This week, we’re featuring two segments.
First up, Phil Wilayto of the Virginia Defenders talks about conditions at Red Onion State Prison in western Virginia where a number of prisoners have been self-immolating in order to escape longterm isolation and racist guard violence. You can find Phil’s article on the SF Bay View which includes a clip of Noelle Hanrahan on Al-Jazeera talking about this subject, and past interviews with and about Kevin “Rashid” Johnson at this link here. [00:01:02 – 00:41:15]
Then, you’ll hear Jo, an anarchist from Germany, speaking about the recent building of conspiracy cases against antifascists known as Antifa-Ost, or Antifa East. You can find our prior interview about NSU Watch and Day X here. [ 00:44:45 – 01:11:42 ]
More info on Antifa-Ost and the Budapest Structure:
- https://www.129a.info/en/index.html
- https://political-prisoners.net/tag/antifa-ost-verfahren/
- https://www.soli-antifa-ost.org/
- https://www.basc.news/
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Featured Track:
- The Adjuster by Adjuster
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Phil Wilayto Transcription
Phil Wilayto: I’m Phil Wilayto. (he / him), A co-founder of the Virginia Defenders for Freedom, Justice, and Equality, based here in Richmond, Virginia. We’re an all-volunteer community multi-issue organization. I’m the editor of our quarterly newspaper, The Virginia Defender, co-founder of the Virginia Prison Justice Network, and coordinator of the Odessa Solidarity Campaign.
TFSR: : : Awesome. Thank you so much for being here. Can you tell listeners and myself a little bit about the Virginia Defenders for Freedom, Justice, and Equality, how it started, and what you all do? It sounds like you’re out of Richmond, but does it have chapters in different places or is it centralized?
Phil Wilayto: We have a few members in other parts of the state, but the bulk is in Richmond. The newspaper is distributed in 16 cities and counties with a press run of 15 000, so it has some presence. We started back in 2002, there were four of us, and the way it began, ironically, was around a situation at Red Onion State Prison. I was a staff reporter with The Richmond Free Press at the time, and we got a call from a man named Ben Plummer. He told us that his brother Thomas was being held in solitary in Red Onion, had been there for six months, and there was no end date to his confinement. He had brought charges against three guards and one officer when he was confined at Wallens Ridge State Prison, which at the time was also classified as a supermax like Red Onion. He actually got the case into court, but our understanding is that the Department of Corrections manipulated the jury, and Thomas lost the case. Then he was transferred right on and put into solitary. Administrative solitary, which is open-ended. So at that time, one phone call to the then Director of the Department of Corrections, Harold Clark, who is no progressive, resulted in Thomas being released, and he’s out of the system now. Ben and his wife, TJ Plummer, suggested that we stay together as a group, the three of us, and also Anna Edwards, who was my girlfriend at the time, and now my wife with 18 years, and form an organization to continue to work on prison issues and other related issues. Ben came up with the name Defenders for Freedom, Justice, and Equality, and that was our beginning. We initially worked around pretty much exclusively issues of jails and prisons, and then we got into some community issues like lead poisoning, housing discrimination, police murders, and investigating cases, some of them actually went to trial, and in one or two cases, there were some officers convicted. We always have been involved in the anti-war movement locally, nationally, and internationally.
What we’re probably best known for is our 20-year participation in an ongoing struggle to reclaim and properly memorialize the section of downtown Richmond that was once the sEkongd-largest slave market in the country. As importantly, if not more so, it was the fountainhead for the US domestic slave trade, the epicenter, the market from which other markets further South got their human… – I keep trying to think of a good word that is not insulting, but is also accurate. But they were, buying and selling human beings like commodities and so many that half of all Black people in the United States could likely trace some ancestry to Shockoe Bottom, including my wife, Anna. That’s been a long, long struggle that has resulted in the city agreeing to a quarter of a billion-dollar project to build a 10-acre Memorial Park, an interpretive center, and possibly a slavery museum. And Anna went back to school to get a degree in history, a master’s degree and is now one of the five public historians consulting on how this story will be told. So that’s been a long part of what we do. Of course, all the contracts for building the park are going to White-owned companies, and that’s the way the struggle is today. But prison work, anti-war, the Shockoe Bottom – what we call sacred – ground work in the newspaper, those are the primary things we work on, and then we support many local struggles through the newspaper and our other activities.
TFSR: : I was just checking out the masthead for the paper on virginiadefender.org: ‘In the spirit of Gabriel and Nan Nat Turner, John Brown, Mary Bowser, Elizabeth van Lew, John Mitchell Jr., Barbara Johns, Oliver Hill and all who struggle for justice.’ That’s really powerful. I don’t know if you want to say a few words about some of the names that show up in there, some of the ways that they’re remembered, or your part alongside the memory of that sacred ground, I guess, the legacy of the struggle against these institutions?
Phil Wilayto: Gabriel was an enslaved Blacksmith, born in 1776 or thereabouts. He grew up in a revolutionary period, and was affected by the rhetoric of the time, but also by the Haitian Revolution. He was literate so he could read newspapers, and he wasn’t confined to the plantation where he was born. He was allowed to go into Richmond, contract for jobs, stay overnight and just bring his wages back to the plantation. He devised a plan for a massive rebellion against slavery, and it grew from January of 1800 to August and involved hundreds of people, enslaved and free. Also some white workers, indigenous people, a couple of Frenchmen who had fought at the Battle of Yorktown and others, more marginalized people in the society. They had planned to march on Richmond, take the governor captive, and negotiate an end to slavery. If it wasn’t for a terrible rainstorm that wiped out roads and bridges, they might have succeeded. He was executed on October 10th, 1800, and every year for 22 years, we’ve gathered at what we believe to be the site of his execution and hold a Gabriel Gathering to remember him and honor his memory and the other conspirators, including his wife Nan. His name is now popular and famous enough that the African-American Studies Department at Virginia Commonwealth University named the building where it’s headquartered, the Gabriel House. Much more needs to be done to keep his memory alive, but that’s one of the things.
