by Chris Hedges
Next to him were two German officers. (Two beautiful, tall men next to this small, bowed Jew.) And those Germans, tuft by tuft, were chopping off this Jew’s long beard with huge tailor’s shears, splitting their sides with laughter all the while.
The surrounding crowd was also laughing. Because, objectively, it really was funny: a little man on a wooden barrel with his beard growing shorter by the moment as it disappeared under the tailor’s shears. Just like a movie gag.
At that time the Ghetto did not exist yet, and one might [not] have sensed the grim premonition in that scene. After all, nothing really horrible was happening to that Jew: only that it was now possible to put him on a barrel with impunity, that people were beginning to realize that such activity wouldn’t be punished and that it provoked laughter.
But you know what?
At that moment I realized that the most important thing on earth was going to be never letting myself be pushed onto the top of the barrel. Never, by anybody. Do you understand?
Everything I was to do later, I was doing in order not to let myself get pushed up there.29
There will be no moral hierarchy to resistance. We will be pulled one way or another by fate and love. And these different routes of resistance will all be legitimate as long as we do not, as Edelman said, attempt “to survive at the expense of somebody else.” Many of those in the developing world, as climate change makes human habitation where they live difficult and then impossible, will be faced with the terrible moral quandary endured by Edelman. They will be denied the luxury of nonviolence. But if the ecosystem continues to disintegrate, we will all have to grapple with forms of resistance that, in the end, will permit us only to protect our dignity until the inevitable comes.
“The majority of us favored an uprising,” Edelman told Krall. “After all, humanity had agreed that dying with arms was more beautiful than without arms. Therefore we followed this consensus. In the Jewish Combat Organization there were only two hundred and twenty of us left. Can you even call that an uprising? All it was about, finally, was that we not just let them slaughter us when our turn came. It was only a choice as to the manner of dying.”30
V/The Rebel Caged
The most valuable blacks are those in prison, those who have the warrior spirit, who had a sense of being African. They got for their women and children what they needed when all other avenues were closed to them.
The greatest spirit of resistance among blacks [is] found among those in prison.1
—AUGUST WILSON, INTERVIEW WITH BILL MOYERS, OCTOBER 20, 1988
If I were a member of the class that rules, I would post men in all the neighborhoods of the nation, not to spy upon or club rebellious workers, not to break strikes or disrupt unions; but to ferret out those who no longer respond to the system in which they live. I would make it known that the real danger does not stem from those who seek to grab their share of wealth through force, or from those who seek to defend their property through violence, for both of these groups, by their affirmative acts, support the values of the system in which they live. The millions that I would fear are those who do not dream of the prizes that the nation holds forth, for it is in them, though they may not know it, that a revolution has taken place and is biding its time to translate itself into a new and strange way of life.2
—RICHARD WRIGHT, BLACK BOY
I drove four hours one rainy, cold morning to SCI (State Correctional Institution) Mahanoy in Frackville, Pennsylvania, from my home in Princeton, New Jersey, to see the black revolutionary Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s best-known political prisoner. We met in the reception area for the prisoners and their families. He sat hunched forward on the gray plastic table, his dreadlocks cascading down the sides of his face. The room resembled a high school cafeteria. It had vending machines on the wall by the entrance, which the prisoners were not allowed to operate, plastic chairs, a few tables, and a booth for the corrections officers. Small children, visiting their fathers or brothers, raced around the floor or wailed in their mothers’ arms.
Abu-Jamal, like the other prisoners in the room, was wearing a brown jumpsuit bearing the letters DOC—Department of Corrections. We dove immediately into a discussion about books. He spoke intently about the nature of empire, which he was currently reading voraciously about, and effective forms of resistance to tyranny throughout history.
Abu-Jamal was transferred in January 2012 to the general prison population after nearly thirty years in solitary confinement on death row. During those three decades, he was barred from physical contact with his wife, his children, and other visitors. He had been sentenced to death in 1982 for the December 9, 1981, killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. His sentence was amended to life without parole. The misconduct of the judge, flagrant irregularities in his trial, and tainted evidence have been criticized by numerous human rights organizations, including Amnesty International.3 Abu-Jamal, who was a young activist in the Black Panthers and later one of the most important radical journalists in Philadelphia, a city that a few decades earlier produced I. F. Stone, has long been the bête noire of the state. The FBI opened a file on him when he started working with the local chapter of the Black Panthers at the age of fifteen. He was suspended from his Philadelphia high school when he campaigned to rename the school for Malcolm X and distributed “black revolutionary student power” literature. Abu-Jamal has published seven books in prison, including his best-selling Live from Death Row, and he was at work on an eighth. Dick Gregory says in Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary, the documentary about Abu-Jamal, that he has single-handedly brought “dignity to the whole death row.” The late historian Manning Marable is quoted in the film saying: “The voice of black journalism in the struggle for the liberation of African American people has always proved to be decisive throughout black history. When you listen to Mumia Abu-Jamal, you hear the echoes of David Walker, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and the sisters and brothers who kept the faith with struggle, who kept the faith with resistance.”4
The authorities, as they did before he was convicted, have attempted to silence him in prison. Pennsylvania banned all recorded interviews with Abu-Jamal after 1996. In response to protests over the singling out of one inmate in the Pennsylvania correction system, the state banned recorded access to all its inmates. The ban is nicknamed “the Mumia Rule.” And the state did not stop there. In October 2014, days after Abu-Jamal gave a pre-recorded commencement address to graduates of Goddard College, the governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett, signed into law the Revictimization Relief Act. The law permits crime victims and prosecutors to go to court to prevent prisoners from making public statements that cause mental anguish. Governor Corbett was surrounded by police officers, victims’ advocates, and Faulkner’s widow, Maureen Faulkner, at the signing. He said that Mrs. Faulkner “has been taunted by the obscene celebrity that her husband’s killer has orchestrated from behind bars. This unrepentant cop killer has tested the limits of decency, while gullible activists and celebrities have continued to feed this killer’s ego at the expense of his victims.” In November 2014, Abu-Jamal and supporters filed a federal lawsuit in an attempt to overturn the law.5
“I was punished for communicating,” Abu-Jamal said.
