How can one live freely in the shadow of a prison?
There are moments, like today in Syria, when we can only rejoice. See the statues of Bashar and his relatives looted, the crowds in the streets, the open prison doors. These moments that remind us that all regimes, including the most authoritarian ones, can fall.
If there is a constant in the revolutions, it is that of freeing prisoners. Symbol of power, of who can decide the freedom of its subjects, prison is one of the nodes on which rests submission to the State and acceptance of social norms.
One of the worst prisons in the world, Sednaya, has apparently been completely emptied of its prisoners, allowing people to see their relatives whom they had not heard from for many years or even meet them for the first time. But let’s not be mistaken, while the «rebels» are emptying the prisons of the fallen regime, those under their control are already filled with opponents.
Revolutionaries have already fallen in the trap of supporting pro-State organisations, by third-worldism, against imperialism, seduced by kurdish communalism or the romanticism of the guerrilla. Unfortunately it is more a religious alliance, wishing to give direction to "the will of the people" than the insurgents in Syria who managed to overthrow the regime. Such structures using military practices will never be desirable. We want to carry an anti-authoritarian and without borders solidarity with the revolted in Syria, because our hopes in the Syrian revolution go beyond the perpetuation of a society held by arms, subjected to a celestial power as earthly, which requires prisons to exist.
While we welcome the liberation of syrians from the shackles of Assad's clan, we can only hope that what was in seed during the 2011 insurrections can go even further, towards a self-organisation of all spheres of daily life, attack and the total questioning of power and property.
Here as there, so much remains to be destroyed. Prisons, Religions, States.
Happiness to the reunion of the freed, force to the ones locked up all over the world!
Anarchists, confident as wary,
France, December 9th 2024