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View From Italy

The U.S. prison system is one of the worst in the world: it is a means of mass oppression and control against the "minorities" (the people of the inside colony) and the proletarians - a perfect example of "class justice" as Marx said - and a specific means of destruction of the revolutionary people, those who oppose the system. So we can see the biggest prison system inside the richest economy of the world and the most sophisticated strategy of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation, such as Marion. And now imperialism benefits from the experiences of different countries in order to build a general counter insurgency strategy, of repression and maltreatment of it's social and political prisoners. Imperialism, and U.S. imperialism above all, all the times speaks out about "human rights standards, " yesterday denouncing the Soviet Union, today Cuba, but imperialism crushes peoples human rights every day and everywhere. Human rights standards is a class definition. Now the U.N. is a "democratic" covering in the hands of the U.S. and the other industrialized western countries, as the "watchdog" of capitalism against the people and proletarians of the world (look at the Palestinian people and Kurdish people, Iraq, El Salvador and all of Latin America) using the human rights blanket.

But human rights can also be a proletarian and revolutionary tool against imperialism inside the process and the struggle for liberation and emancipation all over the world. Imperialism and human rights exclude each other because of the destructiveness of the imperialist system. In that sense prisoners, at the bottom of the oppressive system, have a lot to do with "human rights" from a proletarian revolutionary perspective."

Giovanni Senzanni
Marion del Tronto, Italy

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