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Based on the testimony of John Ehrlichman, White House council to Richard Nixon, they used many drugs which were legal at the time illegal as a tactic to harass and incarcerate people of color and anti war activists. If so, than people who were then and now incarcerated on drug charges are political prisoners.

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Thank you for your work in the prison and your beautiful article. You are touching lives

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... rebuilding them

and rebuilding Faith

.

dude you ROCK.

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Although I think by reputation they would be dismissive or wary of the other, dang if I ever get to hear Hedges and Jordan Peterson talk. I get it, there are some deal breakers in their world views, chiefly about the state of institutions and what I prefer to call climate destabilization. But... both men are the hyper articulate hyper brilliant sons of working class families. Both are deeply well read and and per this article both profoundly publicly affected by Solzhenitsyn. Both are public figures detoured from their natural professions but are of those professions in their bones. I doubt I would ever see this but I will say I see convergence in their life stories and frankly a sizeable part of both their audencieces would appreciate seeing these two great minds spar or even better just talk.

Finally, in The Gulag Archipelago, I will never live down the young boy who had the bravery to tell the "great author and humanitarian" who visited the facility how bad it was. The author left and extolled the greatness of that prison, the boy was shot shortly after the boat with the writer left. When I think of it I would kill God himself for never setting that right. It's required reading for all adults.

Merry Christmas or the next best thing for the lot of you readers. Try to take care and of those that you can as the wicked tempest of 2023 stirs to fact and life.

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If societies can and should be judged by their prisons, there is a case to be made that that the United States will not too long from now follow the Soviet Union into failure and breakdown - and maybe eventual renewal. Interesting that the Soviets, just before their end in power, did end the worst of the gulag, although too late to avoid the poison that helped kill the old system. Here in the USA, our society shows no sign of even such an attempt, or even recognition. Thank you Chris for once again reminding us of these facts, the ignoring of which are central to our sickness as a society.

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Great, great comment by someone who knows how to use their language, an ability which alone can lift the spirits! I have read Gulag twice plus a bunch of Sohl’s shorter stuff and he certainly stands as one of the greats of the 20th century. Most people, on hearing his name ( or that of Borges for different reasons) politely smile and nod their heads. I think about Sohl’s great bravery and fantasize about doing ONE brave thing before I die--but I better get busy! Not too much time left. Be well.

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Yes, and tears in my eyes too, Chris - at Luis - and all those others in your class reading the words of Solzhenitsyn and finding their own stories and spiritual confirmation/growth. I read that work myself so many years ago - how could I then as a young fellow have ever properly understood its impact - its truths - yet I find echoes of those things in my own life since as I read this essay - and of all other accounts of inhuman incarcerations - Primo LEVI, Wole SOYINKA, NGUGI wa Thiong'o - or Behrouz BOOCHANI - among others. Thank-you.

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Restoring the dignity and inner worth of those who have been relegated to the refuse bin of society is truly divine in every sense of the word. Your deeply touching articles allow me to sustain the belief that we can create a shift in consciousness on our planet, before we destroy ourselves.

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A remarkable piece, thanx Chris. But...

The tragedy is that Luis leaves so many good men and women behind.

No. Luis was not in a position to leave or take anyone. It is the society that leaves so many good men and women incarcerated and the likes of Frank Lee that enable it.

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Thank you and Luis for this story. I appreciate your work here, as I am certain, that the students do as well.

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Stalin's prisoners were political and imprisoned without due process. US prisons are filled with criminals that were sentenced for their crimes after due process. I fail to see the contrast.

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It's hard to understand how you can even be on this site, Frank.

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Either you did not read or if you did you did not understand what this column discussed.

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You should look at the reality of what constitutes "due process" for the poor and marginalized in our deeply racist and classist society. When 95 percent of prisoners are incarcerated through plea bargains rather than jury trials, this should provide a hint. It's not just our prisons, it's our entire law enforcement and criminal justice system.

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One more thing, %4.6 of the world's population and %20 of the people incarcerated. American #1 we are the fastest and the best at due process!!! Once again we win!!!

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Yeah man is he delusional or lying?

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The blind cannot see the light. For those of us that cannot see there is no contrast.

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There comes a time when the blind man, woman, takes your hand and says don’t you see.

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This guy is trying provoke. He has nothing better to do.

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Can we please ignore Frank? He is, obviously, a troll or an idiot. It is futile to argue with stupidity.