The other people were active in various struggles. Elizabeth van Lew and Mary Bowser were Union spies in the city of Richmond. Very courageous, Elizabeth was a white woman, Mary Bowser was Black, and they had incredible adventures and were recognized as two of the most important sources of information for the Union Army right under the noses of the Confederacy. John Mitchell Jr. was the fighting editor of the Richmond Planet newspaper who was a fierce opponent of lynching and co-led a year-long boycott of the city streetcar system when the 1902 Virginia Constitution legalized segregation in public transit. Barbara Johns was 16 years old, [when she] led a walkout of a high school in Farmsville, Virginia. The case taken up by Oliver Hill also mentioned their civil rights attorney, and that case was rolled over into Brown versus Education. So these are all heroes of the Black liberation struggle, the Civil Rights Movement, and Whites who supported those struggles. And we like to think of our newspaper as in the spirit of that resistance.
TFSR: Thank you very much. That was very concise. I can hear you. You’ve had to explain that a number of times before. That was very practiced and good.
Phil Wilayto: [laughs] We still get asked quite occasionally.
TFSR: I guess, on a more serious note, reports have been circulating about self-immolation among prisoners at Red Onion State Prison in Western Virginia. Can you talk about what’s known at this time about who’s done this and what the conditions are?
Phil Wilayto: Red Onion is the state’s only supermax prison. It was built in ’98 or ’99 along with Wallens Ridge, and it was meant to be a prison ‘for the worst of the worst.’ It came out of a whole series of articles mainly by a guy named John Diallo who eventually wound up in George Bush’s administration for faith-based initiatives. He postulated that there was a coming generation of what he called ‘super predators’, who would be beyond redemption and wreak havoc in the country, and there’d be a lot of them, and the state had to prepare a place to put them. It resulted in accelerated prison construction, including these supermax prisons, where most people are held in cells for 23 hours a day. Although the public perception is these people committed horrible crimes, and some did, some people are also transferred there from the lower level of security [prisons] for infractions of the local rules, and in some cases, just for getting on the wrong side of an administrator or a guard, you can get sent there for petty things. I was down at the Richmond City Jail some years ago, waiting to speak with an inmate. And I got to talking with one of the guards, an African-American man. We got to talking about Red Onion, and he told me that he had a cousin who was sent there as a prisoner. When he got off the bus, a white Guard walked up to him and punched him full in the face and said: ‘Welcome to Red Onion.’
Red Onion has been the subject of damning reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, many, many court suits. One of the grossest ones that I’m aware of is by a man named Nicholas Reyes. He was a Salvadoran immigrant, he was at Red Onion, and they put him in solitary confinement, so [he was] completely isolated. They have what they call a step-down program, a series of things, of hoops you’re supposed to jump through to be released from solitary. But part of it is a written test. You have to fill out some forms, and Mr. Reyes only spoke Spanish, and he was not literate in Spanish or any other language, so he couldn’t take the test. They kept Nicholas Reyes in prison in solitary for 13 years, and by the time he got out, he couldn’t speak, he couldn’t recognize his mother. He had basically lost his mind. They gave him a settlement of $115,000 which I figured worked out to about $1 a day for all the time he had spent in solitary. Another man would spend 600 days in solitary. There was a settlement in his case. And of course, it’s not just Red Onion. One really revealing statistic by Business Insider, which did a report last year, was on the use of dogs in prison and they calculated that in the five years that ended (I think it was two years ago) there had been at least 295 cases of dogs biting incarcerated people. 24 of those cases were in four other states, and 271 were in Virginia. So that alone, I think, tells you that something is terribly wrong with the state system.
And when you get up to Red Onion, which is a six, seven-hour drive west of Richmond, just a few miles from the Kentucky border, an extremely rural area, regardless of what the law says, regardless of what the Department of Corrections guidelines say, regardless of what the Department of Corrections tells the public, the administration of the guards are free to do virtually anything they want. In the Ekong Eshiet case, he’s one of the men who burned himself, we’ve been in touch. He told me he poured grease on his leg and set it off with some kind of electrical device he had hooked up. And he waited a minute and seven sEkongds, he said, to make sure that it burned really well. And the reason is, there are no burn units in the western part of the state, and for that kind of a terrible burn, you have to be brought to Richmond to the VCU Health Burn Unit. A prisoner had actually done this a year ago and wound up getting transferred out of Red Onion for follow-up medical care, and that was the motivation. Well, Ekong Eshiet who was born in Nigeria, has given interviews with prison radio and with ourselves and other news outlets. And he said that he just couldn’t take the racism anymore. Guards would come up and his last name is Eshiet. They would call him ‘eat shit’ They would continually use the N-word. They searched his cell one time and deliberately threw his Quran on the floor, spit in his food, and then handed it to him. He just couldn’t take it anymore, and so he burned himself. Demetrius Wallace told me he poured boiling water on his leg. I don’t know the particular circumstances of the other people.
