Author Archives: Sean Swain

On The Morality of Killing Police

I wrote to a friend of mine not too long ago and shared with her that I advocated the preemptive killing of police officers when I wrote, “The Fascists Have Already Lost.” She responded with some thoughtful observations, and what she wrote prompted me to consider that perhaps I should explain how I came to the conclusions I’ve drawn, particularly since I’ve taken such an irregular position. I also considered that if she might understand my position better if I showed my math, so to speak, then so might everyone else who has read my previous advocacy for cop-killing, so I may as well write this for publication.

First, by way of background, some ideas I have already shared in previous work: Freedom and regulation are opposites. Freedom is the absence of external regulation, and vice-versa. The more free you are, the less regulated.

Any external entity that regulates us, we call “government.” To regulate is to govern. Regulation, government, control, all the same thing. So, since governments work to regulate, to govern, governments can never be the source of freedom because, by their very nature, they work to oppose freedom. Recall, regulation is the opposite of freedom.

Governments regulate, that is, oppose freedom, through force. Governments enforce their laws with hired security agents who use guns, billy-clubs, pepper spray, riot gear, Apache attack helicopters, and automatic rifles with NATO rounds to control-limit-govern-regulate your freedom.

Another observation I’ve previously made, which flows naturally from the last one: “Force” is “violence.” Whether the play-yard bully actually punches you in the face to take your milk-money, and whether the police are actually employing the Apache attack helicopter they purchased with your tax money really doesn’t matter. The threat of violence is violence. The agents of force that the government employs to limit your freedom have an attack helicopter in the hangar just in case…and they load the automatic weapons, just in case. They are prepared to encircle your house and pump tear gas into your children’s bedroom.

Because of the way we are programmed to respect authority, we overlook or excuse state violence, as though it isn’t violence. If we see strangers sneaking down our street with automatic weapons, we perceive them to be a danger—until we see they have badges affixed to their hips, and then suddenly strangers with inordinate fire-power seem cuddly and lovable. But this delusion aside, police are agents of violence employed by an organization that has as its central organizing principle the goal of limiting your freedom and keeping you in subjection to it, whatever the cost.

Personally, I want to be free. I want to experience the absence of external regulation. This is not a mere “lifestyle choice,” like what fashions to wear or whether I drink Coke or Pepsi. This is far more substantial, in my view.

Freedom means I have the practical ability to choose what I think is best for me. I can serve my own survival and reproduction—my primary biological programming—and serve my own best interests without intrusion into my affairs by hired thugs from some organized gang calling itself “authority.” If I am not afforded this practical ability, then I am compelled to compromise what is best for me and my family; I am forced to defer to some external authority and do what the authority wants. That means I am doing something less than what is best for me, and I am instead doing what is best for authority—which may not know me, may not care about me, and may not consider my best interests when it compels me to do what is best for it rather than what is best for me.

Being the best-informed authority over my own needs, I don’t want to defer to strangers with automatic weapons and attack helicopters who compel me to act in a way that is best for them. I can’t call that “freedom.” I call that slavery.

Those armed strangers stand between me and my freedom. Even under optimum conditions where I have never been confronted by them, they still reserve the right to impose upon me and intrude into my life if my judgment conflicts with theirs, and their ever-present potential for invading me makes me un-free. They stand between me and my freedom, but also stand between all of us and a future where we rule ourselves, a world without them, without their control and regulation of us. In this sense, police murder us every day. They murder the free people we would otherwise be without them. They murder the sustainable world we would otherwise build without this fascist system of mass-production and mass-destruction. This figurative murder of us all is in addition to the systematic and literal murder, largely of minority men, that occurs on a daily basis, from the gun barrels and batons of police.

So when I advocate the killing of police officers, I am not advocating violence instead of peace. I’m advocating violence employed by the oppressed against the oppressor to counter the ever-present violence employed by the oppressor against the oppressed. Whether or not we react with violence, the situation is already violent. The choice is whether we meet the oppressor’s violence with violence of our own, or whether we permit them to unilaterally employ violence against us. By my thinking, it is pathological to allow someone to attack you, to invade you, and to reduce you and those you love. Self-respect and self-love demand that we react in a substantial and effective way. Pacifism, given our reality, is voluntary self-murder.

Our choices are to submit to violence and remain enslaved, or to liberate ourselves through equal and opposite force. That is our reality whether we want to face it or not.

We must also consider the impact of our inaction on others. If we choose not to engage in liberatory violence against those with attack helicopters, we do not simply opt-out on our own freedom—which is bad enough, in my assessment—but we also abandon loved-ones and the rest of the world, limiting their capacity to obtain their own liberation. We guarantee that the future will be worse, given the present trajectory of history. By refraining from liberatory violence, we tell the poor, the oceans, the rain forests, the salmon, and our grandchildren that they can chalk it.

Inaction against tyranny is never moral. It is cowardice wrapped in the window-dressing of morality, which is the worst kind of cowardice.

It is true that many police are probably very nice people with children and spouses, and that they are simply doing their jobs. The same could be said for the guards at Nazi concentration camps who did their jobs and nothing more, returning home to children and spouses. Many concentration camp guards despised the excesses of their co-workers and did what they could to assuage the cruel conditions imposed upon the captives. Perhaps that would entitle those guards to receive a medal of recognition before being summarily shot for committing crimes against humanity, while their co-workers would only deserve to be summarily shot; but their kindness as concentration camp guards in no way excuses their crimes against humanity.

This is even more true in the case of police officers who are defending a sprawling system of mass destruction, who are maintaining the power of bankers and oil barons and sociopaths. They are agents to a system that has turned our planet into a concentration camp. By my thinking, the “good cop” should clean out his locker and stop serving forces inimical to freedom. If he does not, he isn’t a “good cop.” He is an agent of the fascist machine that diminishes us all. He is a willing and paid agent of the death camp.

When we shoot them, it isn’t personal. We shoot them because they have refused to put down their arms. They have refused to abandon the attack helicopters and assault rifles. They have refused to join us in shaping a better future we would happily share with them without having fired a shot.

The choice is theirs.

* * *

By ____ _____1

An Open Letter to Veterans

Watching PBS, I encountered some alarming statistics. Every 80 minutes, a veteran commits suicide. That adds up to 6,500 veteran suicides per year.

Of course, the government’s analysis of these facts seems to miss the point deliberately, and the U.S. Military will never get to the root of the problem. It can’t get to the root of the problem.

