The Opening Statement – Spring 2025

Dear comrade,

Happy Spring! Welcome to another issue of The Opening Statement. This issue centers on a word that seems to be on everybody’s lips these days: fascism. Ever since Trump’s first election, and even before that, people have been using the F word, talking and debating about fascism and its relevance for understanding the politics of the present. And it’s not only Trump in the U.S.—around the world, from Orbán in Hungary and the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) party in Germany to Bolsonaro in Brazil and Milei in Argentina to Modi in India and Netanyahu in Israel, there has been a reactionary, authoritarian turn in recent years that has reminded many of fascism. But how should we understand fascism? This issue includes three pieces that approach the question of fascism not only, or even primarily, in terms of the conventional points of reference like Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, but through the writings (and actions) of Black radicals in the U.S. over the course of the twentieth century. These writers insist, among other things, on fascism’s racial and international character. They also underscore the difficulty of defining it once and for all, because it is a process that changes form depending on its circumstances. Another way to put it comes from Cedric Robinson, the scholar of the Black radical tradition, who writes that “From the perspective of many non-Western peoples, however, the occurrence of fascism—that is militarism, imperialism, racialist authoritarianism, choreographed mob violence, millenarian crypto-Christian mysticism, and a nostalgic nationalism—was no more an historical aberration than colonialism, the slave trade, and slavery.” Rather than being exceptional, fascism has long been present for most marginalized people.

The first piece is a selection from George Jackson’s prison letters on fascism, drawn from his posthumous book Blood in My Eye. The second piece is an interview with the writer Alberto Toscano about his recently published book Late Fascism, which explores the writing of Jackson and others and argues for the value of their way of understanding fascism. The third piece is an original account of Black antifascism and the Hands Off Ethiopia movement in the 1930s, by friend-of-MAPS A.D. Finally, the issue also includes a poem by SHE>i from the newly published poetry collection Like a Hammer: Poets on Mass Incarceration. We hope that this issue helps to generate discussions, questions, and new insights about the F word, both in terms of how it can help clarify our own situations and figure out how to move forward.

And now, on to the news updates. On March 18, Israel unilaterally broke its ceasefire agreement with Hamas and resumed its mass bombing of Gaza with U.S.-made bombs and equipment. According to Al Jazeera, as of April 10, Israel has killed more than 1,400 people since beginning this new round of attacks. These numbers include 35 people who were killed on the Islamic holiday Eid al-Fitr (March 30). At this point, the number of people in Gaza officially documented to have been killed by the Israeli military (with U.S. support) over the last year and a half is over 50,000, but of course the real numbers are much higher than that. Already on March 2, Israel had reinitiated its blockade of Gaza, completely cutting off the delivery of food, medicine, and fuel. As of April 9, the UN World Food Program told Al Jazeera that its food supply would run out in two weeks. Palestinians understand the blockade as another form of war, one that targets the entire population. As a Gazan resident of Jabalya named Abu Muhammad told CNN in March, “They are fighting us through our food.”

According to the Detroit Free Press, on March 12, U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Stafford issued a 38-page report finding that “MDOC officials stymy the prisoners’ efforts to get relief either through the grievance system or in court.” The judge’s ruling came in response to arguments by MDOC against a 2019 lawsuit by brave women at Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, alleging that the prison’s damp and humid conditions had created persistent and toxic mold that damaged their health. MDOC tried to get the case thrown out by arguing that the women did not “exhaust their administrative remedies” before bringing the lawsuit (sound familiar?). The judge rejected this claim. First, she found that, when prisoners are “harmed by a condition of confinement,” MDOC steers them to the warden’s forum instead of the grievance process, but then if they sue, MDOC argues that the suit is invalid because they didn’t complete the grievance process. Further, the judge found that “MDOC regularly rejects grievances as untimely without taking into account the fact that prisoners may have missed tight filing deadlines because of the amount of time it takes grievances to work their way through the internal prison mail system, not because of any tardiness by the prisoners themselves.”

In other good news, on April 1, the Michigan Supreme Court unanimously ruled that it is unconstitutional to issue mandatory life-without-parole (LWOP) sentences to 18-year-olds. This landmark ruling means that Michigan is one of the few states that extends this protection from juveniles to 18-year-olds. All 18-year-olds, regardless of date of offense, are now eligible for resentencing! It’s about time, since Michigan is one of the very worst states for rates of LWOP sentences for both juveniles and 18-year-olds. Nationwide, Black and Brown youth are twice as likely to be sentenced to LWOP as white youth for the same crime. In Michigan, Black and Brown youth used to be three times as likely to get LWOP until last year’s ruling that juvenile LWOP is unconstitutional. Research has established that decision-making ability, impulse control, and cognition don’t fully mature until our mid-20s.