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Frank -- there may be no hope for you

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I'll bet you $20 Frank had two friends when he was little Mike and John. All 3 were playing catch one day on the playground. John let Mike take his only ball and glove home. The next day Mike brought the ball and glove to the playground and gave it back to John. Since Frank didn't get to take it home first, he is damaged deep down inside and hates anyone that likes to share.

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Frank, keep reading Hedges and listen to Willie King sing Terrorized

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Thanks, Jake - now I know the song - as entrée to Chris Hedges' podcast. Good advice to Frank though I suspect he's deaf as well as blind...but, who knows???

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Deaf or blind? He doesn't know.

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I was honored a while back to receive a letter from a prisoner in Illinois. He is in his fourties’ now and was sentenced at age 19. In a beautiful letter to me, he was responding to my published correspondence letters in The Sun magazine, short letters where I have been very critical of the political opinions that often are published in The Sun. Anyway, we have been writing each other, and given the weight of his life reality, I often feel silly and naive in my letters to him. I find myself being critical of my outlook on life and even the language I use in a way that I haven’t before.

This piece by Hedges is helping me understand what I am being challenged to understand through our letters. The process of writing and getting to know this person amplifies my awareness in ways that I hadn’t imagined.

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Are you the poet?

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I write poetry and posted one here once:)

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Yes, I have it. I tried to print out your other stuff but obviously print-protected.

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Beautifully said, Erica. I am in contact with a young fellow in a country made an absolute mess of by the US in the 1990s and 2000s - he's not in gaol (or jail, if you prefer) but he might as well be - unable to leave that country. Trapped. And me - unable to do anything but offer notes of fellow-feeling and hope!

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SPIRIT v. ECON DETERMINISM

Despite the relentless dehumanization, people like Luis somehow find a way to be fully human. Unique individuals, conscious of how their lives are also communitarian and connected. No matter how much the powers that be try to convince them they are isolated, abandoned, nothing. Testimony of some aspect within human, yet more than--a traditional word for which is "spirit." We do not live by bread alone.

Which is contrary to the economic dogmas of exploitative consumer capitalism as well as of leftist beliefs that materialism is the only reality, the problem merely one of distribution. Consider instead the alternative slogan of Bread and Roses. Which recognizes that in addition to physical requirements, there is a strong human need for meaning.

Speaking as someone who was a blue collar worker union activist for 20+ years and as someone raised on Native land, I don't have much faith in centralized authority. Nor do I view my life or those of indigenous people in general as something defined by abstract, deterministic economics. And some of us who wield tools on the job can actually read, write, and think. We don't need a self-appointed elitist "vanguard of the working class."

Economic determinism is part of the mechanisms of power that reward elites while denying the humanity of those considered lessers. That's obvious in capitalism, where corporations are people, and humans merely "resources," like the other items in nature to be exploited, remnants discarded. But it's also true of leftisms that consider abstract historical forces and economic arrangements to be all of reality; the humans who do the actual work secondary effects with no purpose other than materialistic accumulation. That, too, is dehumanizing in the extreme.

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Philosopher David Korten in his recent lecture "Our planetarian existential crisis" says that today the universities teach neo-liberal economics that should be more appropriately called ego-nomics, and that we need to return to the economic systems of Smith or Marx that are concerned with the improvement of the general well-being and not the growth of the individual at the expense of the rest of the community and the ecology. Today we are acting selfishly like Coronavirus or any other harmful microbe graduated from college with a major in ego-nomics.

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re: DAVID KORTEN

In a way what he's doing is philosophy, but his actual background is a PhD in business from Stanford and he taught at the Harvard biz school. After working on several international projects, he concluded that the theoretical underpinnings of capitalist econ meant that it was the problem, not the answer. Check out the magazine he started called "YES." Short articles on alternatives already being done.

I used to live near him. I asked if I could speak with him on the ferry going home after the 1999 Anti-WTO demonstrations later known, I'm proud to say, as the Battle of Seattle. Just prior, I'd been to a U of WA panel discussion. A prof of biz econ claimed that the market (notice the assumed physicality of what is actually an abstract idea) would solve ecological problems. In a desert, water is worth more than diamonds, so its value means water would be conserved. At the Q and A afterwards, I asked: didn't that imply conditions had to deteriorate to desert conditions before that would work? He got red in the face and told me I didn't know what I was talking about. Korten's reaction to hearing that story was: "that's when you know you're right and they don't have an answer."

The term I like is ECONOPATH. I understand what Korten is getting at--short sighted selfishness. Because they aren't part of accounting systems, devastation of communities and ecological destruction are considered irrelevant; in bizspeak "externalities." Which is insane.