Kevin Rashid Johnson is a long-time prisoner activist and author, a self-described revolutionary, and a wonderful artist, and he went on a 71-day hunger strike last year, starting on December of 2023. Because he felt he had serious medical condition that he said were not being properly addressed, and he suspected that the authorities were trying to eliminate him by what’s known as ‘death by medical neglect.’ So he went on a hunger strike and stayed on it for 71 days. And it went on so long that his body could no longer retain fluids. He had to be brought to VCU Health, and eventually, he was transferred to Greensville Correctional Center. He’s since been moved back to Red Onion, and he was in the medical unit when Ekong Eshiet was brought in for follow-up treatment after going to VCU. I believe it was after when he went to VCU, and not before, and Ekong Eshiet told Rashid that about 12 men had set themselves on fire as a way to try to get out of Red Onion. Rashid wrote up the story with a background on Red Onion and sent it out far and wide. It got picked up by Prison Radio. We contacted the local affiliate of NPR, the local daily newspaper, but they wouldn’t touch it because they said it was hearsay and it was improved. So we went on a 10-day in-depth investigation ourselves, and I believe we proved that Demetrius Wallace and Ekong Eshiet had both burned themselves so badly that they were brought to VCU Health and then brought back to Red Onion. After that story came out, radio IQ, affiliated with NPR, did a story and got the Department of Corrections to admit that five people had burned themselves. I called up to Red Onion when we first got the news from Rashid and the warden told me that no one had burned themselves. So Radio IQ did a story and then the local paper was still not interested, or at least they said they were busy with other stories.
Then the online publication of the Latin Times picked up our story, and that caught the attention of the Black Caucus of the Virginia State Legislature, the General Assembly, and they issued a call to the Governor, the State Attorney General, and the Director of the Department of Corrections to investigate this situation. As a result of that, the Department of Corrections issued a statement saying that six people had burned themselves, and the governor issued a statement saying that no one had set themselves on fire, that some people had injured themselves. Well, I don’t know the particular circumstances of everyone. Apparently, Ekong described it as people setting themselves on fire. If he poured grease on his leg and set it off with some kind of electrical device, I would assume there would be some flames. But the Governor also said that there was no self-immolation. So we looked that up in the dictionary, Merriam-Webster, and self-immolation is “harming oneself to draw attention to a cause, often by fire.” So often by fire, but not exclusively by fire. These were self-immolations. Anyway, tomato, tomato, at least six people, according to the DOC, burned themselves so badly that some of them had to be transported six, to seven hours to Richmond for treatment.
The question is, “why? Why did these people take this drastic action?” The attention has been phenomenal. It’s been a firestorm of media coverage, finally, the Richmond Times Dispatch newspaper did a story. It’s been a follow-up by radio IQ, Al Jazeera, The Guardian newspaper, The Intercept, NBC News, and The New York Times did a story on December 1st. We just saw something from The Hindustan Times in India. It’s become an incredible story and an incredible public relations problem for the Department of Corrections and Governor Glenn Youngkin. Some advocates have been calling on the Governor, the State Attorney General, and the Department of Corrections to investigate the situation, and we took a different turn. We’re calling on members of the General Assembly, the State Legislature, to do an investigation, because we don’t believe the Governor, the State Attorney General, or the Department of Corrections itself would do an honest investigation. We’re hoping that honest members of the General Assembly will go out. There have been people who have gone out there and come back and said, everything’s fine. So you can have a setup like that. Or they could go out there and the administration could intimidate the prisoners and tell them they better be careful what they say. But Ekong Eshiet and Demetrius Wallace told me that they’re anxious to speak with the media or anyone else about the situation. Kevin Rashid Johnson has been held in solitary incommunicado, and cannot even communicate with his attorney, Miriam Nemeth of DC, and we’re very worried about his situation. If people do go from the General Assembly, we’re urging them to speak to Ekong, Demetrius, and Rashid, particularly, to make sure that they are safe and they’re not being retaliated against. Demetrius told me he got a charge for self-harm, which, among other things, helped prove that it actually happened because that’s a written charge.
So where we’re at now is, there’s certainly a strong public searchlight on Red Onion, but whether or not anything is going to happen is a question. We’re having a public meeting. The Virginia Defenders are having a public meeting in Richmond on Saturday, at two o’clock. We’re going to be showing the documentary by Appalshop ‘Up the Ridge’, which is an examination of conditions at the Wallens Ridge State Prison. We’re going to have a public meeting with speakers and reading from statements from Red Onion folks who have burnt themselves and other people who can talk about the conditions there. We will have some solidarity statements, and we’ll be urging people from that meeting to contact their representatives in the General Assembly. We have some other ideas on how to keep the pressure up. The next issue of our paper comes out in January. We’ll have a follow-up story there, and we will be putting out stories in between our updates and announcement e-newsletter. We’re in conversations with the other advocacy groups about how to better coordinate our work and make sure that the situation is not just covered up and blows over.
TFSR: Thank you for that. Just to say that ‘Up the Ridge’ is an amazing film. I don’t cry during movies very much. It definitely tore me up a little bit to watch it. But I’m really glad that [I watched it], Appalshop does amazing work, and it’s a really powerful film.
So you mentioned that Rashid had been engaging in a hunger strike that lasted 71 days, that started in December of last year. And one reason that that case, which we covered on the show, got so much notice, was in part because up to 17 people were participating at one point alongside Rashid in the hunger strike. Not because necessarily they were experiencing the same medical neglect that Rashid was, but because they were literally being tortured if nothing else by the racism among the staff there. Because they were experiencing these long-term stints in isolation with no recourse.
‘Up the Ridge’ film was produced several years ago, in 2012 or something like that. Do you remember when it was made? It’s okay if you don’t.
Phil Wilayto: I don’t know the exact date, but I can tell you that the conditions described there are very similar to the letters that we regularly receive from people at Read Onion. Which we will be reading on Saturday.
TFSR: I guess what I’m getting at is that there’s a long-term systemic issue with these isolated, supermax prisons that have programs of long-term isolation, 23 hours a day, and then getting in the hole beyond that. We’re isolating people who are majority from cities. It’s mostly Black and brown prisoners, as Noel Hanrahan said in the Al Jazeera interview. That’s at the top of that SF Bay View article that you wrote, which I’ll link in the show notes. It’s a really good interview. And it’s a mostly white staff, rural white staff, of people that have a lack of oversight, they’re pretty insulated by distance.