It is the root of the problem.

The fact is, we subject human beings to trauma that distorts and alters them. As a veteran myself, I know this to be true. But then we subject them to even more serious and prolonged trauma in combat—in wars that benefit the aims of the larger system, the interests of the wealthy and powerful. Because the suicide rate is really fueled by trauma, and because that trauma is necessary in order to turn troops into what the military needs them to be, the government can only react to these suicides by treating each one as a lamentable tragedy while avoiding any discussion as to the real systemic causes of this suicide epidemic.

So what if this kind of denial leads to thousands more veterans blowing their brains out? To the government, that’s just a reduction in potential payouts in benefits. Suicides don’t spend their G.I. Bills.

Veterans return from combat expecting to transition back to a world of white picket fences, opportunity, and individual liberty. They expect to return to a world based upon fair play, where character and hard work are rewarded. Instead, they find that Americans have the right to shut up. We have the right to sleep in our cars, to lose our families due to economic stresses, to struggle and suffer and wonder why all those soldiers are giving their legs and arms and eyes and lives. And if we stand up, we have the right to be hit with billy-clubs, sprayed in the face with mace, and get our fingers snapped while we’re prone and cuffed.

Land of the free? Home of the brave?

Veterans return from combat to find they have inherited poor, butchered half-lives in return for their sacrifices.

The disillusion wears them down.

But suicide isn’t the solution. I mean, sure, it’s the solution the government actually prefers—which is why it does nothing to substantially address the suicide rates. No government wants thousands of angry, disillusioned combat veterans. If you didn’t kill yourselves, the government would have to monitor you.

You’re dangerous. Dangerous to the real enemy.

My thinking is this: If you returned home from the war to find jihadists tearing your family apart, seizing your home and kicking your kids into the street, forcing you into slavery for pennies per day, you wouldn’t tuck your chin and go along with that. You’d get a rifle and you’d find friends from your old unit, and you’d handle that problem. You wouldn’t put a bullet through your own brain-pan and call it a day.

Okay. So the real enemy isn’t a group of jihadists. The real enemy is a group of bankers and politicians who want to destroy your family and your way of life. Don’t rifles work on them too? I bet they do.

You have come home to a real threat, a threat to your loved-ones’ well-being, a threat to your pursuit of happiness, a threat to the very future itself. As veterans, you have self-discipline, dedication, team-work, and a wealth of direct experience under fire. You have a specific set of skills developed under pressure. Put those skills to use.

Look, you’re being presented with a false concept. You think your only choices are (A) find some way to drag stones up the side of the pyramid for the privileged few and go along with the program, or (B) opt out. What about option C? Option C is: Change the conditions.

Change the conditions.

Look at those now involved in Occupy. Whether you agree with their methods and whether you agree with their political orientation, they have recognized that the system has become intolerable and they have decided that, instead of being slaves, they are going to change the conditions.

Together, all of us who are disillusioned can tear down this system and build something better.

So, don’t kill yourself. If you’re going to kill anybody, kill somebody who’s really got it coming. Don’t remove yourself from the equation—you aren’t the problem. Be part of the solution. Get organized. Develop a plan. Help teach and train others. Build a coherent resistance to this tyranny.

A better world is possible.

We need you.

* * *

By ____ _____1

1 This article may or may not have been written by Sean Swain, but because the federal government has stripped Swain of all constitutional protections on the grounds that his writings “promote anarchy and rebellion against authority,” his name cannot be associated with any published work for fear of fascist repression. Sean Swain, who may or may not have written this, is a political prisoner who supports the Occupy Movement, burning down banks and courthouses, and arming the homeless. In a free country, this footnote would not be necessary.

A Murder of Crows: An Open Letter to the Occupy Movement On One View For Facilitating the Occupation of the Prisons

“It is not necessary for crows to become eagles.”

–Sitting Bull, 1888

In prior communications, I urged Occupy to consider the inclusion of prisoners into any plan moving forward and made some general arguments regarding the potential for such a plan, and to a lesser degree I argued the moral imperative for including prisoners into a movement that in its slogans professed to represent the 99%. Assuming my arguments were as persuasive to you as they seemed to be to me, I now undertake to present one view as to how such a relationship between Occupy and prisoners could develop, and what that collaboration could look like.

It must be noted, however, before I begin, that as soon as my writings were posted and at least one subsequent response from an Occupy group quoted my prior communication, my mail to and from the prison became seriously delayed. It would appear that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is not only monitoring my mail, but the agents who do so need to improve their reading skills; my mail has been delayed up to 45 days and the words in the letters do not exceed four syllables. This speaks to two things: (1) The enemy is afraid of the ideas I’m espousing, and that’s just another reason to undertake them, and (2) the federal government needs to develop a reading program for their agents.

Perhaps someone out there can mail “Hooked on Phonics” to me so the F.B.I. can gain its benefits. Perhaps include a note to the F.B.I. letting them know to take their time with that one.

At any rate, I firmly believe that collaboration between Occupy and prisoners has the same kind of potential as Derrick Jensen’s proposal for collaboration between Occupy and groups supporting ecological defense. Of course, in my thinking, it would be best to select “all of the above,” and have Occupy inextricably integrated with prisoners and the Earth Liberation Front.

In this communication, I provide my view on how a collaboration between Occupy and prisoners could work. By this view, Occupiers and prisoners begin a dialogue for purposes of developing a prisoner resistance manual or manuals, and then distribute those manuals to prisoners. This, then, gives prisoners the tools for organizing resistance cells, developing strategies and tactics for long-term resistance, preparing for repression, informing the larger prison population, and expanding resistance activities to other prisons.

One View

Whether relying upon relationships with prisoners that already exist or else consciously developing new relationships, Occupiers could propose to prisoners that they begin the process of formulating a comprehensive resistance manual that would include methods for organizing and for developing strategies and tactics. Occupiers’ contribution would be to ensure that the organizing is both non-hierarchic and consensus-based, but largely the brainstorming would be conducted by the prisoners.

It may be a good idea to develop two manuals—one that is very dense in terms of information, and a second that is more of a comic-book companion that addresses only the larger, general points. This makes it possible to reach a broader audience.

It then becomes the responsibility of the Occupiers to develop a strategy for delivering this resistance manual to prisoners. I won’t present possible methods here, as that would also alert the authorities. Suffice to say, you have a number of readily available options.

