For want of wild beasts
Prison was a central pillar of communism and an experience shared by generations of eastern Europeans. The USA today can also be described as a carceral society, its prison system the expression of a ‘new Jim Crow’. What does the comparison mean for the definition of the ‘political prisoner’? A conversation.
I’m American, but I’m a historian of eastern Europe. Since Donald Trump, however, one of the things I’ve come to appreciate is the centrality of mass incarceration in the context both of American racism in particular and of our political system more broadly. Many of the people I’ve known in eastern Europe, especially among the generation born just after the war, have also had the experience of being in prison – in their cases, as political prisoners.
For a still earlier generation – the avant-garde poets, for example, who got themselves involved in communism – there was an assumption that sooner or later you would sit in prison. In an interview with Antonín Liehm in the late 1960s, the Czech novelist Jiří Mucha, born in 1915, described prison as ‘simply a writer’s postgraduate education’. And I thought: perhaps, across all these differences, there is a conversation worth having?
Marci Shore: The original impetus for this forum was
horror of the children being taken away from their parents at the American
border, and my thought that we should use material from the Fortunoff archive
to prepare a film about parent-child separation during the Holocaust.
This then opened a larger question about historical comparison….
https://www.eurozine.com/for-want-of-wild-beasts/
Black
and Unarmed and Killed by the Police…an incomplete list…This is America….
May 1968 - June 1989. It's been five decades since
1968, and things are somehow worse
Karl Marx: Letter to Abraham Lincoln, President of
the United States of America; 1865