One of the things that Rashid supporters were stating, and that advocates of all the people that were on hunger strike around the use of extended isolation at this facility, were pointing out, was that the Assembly had passed a bill earlier in 2023 that said that… I’m sorry it was earlier than this, I think in 2024, stating that you couldn’t put people in long term isolation without recourse. There had to be a written record of why someone was being put in isolation and a reason given, but this small procedure wasn’t being followed even at these prisons, or at Red Onion. Was there a misunderstanding about that? Is that a concern? I could see people in the legislature being concerned that they got together, they made a law, and the executive is stymieing and challenging the application of that law in practice. Is that a point of leverage, or does it seem like a moot point?
Phil Wilayto: Well, there are two things: what the law actually said and then how it’s applied. The law has a loophole in it, which is that a prison administrator warden can impose solitary confinement if he or she feels it’s necessary for the safety and good order of the prison. So in other words, they can do whatever they want. At different times The Department of Corrections has claimed that they no longer have solitary confinement because they changed the name to Restorative Housing. In California it’s called SHU: Special Housing Unit. Tomato, tomato. Put someone in a box and leave them there for 30, 60, 90 days, that’s solitary confinement. So I think one of the things that happened last year was prisoners at Red Onion thought that solitary confinement had been eliminated, and when people were still being sent to solitary, they were really angry. And so some people were motivated to go on a hunger strike. Others had their own individual situations, several in cases dealing with what they felt was a lack of medical care for serious medical problems, which is a very, very, very common complaint that we hear. Some will get a biopsy and they won’t get the results back for six months. When they get the results back, turns out, they have cancer and it’s been advancing, and that gets proven by outside doctors. So that was a hunger strike that maybe as many as 30 men participated in.
I do want to address the issue of the isolation of Red Onion and Wallens Ridge. 35 years ago, there was a historic coal miner strike in southwest Virginia against the Pittston Coal Company. The company was trying to eliminate health benefits for retirees, and the miners felt that that was something that was won by their parents and grandparents that they owed to their children and grandchildren to preserve. They carried out a very, very militant strike that eventually wound up seizing control over a coal processing plant in a very rural, forested area, and held it for four days. 99 miners and a Methodist supporter Minister took over the tipple and ran out the scabs and the administration and held it for four days. Tthe union, not a wildcat, officially surrounded the coal temple, as it’s called, with 5000 coal miners and supporters, while the Governor Baliles was threatening to call in the state police, which he did. But they were ready. I worked on strike support for that strike. Dave Cormier [was] with the Hospital Workers Union. I was with the UAW at the time. We wrote the first support leaflet for the strike and set up meetings in cities, up and down the East Coas and the Midwest, so miners could come and tell this story and get support for the strike fund. We were there for the coal typical takeover, and I wrote a book about it, which we’re releasing later this year on the 35th anniversary of the strike. Cecil Roberts, who led the strike and is now the president of the mine workers, has written an introduction to the book. It’s called We Won’t Go Back: Lessons of the Pittston Coal Strike for the Labor Movement. The reason I bring that up is because I got to know a lot of miners and their family members, I stayed with them in their homes, broke bread with them, stayed out in camp solidarity in the woods with them. And I don’t buy this prejudice against rural people that everyone’s a racist. That’s not true, and I really kind of bristle when people assume that just because people are country folk, they have to be racist. On the other hand, there are guards at Red Onion who openly flaunt white supremacist tattoos, who regularly use the N-word against prisoners, the vast majority of the guards are white and the vast majority of the prisoners are Black. And not only is there a racial difference, but you have urban Black men being kept in confinement by rural white men. So there’s a cultural difference, and often an ignorance of Black culture, which can lead to misinterpretations. Then you throw in a heavy dose of racism, and the fact that there’s really no consequences. Even if a warden wanted to get rid of a racist brutal guard, he or she would have to think about how they going to replace this person, because they’re very short-handed. They don’t pay the guards very much. It’s not a job that someone would move to the area to get so they’re always short-handed. People are pulling double shifts, which contributes to tension. So even in the best of circumstances, you’ve got a systemic problem, and then you’ve got the addition of racism and racist brutality and really no recourse. Then you get to a situation where people are ready to severely burn themselves to get out of that situation. And that ought to be enough to force some kind of a complete outside, independent investigation and systemic changes at the prison. And ultimately, a recognition that this supermax was founded on a lie, that it’s always been brutal, it’s always been horrific in its treatment of prisoners, and it needs to be shut down. ,
TFSR: I think that’s really well said, and I totally agree that the presumption that rural folks or white folks are necessarily racist is a lazy step. But I agree also with what you’re talking about – the power dynamics there [in prisons] and the cultural differences between folks that are living rurally and folks that are living in an urban setting. On top of that, there’s the pre-existing prominence of white supremacist speaking points, and that actually shapes the culture of how many of us view the Other, how we view people other than us in society. And when it comes to systemic access to resources and privileges of white folks over other folks, they are oftentimes acted out through white supremacist violence.
Rashid, who we’ve been speaking about, wrote an article this last year, I believe that’s up on rashidmad.com, his website, where he talks about the development of gangs within the Virginia Department of Corrections in prisons. In particular, he was writing at the time during his last period before the medical transfer, talking about the creation of gangs in these western Virginia prisons of Wallens Ridge and Red Onion. Put in the context of the discourse of super predators that Biden was definitely a part of advocating in the early ‘90s, there was a story told about why we needed these kinds of facilities, how our society was degrading, who was at fault for that, and what the resolution was. And so supermax’s isolation, mass incarceration of mostly Black and brown and in general poor bodies became the solution that was proposed to us. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about these sorts of facilities, this approach towards the penal system, and how it stands in terms of white supremacy in the US?