Once prisoners get a copy of the manual, they can begin small group organizing—cells, guerrilla columns, tribes. They decide what strategies and tactics to employ, from sabotage to political violence to all-out takeovers of prisons. They develop a plan for printing up flyers or newsletters or other methods for reaching out to the larger prison population, keeping them informed of events and framing the conflict. The prisoners also prepare for repression and possible even draft in-the-event letters directed to Occupiers, just in case the prisoner resister is captured, so that Occupiers and outside supporters could immediately undertake a defense strategy through phone calls, letters, and protests. Outside supporters can make repression of prisoners very difficult for the prison system, particularly if prisoners who are captured in the course of resistance maintain no communication with their captors and continue complete noncooperation. Their plight could also be made easier by prior planning to deliver messages and necessities to segregated prisoner resisters, re-doubling resistance actions and demanding their release back to population, and possibly even smuggling vitamins and food to prisoner resisters who are hunger-striking.

In this context, Occupiers could greatly facilitate resistance. Armed with the right information, Occupiers could call as a prisoner-resister’s counsel, another as a newspaper reporter, and a third as a representative from Amnesty International or the American Red Cross concerned for the prisoner’s health and well-being. Occupiers could call the prison, the central office of prisons, senators, representatives, and media, causing a firestorm of activity and distraction for the prison complex.

Prisoners with resistance experience who are transferred to other prisons could immediately get in contact with Occupiers and then plant the seeds for new resistance cells.

By this view, an emphasis has been placed upon prisoners engaged in their own liberatory activity, with Occupiers filling generally a logistical role. This is important, both for resistance to work on the macro scale and for the resistance process to be a transformative one for each resister on the micro scale. Also, this approach does not in any way exclude other actions which could compliment this strategy, including selective extractions, for example. I, for one, have long been puzzled as to why supporters of Mumia Abu-Jamal do not take the money they invest in legal counsel and instead purchase automatic weapons and go get him out themselves. The same goes for Leonard Peltier, who should have been liberated long ago.

It should also be noted that this strategy is designed for small-group organizing. Small group organizing is emphasized for several reasons. First, in a penal environment, there is a general lack of trust and a number of divided factions, and it is unrealistic to believe that these groups will unite for an action that requires large numbers for success. Also, it should be remembered that prison is a hyper-repressive situation with informers everywhere, making it necessary to form small, insulated groups for purposes of resistance. This form of resistance then lends itself to sabotage and other acts designed to impede the operation of the larger system. In one sense, this strategy reflects the one employed by the United States government when it de-stabilized the duly-elected Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the 1980s. As someone who edited military training manuals developed from the Nicaraguan experience, my view of a successful de-stabilization of the prisons (and of the government generally) incorporates many of those strategies and tactics.

A final note should probably be made regarding “illegality.”

The way forward I propose may well be criticized by those who take issue with the potential illegality of the actions I propose. De-stabilizing the prison system is certainly violative of prison rules for the prisoners who undertake such actions, and may be against the law for non-prisoners to promote. If such a plan gained any widespread traction, the federal government would certainly invoke the nebulous rationale of “national security,” and would enforce laws whether they existed or not. So, for those who object to this potential illegality, some thoughts:

We all seek freedom. At the base of the Occupy Movement is a struggle for freedom. But “freedom” can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, so to be more precise with language, let me attempt to define what freedom is. Freedom is a lack of regulation. A totally free agent is one who is completely unregulated externally. The more regulated you are, the less free.

I think a cogent argument could be made that we currently live in the most un-free (and therefore most-regulated) society in human history. Nazi Germany nor the Soviet regime had access to technology nor to the immediate means of control that this fascist police state has. You can’t get much more un-free than this. You can’t get much more regulated without the government assigning an agent to every man, woman and child, and then assigning an agent to watch over those agents.

To be free, you have to take away the regulator’s ability to regulate you. You won’t talk the regulator out of his power position. He won’t quit his low-down ways because you present to him a logical argument for your freedom. He’s not going to give you your freedom, your lack of regulation, so if you really want it, you’ll have to take it from him.

If you develop an effective plan for taking back your freedom from the regulator, from the oppressor, from the one who writes the laws and rules, chances are he will declare your efforts to be criminal. So, any real effort to get free is a crime.

To get free, you must commit crimes. Only outlaws can gain their freedom.

From another angle, freedom is a state of being unregulated and therefore beyond law, and an outlaw is, by definition, one who is outside the law. Therefore, a free person is an outlaw, a criminal.

Freedom is a crime.

Each law that is broken is a rejection of regulation, is an expansion of freedom. As both Derrick Jensen and Ward Churchill have pointed out, each violation of the law, whatever it is, becomes a fulcrum that can then be used to make the enemy oppressor/regulator’s system more unmanageable, eating up limited resources and diverting his attention to too many emergent problems at once. It becomes too many proverbial watts for his speakers. The cascade begins, the system falls apart, the tide shifts, the bad guys lose the illusion of power.

If you want freedom, the absence of regulation, then you don’t want the oppressor to maintain his tyranny anywhere. You don’t want him left in control of his prisons. You don’t want the United States out of Iraq and Afghanistan, you want it out of North America, off the planet, gone. You want the United States out of the United States. If you leave the oppressor anywhere with any power over anything, then you leave him the potential to muster the power to again regulate you. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, in “Masters of War,” it isn’t enough to kill this beast, but we will have to “stand over (its) grave to make sure that (it’s) dead.”

And for purposes of clarity, I should point out that the true enemy is not just government. Bankers, corporations, top-down institutions that coerce our complicity to their vast crimes are also the enemy and the government is simply the principle management-machine of its affairs, as aptly described by Insurgente Marcos in “The Fourth World War Has Begun.”

At any rate, however you attack those oppressive institutions, you will be an outlaw. You will be a criminal.

Freedom is against the law. Freedom is treason.

To defeat the oppressor, in the words of a Jewish nationalist from a couple millennia ago, we can’t leave one stone stacked on top of another. The whole thing must be torn down, including the prisons.

That might be illegal.

So, make the most of it.

* * *

By ____ _____ 1

An Open Letter to Occupy Regarding the Controversy Over “Demands” and the Movement’s Way Forward

A recent article in Rolling Stone presented a picture of Occupy divided over the issue of “demands.” According to the article, one faction opposes demands while another views demands as a practical and inevitable strategy. The article leaves the distinct impression that either Occupy is divided or else the mainstream media, who hasn’t been able to wrap its mind around the reality of what Occupy is, has itself become obsessed with the issue of demands and lacks the imagination to conceive of any other way for Occupy to proceed.