The Prison Policy Initiative has released their “whole pie” report for 2024 (lots of pie charts about prisons in the U.S.). Summarizing these findings, the PPI found that the total prison population in Michigan declined by about 5,000 between 2019-2023, but from 2021-2023 the prison population increased by 800. Based on these numbers, it seems that there was a significant drop but a gradual increase in more recent years. We will be paying attention to these trends to see how they develop, but for now what’s clear is that we are not seeing a straightforward process of “decarceration.”

On March 20, the private, for-profit prison corporation GEO Group announced a new contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to house immigrants at its 1,800-bed prison called North Lake Facility in Baldwin, MI. GEO Group secured a contract during the first Trump administration to hold immigrants at the North Lake prison, but the prison was closed in 2022 after an executive order from the Biden administration ending the use of private prisons with the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). Now, under the Trump administration, that order has been revoked, and new deportation quotas and the ramping up of visa revocations, mass arrests, and detentions have laid the groundwork for the prison to reopen. GEO Group expects to generate over $70 million a year in revenue from the North Lake prison, and this is part of a country-wide expansion that CEO J. David Donahue has called an “unprecedented opportunity” to generate new revenues of up to $1 billion per year by contracting with ICE (the company is currently $1.7 billion in debt).

In response to the news, No Detention Centers in Michigan (NDCM), a statewide coalition that works to abolish immigrant detention in Michigan, issued a statement saying that they “have documented inhumane conditions at North Lake and previously called out how GEO Group targets rural communities to deepen their dependency on carceral economies, including Baldwin. In 2020, two years before the facility’s closure, there [was] . . . the tragic story of Jesse Dean. Dean spent 26 years behind bars, including time at North Lake, before he was transferred into ICE custody in 2020. Weeks later in ICE custody, after repeatedly notifying detention staff of severe pain, he died of a bleeding ulcer and hypertension. ‘In the most egregious way, Dean’s case illustrates how medical neglect is inherent to incarceration, whether it’s BOP custody, ICE custody, or a combined partnership. The “Carceral Carousel” that people are forced to endure can be deadly,’ said JR Martin with NDCM. ‘Lives are in jeopardy. We denounce the reopening of North Lake and know that our communities are worth more. There is a crucial need to transition communities reliant on jails and prisons away from carceral economies and toward sustainable, well-paying, and dignified industries that will provide meaningful work and resources, without causing harm and furthering Trump’s cruel anti-immigrant agenda.’” MAPS is part of the NDCM coalition and we’ll be following this situation closely.

In related news, the nexus of mass incarceration and deportation is also proving to be a financial boon to the country of El Salvador, whose authoritarian (fascist?) president, Nayib Bukele, has begun to accept U.S. deportees to be confined to the recently built “Terrorism Confinement Center” (CECOT). Modeled after the American super-max, CECOT has been described as a “black hole of human rights.” It has also inspired other Latin American countries to build enormous new prisons as a way of cracking down on “gangs” (we know this doesn’t work and also conveniently ignores the conditions that force people to turn towards gangs for survival). On February 3, Bukele tweeted: “We have offered the United States of America the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system. We are willing to take in only convicted criminals (including convicted U.S. citizens) into our mega-prison (CECOT) in exchange for a fee. The fee would be relatively low for the U.S. but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable.” Soon after, in March, Trump sent three planes with 261 Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador and paid the country $6 million to hold them—chump change for the US. Among them was a man named Kilmar Abrego García, who the Trump administration admitted that it had “mistakenly” deported—but claimed it would be impossible to bring him back, since he was outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts. The Supreme Court later upheld the administration’s use of a 1798 act to justify these deportations, despite the utter lack of due process, and also ruled the administration must “facilitate” Abrego García’s return to the U.S.

We see this program as an effort to extend the U.S.’s extrajudicial immigrant detention regime into Central America. Relatedly, the Trump administration has also proposed imprisoning migrants at Guantánamo Bay. We’ve heard that some of you who do not have citizenship may be fearful of removal from MDOC to Guantánamo or CECOT in the near future. We cannot provide legal advice, but we are told that ICE does not have jurisdiction over you until you have completed your sentence. If you or someone you know has an ICE retainer, and especially if you are nearing the end of your sentence, ideally you should ask a family member or friend on the outside to contact an immigration attorney for guidance. As far as we’ve heard, as of print time nothing has changed in terms of the MDOC’s communications and custody arrangements with ICE and DHS. However, ICE/DHS are acting so unpredictably under the current administration that the situation could change again in the coming weeks and months.

