When we, women or men, do not speak up against laws and cultural
excuses to keep women as property, we condone the hierarchies of
cruelty; we condemn womankind to slavery and involunatary servitude.
Iran and Afghanistan stand out as the most flagrant of this terrorism
against the greater half of humanity, in which women are imprisoned,
subject to low intensity warfare every day.

We may ask why women are to be so feared that they must be locked
away. Perhaps it is that our unpaid labor creates so much value,
enables even the poorest among men to work himself. Perhaps it is
that if women were fully part of every society, there would open new
possibilities to end war and oppression, to end exploitation and
starvation. The potential of the vast majority of women in every
society is untapped, deforming social well-being and twisting the
rhetoric of democracty into authoritarian warden-states.

No society can advance when more than half the population, the women,
are absent, hidden, dragged away. We in the imperialist/consumer
capitalist nations live under the illusion that we are free. We are
not.

As freedom-loving women we must support our Iranian and Afghanistani
sisters as they heroically lead us all, not only women, but men as
well, forward to a different kind of world.

Each day I think of you, my sisters, you who so bravely stand to
challenge the inhumanity of male-supremacist, theocratic and
capitalist nation states. Without your courage and voice that reaches
over the domestic and social prison wall, we all continue to suffer
from lack of peace and freedom or human prosperty. Let us all become
so brave.

Marilyn Buck, anti-imperialist political prisoners, USA