Comrade Toussaint

“Like an experimental concentration camp”. That was how an unnamed detainee at the notorious fascist hellhole called Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia characterized the place, which is operated by private prison company LaSalle Corrections. Whistleblower Dawn Wooten, a nurse at this facility, exposed the “jarring medical neglect” faced by the detainees. In the report, filed jointly by Project South, Georgia Detention Watch, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, and South Georgia Immigrant Support Network, Wooten exposed an insidious pattern of medical abuse. Detainees are issued one mask each, receive no cleaning supplies to clean their space, and social distancing is impossible. COVID-19 is undoubtedly burning through the facility, like many other prisons across the country and world. Prison authorities have refused to test detainees, and deaths are most likely high. Comrade Rashid  highlights the abuse suffered by prisoners in facilities in Indiana during this pandemic, and there have been several uprisings around the world in response to prison officials refusing to respond to the pandemic to the satisfaction of inmate workers, concerned progressive individuals, and family members of those incarcerated.

We must keep in mind the history of eugenics in the United States. The fascist Nazis learned their art of murder here. Black and Chicano women were routinely sterilized against their will by doctors concerned about the proliferation of so-called “useless eaters”, meaning colonized children. In Mississippi, this same procedure was called a “Mississippi appendectomy”, with noted progressive activist Fannie Lou Hamer being one of the most notable victims. Nelson Denis discusses in “War Against All Puerto Ricans” how a Yankee doctor bragged about his ability to give Puerto Ricans cancer with the intent of exterminating them and opening the island for Yankee colonization en masse, and also how Puerto Rican women who had more than two children were sterilized by having their fallopian tubes sterilized. Prisoners and colonized people have also been subject to medical experimentation, including trials of the drug LSD as a “truth serum” through the MKULTRA program administered by the CIA to sharpen and develop new methods of interrogation and torture. Now, we see nonwhite detainees in ICE custody being forced to submit to medical procedures without proper anesthetic, removal of the wrong ovaries, and forced hysterectomies. This is butchery that reminds one of the Nazi era, which is par for the course considering they were the most adament students of America in all its wickedness.

These crimes and barbarities will not stop through peaceful protests, hunger strikes, or blocking roadways. It is already brutally clear that the intent of the American capitalist-imperialists is to commit genocide against those from whom they can not extract surplus value. This is a tactic of counter-insurgency, a people’s movement can only be destroyed by either cooptation or destruction, physically. We have seen both cases throughout history. Only through protracted people’s war led by a correctly guided Marxist-Leninist-Maoist vanguard party and the organization of the masses into the People’s Army and revolutionary militias capable of exacting people’s justice against butchers such as this can these blood debts be settled.