However, ego, simply the Greek (and Latin) word for "I" is for Carl Jung the center of personal consciousness. It should be able to act as the coordinator of the rational/empirical left brain hemisphere processing and the right hemisphere's preferred poetic, artistic, and meaning generating functions. Instead, western culture, and increasingly the whole world, has tipped totally to the left brain's preference for certainty, control, abstraction, dislike of change, and assumptions that reductionistic materialism is the only reality. In the 1920s, Carl Jung spoke with a Hopi elder. Who said that white people think everything is dead, including people. Whereas the indigenous view is that everything is alive. And meaningful.

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Thanks for you information. I needed it. You see, my only knowledge about Mr. Korten was his lecture which I loved for his defense of our ecology and where he enumerated several possible solutions. I found his lecture at Alternative Radio (1800-4441977) which is my favorite place to ask for MP3 down-loads of lectures by our greatest thinkers. By now, I have a great collection of interviews by David Bersanian and lectures of Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Mr. Chris Hedges including the one on his latest book "The Greatest Evil is War"

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What a terrific piece of reporting, Rafi - with heart at the centre of understanding! A concept of everytime/all-time I have just been reminded of in my reading of recently published Jesustown - a novel centring on the rapaciousness of invader/colonial-till now Australia - by noted journalist Paul DALEY - is "the everywhen" - time and space have a circularity - not necessarily a past or future - the everywhen - a continuum - with no breaks. If I have understood properly - and perhaps in line with the Hopi elder who spoke with Carl Jung...

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Yes, the circularity. But it's not another either/or, but a both/and plus neither/nor. Without flow, we'd be stuck in an eternal present--and not the good "now" of meditation. Notice the ouroboros is holding its tail, not eating it, and the Zen circle isn't closed. (IMO the econ system is an inverse ouroboros; consuming head chewing up its own * hole.)

My time metaphor diagram is a version of Cartesian coordinates. Probably should be imagined in 3D, or maybe even 4D, but I can't really picture that. Anyway, along x axis is the usual timeline--past, present, future. The y axis is the now; no time, aeternal. The z axis is all time; perhaps minds can travel the nodes. Which is a model that could include precognition. Mind-at-large or Consciousness or G-D would be a concept of the Total.

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Circularity encompasses the idea of cycles - but as you further develop the thought - I take on board some of your re-positioning/elaboration... though you have clearly given a lot of thought to this matter.

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I agree with you but would add that I don't believe most of the people on the genuine left, including Chris and many others in the long history of the American left who come from or share the lives of the victims of capitalism, believe it's only about economics or ingrown academic theories of oppression. People who think that way are mostly soul-less opportunists or careerists that can only thrive in bureaucratic/academic environments studiously avoid genuine contact with real people in prisons, factories, fast-food restaurants, warehouses, construction sites, hospital wards, unemployment lines, reservations and other places or actual human oppression. It takes "spirit" to tenaciously join in the fight against oppression, (not just online but in real life), and those without that spirit are not part of the genuine left. That left, the real left that the mainstream media and the right-wing influencers carefully try to airbrush out of the public consciousness (while highlighting the cherry-picked antics of the "woke") clearly does not believe that materialism is the only reality or that the problem is merely one of distribution. Please don't buy into that caricatured criticism of "the left." Here's a more realistic view: https://mailchi.mp/popularresistance/s97xo52imf?e=ff3911e9cc

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Guy, you are right. I suppose that is why Mr. Hedges wrote the book "The Death of the Liberal Class" a long time ago and I never thought that teaching at the jails with the purpose of their improvement was close to "studiously avoid genuine contact with real people in prisons,..."

I thank and admire Mr. Hedges for his good work at the prisons.

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ENCOUNTERS

I'm an old labor leftist, trained in the late '60s by people who'd been union organizers in the harsh conditions of the 1930s. They told me: "liberals are the ones who leave the room when the fight starts." Turned out to be true, huh?

It's not that political purity is needed; that's just one more example of either/or thinking. Good/ bad. With us/against us. What we apply in labor--negotiations--is true for politics as well. I'm not upset when the Squad or Bernie don't behave 100% according to our leftist ideals. I feel like I'd agree with you on most everything and I did check the link, thanks. I'm a little disturbed, though, by any claim of "real" or "genuine" left. I heard that stuff in the '60s when variations went at each other--Maoists, Trotskyists, et al. each claiming to be the only real Marxists. Proclamations as authoritarian; dissent as heresy.

