PARSSTINE'S LIBERATICN) WILMRISERATE US ALL:
A MESSAGE TO A PRISONER LETTER WRITING EVENT
BY CANJaY GOONAN

hitpeyfreccaseynownoblogsar,

with whatever weapons at hand

A Message to a Prisoner Letter Writing Event

Thank you everyone for coming out tonight. It feels like a gigantic hug
t0 know that so many people have learned about my case, which is not
only about me as an individual facing repression, but rather about the
capitalist, white-supremacist U.S. settler state “punishing” and hoping to
“deter” the revival of a global i
quo on college campuses for the sake of Palestis
historical duty to sabotage and expropriate the University of Empire; to
abolish its function as an infrastructure of oceupation, displacement,
warfare, and genocide.

Last Spring, a largely spontaneous, ad hoc, and mimetic combustion of
ereative energy was unleashed by the catalyst-action of not only students
but far-reaching communities converging on some campuses, and of
course small groups of brave people taking big risks. In reaction, the
owning class of U.$. Amerikkkan and Israel-Zionist settler empire was to
engage ina massive repression/counterinsurgency campaign to exhaust,
confuse, and strike fear in the minds of all seetors of society involved in
the campus flood; not only students, not only faculty.

iam but one example of thousands of non-student/non-campus worker
participants in the encampment wave. From this experience, i've learned
that it is important to continuously deconstruct and clarify the false
consciousness that on one hand constructs some of us as “outsiders” who,
threaten the province of “the campus” as an allegedly discrete space,
agined to be self-enclosed, a world apart from society and its
surroundings. While simultancously, on the other hand, it is only
“students” and “faculty” who reside as the privileged historical subjects of
“campus life” and of this recent sequence of protest. What was most
threatening about the campus flood is that, at least in some geographies,
the convergence of these segregated worlds threatened to collapse the
division and hierarchies of labor, authority, and space-time which serve to
maintain the university campus as a technology for imperialism and
transnational capital, for population management, for white ciy
nation-building, and settler land-ccological conquest.

‘The potential of the campus flood, the potential force that provoked
incredible reaction from the government, the owning class, and grassroots
supporters of fascism, the potential that was displayed by the actions of so
many people last Spring is in the convergence of two segregated worlds
that in combination can overtake the university campus as a primary
chokepoint of capital flows and state power, while in our own turn
eliminating the alienated social roles that we take on from either side of
the line. Such social roles, these categories of existence under capital, are
preserved by the ongoing belief that it is only the “teacher” who teaches,
only the “student” who learns, only the “staff” who toils on logistics, and.
only the “custodian” who repairs and cleans. Meanwhile, what brings all of
these components together is the singular mandate of the wage (or future
‘wage)—labor and surplus to be managed and policed by administrators
and their chain of command.

‘What almost happened in certain geographies s that, to paraphrase
Fredy Perlman, the university campus almost finally, actually, Gronically)
for once became a site of learning rather than a site of discipline into
conformity. The spectre of a different relation to authority was
‘summoned, if only for a brief moment. Communicated by this spectre is a
critical lesson: one of the most direct and tangible ways we can act in
solidarity with the resistance to the Isracli-Zionist entity in historic
Palestine is to abolish the university of settler-empire first as a concept
and then as a material infrastructure.

P've mentioned this elsewhere, but at the end of the day these campuses
are just buildings and a mass accumulation of resources. It is all of us who
give it a specific social meaning; those of us whose labor (or “work”)
actively create its social basis of power. This is just as so for those of us
‘who are excluded from its provincialized space, those of us who accept
that we do not belong on its premises or that we cannot act
autonomously, ourselves, against the University of Empire without
permission from some mythic “student leadership,” those of us who
joined the encampments yet so often were relegated to the restricted
status of “community support.” S0 long as we accept an image of the
college campus that confirms the colonial-bourgeois schema, we will
never see victory.

et that which is social can always be changed. What is needed is an
attack in the immediate, a protracted revolutionary insurrection against
the social relations of production and existence that constitute the
University as an infrastructure. Then and only then will we be able to say
we are contributing to the liberation of Palestine and materially

.
combatting Zionist rule from our location in (global) settler-empire.

We can set an example by overtaking the university campus and
destroying the assigned roles we all hold “within® and allegedly “outside”
it, thus eliminating the social basis that creates its function asa
‘managerial apparatus for colonial-capitalist Amerikkka. We can set an
example for all by expropriating the campus and de-alienating our own
life and labor in the process. If the “movement” formed in the
encampments and building takeovers were to link itself to organizing
efforts across all sectors of labor and society on a specific campus and its.
surrounding area, with the goal to converge, t0 refuse work, and to wage a
general strike, what new forms of creative energy might this unleash? The
secret is to begin, to radically break from habits.

“Palestine’s liberation willliberate us all” has been a popular slogan in
recent years. And for good reason. However, i am of the belief that the
inverse also holds true. To liberate ourselves from capitalism where we
are situated and to destroy the social roles that a settler-colonial, white-
supremacist, and anti-Black hetero-patriarchal class society assigns us is
precisely the centripetal force necessary to defeat Zionism and U.S.
Amerikkkanism. Such is the very self-activity that will destabilize the war
machine that s killing Palestinians, the very self-activity that will also
lead us into the inevitable “people’s war” here, bringing us squarely into
combat against the police and all who have a class interest in the order of
things, the genocidal status quo, the way this social structure is but does
not have to be. It is this initiative that will unleash a flood that spills out
from the liberated campus, the abolished university, to generalize
disruptive self-activity across all sectors, to the factories and fields, to the
service industry workplaces and city centers, to the encampments and
housing complexes, to the jails and prisons.

Itis such an initiative—the destruction of the University of Empire—
that the U.S. government truly fears, and of which my experience of state
repression is a microcosm. This is why i say that i am not an “individual”
in this situation. i am an individual to the extent that i am an autonomous
person who can think, make decisions, and act for myself. Yet this “self” is
always in relation, collectively formed. i do not exist in a vacuum. i exist
within an innumerable combination of affinities, communities,
collectives, and networks. We are all, in the first and last instance,
interconnected and dependent on one another to extents hardly
perceivable. Together we will set the example. May the Intifada of the
university campuses be eternally revitalized and may future revolts
continue to generalized.

To do this, there will be a need for relentless and widespread anti-
repression skill-sharing and prisoner support, so our movement does not
fear taking necessary risks. And in this respect, you all who gather tonight
are setting this example. Tonight is an exemplary action.

Blessed is the flame of anti-colonial resistance!
Longlive the Palestinian revolution!

“Take the buildings, take the campus, then give them away to the broader
‘movement, so that it can organize for work on other areas, such as direct
action against defense contractors. Come back after summer and take
them again. The fight for the liberation of Palestine will be long."

— Research and Destroy (June 2024)

“We are on the inside [of US. Empire]..... We are the only ones .... who can
get at the monster’s heart without subjecting the world to nuclear fire. We
‘have amomentous historical role to act out if we will. The whole world for
all time in the future will love us and remember us as the righteous people
who madeit possible for the world to live on. If we fail through fear and
lack of aggressive imagination, then the slaves of the future will curse us,
as we sometimes curse those of yesterday. ... We must build the true
internationalism now.”

— George Jackson (April 1970)

Casey Goonan
Santa Rita Jail
February 20,2025
For current letter writing information, ways to support, other resources,
& updates, visit: https://freecaseynow.noblogs.org/

7
BLESSED IS THE FLAME

OF ANTI-COLONIAL
RESISTANCE!

LONG LIVE THE

PALESTINIAN

REVOLUTION!