We Are Leaving 2024 Behind - a Year Like None Other

By Julia Wright

What have I learned during this past year that shook the world because of October 7th?

                                    SURVIVORS CAN BECOME BUTCHERS

I have learned that I am not omniscient nor prescient and would never have dreamed that a second genocide would be committed by some of those who survived the genocide by the nazis - where my own maternal jewish relatives were gassed.   I have learned that survivors of the worst atrocities can become butchers. Does this mean that I as a survivor can become a butcher and under what conditions ?... If, as Mumia has written, ours is a Vampire Nation how do each of us in the abolitionist movement avoid getting bitten - and start biting in turn ?

How does a class of assaulted victims such as ours not succumb to the temptation of butchery ?

I have learned other things that I did not know before - even though I am a veteran.

I am not the only one to have found out, thanks to the Palestinian resistance, that we are capable of standing on its head a twisted, corporate-based narrative in an historically irreversible way by showing that the white supemacists are spreading this narrative deliberately shorn of its ancestral and geopolitical context. As Thich Nhat Hanh said : ' There is no such thing as emptiness '. In fact the creation of the illusion of emptiness is a shoddy colonial conjurer's trick. Not only is history a weapon but it is the people's weapon because it provides the only  intergenerational context to ground and validate the people's decision to rise up against a precise timeline of criminal settler, racist, colonial and Apartheid conditions.

                                         GAZA AND US INTER-BE

The second lesson I have learned is that we in the belly of the beast  are inextricably interconnected with the genocide in Palestine not only through being  US citizens and thus paying tax dollars to enable that genocide but because there is an eco-criminal recycling of extermination methods from our cop cities to Gaza and from the Palestinian lab back again to our disenfranchized Black, Brown and Indigenous communities and prisons.

Gaza and us inter-be.

Then there was a most important mind boggling discovery: the strength of the Prisoners' Movement against zionist Israel - a movement so strong that it is a decisive component anchoring the Palestinian Liberation Movement as a whole. Prisons are universities where the incarcerated teachers write, educate and even father children through smuggled sperm. Though infamously tortuous, Israeli prisons are spaces and places where the movement re-sources itself and unites. Sinwar at one point was even reluctant to leave his Israeli prison because he still had important work to do there...

And how can I forget the emphasis placed at The Palestinian Youth Movement Conference - six months ago - on cross movement building in the Palestinian diaspora? Cross movement building and the deepening need for unity is something we recognize the need for increasingly within our own still too disparate campaigns be it for our political prisoners or to counter death by incarceration or to oppose the police unions and the criminal injustice system campaigns ... Not to speak of the death penalty ...

The word "unity" is bandied - a bit like the phenomenon of ghost sightings : lots of folks talk about them but who has actually seen them?

There is such a thing as unity-mongering.

The slave masters knew that as long as they could auction off husband and wife separately they were in a win-win situation. Divide and rule better known as balkanization became the white supremacist weapon. And our experience of mass incarceration is that the prison perpetuates the destruction of the family that the slave master began.

The white elites are desperately afraid that we will brick by brick, wall by wall, undo their balkanization and cement unity.

So, yes, 2024, was a year where the need for unity became the writing on the wall - because as Ericka Payne said about her uncle, the political prisoner, Ed Poindexter RIP: "our political prisoners are all subjected to cookie cutter torture".

Also fundamentally with unity-building we can't go wrong  because we are following the lessons taught by Mother Earth herself - also under assault by a cruel, predatory capitalist world.

                                         INTER SPECIES UNITY

As severe droughts are affecting tropical areas, varying species of animals who usually prey upon each other - are increasingly sharing water holes.

I interviewed my son, Malcolm Wright, who is a professional conservationist and asked him to give an example of cross movement cooperation between animals i.e. inter species unity. He replied :

"Near the Botanical Gardens in Melbourne, Australia, stand a couple of trees that bear small pink fruit.  These are whimsically named Lilly Pilly trees.  The fruit is nutricious and full of vitamin C, though not particularly delicious.

These two trees are a small neutral territory for the local bird species.  Crows, Kurrawongs, Noisy Minahs, Asian Minahs, Cockatoos, Lorikeets and more... all share this zone.  Whilst other areas are distinctly controlled by one species or another, these two Lilly Pilly trees are universally respected as a common area, where the birds intermingle personably and peacefully.

Which is not to say that there are no hijinks: the various species prank each other constantly and there is almost always some element of playfulness afoot for the observer to enjoy."

Recently, marine biologists have pointed out that orcas who are known to be fierce predators of gray whales have changed their behaviour and these biologists have documented the amazing sight of a circle of orcas protecting a wounded gray whale calf keeping it afloat and singing what sounds like lullabies using acoustic signals close to that used by the gray whales themselves. This show of physical and communication solidarity continued until the calf's family of whales was able to come to its rescue with the orcas opening their protective circle to allow the mother whale to take her calf away:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0xZF20yvSY

Until now scientists thought the decline or growth of forests was due to the survival of the fittest i.e. competition of the trees for light and water and nutrients. However recent fascinating discoveries have shown that the various species of trees in a forest actually collaborate through an intricate interconnection of roots and mycellium to warn each other of invasive pests and other deteriorating or climate change conditions. In other words, a forest is a natural and ongoing work of Treedom unity.

May 2025 be the year of the survival of the united !

United we stand, Divided we fall. Kwame Nkrumah.

(c) Julia Wright. 25 December 2025. All Rights. Thanks to Malcolm Wright for the information on the Lilly Pilly Trees in Melbourne.