What I know is not simply abstract political caricature, but through many decades of intense activism and from listening to elders. Reasons that like my logger grandfather, I'm a Wobbly. And, TBH, when I evoke "spirit" and "meaning," I don't just mean collective econ-political struggle. I'm referring to something transcendent, probably something to do with consciousness as more than local or physical. Yet expressed through specific life forms in specific environments. Therefore not the inadequate leftist caricature as mere belief, rather out of many decades of direct encounters.

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Well Chris you sure know how to move your audience. Unfortunately you can't budge Congress in inch. Oligarchs can Raytheon can but you and I and your readers can't.

Happy Holidays brothers and sisters.

This here atheist prays daily for a cease fire in Ukraine and "peace on earth for all therein.

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Off and on for about a year I have read Sketches of the Criminal World by Varlam Shalamov. The sketches are about his 17-year imprisonment in Kolyma, where he was sent as a political prisoner in Stalin's purges of 1937-38. He survived, incredibly, he survived, like Solzhenitsyn did. But millions perished, victims of the cold, forced labor in mines, abuse, and wretched nutrition.

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Brian, Solzhenitsyn wanted to write his book with Shalamov, but Shalamov was too broken by his years in the camps. Shalamov's book Kolyma Tales is brilliant, as you know, and Solzhenitsyn refers to it at several points in his narrative. I read stories from Kolyma Tales to my class. Chris

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The Gulag Archipelago is absolutely shattering in effect. One of those rare works that takes far, far more time to process than to read. Definitely worth a revisit within the context of the US carceral apparatus and the contemporary state, thanks for sharing some of those connections here.

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The Gulag Archipelago is indeed an indictment of Stalinism. But is not an argument against socialism, merely against Stalinism, which was NOT Marxism by any means. This must be made clear.

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Read his book "A Day in the Life", which I have always believed is a book describing his experience among other prisoners...and if the American political and "justice" systems were working toward fixing our social problems, we wouldn't have so many people in prison or so many bad happenings in our society. It's time to use what we know to solve people's problems so they don't become "criminals" rather than waiting for bad things to happen and then punishing the bad behavior so scared, angry people will vote for what lawmakers can benefit from. We've had statistics and psychiatric studies at least since the late 1960's and through the mid 2000's at least that show the vast majority of crime can be resolved during a prison sentence, and it can be prevented by focusing on recognizing, for example, kids who come to school with signs of abuse, and even just generally acknowledging the truth, the reality that many people bring into adulthood their childhood experiences without the opportunity to learn better ways before they act out. We can solve the issues that create the situation...poverty, child sexual abuse, bullying, racial discrimination, and other things. We can do this, it is possible, most especially if we effectively exercised the knowledge brought forth by mental health and other experts especially since the mid-1990's. But politicians need crime and things that scare people and make them angry so they can enact crazy and stupid laws that make people believe they are working on it, but don't really solve anything at all. Forever punishment was never intended to be what the justice and corrections systems were about; the refusal to restore citizenship rights and the opportunity for good jobs lost because you're an ex-felon...time served should be time served. I was a major voice, and engaged once in a committee meeting that was about automatically restoring ex-felons voting rights back in the mid-2000's in Iowa, and some of these things came up. When I brought up the ideas I've just written here, I was asked to my face by a lawmaker, "If we solved the problems, what would we have to hold out to people to get them to vote for us?" My response was, "If you solved the problems, wouldn't you be a hero everyone would want in your position forever?" Look, folks...we kill people who kill people, but people kill people every day, all day long...that's obviously not the solution, is it...? We register sex offenders and punish them in several ways forever, but we give them probation in many cases instead of sending them to prison the first time; statistics have shown for a long time that those who go to prison are only maybe 5% likely to ever do it again, whether first time or third, compared to statistics in the upward of 70% recidivism for a number of other serious (and some not so) in so many other crimes. What does that tell you?

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Best journalist of all time. And the biggest balls of them all. Love this guy. Wish I had a 100th of his writing skills and most of all the size of his heart. Especially for the helpless and down trodden no writer can touch him.

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I read the Gulag Archipelago decades ago, however, it must also be admitted that Solzhenitsyn was a right-winger politically and that the crimes of Stalin are mistakenly (including by you, Chris) attributed to Lenin and Trotsky. This does not take away from your work in the prison. I have a friend who was incarcerated in San Quentin prison in California for armed robbery. He served his time and started writing when he was inside. Upon release, although suffering under the "three strikes" law (supported by then Attorney General Kamala Harris), he published a book about his experiences and was eventually pardoned by Jerry Brown before Brown left office as governor. I recommend the book, "Gun, Needle, Spoon" by Patrick O'neil.

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