Marilyn Buck's Solidarity statement for second seminar

I greet you as a sister and comrade, and as an anti-imperialist political prisoner, imprisoned for more than 22 years in US prisons. Since I was a young woman in the 1960s, I have supported Iran's just struggles, first to defeat the US puppet Shah regime, and then against the clerical regime that aborted the Iranian revolution. In the face of first the Shah's SAVAK and now the clerics' so-called Revolutionary Guard, you have withstood prison, torture and murder to continue. Your steadfastness inspires and reminds all who love justice and human beings of the courage needed to face these perpetrators of capitalism and its dictatorships. You do not waver.

And women do not waver. Worldwide we refuse to be silenced or to accept being erased from our nation states' public lives. We want justice, we need equality, we demand human liberation. We know that there cannot be, indeed will not be a successful socialist revolution anywhere without women standing at the head of the column. Any society or culture that relegates women to a lower status than men-as their property-or hides us from view behind walls and prohibits education and development is an authoritarian and oppressor society that sustains capitalism and imperialism. All religious states are an enemy of women and humanity.

Women are crucial in order to unleash the creative forces necessary to imagine and achieve a new classless world. Without women's liberation and equality we will never achieve "from each according to ability, to each according to need."

May our men comrades wake up and let go of their fear and material privileges gained from women's oppression. Brothers, free yourselves from the economic and cultural chains that bind you to patriarchal capitalism. Join women in this global struggle. In closing I dedicate a poem to all comrades imprisoned and those who continue at all costs to vanquish the theocratic dictatorship in Iran:

we fear language
an electric cattle prod
to drive us into corners
where we cower
for fear of being called
terrorists or communists or criminals

why do we allow
capitalists and congressmen
to rob us of our language
to intimidate us into cutting out
our tongues
to paralyze our movements!

why are we more afraid
To be called terrorists
than to die in the dark
leaving no one to speak for us?

Marilyn Buck

Support all Political Prisoners!
Support all women who refuse to be afraid!
In a free, democratic, and secular Iran

Marilyn Buck
U.S political prisoner- anti-imperialist

July 18, 2007