"Nothing is more precious than freedom," said Vo Nguyen Giap (pictured), a Vietnamese general who led his country through two liberation wars.

The first was against French colonialists, the second against the United States. And despite heavy and painful losses, Vietnam prevailed, defeating the French imperialists at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the US ones in the Ho Chi Minh Campaign of 1975.

General Giap, the son of a peasant scholar, stood tall in both wars, only bowing down to the resolve of his people.

"Any forces that would impose their will on other nations will most certainly face defeat," he once said. His words will always be true.

He died last Friday, October 4, at the age of 102.

On the same day the former black panther Herman Wallace, who had spent 41 years of his life in solitary confinement in Louisiana State Penitentiary, died from incurable liver cancer at the age of 71.

Just a few days before his death Judge Brian Jackson had overturned a charge that robbed Wallace of much of his life.

According to Jackson, Wallace's 1974 conviction of killing a prison guard was "unconstitutional."

Despite the lack of material evidence, "discredited" witnesses and a sham trial, Wallace, who was a poet and lover of literature, and two other prisoners known as the Angola Three were locked up to spend a life of untold hardship for a crime they didn't commit.

Now that Wallace is dead two remain. One, Robert King, was freed in 2001 but the other, Albert Woodfox, now 66, is still in solitary confinement and "undergoes daily cavity searches," according to reports in British media.

"When his conviction was overturned it cleared the slate - he could die a man not convicted of a crime he was innocent of," King said of the release of Wallace.

One of the last photos released of Wallace showed him raising his clenched right fist from his hospital bed, perpetuating the legendary defiance of a whole generation of African Americans and civil rights leaders.

While some fought for civil rights in the streets of US cities, Wallace fought for the rights of prisoners.

The four decades of solitary confinement were meant to break him. Instead they made him stronger.

"If death is the realm of freedom, then through death I escape to freedom," Wallace quoted Frantz Fanon in the introduction to a poem he wrote from prison in 2012.

In A Defined Voice, Wallace wrote:

They removed my whisper from general population, To maximum security, I gained a voice

They removed my voice from maximum security, To administrative segregation, My voice gave hope

They removed my voice from administrative segregation, To solitary confinement, My voice became vibration for unity.

"Literature can and must elevate a man's soul," General Giap once said. The son of the "peasant scholar" was right, as Wallace's own words attest:

"The louder my voice the deeper they bury me,

"I SAID, THE LOUDER MY VOICE THE DEEPER THEY BURY ME!"

There was so much in common between Giap and Wallace, even though they never met.

Giap fought colonial powers and died free. Wallace, known as the "Muhammad Ali of the criminal justice system," spent most of his life a prisoner but never lowered his clasped fist, not until he died.

But then again: "If death is the realm of freedom, then through death I escape to freedom."

There are echoes in his defiance of the words of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish:

"It is possible...

It is possible at least sometimes

It is possible especially now

To ride a horse

Inside a prison cell

And run away ...

It is possible for prison walls

To disappear,

For the cell to become a distant land

Without frontiers."

Of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, 1,200 suffer from various illnesses and among them, according to UFree Network, 44 suffer from cancer.

Among the nearly 5,000 prisoners, 320 are children.

"Free all political prisoners, prisoners of war, prisoner of consciousness." That's how Wallace ended his poem.

His words were not directed at himself and his prison mates.

From Palestine, to Afghanistan, to Guantanamo, to Louisiana, his words are loaded with meaning and relevance.

"When we started out we weren't thinking about ourselves, we were dealing with the system. That goes on," said King.

And it will go on, because, as Giap said, there is nothing more precious than freedom.

And those who fight against the "system" need to understand that without unity no battle can be won, not those of liberation wars, as in Palestine, nor those fought from solitary confinements.

In an interview with CNN in 2004, Giap, speaking of the US war on Iraq, said that a nation that stands up and knows how to unite will always defeat a foreign invader.

"When people have the spirit to reach for independent sovereignty and show solidarity, it means the people can defeat the enemy," the Vietnamese general said.

Like Wallace, Giap was very frail by the end. Yet these "defined voices" continue to define history.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father was A Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story (Pluto Press).