Phil Wilayto: I think it’s important to remember that all societies have prisons at the present stage in history, but the United States’ prison system grew out of the need to control Black labor. That was really not the only motivation, but a major motivation. The old name ‘penitentiary’ comes from a Quaker view that, rather than corporal punishment, people should be confined so they can think about their crimes and make penance. But from a point of view of labor, the only reason the United States developed into a country was because of agriculture, which was its main Ekongomic activity, and to be profitable, it was dependent on slave labor. So after emancipation, not only the Southern slave owners, but the entire economy, needed to find a way to continue to exploit labor, and the easiest target, because of the history, was Black labor. And so in prison, people were picked up for petty offenses, in some cases, no offenses. For example, vagrancy laws. You don’t have a job, you can’t prove you have a means of employment – we put you in jail. And then the jails would rent out the inmates to private corporations or plantations, and this would be a way of bringing money in for the prison or the state. The famous story of John Henry, the miner who challenged a machine to see who could be more productive and efficient and died with a hammer in his hand. He was a prisoner from the Spring State Penitentiary here in Richmond, who was rented out to a mining company. That was a common thing.
At the height of the Great Depression, there were about 65,000 Black people in prisons, total at the height. And today, where there are twice as many Black people in the country as there were then, if the numbers had continued linearly we’d have 130,000 Black people in prison. Instead, we have about 1.2 million. And I think the reason is that during the Depression, it was understood that the Depression at some point would end, and there would be a need for low-wage laborers who would be Black workers. But today, the Ekongomy has changed so much that it couldn’t absorb the 2.2 million people that are in prisons today in the United States, 4% of the world’s population, and over 20% of the world’s prisoners. So I think it’s a means of controlling labor. And of course, once people are in prison, they work. In Virginia, they’re paid between 27 cents and 45 cents an hour for doing jobs in the prison. And then you have the prison industries, where people produce things for sale to other state institutions. Every piece of furniture at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond is made by prisoners, and the university is forced by law to buy that furniture from prisons. Then there are the private corporations that will operate within the prison walls. So it’s continually a means of controlling Black labor.
I remember talking to my mother one time. My dad grew up during Depression, he grew up in foster homes. It was very difficult to find a job when he got out of the system and he went to work for a year in the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s work programs. Then he went out to the woods and planted trees, he was making five bucks a week, and he was feeling pretty good during that time. And I said: “See, mom, that’s when the unions were strong and they were demanding these kinds of programs.” And she said, “No, that wasn’t it.” Her father was a good union man, an organizer. She said “it was because the government didn’t want all these young men standing around with nothing to do on the outside. They were worried about that.” See, I thought that was a really good insight. She was a smart lady. Never went further than high school. I think the prison system today is a way to control a quantity of surplus workers that they don’t need anymore, but they can make money off if they’re put into prisons. It costs more to keep someone in prison in Virginia than to send them to a state university, but there’s a strong lobby of the organizations, institutions, and companies that make money from prisons. So the problems are systemic. It’s not just that there are some bad guards. It’s not just that there are some bad administrators. The entire system is not set up either to “keep society safe” or “to rehabilitate prisoners.” It’s meant to control a section of the population that they really have no use for on the outside, and because of that, it’s fundamentally flawed. Could there be a humane system?
I know people talk about abolition. I think we would all want to see a society without cops, courts, prisons, and the military, but the prisons will be one of the last things to go. It’s not going to be a demand we can win before there is a fundamental change in who runs this country. But in the meantime, they don’t have to be inhumane places. They don’t have to be cruel places. They don’t have to be places where brutal racists can play out their fantasies against a vulnerable population. Prisoners say: “They send us to prison as punishment, not for punishment,” and that’s a good point. Being deprived of your freedom, your family and your friends, that’s punishment. But to torture people psychologically and physically, should be unacceptable in a civilized society, and yet it’s been going on since the beginning of the first prison system. So yeah, that’s some rambling comments. I hope that’s helpful.
TFSR: I think it was very helpful and very insightful.
Thank you very much for this conversation and for amplifying the voices of people who are going through this and getting more eyes on this situation. Hopefully there will be some sort of reportage, or recordings or something from that gathering. But could you tell people again where they can keep up with news about this through the Virginia Defender, and suggest a couple of ways that they can help amplify those stories and put pressure on ending the circumstances here?
Phil Wilayto: Yeah, they can go to virginiadefender.org. That’s where we keep past copies of our newspaper. They can see the current issue on the deals with Red Onion. Under Prisoner Essays, and I think also on the main page, there are several of Rashid’s essays dealing with Red Onion and other prison matters and beyond. He’s not just a writer, he’s an analyst. He’s a strategic thinker, and I’ve learned a lot from him about the way that he has viewed the prison system. Things like introducing gangs into the prison system, as he explains, allow the administration to pit prisoners against each other and so control them. That’s hard to understand, the enormity of the problems in the prison system, unless you really dig into it. You can tell the anecdotal stories about how guards will pit one prisoner to attack another, and then the guards will stand around in the circle and watch and place bets and so on. Stories that just come, we can’t prove it. There’s no video, but you hear the same stories from many different prisoners at many different times, from different institutions. They’re not able to communicate with each other, and that’s a pretty good indication that these stories have some validity.
So, people can go on virginiadefender.org and also the Facebook page for the Virginia Defender, and we have a link there to the public meeting “Crisis at Red Onion supermax. How you can help.” The meeting will be on Saturday, starting at two o’clock at Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church, 1720 Mechanicsville Turnpike in Richmond, East End. A link to the video of the meeting will be posted hopefully the following day on the Facebook page for the Virginia Defender.