Philosopher Cornel West says in the documentary, “The state is very clever in terms of keeping track, especially [of] the courageous and visionary ones, the ones [who] are long-distance runners. You can keep track of them, absorb ’em, dilute ’em, or outright kill ’em—you don’t have to worry about opposition to ’em.
“If you tell them the truth about the operation of our power, this is what happens to you,” he goes on. “Like Jesus on the cross. This is what happens to you.”
I was not permitted a pencil or paper during my four-and-a-half-hour conversation with Abu-Jamal. I wrote down his quotes immediately after I left the prison. These restrictions mirror the wider pattern of a society where the poor and the destitute, and especially those who
rise up in rebellion, are rendered invisible and voiceless.
The breadth of Abu-Jamal’s reading, which along with his writing and 3,000 radio broadcasts has kept his mind and soul intact, was staggering. His own books are banned in the prison. In conversation he swung from discussions of the Opium Wars between 1839 and 1860 to the Black Panthers to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to the series of legislative betrayals of the poor and people of color by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Democratic Party.
He quoted Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Huey P. Newton, Assata Shakur, Eric Foner, Gore Vidal, Cornel West, Howard Zinn, James Cone, and Dave Zirin. We talked about Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, Joseph Cinqué, Harriet Tubman, Charles Deslondes, Denmark Vesey, and Sojourner Truth. He was simultaneously reading Masters of War by Clara Nieto, How the World Works by Noam Chomsky, The Face of Imperialism by Michael Parenti, and Now and Then by Gil Scott-Heron. He wondered what shape the collapse of empire will take. And he despaired of the political unconsciousness among many incoming prisoners, some young enough to be his children.
“When I first got out in the yard,” he said, “and I heard groups of men talking about how Sarah was going to marry Jim or how Frank had betrayed Susan, I thought, Damn, these cats all know each other and their families. That’s odd. But after a few minutes I realized they were talking about soap operas. Television in prison is the great pacifier. They love Basketball Wives because it is ‘T and A’ with women of color. They know how many cars Jay-Z has. But they don’t know their own history. They don’t understand how they got here. They don’t know what is being done to them. I tell them they have to read, and they say, ‘Man, I don’t do books.’ And that is just how the empire wants it. You can’t fight power if you don’t understand it. And you can’t understand it if you don’t experience it and then dissect it.”
Abu-Jamal’s venom is reserved for liberal politicians such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, whom he excoriates for callously disempowering the poor and the working class on behalf of their corporate patrons. And he has little time for those who support them.
“It was Clinton that made possible the explosion of the prison-industrial complex,” he said, speaking of the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill.
He looked around the visiting area at the thirty-odd prisoners with their families.
“Most of these people wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Bill Clinton,” he said. “He and Barack Obama haven’t done anything for poor people but lock them up. And if our first African American president isn’t going to halt the growth of the prison-industrial complex, no president after him is going to do it. This prison system is here to stay. The poor and the destitute feed it. It is the empire’s solution to the economic crisis. Those who are powerless, who have no access to diminishing resources, get locked away. And the prison business is booming. It is one of the few growth industries left. It used to be that towns didn’t want prisons. Now these poor rural communities beg for them. You look down the list of the names of the guards and see two or three with the same last names. This is because fathers, brothers, spouses, work here together. These small towns don’t have anything else.”
The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world—743 adults per 100,000.6 Of the 2.3 million adults incarcerated in federal and state prisons and local jails, nearly 60 percent are nonwhite.7 He who has not been in jail does not know what the state is, Leo Tolstoy said.8
The Omnibus Crime Bill, pushed through the Senate with the help of Joe Biden, appropriated $30 billion to expand the nation’s prison program, state and local law enforcement, and border patrols over a six-year period.9 It gave $10.8 billion in federal matching funds to local governments to hire 100,000 new police officers over five years.10 It provided nearly $10 billion for the construction of new federal prisons.11 It instituted the three-strikes proposal that mandates a life sentence for anyone convicted of three “violent” felonies. The bill permitted children as young as thirteen to be tried as adults. It authorized the use of secret evidence. The prison population during the Clinton presidency jumped from 1.4 million to 2 million.12 Between 1982 and 2001, total state corrections expenditures increased each year, rising from $15.0 billion to $53.5 billion in real dollars, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). Between 2002 and 2010, according to the DOJ, expenditures fluctuated annually between $53.4 billion and $48.4 billion.13
Abu-Jamal talked about being a Black Panther and the use of violence as a form of political resistance throughout history. He remembered visiting the Chicago apartment where Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was shot to death by Chicago police and the FBI while he slept on December 4, 1969. He called Hampton, who was twenty-one when he was killed, “one of the bright lights.” Abu-Jamal choked up and his eyes glistened with tears. “Fred …,” he said as his voice trailed off.
“It used to be that a politician promised jobs, a chicken in every pot,” Abu-Jamal went on. “But in our new national security state, they promise law and order. They get elected by saying they will be tough on crime and by calling for the death penalty. Death sells. Fear sells. What was a crime by the state in the 1960s is now legal. The state can wiretap, eavesdrop, listen to phone calls, and break into homes. And there is nothing we can do about it. The mass incarceration and the mass repression impact every community to make people afraid and compliant.”
Abu-Jamal has written: “In this place, a dark temple of fear, an altar of political ambition, death is a campaign poster, a stepping-stone to public office.… In this space and time, in this dark hour, how many of us are not on death row?”14
“The brutality of the empire was exposed under George W. Bush,” he said to me. “The empire desperately needed a new face, a black face, to seduce the public. This is the role of Barack Obama. He is the black face of empire. He was pitched to us during the most recent presidential campaign by Bill Clinton, the same Clinton who gave us NAFTA in 1994 and abolished good-paying manufacturing jobs for millions of workers. The same Clinton who locked us up. Clinton and Obama represent the politics of betrayal at the heart of the corporatist machinery. And they have fooled a lot of people, especially black people. During slavery, and even post-Reconstruction, there were always a few black people who served the system. The role of these black servants to white power was to teach passivity in the face of repression. This is why Obama is president. Nothing has changed.”
Abu-Jamal saw hope in the Occupy movement, largely because white middle-class youths were beginning to experience the cruelty of capitalism and state repression that had long been visited on poor people of color. But, he added, we must recover our past if we are going to effectively resist. We must connect ourselves to the revolutionaries, radicals, and prophets who fought injustice before us. We must defy the historical amnesia that the corporate state seeks to cement into our consciousness. His book Faith of Our Fathers: An Examination of the Spiritual Life of African and African-American People sets out to do precisely this, to recover a past intellectual and spiritual life for African Americans that has been trivialized, ignored, or censored by the dominant culture.15 He was worried that the mindless diversions of popular culture and the assault by corporate power on education are keeping many from grasping not only what is happening but the continuity between modern systems of oppression and older systems of oppression.
“We would not be who we are as African Americans of this date were it not for the Reverend, the Prophet, Nat Turner—who brilliantly merged the religious with the political,” Abu-Jamal said in the film. “Who didn’t just talk about the world to come but fought to transform the world that is. You know, [Nat Turner] is honored and revered today—not because he could quote the Bible well, he could do that, but because he worked in the fields of life to get the slave master off of his neck, off of all of our necks.”
The vending machines in the reception area dispensed White Castle hamburgers, soda, candy, and Tastykake cupcakes. I dropped in the prepaid tokens—no money is a
llowed inside the prison—and the fast food tumbled into the vent. For Abu-Jamal, forced to eat prison food for decades, it was a treat, especially the Hershey’s bar. He watched as a boy darted past him toward his father.
“I didn’t see children for thirty years on death row,” he said quietly. “It is a delight to see them here. They are what is most precious, what the struggle is finally about.”
The effort to silence Abu-Jamal is part of the cultural drive to crush the remnants of the black prophetic tradition. This tradition, which stretches back to Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, has consistently named and damned the cruelty of imperialism and white supremacy. It has been our most astute critique of empire. The black prophetic tradition expressed radical truths with a clarity and moral force that have eluded most other critics of American capitalism. Obama first displayed his fear of this tradition when he betrayed his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, abetting the brutal character assassination of one of the nation’s most prophetic voices. And Obama has sustained this assault, largely through black surrogates such as the Rev. Al Sharpton, Tom Joyner, and Steve Harvey, in vicious attacks on Cornel West.
“Jeremiah Wright was the canary in the mine,” West told me when we spoke in Princeton, New Jersey, where we both live. “The black prophetic tradition has been emptied out. Its leaders have either been murdered or incarcerated.… A lot of political prisoners who represent the black prophetic tradition [are] in jail. They have been in there for decades. Or we have leaders who have completely sold out. They have been co-opted. And these are the three major developments. With soldout leaders, you get a pacified followership or people who are scared.
“The black prophetic tradition has been the leaven in the American democratic loaf,” West said. “What has kept American democracy from going fascist or authoritarian or autocratic has been the legacy of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Martin King, Fannie Lou Hamer. This is not because black people have a monopoly on truth, goodness, or beauty. It is because the black freedom movement puts pressure on the American empire in the name of integrity, decency, honesty, and virtue.”