You may have heard about the strike by New York state prison guards, which began on February 17 and ended on March 9. Participants in the strike, which went against union officials’ recommendations, demanded higher pay, stricter security checks for prison visitors, and a rollback on prison reforms, including those that limit solitary confinement. Now, we at MAPS generally support wildcat strikes, but we don’t see prison guards as workers in the same way that auto workers, Starbucks baristas, nurses, and others are. What is the purpose of a worker whose job is to cage people? Moreover, if unions are supposed to advance the interests of the working class in general, what should we think of a group of workers whose job is to oppress other workers?

In any case, the strike across NYDOC came in response to the announcement of criminal charges against prison guards who had beaten a handcuffed and shackled man to death at Marcy Correctional Facility in January. During the strike, abuses of prisoners increased, and access to mail, food, and exercise was restricted. This happened in spite of the fact that the National Guard was deployed to address the staff shortage, but they obviously have zero experience in prison work. Some prisoners’ JPay messages about the strike were remotely erased. Prisoners at Clinton State Prison reported that a man died after guards neglected to administer his insulin. Prisoners at Sing Sing and Auburn also were killed through neglect during the strike. One prisoner at Woodbourne Correctional Facility told the Associated Press that “They want the atmosphere to become violent to prove a point about staffing. . . . It’s like we’re caught in the crossfire between the union and their gripes with Albany and the administrators.” All in all, according to the New York Times, at least nine prisoners died as a result of the strike.

The strike eventually ended with a deal that reduced 24-hour mandatory overtime shifts and temporarily suspended provisions of a law that limits the use of solitary confinement. While most of the guards returned to work following the agreement, some 2,000 refused, and they were fired and barred from future state jobs (how about that staffing crisis, huh?).

Did you know? This is our ongoing feature where we share facts about history from below that have been silenced. We have been thinking a lot about genocide over the last year and a half since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza, which has now expanded to the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and beyond. Although the history of genocide goes back at least to 1492, the crime of genocide was first codified in the wake of the Holocaust, in the UN Genocide Convention in 1948 (the same year that the state of Israel was established through the nakba or “catastrophe,” in which 750,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their lands). The continuing centrality of the Holocaust in discussions of genocide has led the scholar Zoé Samudzi to propose the term “genocide exceptionalism” to describe the common idea that Nazi violence aginst the Jews was “unique and exceptional” and therefore must not be compared to any other case.

But Samudzi also notes that the Holocaust was not only not a singular event but was preceded by and modeled on colonial genocide. One relevant example is the genocide of the Ovaherero and Nama peoples of what is now Namibia, but was known at the time as the colony of German South West Africa. Between 1904-1908, the German military exterminated 80 percent of the Ovaherero and half of the Nama populations. The Germans were explicit about their goals, with the head of the campaign, General Lothar von Trotha, issuing an Vernichtungsbefehl (“extermination order”) in October of 1904: “I, the great general of the German soldiers, send this letter to the Hereros. The Hereros are German subjects no longer. . . . The Herero nation must now leave the country. If it refuses, I shall compel it to do so with the [cannon]. Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or cattle, will be executed. I shall spare neither women nor children. I shall give the order to drive them away and fire on them. Such are my words to the Herero people.”

The logic behind this extermination order was the concept of Lebensraum (“living space”). The nineteenth-century German geographer Freidrich Ratzel popularized this term within the realm of geopolitics. Drawing on Charles Darwin’s work on natural selection, Ratzel argued that human “species” (or races) should be understood in the same way, trapped in a competitive struggle over space. On this basis, he advocated for Germany’s colonial expansion in Europe and Africa, and affirmed that this colonization would necessarily entail the destruction of the native peoples who belonged to “inferior” races in order to make room for the “superior” ones. The concept of Lebensraum, which combined colonial expansion with genocidal elimination, had a significant influence on Hitler, and in this way his designs for Nazi expansion and more generally the intellectual foundations of the Holocaust can be understood as building directly on Germany’s colonial history in Africa.

We want to conclude with a passage from the Martinican author Aimé Césaire’s book Discourse on Colonialism (1950) that proposes the idea of the colonial “boomerang,” in which the practices of European colonizers outside of Europe don’t stay there but inevitably return home, for example, as in the case of the Nazis:

First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, . . . each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these pris­oners who have been tied up and “interrogated,” all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery. And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

As always, please feel free to send us art, poetry, writing, and other reflections in response to this issue. Unfortunately, as we’ve explained, MDOC now blocks TOS issues that contain writing by Michigan prisoners. But we would love to hear your thoughts, analysis, and suggestions in response to the contents of the newsletter, and we’d love to hear more suggestions for future themes as well. Be sure to share this issue with friends.

With respect and solidarity,

MAPS

Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash