MXGM Self-Defence Manual

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Malcolm X Grassroots Movement March 2013
• Anti-Containment Campaigns – These campaigns focus on stopping local, statewide, and
national policies and programs that repress and displace our communities like racial
profiling, check points, stop and frisk, weed and seed, gang injunctions, drug war
policies, three strikes and zero-tolerance policies, etc. In addition to stopping these
reactionary policies, we should also engage in proactive campaigns, like those that seek
to abolish prisons.
• Anti-Surveillance Campaigns – These campaigns should focus on forcing the state to
become transparent about its extensive surveillance infrastructure and operations, and
organizing campaigns that demand that they be wholly dismantled. These campaigns
can start with initiatives that publically expose the methods and tactics used by various
government agencies to monitor our social activities. We must also develop and
effectively utilize a national database that exposes the undercover agents and
provocateurs used by the government to infiltrate, disrupt, and discredit our social
movements (this must be done through extensive factual documentation and not
innuendo which can be and is very destructive to our movements).
• Demilitarization Campaigns – These campaigns should focus on ending the military
weapons and tactics used by domestic law enforcement. Law enforcement agencies
throughout the US empire have enhanced their military capacities since the 1960’s,
primarily focused on containing and repressing the national liberation and progressive
social movements. For their arsenals they have acquired and incorporated military
assault rifles, tanks, combat ready helicopters, grenades, hollow point bullets, camera
and satellite integrate surveillance systems, infrared equipment, and sonic and
microwave crowd control equipment, etc. Tactically, they incorporated various
strategies of counterinsurgency and pacification, including envelopment tactics that
surround communities, check-points that control traffic in and out of a community,
“weed and seed” programs that deliberately divide communities, gang injunctions that
criminalize social relationships and customs (youth fashions, informal associations,
etc.), “stop and frisk” tactics that allow for illegal searches and seizures on a massive
scale, and initiatives like “Operation Ghetto Storm” intentionally designed to terrorize
oppressed communities. These campaigns are intended to heighten the contradictions
between the people and the state (i.e. the government) and put the questions of
institutional racism, national oppression, and US imperialism at the center of public
debate within the empire 18 .
• Anti-Drone Campaigns – The introduction of surveillance and military drones over US
held territories marks a critical new phase in the development of the repressive
capacities of the US government. In order to preserve any notion of democratic space,
we must launch local campaigns to resist the use of drones at the local and municipal
levels and join or start campaigns that challenge their legitimacy and utilization
throughout the empire.
• Prisoner Defense Campaigns – These campaigns should focus on defending a) our political
prisoners, prisoners of war, and political exiles from ongoing prosecution and violations
of international law, b) our prisoners from unjust prosecution and human rights abuses,
and c) community members from entrapment, false imprisonment, and false
prosecution. These campaigns should employ every means of struggle we have available
to us, but should rely first and foremost on methods of mass struggle, rather than
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legalistic methods that appeal to the enemy’s courts rather than the people.