So I think that’s all I got. Thanks so much for the opportunity to get this information out. We are not pretending to speak for the prisoners. We’re trying to amplify their voice. But definitely, they did ask us to try to get the widest possible attention on this situation and the conditions, and if something dramatic doesn’t change, I’m afraid the lesson to the Department of Corrections will be that they really are free to do anything they want. And it’ll be 10 times harder to raise any other issue after this. It’s 6 to 12 men taking a drastic step of burning themselves to escape a situation that is just absolutely intolerable. If that doesn’t produce some changes, with all the contended publicity and media coverage, I think we’re going to be in rough shape, particularly going into what could be a near-totalitarian administration coming up in January. So folks, please pay attention to the issue. There are some suggestions on the Virginia Defender Facebook page about what people can do to help, and hopefully, we’ll have some good news on this story before too long.
TFSR: Yeah, I hope so. And thanks again, Phil, I appreciate it. Thank you.
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Antifa-Ost Transcription
Joe: My name is Joe, I have worked in structures against repressions, prisons and in solidarity with persecuted people in Germany for many years already. I am in different groups of solidarity concerning the Antifa Ost case, but also in other structures that support persecuted people. My background is more anarchist, but I’m coming from the East of Germany. Since then, I used to be also in Antifa, because that was the only choice coming from small towns over there. And I still do understand the necessity of fighting Nazis, but my main issue is more the anti-oppression movement.
TFSR: Thanks for having the chat and having it in English with me. I really appreciate it.
So I was wondering if you could speak a bit about the recent and ongoing repression of antifascists in Germany and some of the international ramifications of this. Would you mind giving us an introduction to this, some of the state of fascist presence and antifascist action in Eastern Germany, and maybe describe what Antifa Ost means?
Joe: About the repression against Antifa people in Germany, the repression was always there, but it increased a lot since some people were arrested in 2019 after an attack on a well-known Nazi from Eisennach, a city in Thuringia in East Germany. Following this arrest, a lot of investigations and also operative measurements started. Many raids and also other arrests happened. One of our comrades, Lina, has been in preventive prison for some years, since November 2020. There were many accused in the same case because they [the prosecution] built up [accusation about] some kind of criminal organization based on attacks against Nazis all over East Germany and tried to combine all those actions into one structure [/ case]. Since then, they made a big network out of investigations against a lot of people connected to Antifa. The first case of Antifa Ost, which means Antifa East, in connection to East Germany, started in 2021, one year after Lina was arrested. They accused four people in the first trial. But there were many other accused all around that are still waiting for their trials.
TFSR: That’s a good starting point. So does Eastern Germany have a higher percentage of street-based fascist organizations than the rest of Germany? Or is it just where the fighting is really visible between fascists and antifascists?
Joe: It’s difficult to say if there is now a bigger amount of Nazis in East Germany, but the history of street violence is a bit more visible in East Germany because you had these pogroms all over the ‘90s (also in west but more in the eastern parts of the country in the late 90s and early 2000s). Antifa developed out of this, but both sides went somehow more reformist through the last 15-20 years, and now you can see the Nazis are more strong in the parliaments, especially in the east of Germany. They are the percentage winners of the elections in some parts, but out of a coalition of other parties they are not in power yet. But they are gaining more and more power since then. They can also support their paramilitary structures in the streets, while it’s like a close connection in between nazis in parliament and the street riots that are increasing more and more again.
TFSR: Thank you for saying that. When I spoke with someone from NSU Watch [National Socialist Underground] a few years ago about some of the histories of Nazi terrorism and pogroms, I think a lot of what they spoke of was happening in eastern Germany back in the 90s. I wonder if you could speak a bit more about the case of Lina E. and the charges that are being faced. Who’s bringing the charges and how was that case resolved?
Joe: Lina was arrested in November 2020, almost a year after the attack on this Nazi in Eisennach, where she was arrested together with some other people, and she was in preventive prison until the case was done last year in May. She was imprisoned also with Beate Zschäpe, the last surviving NSU prisoner, because the other ones killed themselves. So, she was in the same prison as one of the National Socialist Underground leaders. The trial lasted almost 100 days, from 2021 until last year in May. And the first four accused in this [trial] were mainly accused of [being part of] criminal organization, criminal assault and coercion. But not all of them were accused of the same things. Some of them were only accused of being supporters of the criminal organization, or being part of or supporting specific attacks against Nazis. So it was a bit confusing to see how they put all of them together, and even though one person was just accused of one or two attacks, they had to stay there the whole 100 days to be persecuted in the end. They were sentenced to two years and five months, up to five years and three months (the highest charge was for Lina).
What is interesting in the case is that it’s led by the Highest Federal Prosecutor, which is a political institution that usually takes over terrorist cases, but can also choose to take over other cases he considers to be close to terrorism. This High Federal Prosecutor is not a position that is considered a law/legal position, but a political one that can be changed [appointed] by the people holding the political power. Because of , you see how interesting this antifascist movement, or the antifascist actions, were to the people holding the political power in the State. The investigations in the case are made by a special unit against left-wing crimes in Saxony, East Germany, which is a kind of group of cops that is only taking care of attacks out of the so-called left-wing movement [a red squad]. This does not mean only antifascist actions, but also anti-authoritarian attacks against gentrification and cops, whatever. It was also them who imprisoned Lina in November. Lina is out now, and the four of them are waiting for the appeal to go to prison after that. So the final judgment is not done until the appeal is done. But as the whole court case was not in the highest court or the highest possible court, they had just one opportunity to make an appeal which usually has a rate of four percent to be accepted.
TFSR: During the case, I thought I remembered there also being several unnamed accused, basically unknown defendants, that hadn’t yet been named for crimes. Am I misremembering that? Or is the conspiracy wider than the people that they arrested?
Joe: It’s much wider than that. They arrested other people than they accused in the first court case. For example, the ones that were accused, the two of them were arrested in the first attack that they built on the whole investigation against this so-called criminal organization, and there are still some unknown people. I think the last person that got accused of [being part of] this criminal organization and [participating in] the attacks was accused in August this year. So it’s an ongoing repression against people. It happened in many, many, many ways, but the only person who was in preventive prison until now was Lina, and since November also Nanuk and Johan have been imprisoned.