I would like to add my voice to the dialogue. I would suggest that making demands would be very difficult, if not impossible. Before making any demands, at least 3 questions must be definitively answered: (1) Who is making the demands?, (2) To whom are the demands made?, and (3) What will be done in exchange for the meeting of demands? If you do not have the answers to those questions, then you cannot effectively enter into any demanding or negotiating. You may as well make your demands to the wall.

As to the question of who is making the demands, Occupy presents itself as a movement of the 99%. That means anyone making demands must be making them for the entirety of the 99%. As I am part of that 99%, for the purposes of informing anyone seeking to make demands, the two non-negotiable demands that should be made on my behalf are: (1) The immediate and complete abolition of the global system of capital, and (2) The immediate and complete abolition of the United States as an incorporated entity, including its state subsidiaries. All other points are negotiable for me. Good luck.

But I think this presents my point succinctly that it is impossible for anyone to present demands on behalf of the 99%.

The second question, to whom the demands are made, is just as complicated. Some in Occupy want banks re-structured, some want recognition of Occupy’s right to exist in public spaces, and some may want the release of secret documents linking space aliens to the JFK assassination. All of these demands require negotiation with a variety of different institutions and governments on many levels. This requires the juggling of millions of demands issued to thousands of agencies and organizations, and juggling the various responses. Again, good luck.

And this brings up another issue to consider, related to power relationships. When issuing a demand, you’re recognizing the authority of the person or entity to grant or deny the demands. You are, in essence, accepting that they have the right to exist, and you are seeking resolution with their legitimate exercise of power. I do not think this can be done on behalf of the 99%, as some of us do not recognize the right of governments, banks, or corporations to exist. They have no authority; they have the power to compel.

That brings us to the third question, what will be done in exchange for the meeting of demands? Before a representative of Occupy (however that would work) could present demands (whatever they would be), the representative would have to be able to guarantee that, when demands are met, Occupy would relinquish something or give up something, or refrain from something. That is how demands work.

It must be understood by everyone at the table that, related to Occupy, if all demands are met, then everyone involved in Occupy will pack up the tents and apply for work at WalMart and Starbuck’s, resuming their shopping at the mall. If Occupy’s representative cannot guarantee the authorities that the 99% will return to dragging stones up the side of the pyramid when demands are met, then there is no way to issue demands; the demands are meaningless because even if they are met, nothing will be resolved.

For my part, I only hope there are others as unreasonable as I am, and that they will not resume their roles as slaves under any conditions, that the system can meet their demands when it ceases to exist.

So, having presented what I hope is a brief and effective argument for why demands are an impossible way forward, I would like to provide an alternative way of viewing the current reality, which may inform us as to an effective way forward.

Occupy is a system that poses as an alternative to the hierarchical, corporate, global-colonizer system (we can just call it “the enemy system”). It may seem strange to think of Occupy as a system because it is consciously unsystematic, but it is a system in the same way that biosphere is a system, containing a diversity of life. In many ways, Occupy is the un-system.

All the same, Occupy, as a system, is facing down an enemy system that does not tolerate alternatives to itself. How many people do you see foraging? Hunting the buffalo and living in a wigwam? Exactly. The enemy system eliminates alternatives. It does not play well with others.

Your system, Occupy, cannot co-exist with the enemy system because the enemy system will attempt to eliminate you through whatever means are available. It will send its cops and military to crack your skulls. It will send snitches to infiltrate you and divide you. It will unleash propaganda to isolate you and brand you as terrorists. It will then confine you and neutralize you and maybe kill you.

The reality is this: We have two systems, opposing cultures, and one will eliminate the other (or, in the instance of Occupy prevailing, weaken the other system so it no longer has the power to eliminate you). This is a culture war. That may not be the term you like, but whatever euphemism you choose, the reality is what it is. A hostile system is at war against you, and you can either win or lose.

The longer the enemy system exists, the more it will harm you. As Ward Churchill, Derrick Jensen, John Zerzan, and a host of others have pointed out, your interests are best served by taking down the enemy system as quickly and effectively as possible. Then we’ll all be free to live as we choose, without interference.

If Occupy is to move forward according to this mode, then I would like to propose 7 principles to guide Occupy:

Occupy must be led by no one.

Because the enemy system is centralized, hierarchical, and rigidly structured, Occupy can only defeat it by being what it is not. Being leaderless, everyone must lead themselves and thus have the transformative experience that will never again let them become sheeple. A leaderless Occupy is more difficult to defeat.

Occupy must proceed according to no plan.

With no leader, no architect, there is no one to herd Occupy into conformity to a singular plan. Variety and diversity of tactics forces the enemy system to herd cats. If anyone come up with the perfect plan, burn it immediately.

Occupy must have no targeted end-point.

For reformists seeking to make demands, this point will be difficult. To proceed with no end-point is to view yourself as developing a way to live into the future, for yourself and your children. It implies no compromise, no return to the enemy system. It says you will live as you live until the enemy defeats you or goes away.

Occupy must develop a new currency of support.

The enemy system rewards its supporters with pay that translates into material goods. You end up with unhappy slaves with large piles of material stuff.

Occupy must have a different “currency.” Rather than paying supporters with money that translates into material goods, Occupy must re-pay supporters with support. In other words, those who give support will get support. You are rewarded not with material junk, but with community and belonging and care and support. Social support must be Occupy’s currency.

Occupy must proceed incrementally.

Occupy’s advantages are its diversity and de-centralization. Each autonomous group can develop its own strategies and approaches to living, and those efforts will become part of Occupy’s collective knowledge as each group builds upon the ideas of others and perfects others’ failures. This provides a start-stop-start progress, unlike the enemy system which attempts to impose one uniform program for success.

Occupy cannot prevail all at once.

There is no magic button to push to make 8,000 years of control programming go away. There are, however, a million very practical buttons to push repeatedly and in no particular order that will make the control program collapse fairly quickly. It will not collapse at once but will unravel, faster in some places than in others. At some point in the future, we will realize the enemy system has gone away completely.

Occupy must recognize no authority but its own.

The 99% have no presidents, no representatives, no congress, no courts. The 99% have no bosses, no bankers, no managers. The 99% have no joint chiefs, no police, no military. All of these things are the property of the 1%. They are all components of the enemy system that we must reject.

By this view, we should have no illusion of any authority but our own authority. We have no one to negotiate with. There is no one who has authority to “grant” us the future we strive to construct directly.

I suggest these 7 points as a general guide. I hope they provide a kind of framework for moving forward without the reformist model of making demands and negotiating with the enemy system. It is my hope that these principles can guide Occupy not only to defeat the enemy system, but also guide Occupy into the future beyond the enemy system’s collapse.

I think these principles shape localized communities we all deserve.

* * *

By ____ _____1

Dear Special Agents

Federal Bureau of Investigation

935 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.

Washington, DC 20535

April 25, 2012

Dear Special Agents:

I write this letter to all of you who are employed by the F.B.I., in the hopes that I can persuade you to resign.

Ever since a statement posted by Occupy Oakland quoted me, my mail has been extremely wonky. On letter from a friend of mine that mentioned events related to Occupy took 45 days to reach me.

I know in the old days, mail would sometimes be delayed because the Pony Express was attacked by hostile Indians. However, to my knowledge, the postal service no longer employs horses for their mail delivery. I am also unaware of any attacks by hostile Indians.

This leads me to believe that the chronic delays in my mail are caused by you guys. I’m guessing that you are “monitoring” my mail. You likely see this as a security measure to make sure I don’t disseminate ideas that would endanger public safety and so on.

If I attempt to see this from your perspective, if I stand in your proverbial shoes, I bet you’re patriotic and you love your country. You think the United States is exceptional because we have guaranteed freedom, and you wish to serve this country and its citizens by keeping them safe.

That’s admirable, I think. It’s the reason I joined the U.S. Army. I wanted to defend freedom, an I saw our freedom as originating from our government’s founding documents, so to defend freedom is to serve and defend the institution of government that guarantees that freedom.

I get it.

From this view, any irresponsible bomb-throwers who advocate actions against the government and its officials, or who spout off incendiary ideas that stir up the psychologically-imbalanced to engage in destructive behaviors threaten the stability of the system and threaten our freedom. And you, in defense of freedom and government, must then read my mail.

But what is “freedom”?

To answer that, we could brainstorm a list of freedoms like the freedom of religion or freedom of speech, and that would help us to understand the varieties of freedom, but it wouldn’t get us any closer to a general definition of what freedom is in the first place. What we need is a working definition.

I like this one: Freedom is the absence of regulation. That’s pretty simple and general. The less regulated you are, the more free you are—and vice-versa. At one end of the spectrum, you are completely and absolutely free; you have no external regulation or control over you. At the other end of the spectrum, you are completely regulated, and you have no freedom whatsoever.

Of course, between those two extremes you have various shades of gray, where freedom and regulation are in constant tension and your level of freedom depends upon the degree to which you are regulated.

And to make a quick point here, with our definition, it matters not what sphere of human conduct you’re talking about—whether it’s speech or gun ownership or religion or what have you. In whatever sphere, freedom is the absence of regulation and the more regulated the human conduct, whatever it is, the less free it is.

In our country, we think of ourselves as free. We have a constitution with a Bill of Rights. We’re proud of that. We live in a country where the government is founded upon the idea of individual freedom.

But as we already established, freedom is the absence of regulation. So, each time we say we are free, we are saying that we are unregulated. When we talk about free speech, we’re talking about unregulated speech; when we’re talking about the freedom to own firearms, we’re talking about the absence of regulation over firearms.

Do we really have free speech? Is speech unregulated? If we’re being truthful with ourselves, we must admit that our government certainly regulates speech. It is a crime to induce panic or to advocate the assassination of the president. Whether those regulations on speech are justified—that’s really a separate question—we have to admit that speech is regulated. And if the government passed only one law to forbid us from saying just one thing, our speech is no longer free but regulated. Our speech might be less regulated than speech in other countries where the government forbids two or three or ten instances of speech, but it is still regulated and it is still no longer free.

The same goes for religion or gun ownership. If the government passes a single law that regulates the exercise of one religious practice, then the exercise of religion is no longer free but it is regulated; and if government passes a law that regulates even one person’s ownership of one kind of firearm, then gun ownership is no longer free but is instead regulated.

Freedom is the lack of regulation. If you are regulated, you are not free.

Still, when we say we live in a free country and we speak of our freedoms, we now that our conduct is regulated, but we claim to be “free” because we think of ourselves relative to everyone else in the world. We know that we are regulated in our speech and religion and gun ownership—in every sphere of human conduct—and we don’t question that; we simply believe we are less regulated and therefore more free than people in other countries.

For that reason, we see our exceptional government as the source of our freedoms. But is this true?

Freedom is the absence of regulation. Every regulation limits freedom. If we look at this objectively, we’ll see that it could never be the case that government is the source of our freedom.

Governments govern. That is what they do. They are external authorities that regulate. As their very reason for existing is to regulate, governments by their very nature limit freedom. It is their job.

Whatever it is that regulates us, we call that a “government,” and where there is regulation, there is the absence of freedom. Government could never conceivably be the source of freedom or the protector of freedom when it is, by design, by nature, the regulator and limiter of freedom. Where there is government, there is regulation; where there is regulation, there is the absence of freedom.

So, contrary to our belief that the U.S. government is the source and the defender of our freedom, the truth is quite the opposite.

So, having established that freedom is the absence of regulation, and having established that the U.S. government is the source of our regulation and not our freedom, some would still argue that we are still relatively free; that is, we have a Bill of Rights and we are therefore more free and less regulated than people in other countries. This is what we believe. We think of the United States as exceptional.

And just a quick aside here, but to argue that we are more free than others is to say we are not completely free; it is to say we are regulated but not as regulated as the next guy. That’s like saying we are slaves, yes, but we are not treated as badly as those other slaves on that other plantation; or we are slaves, yes, but we are slaves who work in the master’s house rather than toiling in his fields. We are slaves but we are relatively better off than those others who are demonstrably less free than we are.

When looked at closely, the argument doesn’t quite feel so compelling, does it?

At any rate, if we look at the argument that we are more free and less regulated than other countries, we will see that this simply isn’t the case. The United States has far more laws and regulations than other countries, and our government systems prosecute far greater numbers of our citizens for the violation of those numerous laws and regulations.

