I'm obsessed with prisons these days

Germany 1939

by Kate

I'm obsessed with prisons these days.

Especially with Guantanamo Bay, where more than 400
men have been held for almost four years in inhuman
conditions – many of them outside, in rain or heat or
cold, not able to wash regularly (and cleanliness is
very important to Muslims), no privacy, no regular
exercise, no charges, no arraignments, no trials,
sometimes no lawyers.

Let me say that again – four years, no charges, no
lawyers, no trials.

There have been at least 34 suicides which have been
barely reported in our press, though they are widely
covered in the Arab, British and even the Taiwanese
press. The military has reported several hundred
“SIBs” – “self-injurious behaviors”, averaging two a
week. The other day, Jumah Dossari tried to hang
himself in front of his lawyer. I heard the lawyer,
Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, on Democracy Now! If I relied
on CNN or ABC for my news, I could well have missed
the story. Yes, it was there, but there wasn't the
kind of up-to-the-minute breaking news coverage that
there was when Terry Schiavo was sucking in her last
artificial breaths, or when Scott Dyleski murdered
Pamela Vitale in Lafayette.

But that's no surprise. The mainstream media works for
the government or at least for the same agenda, we
know that, and their interest is in burying stories of
US atrocities. The surprise to me has been the lack of
response from the left, even from the people I have
worked with for years on other prison issues, against
the death penalty, against control units.

When I mention Guantanamo to them, they say, yes, and
people are also being tortured in Pelican Bay and in
East Oakland. We are busy focusing on that.

Okay, I get that. But actually, I don't think that's
right. I think we, the left, are in denial about the
significance of what has happened over the last four
years.

When the Guantanamo prisoners began hunger striking, I
thought that would wake us up, make us realize this is
an issue we need to target specifically right now.
Just in solidarity. I mean, they are being force-fed
with tubes up their noses, which are then put into the
next person's nose without even cleaning the vomit and
blood off of them.

And if that is not enough, now we know that our
government is abducting people from their countries
and taking them to Romania and Poland to be tortured.

Congress just said it's okay to torture people as long
as they're not u.s. citizens and not on u.s.
territory.
I'm not saying that what's happening in our own
communities, what has been happening for years in our
prisons, is okay, or is less important. The california
supreme court recently found the state's prison
"health care" system a form of cruel and unusual
punishment, and ordered it reformed, and then a couple
weeks ago that reform was put on hold because they
can’t find a qualified person to implement it (perhaps
they should consider the EVIL DAVE KEARS). And this is
an issue that the California Coalition for Women
Prisoners and other prison activist groups have fought
hard on for years and years.

And then there are the stories about the prisoners in
New Orleans. How the guards left the prison, the
largest in the country, leaving the prisoners in
locked cells to drown, how some of the prisoners were
able to help others get out, how the guards surrounded
the prison with rafts to round up the people who
managed to make it out, and held them for days on a
bridge where they were not allowed to stand up but had
to pee on themselves, how then they were taken to a
soccer field where they were held for like a week with
no blankets and no mattresses and guards would come
and throw peanut butter sandwiches over the fence for
them to fight over. And on top of that, Human Rights
Watch found that when they finally got to whatever
prisons they were sent to all over the south, that
some of them were badly beaten, just because.

I don't try to say that couldn't have happened eight
years ago, because it probably could have and would
have and maybe it even did. But I think that
Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib made it more possible.
Because we, the good people of this country, the ones
who care, have heard about Guantanamo, and we have
seen the pictures of Abu Ghraib, and we have been
pretty silent. Not in our houses, not in our cars,
certainly not in our hearts, but in the streets, we
have been silent.

Guantanamo, and its counterparts in Iraq and
Afghanistan and Poland and Romania and wherever, stand
out to me for one reason: Auschwitz.

We have not had one major demonstration focused on the
enormous erosion of civil rights that is represented
by the newly legalized phenomena of indefinite
detention, offshore prisons, "renditioning" and
torture. I mentioned this recently to some friends,
and I was shocked by their response. "Oh, I don't
know, I think people have done some things, there's
that group that does street theater, and the Center
for Constitutional Rights is doing stuff about it." I
don't dismiss those actions, some of which I have done
myself, but if you heard that as of late 1942 the
German left had done a few small theater actions about
concentration camps, and some liberal lawyers filed a
lawsuit, would you be impressed?

Why do they call Guantanamo a prison? The people held
there – apparently for the rest of their lives, are
not called prisoners. They are called "enemy
combatants"? What is an enemy combatant? Isn't it a
prisoner of war? Well, yes, except it's a prisoner of
war who is not subject to any of the international
covenants, to which this country is signatory, on the
treatment of prisoners of war. The people we are
imprisoning and torturing all over the world are not
subject to these covenants because our government says
they don't have to be. End of story. Well the Jews in
europe were not called prisoners of war either. They
were called “deportees” or “enemy aliens.”

A website dedicated to defining terms related to the
nazi genocide explains, “Concentration camps were
prisons used without regard to accepted norms of
arrest and detention.”

