This whole thing is a farce, and it has to be uncovered. People have to pull the cover back off of this thing and it needs to be exposed. That’s why I write. We’re trying to expose certain things. We have to oppose the rulers above society no matter what their identity is.
If there isn’t resistance to police brutality, then the white supremacy and violence will increase. In some ways, we’re holding back a tide more than we’re actually advancing the bar.
2018 saw a major backlash against human rights defenders advocating legal access to the asylum system in the EU. Volunteers and NGOs have been threatened, attacked, and legally prosecuted. Are You Syrious? (AYS) is one of them.
The Penza Remand Prison was at such pains to show that none of the suspects were being tortured anymore that every evening all ten were “inspected.”
Long term prison-abolitionist strategies are not necessarily the same as those we’ll need to free individual prisoners in the short run. But in Sara and Seán’s case as in any other, it is important that we have critiques of the oppressive nature of prisons in mind while thinking about the specificity of their context.
“In Penza, the FSB does not even bother to hide what they are doing. Officers show up at the remand prison there, and take their man to another room, where they have a generator and electrical wires set up.”
The more publicity this case gets, the safer our comrades will be in remand prison from violence at the hands of prison stooges and more torture at the hands of the FSB.
Iñaki need not worry about being thrown in prison; he need not fear pursuit: the Spanish justice system does not persecute his ethnicity. He currently lives in a villa on Lake Geneva. His bank account is full.
The laws have changed their names, but they are still laws of exception, and they still have the same consequences for dissidents: persecution, criminalization, repression, and imprisonment. Freedom of expression exists only for those who think the way they do.
Are the powers that be just going to give up and end the War on Drugs and switch all this money to policies that make sense? Not unless we make them. That’s going to take each and every one of us engaging in daily actions of resistance.
