The Struggle Within Quotes

“Conspiracy is a vague legal category that does not require the accused to have participated in illegal activity to be guilty of allegedly dangerous associations. Its capaciousness has proven a convenient way to target different anarchist networks and radical groups who have planned protests, participated in direct actions, or organized international solidarity efforts.”
― Dan Berger, The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States

“Over the next seven years, the group [Weather Underground] claimed credit for more than two dozen bombings of high-profile targets such as the Pentagon, numerous courthouses and police stations, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and several corporations involved in the coup in Chile or colonialism in Angola. Weather articulated a politics of solidarity that demanded a high level of sacrifice by whites in support of Black and other revolutionary people of color. This support emanated from a strategic belief, pioneered by Che Guevara, that U.S. imperialism could be defeated through overextension; bombings were an attempt to pierce the myth of government invincibility and draw repressive attention away from the Panthers and similar groups. It also reflected a political position that said white people had to side with Third World struggles against the U.S. government—and had to do so in a similarly dramatic way.”
― Dan Berger, The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States

“The liberal international human rights community often defines political internees as those incarcerated for their beliefs, not necessarily their actions. While such instances abound, they are not the only or even the best examples of politically motivated incarceration. Whether someone “did it” ought not to determine fully who receives our support. Instead, political prisoners are best conceived as active participants in resistance movements.
Thus the central issue for thinking about political prisoners is not whether they “did it” but what movements did they come from and what are the broader circumstances surrounding their arrest. Most of those incarcerated participated in radical movements seeking fundamental overhauls of structures of power. (...) Political prisoners emerged from movements seeking to stop, to overturn, to develop alternatives to state and extralegal violence of the system. All of America’s political internees did something; some resisted with force, some put their bodies on the line, and others used words and propagated ideas the state deemed too powerful to let slide as just so much free speech. The issue of political prisoners is less one of “innocence” than of defending people’s ability and capacity to resist.”
― Dan Berger, The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States

“The issue of incarceration itself—including not just political prisoners but the prison as a system—needs to be framed as a fundamental question of building and defending our movements. This is a movement rooted in care: It means supporting prisoners as part of a movement culture where people care for one another, create new bonds of solidarity, and celebrate people’s history. This is a movement focused on shrinking the state’s capacity to repress: It means working to close prisons, end solitary confinement, free prisoners, eliminate borders. It means embedding direct challenges to the carceral state within social struggles while working to popularize a wider set of radical politics. While no one organization can do everything, a successful anti-prison movement will need to synthesize direct action, popular relevancy, and radical critique. To separate these approaches is to grant victory to the prison state.”
― Dan Berger, The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States

“Unlike others who carried out high-risk actions, Plowshares activists did not adopt a hit-and-run strategy. Their project was one of moral and spiritual witness. As such, they awaited their capture at the scene of an action, using the trial and surrounding publicity, even jail time, as further opportunity to spread their political message. During these trials, Plowshares activists and other pacifists (including, for instance, those who engaged in antiwar civil disobedience during Gulf Wars I and II) have cited international law and the necessity defense as justification for their actions—sometimes resulting in lower sentences or even acquittals. While most Plowshares activists came from a religious background, the antinuclear and antiauthoritarian politics were also salient; for instance, Jewish secular anarchofeminist Katya Komisaruk dismantled a military computer designed to guide nuclear missiles as part of her involvement in Plowshares. She served five years in prison.”
― Dan Berger, The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States

“Perhaps the most famous nonviolent militants of the time were Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Jesuit priests and tested pacifist warriors. The Berrigan brothers and seven other Catholic leftists burned almost four hundred draft files in Catonsville, Maryland, on May 17, 1968, using homemade napalm to protest its widespread use in Vietnam. Regarding the attack, Daniel Berrigan said, “Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.”
― Dan Berger, The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States

“Beginning in the late 1960s, some activists managed to establish illegal, clandestine structures committed to nonviolent action. (...) This nonviolent underground had several expressions to aid those in danger: the two most common were to help ferry draft resisters and antiwar soldiers out of the country and to provide safe abortions for women in need before the practice was legalized in 1973. In the 1980s, much of this infrastructure was revived and expanded to provide sanctuary for refugees fleeing repressive, U.S.-backed military regimes in Latin America. The experiences of these nonviolent revolutionaries disentangle militancy from violence and violence from clandestinity.”
― Dan Berger, The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States

“Although armed actions have been the most dramatic, revolutionary militancy has never been limited to guns and bombs. Hundreds of political prisoners have come from pacifist circles, both secular and religious. While these activists are generally imprisoned on shorter sentences than those described above, their political actions are no less vital, their commitments no less revolutionary. Just as those who engaged in armed struggle never comprised the majority of the movements from which they came, most nonviolent activists who serve prison time for acts of civil disobedience are not revolutionaries. Yet many of them are, and their work provides a vital point through which to build strategic unity among those who differ on questions of tactics. It was, in fact, revolutionary nonviolent activists who maintained dialogue and critical support for armed revolutionaries in the 1970s when other sectors of the Left, who were often theoretically supportive of armed struggle in Third World countries, were decidedly hostile to its domestic iterations.”
― Dan Berger, The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States

“Tried together, they were dubbed the Ohio 7, although legal battles took some of them from Ohio to New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. These legal battles weren’t the only troubles greeting these revolutionaries: except for Williams, whose wife and children did not accompany him underground, the other six were couples who lived and raised their families underground. After the arrest, the government attempted to use the nine children, most of them under ten and all of them minors, as bargaining chips against their parents. The state offered the Levasseurs’ eight-year-old daughter $20 and some pizza to cooperate with the government against her family. The Mannings’ children were held incommunicado for two months after the parents were first arrested; they had to go on hunger strike to force the government to disclose the whereabouts of their children.”
― Dan Berger, The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States

“The UFF [United Freedom Front] claimed credit for nineteen bombings in the Northeast in the 1980s against assorted U.S. military installations and corporate headquarters, such as General Electric, Motorola, and IBM. These actions were done expressly in solidarity with the revolutionary struggles against racism and U.S. imperialism in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and South Africa. The UFF took precautions to ensure that no one was killed in any of its bombing attacks; like most other groups, it relied on bank robberies to secure funding for its activities.”
― Dan Berger, The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States

“Lacking wealthy benefactors or steady access to resources, BLA (Black Liberation Army) cells often relied on bank robberies to secure funds (a tactic revolutionaries call “expropriations,” for it involves taking money that capitalist institutions have secured through other people’s labor and using it ostensibly to further liberatory ends).”
― Dan Berger, The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States