The United States has the most complex and sprawling punishment system to regulate its own citizens, larger than any punishment system in the world. In fact, it is the largest punishment system in human history. The United States is the most regulating government that has ever existed in human history.

Not only are we less free than people in other countries around the world, but we are quite conceivable the least-free people who ever existed in the history of human kind.

That is not a belief. It is an objective, demonstrable fact. You can move to any point on the globe and not be less free or more regulated than you are right now. The only way to become less free, at least in theory, is to stay where you are and wait until tomorrow to see if your government will pass more laws to regulate you even more.

You work for the United States. You enforce its regulation of us. As long as the government exists, those of us who are subject to its regulation can never be free. I suspect you go to work each day with the best of intentions. You perform your jobs, believing in freedom and patriotism. But the fact is, from what I have just presented here, the United States government is an enemy of freedom and it relies upon you to continue its operations. This giant regulation machine continues its assault on freedom with your assistance. You are essential for the United States government to impose itself upon hundreds of millions of people who are tricked into thinking they are free.

I hope you think about what I have written and that you will share it with others who work with you. It isn’t too late for your to have healthy, happy productive lives—lives with meaning and purpose. I suspect your identities and your senses of your personal importance are inextricably tied to your occupation. Your minds have been seriously mismanaged. You probably cannot imagine life apart from being special agents making the world safe and defending freedom.

But that story isn’t true. The story you were living out is provably, undeniably untrue. You’ve been playing for the wrong team. You need a new story to be in, a new definition of yourself. Feel free to write to me when you get done rifling through my mail. If I can help you in any way to make the rough transition to becoming a real, complete human being unplugged from the monster Matrix, I will.

Please resign.

A better world is possible.

Freedom,

Sean Swain

c: Everybody

Solidarity

Too often, we use the word “solidarity” interchangeably with “identification”—a word that indicates how we think or feel about something.

We can identify with the poor of Mexico, but that feeling doesn’t constitute solidarity. We can care deeply about the extermination of salmon, but that caring doesn’t constitute solidarity either. We can recognize that the systems of justice and corrections are weapons used for demographic, social, and political ends, but that recognition still isn’t solidarity.

Our enemy, the rulers of this concentration camp world, don’t care how we feel about the Zapatistas or salmon or prisoners. It doesn’t matter to our rulers how we feel about our rulers or their policies. You can wear any slogan you like on your T-shirt, however militant, just so long as you stay in your place in line and keep marching in lock-step, right into the gas chamber.

They don’t care about what you think or feel. They care about what you do.

They want you to work, shop, pay taxes, and obey the laws they write. Period.

To the enemy, your conduct counts. Your actions. How you think and feel are irrelevant to what you do, and what you do sustains the system of control, keeps it going, perpetuates the grinding machine into tomorrow and the next day and the next. What you do allows the system to project itself farther and farther. When you shop and work and go along with the program, you increase the chances of the next slave following behind you, continuing the same march into the gas chamber of our collective future.

Because our active participation in the system of control keeps the system going, independent of our greatest thoughts and feelings and theories, then, in this context, our solidarity can only be truly expressed by what we do. Can you claim solidarity with the Zapatistas while your purchases at the mall create the demand for more seizure of land and more profit, while you don’t google guerrilla warfare, while you don’t own an assault rifle or intend to learn how to use one? Can you claim solidarity with dying salmon while the 2 million dams in the U.S. remain standing, even though only 75,000 are taller than 6 feet and it only takes 4 pounds of explosives per square foot to bring them down? Can you claim solidarity with 2.3 million prisoners in the U.S. gulags while the fences remain standing and prison officials have developed virtually no contingency plan for getting attacked form the outside?

Any realistic view of solidarity cannot ignore that our working, shopping, and compliance with the program benefits our enemy and places a duty on us to engage in action that benefits those with whom we claim to identify, with those we claim have our solidarity. Acting in benefit of the system but feeling empathy for the system’s victims is not solidarity, it’s self-delusion. It’s a desire to escape the reality of our complicity in the system’s crimes by “feeling” connected to the victims. But “feeling” connected doesn’t cut the mustard when as Vaclav Havel described it, our daily conduct “keeps the totalitarian machine rolling.”

True solidarity equates with action. It requires us to act, and act daily, so that the totality of our actions creates a net loss for the system. When we take into account our working and shopping and tax-paying, our resistance actions must add up in such a way that we make the system less manageable, less sustainable, and less operational.

Derrick Jensen has suggested knocking down dams with sledgehammers or loosening lugs on cell phone towers. I would also propose that fake bomb threats from throw-away phones to courthouses and banks and insurance holding companies would make a wondrous mess of things too. There’s always arson. The Smith Act makes it illegal for me to propose political kidnappings, assassinations, or acts of political violence directed at the U.S. government, so I cannot legally express support for such actions. However, if it wasn’t illegal to promote such actions, I would probably be enthusiastic about all of the above. And you should be too.

Frantz Fanon once said that for the colonized, liberation springs forth from the corpse of the colonizer. It still does. So if you’re in solidarity with the colonized, the vast colonized of the world that includes you and me, then you must be contributing to the body-count of the colonizer, both figuratively and literally. That requires action.

Solidarity doesn’t mean militant slogans on our T-shirts. It means living them out.

By ____ _____1

_________________________________________________

This article may or may not have been written by Sean Swain, but because the federal government has stripped Swain of all constitutional protections on the grounds that his writings “promote anarchy and rebellion against authority,” his name cannot be associated with any published work for fear of fascist repression. Sean Swain, who may or may not have written this, is a political prisoner who supports the Occupy Movement, burning down banks and courthouses, and arming the homeless. In a free country, this footnote would not be necessary.

Arm The Homeless

The U.S. has more guns per capita than any nation in the world. We’re heavily armed. Spend a day in any American urban area and you’ll encounter as much gun violence as in any collapsing third-world failed-state. Even high school students go on Columbine-style shooting sprees with such regularity that we no longer feel surprised by the news footage. In fact, we’re more surprised when a day passes without a school shooting.

Conservatives and liberals approach the question of gun violence differently. Liberals largely support some kind of government intervention to limit the proliferation of guns. Conservatives, on the other hand, claim that gun ownership is not the problem and gun control is not the solution; we simply need to do a better job instilling the proper values.

Personally, I don’t know that gun violence is a problem. I think we’ve just been shooting the wrong people. When was the last time the Crips planned a drive-by on the homes of Bank of America execs? Or when was the last time the Bloods pistol-whipped school-board members for ripping-off generations of students and robbing them of an effective education?

