking about defending the lives and the well-being of the many, even at the expense of the wealthy and powerful few. I’m talking about collective self defense, which, if employed long ago, might have saved the lives of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Malice Green, Michael Pipkens, Amadou Diallo, and the unarmed couple shot 137 times by the Cleveland police for driving-while-poor.
If we truly oppose the fascist terror-state, if we reject the final solution now being waged upon the poor of the world–for which the prison industrial complex is a key component–and if we really seek to bring an end to the repressive machinery of a technological totalitarian terror-state that grinds out a profit for the banksters and warmongers, then we must form our own mobile guerrilla communities and effectively live up to our ideals of liberation. We must evolve from Occupy to Shockupy, and build a million brushfires to topple all of the components of the enemy’s empire.
Let the enemy wake up with a shotgun in his face for a change.
FREEDOM
Sean Swain
Anarchist Prisoner of War
Ohio State Penitentiary
8 October 2013
(Day of the Heroic Guerrilla)
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Sean Swain is a prisoner in Ohio State penitentiary and a regular contributor to Fubar. He does not have computer access and cannot receive email. Sean’s website http://seanswain.org is maintained by his supporters.
Sean’s address is:
Sean Swain 243205
Ohio State Penitentiary
878 Coitsville-Hubbard Rd.
Youngstown OH 44505