Sean Swain’s appeal to the warden of ManCI was ignored.

The next stage in Sean’s appeal of the RIB decision is director Gary Mohr at central office.  Here is that appeal:

Gary Mohr Appeal

Supporters can call or write to director Mohr in support of Sean at:

770 West Broad Street
Columbus, Ohio 43222

Phone 614-752-1150

Sean Swain is still under investigation by the Ohio State Highway Patrol (OSHP) and the FBI for alleged involvement in “The Army of the 12 Monkeys” a group that allegedly committed acts of sabotage and vandalism inside ManCI. On September 19th, Swain was put in a suicide cell for 5 days, denied heat, bedding, and normal clothes. They knew he was not suicidal, they were trying to break him. He refused food for the first two days, and after 5 was transferred to administrative segregation. Two other prisoners have been transferred to Seg as well. No charges have been made against any of the three. According to the prison rules, when someone is transferred to seg for the purpose of investigation, they must be charged within 21 days, or returned to general population. It’s been more than 21 days.

While in segregation, Sean has been denied access to writing and reading materials, mail sent to him and received from him has been very delayed. He has sold his meals to get envelopes and pens to send us a few messages. He is okay, angry but energetic, as always. We have decided not to post these messages, on the advice of Sean’s lawyer. Apparently the Ohio State Highway Patrol is looking to expand their investigation to people on the outside, thinking that Sean can somehow connect the 12 Monkeys with the hacker group Anonymous. Even though there is nothing incriminating in these letters, Sean’s lawyer has advised us against posting them until the investigation is over.

In the meantime, we still support Sean and believe he has a right to be angry about his treatment and his legal situation. We believe that this investigation is really retaliation against Sean’s speaking out against JPay and the parole board. We need help in this support. We’re asking people to write letters or make calls to the Warden, the OSHP and the ODRC with the following demands:

1. That Sean be returned to general population and the inconclusive investigation called off.
2. That they immediately give Sean our many letters, including the extra paper and stamps (embossed envelopes) we have sent.
3. That they give him the books we had sent from publishers to him, which have been denied on frivolous grounds.
4. That they give him the same access to commissary as anyone in ad seg.
5. That there be no further retaliation against Sean for his writings, his grievances, or his attempts to remedy the mistreatment by the parole board.

You can also write him lots of letters, especially with fun stuff to read and extra paper and envelopes.

ODRC:
(614) 752-1159

770 West Broad Street
Columbus, Ohio 43222
Phone

ManCI:
(419) 525-4455

P. O. Box 788
1150 North Main Street
Mansfield, Ohio 44901

Warden Terry Tibbals
Ad Seg CO Lt Lynch

OSHP:
1-877-772-8765 (ask to be transferred to ‘investigations’)

Ohio State Highway Patrol
P.O. Box 182074
Columbus, Ohio 43223

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

      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

_________________________________________________

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.

      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.

* * *

      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.”

* * *

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?

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.