Liberate

“If they haven’t got prisoners, we have stopped fighting. If our prisoners are forgotten about, they have beaten us.”
— Keith Mann, ALF activist and former prisoner

It’s no exaggeration at this point to say that our planet is in the midst of a serious ecological crisis. All over the globe, every day, the omnicidal plague of industrial civilization continues to spread, driven by economic greed and an insatiable, constantly accelerating demand for energy and resources. And as this cancerous MegaMachine blindly pursues its “scorched Earth policy”, entire species are going extinct and entire societies are disappearing, and it’s all happening so quickly that there hardly seems time to react.

Yet react we must, assertively and immediately, before the biosphere is poisoned and fouled beyond repair and while we still have something worth fighting for. It is in response to the severity of the global environmental crisis that more and more people are starting to step outside the system of Man-made laws and take “illegal” direct action in defense of the Earth. Of course, in this context, legal and illegal are meaningless terms; if we accept that certain strategies ( like economic sabotage ) are necessary to put the brakes on the industrial death machine, then we have to be prepared to support those individuals who are risking their lives and freedom to carry out these acts.

What we are starting to see is the emergence of a truly radical, decentralized, international environmental movement and an integral part of building such a movement is going to be the creation of a solid, well-organized prisoner support network. Our movement will not continue to grow unless we are able to provide this level of support to our comrades who are unfortunate enough to become prisoners of the State. Regardless of what one may think of the I.R.A. and their nationalistic independence struggle, it’s clear that they’ve done a phenomenally good job taking care of their P.O.W.s and that’s one of the main reasons their movement has been so hard to defeat.

It’s also one of the main things that makes the Irish independence struggle a real struggle, and that separates it from other less- organized movements. We have to start viewing prisoner support work as a revolutionary act and as an indispensable part of any real revolutionary struggle or else the State will crush us while our movement is still in it’s embryonic stages and we will lose the momentum we now have. The purpose of this newsletter is to spread the word about certain individuals who have acted in defense of the Earth and our collective future and who have fallen victim to state repression. We will not allow these comrades to be forgotten about and we will do everything in our power to bring attention to their situation. But beyond publicizing their plight, we want to build up a reliable and consistent support network for them, both to honor their heroic acts and to send a clear message to the State that we are organized enough to take care of our own.

If there is one thing we ask of anyone who comes into contact with this newsletter, it’s that you take the time to write some of these prisoners, not just once but regularly, because in the final analysis this is the best support we can provide them with. We also need to actively counter the State’s propaganda and their attempts to portray these individuals as “terrorists”. The terrorists are those who wage war in pursuit of political power and economic gain and who build prisons to house the ever growing number of people who choose to speak out against this insanity.

Copied from: http://www.spiritoffreedom.org.uk