It’s the corporate bosses and swindling bankers and their purchased politicians leaving us sleeping in our cars and dumpster-diving for scraps and upping iron on each other in desperation. We need to stop shooting other poor people and start shooting the ones who have it coming. I’m talking about some real, low-down sociopaths, some global-scale criminals. And we don’t have to shoot them all. Just like with judges or law-makers or cops, if you just shoot a handful of them, the rest of them will likely start acting right. At least for a while.

My thinking is, we need to arm the homeless. I don’t come to that conclusion because I want the down-and-out to do the dirty work so the rest of us can keep our hands clean. I think we need to arm the homeless because they’ve generally got clearer vision than the rest of us. By and large, the homeless are composed of people who were the flotsam and jetsam of our global disorder, tossed over the side when the seas got rough. But they’ve survived. They’ve thrived. They’ve endured rain and cold and deprivations, and it has turned them to steel. I don’t want to paint the entire homeless community with too broad of a brush, but I suspect a large majority of the homeless, if given the chance to rejoin the system that betrayed them and resume their place in the matrix, would probably tell global capital to go fuck itself.

There are tribes of kids who live in the New York subway system. They are as loyal to each other as humans get. If you send in a platoon of the best-trained special forces group to eradicate those kids, I’d put my money on the kids. And that’s before you arm them.

There are groups of homeless combat veterans with training and skills that got them through innumerable tours in combat theaters across the globe and got them home alive, only to be discarded on the pavement. We’re talking about some of the best and brightest of a generation, left adrift in a cold world that has rendered them invisible and destitute.

It’s possible to change the world with a few gun racks and some boxes of ammunition. You cfan start off big by robbing a military armor; it wouldn’t be too hard because the government is lazy and over-confident and security measures are likely far more lax than you would expect. Get inside, observe the process, maybe take a supply clerk hostage and there you have it—millions of dollars in weapons and ammunition. This is what I call “The John Brown Method.”

Or, you can start off small, taking the weapons from a couple of cops. They may give them up without much of a fight, or you may have to pry their weapons from their cold, dead fingers. Either way is cool. Then, use those guns to rob a few more cops, and then a few more.

The advantage to using military and police weaponry is, you can always find the right ammunition just by shooting the bastards that the fascists send after you and taking from them what they’ve been firing at you.

Once you’ve got the weapons, it’s only a matter of finding the homeless people and making the delivery. You could provide them the names and addresses of bankers, politicians, corporate financial officers, profiteers, and other enemies by taping photo-copied address lists to the butt-stocks. Once you get rolling you can expand into explosives and set up shop. On one side of the street, you’ll have FOOD, NOT BOMBS, and on the other side you’ll have BOMBS, JUST BOMBS. It’s the ultimate empowerment program. Those who have lost the most will have a chance to gain some much deserved catharsis, like a carnival dunk tank for global capital…only with bullets.

Some will call this proposal irresponsible and say you can’t just hand out guns to complete strangers who may have serious psychological disorders. But I know an organization where that’s routine. It’s called “The United States military.” Also, consider that we already arm the angst-laden, Ritalin-fueled high-schoolers who have been picked-on by the beautiful people.

All I’m saying is, we have all these bankers, all these victims, and all these bullets. Something is gonna happen. We might as well get it organized and get it over.

* * *

Reform Is Madness: A Response to Damon Eris’ 6/5/10 Posting

A friend recently sent an old posting from Damon Eris where he named me “Oddball of the Week.” I don’t know Eris and I have no internet access in prison, so I have never seen this posting before. In it, Eris recounted my run for governor from prison, fairly and accurately quoting me and providing a pretty decent sound-bite summary of my position.

He then went on to lament that “an individual like Swain has been driven to the advocacy of madness rather than prison reform.” This “madness” I advocate is scrapping the whole system rather than trying to fix it. Eris then cites statistic after statistic to demonstrate that our systems of justice and corrections are completely dysfunctional. He concluded, rather nicely (if not overly dramatic), “If we allow for the breakdown of civilization behind bars, it should be no surprise that those behind bars will call for an end of civilization on this side of them.”

I have a couple of disagreements with Eris’ conclusions and would like to respond.

First, I am not “the most extreme left-wing,” as he charges. I don’t take issue with Eris calling me an “oddball,” but I do take issue with being called a leftist. I know left-wing politics because I used to embrace them back in my reformist days, back when I agreed with Damon Eris that we needed to hold hands and sing “Cumbayah,” that we could create the change we could believe in, and all of that pie-in-the-sky sun-worship. But I am no leftist now.

Barney Frank is a left-winger. I don’t think he makes sense, I think he makes a good hostage—as good a hostage as John Boehner might, and Boehner is a right-winger. Frank and other leftists might also make good hat-racks, but they have never made any good policy I could support.

In our political dichotomy of left and right, both ideologies have proven completely bankrupt. Both of their solutions are now and always have been part of the problem.

What do you call “solutions” that are part of the problem?

This system has been around for centuries with liberals and conservatives pulling levers and pressing buttons, opening and closing valves, tinkering and tweaking, only for the same old results: war, poverty, crime, drugs, homelessness, mental illness, rape culture, and on and on.

See a pattern? We oust one group of fuck-ups in favor of another group of fuck-ups, and nothing good ever results. Perhaps instead of entrusting fuck-ups on the left or right to “fix” the system, we need to scrap it. Perhaps the system isn’t really ours. Perhaps this is a system of pillage for the elite who keep tricking all of us into dragging stones up the side of this complex pyramid.

So that brings me to my second issue with Eris, the very thing that makes me an “oddball.” Eris contends that when I advocate scrapping this system, it is “madness,” and the Eris solution is “prison reform.”

I know a little about prison reform. My Associate of Arts with a concentration in psychology exposed me to the social science material related to justice and corrections and in my extended studies, I read every relevant, published work on crime, violence and corrections written between 1972 and 1999. As Secretary of Catholic Justice Fellowship, a prisoner social action ministry, I successfully lobbied the Ohio Catholic Conference to support parole reform legislation, Policy Advisor Jim Tobin speaking on behalf of the bishops before the Ohio Assembly. As a member of CURE-Ohio’s Prisoner Advisory Board for 2 years, I influence that organization’s direction. My written reports on the social, economic, and demographic impacts of imprisonment were submitted to senators and representatives.

