PRISONER EXPRESS

Real talk. I am a theme writer of the Prisoner Express Newsletter. Oftentimes being in a position to formulate an opinion of your own, without the viewpoints of the mainstream mass media sources, this is why most prisoners read prison newsletters and underground magazines plus newspapers. The reason I enjoy projects like (P.E.N.) is because when I write, it's the First Amendment freedom of speech and press our people of America have shed blood and died to protect. Who is better to speak for us prisoners, than the political prisoners incarcerated to get the free world society involved? A people without a voice is a people without a choice, they cannot have a say so in the case of a disagreement with the powers that be. We are not yes men to the government and will not blindly agree with choices we feel strongly against.

A lot of prisons have censored F.E.D. Magazine written for us by us because we tell it like it is. We are not getting paid by bosses who can fire us for not being a puppet to the puppet masters that be. Why must the government have examiners of what we read, who prohibits objectionable materials? This is a form of mind control because you cannot challenge what you do not know about. You cannot solve a problem without knowing what the problem is. What makes censorship more dangerous is: if you cut off the voice of a people who need to be heard, no matter how rebellious the information is, the only solution left is violence. If no help is coming we must save ourselves, and us prisoners know these lessons well through prison riots and staff assaults, which may result in murder and mayhem. To cut the voice of the people off leaves the people with no means of peaceful communication, having to exchange thoughts with force in order to get publicity, which may become physical. No one likes their thoughts suppressed; it makes them feel unimportant in decision making. The underdog will have to take things to extreme remote intense drastic measures that would have been uncalled for had the authority fighters had a little time for the outcasts.

The purpose of public opinion is important to any cause, dealing with masses of individuals. The opinion becomes political operations once it's in print, because it is a political objective. A people without a way to address their grievances on the issues in which to gain sympathy of the free civilian population must react, since no reaction means certain death. Do you want to live or do you want to die? This sympathy can be built up through incessant propaganda like the Prison Express Newsletters, so as to gain control of public opinion. Once we let people control what we say or write, they control our minds. This is one of the means Hitler used to take over. It's best to know what your community is thinking about, so you can be ready for the outcome. Why do you think if you're caught talking in prison you get a ticket? To prevent the ideals of man from spreading into resistance. Resistance starts in the mind. Guerilla warfare is basically organized and maintained by the masses, and once it is deprived of these masses or fails to enlist their participation and cooperation, its survival and development is not possible. Even if it's something you do not want to hearâ€"listenâ€"now or deal with the problem at its worst. We should stand up in prison against censorship in society, if you do not like being controlled by what you read. After all, us men and women are adults, who says we can't handle information? I guess its trueâ€""information is power"â€"and the powers that be want all the power for themselves.

I would like to think of myself as a controversial writer, since I am an underdog; people who think like me are barely, if ever heard. People like me make rap music popular because we so urban with it, we have no time for stand stills, our lives are on the line. No one can relate to prisoners, with an ineffective method of political indoctrination among the masses, information is used as a psychological weapon by masterminded government scientists and manipulators alike to promote conscious activity, to agree with or disagree with campaigns. The U.S. scientists know aggressive ideology, one which either holds the formal levers of command in a nation-state or aspires to do so through subversion. The U.S. Army calls this Psywar doctrine, when it uses "propaganda" and "information" as a strategic operation. Would you rather the government say "don't listen to this because it's hate," or would you rather decide what hate is for yourself. For the people, by the people is the slogan they taught us.

Understanding the mind games being placed on the masses, I recalled an ex-inmate, Colonel Lacheroy, comes to mind. He was formerly a prisoner of the Vietminh. Although this article does not touch upon the intense political ramifications of psychologique movements, it is so appropriate to point out the attitude, in which we were instrumental in the French services to defend the waning prerogatives of the Fourth Republic in May, 1958. In the book Modern Guerrilla Warfare, by Franklin Mark, Osanka states on pg. 432:

Generally speaking, the mode of thinking in 1954-56, when l'action psychologique was germinating, was the following: when the adversary is unscrupulous, what is fair is what works. And what works can be admired, even if the one who has delivered the hard lessons inspires nothing but hate.

This was to lead a number of French officers to the detailed examination of the methods employed by the Vietmind in the Indochina War as well as to the study of a number of central communist and psychological texts that provided both a justification and a methodology of the type of warfare they were proposing. The anguish of the Indochina defeat gave rise to serious questioning of democratic military doctrine.

In a lecture given at Nice on 20 July, 1957, Lacheroy exclaimed:

In Indochina, as in China, as in Korea, as elsewhere, we observe that the strongest seems to be beaten by the weakest. Why? Because the norms we used to weigh our opposing forces, those traditional norms are dead. We have to face up to a novel form of warfare, novel in its accomplishments and novel in its achievements.