Ed Mead's Response to "Rovics on the Green Scare"

"I envy you. You North Americans are very lucky. You are fighting the most important fight of all—-you live in the heart of the beast."

—Che 1964, from The Old Mole, Boston , late 1964

It was a great pleasure to read the post "Rovics on the Green Scare." It has been a long time since I've come across something so well said and far reaching. Thank you Break The Chains for posting the piece. Many should benefit from its reasoned truths. While I lack both the depth and breadth of the author of that article, I do have some small amount of experience. So let me quickly make note on one of the things I have learned.

First I would like to point out that when one decides to engage in any form of armed struggle, be it property damage or more, one is making a conscious decision to risk death or imprisonment in an effort to bring about what everyone must now clearly see—a revolutionary change in social classes (and if class-based revolution is not your objective then you are nothing but an armed liberal). When individuals and groups reach this understanding, when they have fully internalized the reality of the potential consequences and nonetheless proceed forward, then from there on out they will pretty much be immune to the tactics of the state’s apparatus of repression in terms of trying to get them to turn on their comrades.

These people will not be as motivated by self-serving cooperation with the pigs at the expense of other revolutionaries. Unlike social prisoners, who often take pride in “getting down first” by ratting off their crime partners before they have a chance to do the same, properly conditioned revolutionaries will make no compromises with the police. They will not engage in any type of conversation with the FBI, state detectives, etc. And I say this because there have been some groups of young anarchists who’ve engaged in acts of property destruction, and when caught almost invariably some of them will quickly turn and testify against the others—they will play the narrow self-interest card. And really, isn’t that what capitalism is all about, looking out for number one?

So my suggestion would be to carefully study the revolutionary movements that have already taken place, both the successes and the failures. Also study the revolutionary struggles that are going on in the world today. And as you do so don't be blinded by your narrow political perspectives. The struggle of the Iraqi people to throw off the yoke of a brutal foreign occupation, for example, qualifies and an anti-imperialist struggle. The religion of these people or how they treat "their" women must take a back seat to their struggle for what amounts to national liberation. The citizens of the U.S. quietly sat by while "their" government installed and supported brutal dictatorships in Iran and Iraq , dictators who then systematically tortured and murdered nearly all of the communists and other progressives. Today there is nobody left in these countries to fight but the religious sector. Our job is not to lecture them; our job is to materially support them. We are the ones who created this mess in the first place, and because of that they are being slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands. Should our solidarity with their struggle not also involve some level of risk, or are our lives more precious because we are Americans?

The simple advice I would like to pass on is that you should not rat on your friends, and that you most likely won't if you first weigh and be willing to accept the consequences that could flow from any decision to meaningfully resist the bourgeois state. We don't need any more idealists hanging themselves in jail cells, but, if defenses don't work, we do need people on the inside of our prisons preparing the way for those who will surely follow. While we want to avoid capture, and escape confinement where possible, the bottom line is that prisons are but another front in the global class war. Malcolm X once described prisons as universities of revolution. “I discovered myself in prison and also a sort of freedom that I had never before known,” he said, “my body might have been imprisoned but my mind and spirit became completely liberated...”

Ed Mead
Prison Art Project
P.O. Box 31574
San Francisco , CA 94131-0574
ed@prisonart.org - http://www.prisonart.org
415-602-5341