In the end, Senator Jeff Johnson, the sponsor of reform legislation, was pushed out of office and into prison; Catholic Justice Fellowship was forcibly silenced by prison officials, and I was targeted for plausibly-deniable repression for a decade, the parole board extending my imprisonment for eleven years now in order to stick it to me for my reformist efforts. The prison reforms that others and I struggled and sacrificed in order to see materialize? Gone. Dead. Forgotten.

So ten years after the death of any possibility for meaningful prison reform, Damon Eris googles “prison,” discovers the harsh reality, and thinks we need to “reform” the system. Things have gone more than a decade in the wrong direction even since my reform days—and not just the prison system.

Reform? Really???

I think “madness” is when you stick your hand in the same fire over and over again, expecting a different result. How many times have we been bamboozled into sticking our hands into the “reform” fire? A dozen? A hundred? A thousand? A million? No offense to Damon Eris, as well-intending as I’m sure he is, but sticking his hand in that fire will result in the same burn as the last ten thousand times. By my thinking, that is madness.

Perhaps the Damon Erises of the world, as well-intending as they are, don’t want to face that reality. Perhaps they are comforted by their dreams of reform and hope, bunny rabbits and rainbows, moon-beams and fairy dust. But in the short time since Eris’ “oddball” piece on me, I notice there are a lot of Sean Swains out there. They’re rejecting the Eris approach to reform and they’re taking to the streets in New York, Oakland, Cleveland, Chicago; they’ve abandoned polite discourse in favor of confrontation. They’ve scrapped bunny rabbits and rainbows; they ear rubber bullets and drink tear gas.

They’re only getting started. Their numbers are quietly growing and as the system continues to slide toward its own inevitable dissolution, their number will continue to grow. Our numbers. The “oddballs.”

It was no less than Martin Luther King who said that those who make nonviolent revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.

Perhaps Damon Eris should put down the pom-poms, reject the bunny rabbits and rainbows, and join the “oddballs.”

* * *

An Open Letter In Support of Siddique Abdullah Hasan

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

“Justice” For Trayvon Martin?

“JUSTICE” FOR TRAYVON MARTIN?

By ____ _____1

After a private security guard for a gated community gunned down a Black youth named Trayvon Martin, the security guard was questioned by police and then released. This fueled resentment and outrage, particularly among poor and minority people who saw this event as symbolic of the justice system’s blatant double standards.

Nationwide, protests erupted and drew media attention, an effort to make sure the Trayvon Martin case and all of the latent issues it contains will not simply fade from public memory. Protesters spoke about justice and accountability and fairness and racial equality. They wore hooded sweatshirts with the hoods up in symbolic solidarity with Trayvon. They waved signs and banners that said, “Justice for Trayvon.”

Justice for Trayvon? Not trying to rain on anybody’s parade, but haven’t we already missed the chance to gain justice for Trayvon?

Trayvon is dead. Is there anything that can be done now to hit some magical “rewind” button and pull Trayvon’s bullet-riddled body from the ground and restore him to life? If so, we need to do that. We need to stop marching and waving signs about justice and we need to achieve justice by bringing Trayvon back from the grave. But if there is no magical “rewind” button, then any signs we carry demanding justice for him might as well be demanding safety measures to prevent the sinking of the Titanic.

There was no justice for Trayvon Martin. And there won’t be.

Yeah, I know—what these protesters mean is that they want the shooter charged. They want him processed by the machinery of the criminal justice system. They want “official” action. But is that justice? A handful of lawyers in a courtroom will navel-gaze or read tea leaves and then speak in tongues, performing for television cameras, and then a judge will give a carefully-rehearsed statement and pound the gavel. None of them knew Trayvon Martin and none of them really give a shit. When the case is over, they will proceed to naval-gaze or read tea leaves in some other case that doesn’t matter to them.

Trayvon will still be dead.

Perhaps a legislator will waggle his finger and hold a press conference and opportunistically draft a bill that will have Trayvon Martin’s name on it. Maybe opportunistically draft a bill that will have Trayvon Martin’s name on it. Maybe it will get passed maybe it won’t. Maybe the legislator will get re-elected. Maybe he won’t.

Trayvon will still be dead.

So, is this “justice for Trayvon? Justice for Trayvon means getting a few powerful people to pretend like they give a damn when they don’t?

When protesters hold signs that say, “Justice for Trayvon,” what they are really saying is, “I want someone in government to do something.” I just don’t get it. You can’t appeal to the larger system that routinely sacrifices the Trayvon Martins and ask them for “justice.” Fuck the police. Fuck the prosecutor. Fuck the judge. Fuck the legislature. They wouldn’t know justice if they lynched it with their own rope. There’s no justice there. They don’t really care about “rights” and “justice” and “the rule of law.” That’s window dressing. They care about their kids’ college funds and about their mortgages and about giving the public a good performance so they’ll all go back to working and shopping and believing the system works.

But Trayvon will still be dead and in no time—it may have already happened—some security guard or a cop or somebody else with a license to kill will gun down another Black youth in a hoodie, and protesters will carry signs demanding justice until government officials pretend to give a shit again.

Not much “justice” there.

Why are we so paralyzed that we appeal to government to do something rather than doing something ourselves? We don’t need hoodies; we need ski masks. We don’t need protest signs; we need cans of gasoline and books of matches.

We could release a statement that says, “This community hired George Zimmerman. George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin. We seek justice.” Then, we invade that gated community that hired George Zimmerman, and we burn all the houses to the ground. Each home that goes up in flames, we could hand a bag of Skittles to the homeowner.

Taste the rainbow, motherfucker.

Once those folks rebuild their homes and seek to employ new security for their gated community, I bet they’ll have a whole new set of priorities. I bet the new security guard will think twice before pulling a pistol on a teenager in a hoodie.

And since the real solutions never originate from courthouses or legislatures, we don’t need them. In fact, more often than not, courts and legislatures maintain the status-quo that turns Trayvon Martins into population statistics. So, we might as well burn them down too. If they ever rebuild them, they too will approach their business with a new-found respect for the rights of Black teens.

There can be no justice for Trayvon Martin because he’s dead. But it’s not too late for the rest of us. We can put down the signs that ask the oppressor for justice and we can pick up the tools that will manifest it directly.

No peace, no justice.

None.

1 Yup. Might be Swain. Might not. You know the drill.