Solidarity Means Attack!: For the Destruction of All Prisons and the World that Makes Them

“Those who shout ‘insurrection!’
These are our bothers and sisters, our children,
Our companer@s, our comrades, our friends.
Those who have only violence
To break the walls of silence…”

This text will not speak of the misery of prison, as everyone among us who risks it knows this misery. Nor will it speak of the need to destroy prison; this need is evident for us, we feel it in each heartbeat. This text will not speak of the misery of survival here, outside the walls of prison, in the “free world” which is in itself nothing but an outdoor prison.

What we want to do to today is to address ourselves to the rebel prisoners, to those who experience a compulsion to struggle for the light of which they have been deprived. What we want to say today is that inside a prison, they can take everything from us, except the desire for freedom. Sometimes, this desire is capable of shouting so loudly that it rises over the walls of silence as in Alcoentres, Caxias, Monsantos, Coimbras, Leiras and in every other prison they don’t talk about in the papers.

In the escapes, the refusals to return to the cells, the refusals to eat the shit that they serve, the attacks against the guards, the work strikes, the fires, the hunger, thirst, and silence strikes, the destruction of infrastructure, the act of climbing onto the roofs, the revolts, the fists, the screams.

In the screams that, this time, were born of a desire that flows inside, a desire to communicate with one another. In the screams that, this time, are confirmed by the revolt which aims only at breathing more freely, without bars, or guards, or controls, or walls! In the screams that, this time, are not the products of beatings, of psychological or physical torture, of isolation, of the shots of the GISP1 murderers who kill like any other prison guard kills, like any cop, like any judge, like any journalist, like any politician.

These cries are yours, and also ours. They belong to every one of us who feels daily in her skin that authority is the enemy of freedom; they belong to every one of us whose lives are controlled and stolen by those with the power and the institutions; they belong to every one of us who wants to take back control of his own life by fighting for it.

Solidarity means attack,
For the destruction of all prisons and the world that makes them.

-Some anarchists from Portugal

1 GISP: Grupo de Intervenção e Segurança Prisional, or Prison Intervention and Security Group, a highly-trained, paramilitary, Portugese police unit, specializing in, you guessed it, interventions in prisons.


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