This society is held together by fear, fear of punishment if you break the rules. Those with the wealth and power, create those rules and they have an array of institutions to enforce those rules. For us to break their rules could endanger their powerful and privileged position, this will not be allowed at any cost. From fear of losing your job, or your home, to court orders and fines, on to imprisonment, are just some of the accept methods of keeping you subservient. It is obedience or a precarious life of repression, and we call it democracy. The farce of a free society where inequality is protected and dissent is met with repression. Fear is a weapon used against our class, until we can act freely, we are slaves.
The “Faetzig-Camp” is a mixture of a Summer camp with political focus and a festival.
Why oppose prisons?
We live in a society of punishment. All of us have experienced the principle of punishment, whether in our families, at school, at work, at the job centre or other agencies, in hospital or in psychiatric institutions.
Punishment is part of a top-down system of power and powerlessness. It lets the strongest win, because they write and are able to enforce the rules. Punishment directs how we act and think. Punishment creates fear and makes us adapt. Fear of punishment is what creates the cop in our heads who forces us to help carry the violence known as normality. Fear of punishment stops us from taking action against injustices and wrongs.
Growing up in a world filled with punishment leads to a system of punishment living inside of us. It leads to us accepting and using punishment as a means of solving problems ourselves.
Prisons are the heart of punishment. Prisons isolate, humiliate, debase, wound, abase, traumatise, rape. Forced labour, control from the outside, arbitrariness and ruthlessness reign in prisons. Prisons mean to lock away anything that is disruptive instead of dealing with it. Prisons are the opposite of respect, the opposite of peace, the opposite of taking action with consideration for the needs of others. Prisons are the opposite of a free society.
We are looking for a way out of these confines. We are convinced that people can encounter each other equitably and organise without institutions of the state. Also when solving conflicts.
We, people from various politically active contexts, from environmental movements, anti-prison groups, Antifa groups, have repeatedly made the experience that being politically active leads to repression. Around us we can see that those who have few privileges as it is, are sorted out and given fewer opportunities still.
During the camp we want to meet people who are open for the problems addressed here.
In and after presentations, during workshops and rounds of discussions we want to join you in thinking about how to improve our networks, how political strategies might look like to en- and counter intensifying repression. What we need to change in our everyday lives, in our everyday environments, step by step. How a society of prisons can be overcome in the long-term.
Let“s not let ourselves be separated from prisoners through walls! Keep and get in touch with them! Let us make the issues of prisons and the omnipresence of punishment present in more heads again!
Let us fight for a world on a level playing field, in freedom and equality. For a society without oppression, without punishment, without prisons.
Prisons are not a solution, they are part of the problem!
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