TFSR: I want to ask a little bit more about Nanuk in a moment, but I guess it is interesting that this politically appointed prosecutor is taking so much interest in left-wing and antifascist organizing. Can you speak a bit about the application of section 129 AB, what it was devised for, and how it’s being applied today?
Joe: Section 129 has existed since 1871 and it was usually used against socialist organizations. But then with the armed struggle in Germany in the late ‘60s, they added the 129 A in 1976 and made up a [section against] terrorist organizations. The B was added just in 2002 after the [attack on the] World Trade Center [attack and it is used against] terrorist organizations in foreign countries. Additionally, since 2017 a new European law also allows to investigate such organizations without [knowledge of] their concrete founding time or more group members, or [having] some idea about the financing and the place of the organization. It’s supposed to support the prosecution of organized crime, but in Germany especially it’s mainly used against political structures. So it allows them to investigate Antifa or any political actions, claiming that people have a common understanding under this section, this paragraph, allows them to investigate and to follow any political action. Many investigations against such political structures were started in the past years by the Federal Prosecutor, but also in the Federal States. This [law] gives them more rights for oppressive surveillance and operative measures, also against the surroundings of the suspects, like their families of friends. Besides anti-authoritarian and antifascist people, many Kurdish activists and Turkish communists are persecuted and imprisoned in Germany under the 129 B.
TFSR:
Is it applied against [Turkish fascist ] Grey Wolves as well?
Joe: As far as I know, it’s not used against the Grey Wolves yet, but it’s used, for example, against the Nazis that allegedly were beaten up by this criminal organization of Lina and the others. So they use it against both sides, also out of the extremism theory. So they allow themselves to be the so-called middle in between the extremes and also [justify] their power by saying that those two sides have no right, and use it against both.
TFSR: So like a counter-insurgency tool that would be used against any destabilizing actor, I guess.
Joe: I think they call it the monopoly of power. So the idea of the State is to keep the monopoly of power by using those laws against both sides, to confirm themselves as the middle.
TFSR: Yeah. So recently you mentioned Nanuk. Nanuk was arrested in Berlin. I wonder if you could talk about this situation and how it does relate to the Antifa East or Budapest [cases].
Joe: Nanuk was arrested because he was accused of being part of the criminal organization around Antifa Ost, but also in other cases. He’s not accused of being part of the Budapest structure, but you have to see that they connect the Budapest structure with the Antifa East case very deeply. Johan was arrested just a few days afterward, and he is accused of both.
TFSR: And could you describe the Budapest structure? My understanding is that there was the arrest and extradition of people who allegedly participated in an antifascist demonstration in Budapest a few years ago. Is this right?
Joe: Yes, I could describe a small chronology of what happened.
TFSR: Could you? Yeah, that would be very helpful.
Joe: The case in Dresden against the Antifa East people was still going on when in February 2023 when some people were arrested around the March of Honor in Budapest, Hungary, and two of them were Germans. One was already accused in the Antifa East case and also arrested together with Lina in Eisennach in 2019. Since then, the cops made this connection and they made international warrants against the people all over Europe. One person already confessed in his trial in Budapest, also saying that he was part of this so-called criminal organization of Antifa East after they were sentenced. Then there was Ilaria from Italy, who is now in the European Parliament and got political amnesty [because of her election] and since then she’s free. In November last year, they arrested Gabriel in Milano, Italy, he was released in March. Then Maya was arrested in December last year also in Berlin and was extradited to Hungary in June this year. Anna was arrested in May this year in Nuremberg, Germany. And then Johan was arrested, as I said, in November. And Gino was arrested as well, first in Finland, then he somehow got out and was arrested in Paris, also a few weeks ago. So we are not sure about the status about all the extradition trials that are still going on. We do not know if Hannah and Johan are going to be extradited, and Gino has his next trial in December this year. So it could be that all those people also will be transferred to Hungarian prisons, and there are still a dozen people on the run, but we know that the European repressive authorities work together very well and have a good exchange of information.
TFSR: Boy, that’s really dire. Thank you for describing that.
We’ve already moved a little bit past Lina’s case, but I think you had said that you were interested in talking about how one of the defendants in the case turned on the co-defendants. Can you talk about what happened there? As I understand it was about repeated abusive behaviors that that person had participated in or taken?
Joe: Yes, there was one guy who was also accused in the case, but he was not part of the first four people who were on trial. He was called out as a rapist in October, just a month after the trial in Dresden started, and since then a big debate about patriarchal violence, also inside the militant antifascist movement, started. This guy left for Warsaw to live over there and refused to make a[n accountability] process about his patriarchal behavior. He was interviewed by the secret services of Germany in March of the year after and decided to cooperate with the repressive authorities, and he is still doing that. So he was snitching against many people from all over Germany and also made a confession or testimony in the Dresden case. He was speaking there for many days against the people who were accused but also got other persons [accused]. He was one of the main reasons for these high sentences because the judges believed him and did not think that he had any interest in revenge against those people.
But the interesting part about this is that besides the snitching, a lot of people started to think about how people get connected to these kinds of structures that are acting very violent in a political way, but they do not have a deep level of debates or discussions or reflection about sexism, patriarchy and other areas of political involvement, and also no deep criticism of the System and the State. Since it’s much easier then to just take part in specific stuff and go to snitch as long as you’re not being part of a movement that has all those reflections in itself.
TFSR: Yeah. That’s a really important discussion that I feel has been long overdue in a lot of militant movements. In your interpretation, do you see pretty good progress with normalizing critiques of things like homophobia, sexist violence, and the values that are associated with that within the antifascist movement?
