Speech to be read at October 22nd National Anti Police Brutality rally
By: NATO 5 Political Prisoner Comrade Migs / Mark Neiweem #M36200
(A chant: No More Cops, No More Hate, No More Prisons, Smash The State!)
Greetings of solidarity, comrades and friends.
Thank you for coming out to the October 22nd National Anti Police Brutality rally.
My name is Comrade Migs, and I reach out to you from the dungeons of the Prison Industrial Complex to join you today in word and spirit.
Police and state violence is widespread and an often covert societal plague, which spreads and thrives on silence. Silence it often extorts from us through coercion. It most commonly thrives in poor and working class communities of color and is deeply rooted in racism and class domination. Sexism, homophobia, transphobia and other forms of hierarchical class structures maintain and perpetuate the status quo of this unnecessary and terrible foe of freedom, and a healthy society based on love, tolerance, and equality cannot be wrestled from the system and ideologies which create it.
We will not be given the tools or knowledge to frame and understand the causes and conditions of such social failings from the same social structures that maintain the very class system so many of us are an enemy of. This is made so brutally clear by the clubs, guns, tasers, gas, and boots laid upon us, or our families and neighbors, by those who enforce and maintain this class structure – the police.
Our insight, our skills, and learning by walking through our struggle will create the tools and knowledge for us to combat these attackers. We will examine the causes and conditions together, for we learn best when we teach one another. The system can’t teach this to us. We can and must teach ourselves, for we are those who suffer. It is our responsibility. Not “responsibility” in a sense of placing blame, but rather in the sense that we must take responsibility for our own liberation – for reliance on victimizers in any situation, be it systematic state violence or domestic violence, is ignorance.
The racist and authoritarian beliefs that justify acts of violence on us come from colonization and beyond. They are baseless beliefs of domination that have passed from feudalism to capitalism and infected the newly created institution of state communist experiments. These problems and societal cancers have infected us all, and the overthrow and seizure of state power by a new party or the replacement of politicians will not correct them. The system must be abolished, but our social relations must be the revolution. We must be proactive and be the change we wish to see in order to collectively move forward in decentralized, non-hierarchical bodies for grassroots struggle in and for our communities.
We must reject our own racist or phobic tendencies to whatever degree this society has tainted us individually, and leave all forms of authoritarianism and domination, fear and prejudice, out of our organizations. We must be our new world – be the change, and not without staging an inside revolution. Just as the state reflects violence in its institutions, policing, and prisons, we must reflect our values in our resistance movements.
I’ve mentioned police and state violence, oppression, and racism in our nation’s working class and poor communities, but there is another large community whose issues are kept out of sight by the corporate media. This community is that of the prison industrial complex, which has 2.6 million oppressed and impoverished under its thumb – also primarily from poor communities of color. State violence thrives here because of the same racism, phobias, and authoritarian ideologies.
Communities out of sight are havens for state violence with little to no accountability. Violence is so common because of the silence. The state, like any bully, will go as far as permitted, and just like domestic violence, institutional and state violence hates the light of day.
Thank you for coming out today, breaking the silence to bring the light and hope and love necessary to expose this epidemic of police brutality and state-sanctioned violence. Let us continue forth today to work hand in hand as The People, to be and create the better world. To be the revolution inside and out, to birth it and know as we look amongst ourselves at the conclusion of this speech, that a large number of the 2.6 million imprisoned Americans and prisoners abroad stand with you.
In solidarity, yours for our revolution,
Comrade Migs (NATO 5)
#OpPenPal 