Guantanamo is a concentration camp, and by all
accounts, which are pretty sparse because not many
people are allowed in there, and not many are trying
to go as far as I can tell, it is becoming a death
camp. Abu Ghraib, where torture and abuse did not stop
when Lyndie England was sentenced, or when Janis
Rapinsky was demoted, or when Newsweek retracted its
story about the desecration of the Koran, is another
concentration camp. Shebergan, in Afghanistan (CIA
code name “The Salt Pit”), was another, where at least
43 men suffocated while being transported in closed
metal containers, and at least five hundred were in
danger of starving to death when the International
Committee of the Red Cross “was forced to step in”
(Washington Post editorial).

The truth is that we don't know how many more u.s.
concentration camps there are around the world. And we
don't know partly because we are not trying to find
out. Because we are too busy with our lives, and with
our other work, trying to stop the death penalty,
trying to Free Palestine, trying to educate each other
about sex trafficking and publicize the rape of a
22-year-old Filipina by six US marines (see articlesee
article).

I grew up on the stories of the nazi holocaust, and
how the good people of europe stood by and did
nothing. And I always believed that I wouldn't do
that. And I wondered how it could be that whole
countries allowed people to be rounded up and starved
to death and then annihilated.

Now I think I know. It's because it didn't start with
millions, it started with a few thousand, and there
weren't banner headlines that said, "Nine Million Will
Be Killed." They were enemy aliens, they were
traitors, they were troublemakers, they were cheats,
they were fanatics; they were work camps, they were
temporary detention centers, they were transit
facilities, they were deportation centers; there was
war, there were weddings, there were babies, there was
work.

They didn't invade Poland one month and Czechoslovakia
the next and France the month after that. They invaded
Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 and Syria in 2006
… and in the meantime they had coups in Haiti and
Venezuela and the Philippines was reinvaded without
anyone really hearing about it.
We the left in this country need to acknowledge the
situation we are in. We are not Germany 1929. We are
Germany 1939. It's not "Can It Happen Here?", it's not
"If It Happens Here," and it's not "When It Happens
Here."

A few weeks ago, I was skimming an article in the San
Francisco Chronicle about the Democrats. It was titled
something like, "Democrats bumble, Republicans
fumble," and its point was that the Democrats are
against a lot of things but they don't really stand
for anything. Now if someone wants to argue that the
Democrats are wishy-washy, I'm the last one to
disagree. But the premise of this article was the
Democrats are against tax breaks for the rich, against
privatizing social security and against – um – letting
poor people drown, and insofar as that's true, that's
actually adds up to being for some pretty important
things.

I don't care about the Democrats, because in fact,
they never do stand for much. But the argument, that
being opposed to enriching the rich and emiserating
the poor or to wars of annihilation and weapons of
mass destruction, is too negative, is the same one
that is often made against the left, even by
ourselves. We talk about needing to know what our
vision is, that we only critique but don't offer an
alternative, needing focused strategic campaigns that
we can win. Somehow, when I read that article, I had a
revelation:
If you read a news article in a German newspaper from
1938 and it was talking about a group of people who
always seemed to be protesting the Nazi government,
would you think, "Why are they so negative?" If in the
same paper they had an article about another group
that was organizing small collective businesses and a
barter system for their neighborhoods, which would you
think was doing the more important work?

I'm sure that there were Germans who organized summer
camps and did cool art with underprivileged kids; some
of them doubtless scandalized everyone by inviting a
few Jewish kids. I remember reading about Polish
Catholic women who took blankets to Auschwitz and
threw them over the fence. But the people I grew up
learning to honor are the ones who blew up train
tracks and sabotaged weapons factories.

We are not in a period like the Paris Commune. We
cannot let a hundred flowers bloom. When you live in a
country that has concentration camps all over the
world, where people are being tortured and imprisoned
indefinitely because of their nationality and
religion, a country whose government is bent on the
destruction of every Muslim country, your job is to
mount as much resistance to it on a daily basis as you
can.

It's not true that we don't have a vision. We know
very well what we're for. We are for good jobs and
good health care and good housing and respect for
every kind of communal or family structure people
choose to have. We are for freedom from hunger and
freedom to thrive and freedom from arbitrary rule.
We're for just and peaceful resolution to conflicts
over land, we're for sharing the earth's resources as
fairly as possible, and for developing a lifestyle
that tries not to destroy so many of them.But let's be
clear. That vision cannot simply coexist with the
status quo. It's not an alternative vision, it's a
counter vision. Sometimes, maybe most of the time, you
need to tear down the old house before you build the
new one.

I always thought, and I know that most of my friends
did too, that If It Happened Here, I would resist to
the max. But it is happening, and I'm not doing that,
because one, I don't know what to do, and two, I don't
want to sound like a nutcase, and three (and if I'm
honest I admit that this is the biggest reason), if
they don't succeed in wiping us all out, and they
probably won't because that's not what they're trying
to do, I have to have a life, I have to have a place
to live and food to eat and clothes to wear, and money
to live on when I can't work any more.

But when history is written, people are going to say,
"How could they have known and done nothing?" And I
guess maybe someone will read this article and say,
"That's how."

Or maybe they will say, "They did do something. They
blocked the bridges, they stopped the trains, they
interrupted the ballet, they took over the airwaves,
they sabotaged military equipment, they protested at
the homes of the torturers; they didn't stop it right
away, but they kept at it and eventually they made
things change."