Joe: There was a bit too much polarization between him and the other people in the Antifa Ost case because it was obvious that he was not the only man who had this kind of behavior. But slowly, slowly, it is more of a structural reflection in different groups and parts of the movement, and not so much concentrated anymore on this specific group of accused people. In the beginning, it was a bit difficult to create the understanding that the snitch was not just one monster, but a part of the movement that could easily enter it because of being [seen as] somebody who can be used as kind of a soldier in this kind of action.
TFSR: Stepping back a bit: in the last decade or so, as you mentioned earlier, far-right parties, like Alternative for Germany (AfD), and Homeland or the NPD, have been gaining parliamentary representation throughout parts of Germany and in the European Parliament. Also, we’ve seen clear cases of collusion and overlap between far-right movements like Reichsbürger and the police and military in the case of Day X, which we spoke about at that earlier, NSU Watch discussion that folks can listen back to if they want to. Have these trends towards far-right groups having more representation in government, been accompanied by more repression of antifascists?
Joe: Those structures and groups are still not so much in power to have any kind of influence on the law or directly influence cops, but after many years, full of many scandals about the connection between the military and cops with Nazis or Nazis inside the cop and military structures, it’s kind of normal now. So there’s no scandal anymore. Whatever happens, there are many Nazis chat groups inside the police. Also in the case of Antifa Ost, it was obvious that there were Nazis who were not allowed anymore to work as police officers, but they still gave their testimony against the people in the Dresden case, and they also gave the photos of the [accused] people and their files to the Nazis. So they published a lot of stuff that was not supposed to be public on their blogs and newspapers and stuff. But this did not lead, so much, towards a more radical antifascist opposition, or however it’s called. It’s more like people do not know how to deal with this massive right-wing power that they have gained for now. And about the other parties: it’s easy to say that obviously, they work more against migrants and left-wing movements, because they would like to gain back those people who vote for the right-wing parties. Since then, the so-called middle is going more far-right than the Nazis themselves, sometimes.
TFSR: Can you talk a bit about the international nature of antifascist resistance in the face of ongoing far-right violence, as well as increased inter-governmental cooperation in repressing grassroots resistance from the left?
Joe: To be honest, there’s not so much anymore. There were some demonstrations in solidarity with the arrested and accused people, especially in the Budapest case, in different countries, and people organized information and discussion events internationally. They did supportive actions, wrote texts, and also collected funds for the persecuted, but it’s more of a defensive position right now compared to the times of the anti-globalization movements, where people came to go in other ways and have different connections than it is nowadays.
TFSR: And how can people learn more or offer support around these cases?
Joe: All those anti-repression structures, the solidarity groups of the different cases, have blogs where people can inform themselves [with], sometimes even in English: soli-antifa-ost.org, basc.news. Those are the two bigger blogs that combine all the information about the Antifa Ost case and the Budapest case.
And what you can do is fight Nazis and fight the states. It seems like you have your own problems [laughs]. There are fascists over there. So, I don’t think that this is a European problem or a German problem, but it’s going to be a worldwide one. Since then it’s needed to fight Nazis and this system all over the world.
TFSR: Yeah. Well, thank you very much for having this conversation. Is there anything that occurs to you now that I didn’t ask about that you’d like to say?
Joe: I think I did not speak about the Antifa movement, the change of the Antifa movement from the ‘90s to now. Both were something that I mentioned after the part about the Nazis and the street violence.
TFSR: You mentioned that things are not like in the days of the anti-globalization movement. I guess, could you talk about how the antifascist movements have shifted and grown since that period?
Joe: Antifa changed also to be more of a reformist structure, and organizational movement, but it’s still organized also in smaller groups that fight Nazis in the streets. The problem was the minimal consensus against Nazis. There was often not a strong position against the System and the State. And we also had the problem with many debates about militance and violence inside the movement. So the people who work more close to the State and still consider themselves Antifa are sometimes very much in trouble with the people who fight Nazis in the streets or the top structures who do this kind of actions against them.
TFSR: Does that shift reflect a wider weakening of autonomous social movements, or what caused the more reformist nature to develop within antifascist circles?
Joe: It seems like it was the belief in gaining more people in the streets against the increasing problem with the Nazis, even though the autonomous and anti-authoritarian people before were very successful in the fight against Nazis. It came in a parallel move that Nazis started to build up parties to be part of the elections, and then people started to fight against them, also together with other political parties and unions and stuff. And this caused the problem that there’s not the criticism that is needed against the State and the System.
TFSR: Too much of a Popular Front strategy that watered down the politics?
Joe: Kind of an appeasement strategy, also that lots of structures were somehow supported by the State. There are so-called “autonomous centers” that are financed by the Federal State itself. People depend on the State’s money, in many cases. So all those structures depend on the State. This is kind of usual now, but before it used to be much criticized, also because lots of squats were evicted, and lots of possibilities that the movement had beforehand are not there anymore.
TFSR: Yeah, squats were evicted or legalized, right?
Joe: Yeah, the legalization of squats is another problem, but exactly. Autonomous spaces do not exist so much anymore, the legalization of squats was already happening at the end of the ’80s and beginning of the ’90s. But the new development of these kinds of social centers and legalized projects that depend on the States or the cities also came up a bit later, and people have no criticism anymore towards these dependencies. And now you can see in eastern Germany, in the parts where the AfD is winning the elections, that people are going to be afraid that they’re going to lose all their local structures and financed projects.
TFSR: Are you seeing much conversation about ending a reliance on those State-supported structures because they could be taken away at any time.? Or are people just sort of panicking and assuming the worst? Like, are they taking agency?
Joe: Well, to me, it seems more like the second, people are just trying to prepare themselves, how on the legal side they can fight against this, but it’s not part of any radicalization of the movement so far.
TFSR: Well, on that depressing note, thank you again for having this conversation. [laughs] I appreciate it.