SuperWeed

Last week, imprisoned activist Josh Harper was released from restrictive “Special Housing” (aka “the hole”) after 100 days of constant lockdown, loss of possessions, no access to vegan meal options, and only one 15 minute telephone call per week. The reason for the special punishment? The prison administrators — not a judge, not a jury, not anybody in any way qualified to pass judgement on such matters — determined that an interview Josh had given to a skateboarding zine constituted the crime of encouraging domestic terrorism.

I’m not making this up. On the basis of that zine and a couple of magazines found in Josh’s cell, the prison administration essentially charged and convicted Josh of terrorism. You can read it yourself in the prison incident report:

Click the thumbnail to read the document.

That reminds me that I’ve been meaning to link to the recent Black Looks blog post on the recent imprisonment of freelance investigative journalist Thabo Thakalekoala in Lesotho. You can read the bizarre and menacing story of his arrest by authorities in articles by the UN Integrated Regional Information Networks and in the South African Mail & Guardian.

I don’t know of anything in particular that people in the USA can do to support Thabo Thakalekoala, but you can visit the websites of Reporters Without Borders and the International Federation of Journalists (which yesterday called on African leaders to release of imprisoned journalists throughout the continent) to learn how you can express solidarity with endangered journalists worldwide.

Already in 2007, according to Reporters Without Borders, 50 journalists and eight media assistants have been killed, 125 journalists and six media assistants have been imprisoned, and 66 cyberdissidents (many of them bloggers) have been imprisoned. For background on the case of Thabo Thakalekoala, see this Reporters Without Borders report on Lesotho.

Coming back to political prisoners here in the USA, Josh’s codefendant Andy Stepanian’s latest letter from prison is well worth reading. Like Josh, Andy is imprisoned because of words he has said as an animal liberation activist but does that work within an integrated analysis of the interconnections among purportedly different kinds of oppression. Like Josh, Andy has done anti-racist and environmental activism as well as animal advocacy and took action on prison issues long before he himself was imprisoned. Like Josh, Andy is a man who takes feminism seriously and tries to act in accordance with its principles.

In short, Andy and Josh share with me (and with many of the readers of this blog) what might be called a unified field theory of oppression. This insight is in evidence in his latest public letter, in which he writes:

Freedom is a word that has become so lost amidst our culture that the mere mention of it invokes emotions. One only need look out their window and see billboards using the female body to sell products, commodifying womyn and using their figure as a marketing tool, or to see a “For Sale” sign on a piece of land, assigning it a dollar amount and proclaiming how to procure it. One need only go as far as a local market to see refrigerators filled with Styrofoam trays and cellophane packages of meat for $2.99. Nowhere is there mention of the words “cow” or “hen,” but rather we see words like “Brisket” or “Tender.”

Here, Andy gets at something that is missed by the proponents of pornography who have left comments on this blog: Objectification of women is harmful in and of itself, even when (as in the case of billboard advertising) the models of that objectification have agreed to be commodified.

Andy goes on to discuss the origins and functions of capitalism before raising his voice against the commodification of nature implicit in it:

A forest is a forest, not a stand or cut; an estuary is an estuary and not a fishery; a womyn in a swimsuit does not exist to sell beer from a billboard, her name is Monica and she wants to study botany; a mountain top is a mountain top and not a claim, and a monkey being mutilated on a necropsy table inside Huntingdon Life Sciences is not a subject in a Colgate-Palmolive test, his name was James.

I won’t quote any more. I want you to read the whole thing yourself.

I know and love Andy and Josh both. That helps me to really feel, rather than just abstractly believe, that none of us is free while they and so many other prisoners of conscience are behind bars. As Andy writes, “I write from a medium/high security institution within our capitalist system, and you listen within the comforts of our minimum security wing.” If he were editing this over my shoulder, he’d probably want me to remind you that we’re also not free as long as animals are imprisoned in vivisection labs and women are enslaved in brothels and poor people are behind bars for writing bad checks and all of our minds are fettered by the racist, sexist, heterosexist, nature-hating, commodity-loving ideas we’ve been fed all of our lives.

Write to Josh. Read Andy’s letter. Support Reporters Without Borders. Learn about the prison industrial complex and then join the resistance. None of us will be free until you do.

June 30th, 2007 | Category: Activism, Gender, Intersections, Politics, Race | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL