Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

eceive our civilian clothes, and I receive mine, including my much-needed
elastic compression stockings – I breathe easy again!
Mr Ho appears and he takes three prisoners to a waiting minibus. I ask
him, ‘Are you the gentleman from G Division?’.
‘Yes, I am the Chinaman from G Division, the only one’.
‘You were one of the few gentlemen there whom I found to have a
sensibility that showed wisdom – must be because you come from a 7000year-old
culture, and consciously or subconsciously you’re carrying that
burden with you on your shoulders, much like the Greeks and Italians carry
their civilisation with them – and Germans carry only a 12-year civilisation
but that was so monumental that the world is still worrying about it.’
He smiles and bids us enter the minibus, which soon begins its trip through
the prison gates, turns right towards the new freeway that follows the road to
the Gawler–Freeling turnoff where we trundle along the Freeling–Kapunda
road, have lunch at Kapunda, then cross the Murray River at Morgan and
after more than a 2-hour drive arrive at the Cadell Training Centre.
* * * * *
In E Division I again had pen and paper, and began to record my thoughts
and impressions, thereby trying to make sense of my current situation:
1. Snapshots: Smoke-free environment exists in common rooms and
corridors outside, and so there are cells for smokers and non-smokers;
barter trade flourishes, as it does in prisons all over the world; the
pettiness of it all – ¾ of inmates in here for trivialities: 5 days for resisting
arrest – yet in the news I hear an off-duty policeman was attacked in
Melbourne – definite level of social frustration accelerating – lost souls,
gangs Association Laws against Bikies in South Australia and now also in
Queensland = dangerous precedent. Will association laws against
Revisionists be next? Communist hunt of 1960s - the logic of it
transparent: racism – revisionism – nationalism = concepts carried by
the enemy of what groups/organisations? Individuals who are outside of
the in-group. Max Weber’s insights, but question: in politics is there the
need for a friend-foe divide? It’s the win-lose dialectic of Marx/Talmud,
rather than the win-win dialectic of Hegel where the opposites come
together to conserve their differences in a new synthesis rather than one
destroying the other. It’s the battle of the wills all over again and if, for
example, the police are not there to be the whipping boys, then groups
turn upon themselves, husband against wife, brother against sister, etc.
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