--Please sign our Color of Change petition to Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner: Stop Defending Mumia Abu-Jamal's Unjust Conviction
(Note From Jamal Journal: this essay entitled “The Power of Truth is Final” was first published as an introduction for Mumia Abu-Jamal’s newest book, Murder Incorporated, Book Three: Perfecting Tyranny, just released by Prison Radio.)
"Conventional wisdom would have us believe that it is insane to resist this, the mightiest of empires, but what history really shows is that today’s empire is tomorrow’s ashes; that nothing lasts forever, and that to not resist is to acquiesce in your own oppression. The greatest form of sanity that anyone can exercise is to resist that force that is trying to repress, oppress, and fight down the human spirit." —Mumia Abu-Jamal
As we witness everyday, the brave truth-tellers of the current age are ridiculed, scorned, and marginalized as 'raving lunatics.' Some are eliminated. When the Empire is questioned or undressed, the noise machine beholden to the elite cries 'conspiracy theorist… traitor… apostate'—all of which quickly smears and deprecates this newly crowned 'public enemy,' one who is unafraid to speak the unspeakable truth. —Stephen Vittoria
Mumia Abu-Jamal once famously opined, “The state would rather give me an Uzi than a microphone.” More than five decades of intense surveillance, harassment, confinement, repression, and torture levelled against him by Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia Police Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, have graphically illustrated the truth of those words.
The United States government is terrified of what Mumia has to say. And with good reason. See, there is a reason slaves were never supposed to learn to read or write. A reason prisoners are best kept muted, retained hidden behind walls, unheeded. People like us are not supposed to tell these troublesome truths. The truth, Ramona Africa reminds us, is always dangerous to those pushing the lie.
Mumia tells the truth.
He has always told the truth, and he does it again here, writing alongside Stephen Vittoria in this third and final installment of their magnum opus Murder Incorporated.
These three books—Dreaming of Empire, America’s Favorite Pastime, and Perfecting Tyranny—deconstruct and lay bare the United States experiment in imperialism. Written by a captive rebel living under the hostile eye of the state, this historical trilogy exposes the continuous and deadly hypocrisy of empire.
Murder Incorporated builds on the work of Howard Zinn’s manifesto A People’s History of the United States. This work aims to expand the telling of the story of the United States from the front-line perspective of those dispossessed and discarded by the treachery of U.S. imperialist expansion.
It is important to recognize and respect the conditions under which this opus was written. Unlike other twenty-first century scholars, Mumia writes, researches, and publishes having no contact to a university library and no access to the Internet. He has never surfed the world wide web and has no quick access to books, essays, journal articles, or interview subjects. He is only permitted to have seven books in his cell at a time; any more than that are considered contraband.
In researching Murder Incorporated, Mumia had to constantly cull his stash of written material, absorbing all he could from each book before getting rid of it to make space for a new one. As has been his process since he first started publishing from prison, he took precise, careful, and scrupulously detailed notes of every book and article he read, along with page numbers and citation information. He wrote as small as possible, to fit as much material as he could into his limited number of notebooks.
At what other time and place has a history of this scope—a thoroughly detailed overview of a nation’s crimes of colonization from its inception to the present day—been crafted under such draconian measures? When has such a record of the crimes of a state been created by one of the state’s own victims, with every word penned under the state’s pretense of control?
Consider the barriers placed in the way of Abu-Jamal’s and Vittoria’s intellectual collaboration. Mumia’s access to visitation is strictly limited, and he can only speak on the telephone for fifteen minutes at a time, once a day. Just one fifteen-minute call, if he can get the guard to put in a slip for it. He is permitted two visits a week, to which he cannot bring even a pencil or piece of paper. He endures a full-body cavity strip search before and after every visit. For nearly a decade he was denied visits and phone calls. For two decades, and the first nine of his books, he wrote everything by hand with the mere cartridge of a ballpoint pen.
All visits are supervised, all phone calls recorded and surveilled, and all his mail is read by prison staff. Letters, books, or papers deemed “inappropriate” by the mailroom censors are discarded before they reach him.
In order to build the intellectual partnership that created Murder Incorporated, Vittoria and Abu-Jamal had to overcome the state’s exhaustive efforts to limit Mumia’s contact with the outside world. These are some of the constraints under which Murder Incorporated was researched and written. Abu-Jamal and Vittoria’s success is a testimony to their will, determination, and bond as writing partners.
The book you hold in your hands today is an act of protest and dissent. Its very existence defies the repression of the state. So does its content. While Murder Incorporated can and should be used in the polished hallways of academia, it is deeply rooted in the proud tradition of American protest literature.
Vittoria and Abu-Jamal seek to advance the interests of the exploited, evicted, imprisoned, and marginalized working class people by telling a history that does not flinch from the truth.
In this project, Murder Incorporated positions itself alongside Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, Vincent Harding’s There is a River, and Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation by embracing the historic imperative of truth telling. Like those great works, Murder Incorporated makes an intergenerationally significant contribution to the bank of historical political thought and social movement theory.
It is no accident that Murder Incorporated was co-written by a man in prison, a man who has spent the lion’s share of his life on death row. Scholar Joy James suggests that prisons function as political and intellectual sites that are largely hidden from our mainstream discourse. Those warehoused within write with “unique and controversial insights into idealism, warfare, and social justice.”
Thus, the prisoner, who is denied access to any of the privileges and protections afforded to citizens of the state, who is subjected instead to indignity and deprivations, is uniquely empowered to criticize the state. Moreover, because the prison writer typically has no access to editors or publishers, and writes with no expectation of receiving remuneration from their writing, they are able to write what they know to be true. Their words are uncompromised.
In this regard the prisoner is free in a way that no one else is free. Mumia has nothing to lose from telling the truth. The state has already done everything in its power to silence him. There are no remaining threats that can be leveled against him. There is no tactic of abuse or control left in the state’s arsenal that it not already been inflicted on him. He has withstood beatings, torture, and near-fatal gunshot wounds.
From the time he was fourteen years old, working as a young organizer for the Black Panther Party, he had already earned security index status from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. He spent his teen years and early twenties under unyielding police surveillance and harassment.
Since his arrest and framing in 1981, he has weathered forty years of incarceration—separated from friends, family, and community. Twenty-eight of those years he spent in solitary confinement with a pending execution.
He survived two death warrants, each of which gave him thirty days to live. He survived a life threatening battle with complications from Hepatitis C, dragging himself back from the brink of death after the prison’s vicious and deliberate medical neglect sent him into a coma.
He won court battles to overturn laws written and passed by the Pennsylvania legislature with the express specific purpose of forbidding him from publishing his writing. Censorship was discussed at the federal level, on the Senate floor. None of it has stopped him.
He is perhaps the world’s most prolific imprisoned radical. Perfecting Tyranny is his twelfth published book, and he has authored thousands of radio commentaries.
Within a month after being shot and arrested in 1981, he was writing essays from Holmesburg Prison. When warrants were issued for his death in 1995 and 1999 while he sat awaiting execution, Mumia still continued to write. Recovering from near death in the prison infirmary in 2015, Mumia continued to write. And why not?
The state has already made up its mind to kill him. He is alive because he, and the movement behind him, have fought the state at every turn, sometimes winning extraordinary victories—like the overturning of his death sentence—and sometimes grinding into a bitter stalemate, but never giving up ground. The state has not refrained from killing Mumia: it has failed to kill Mumia. What possible incentive could he have to flinch from the truth?
Given the forces arrayed against Mumia, it may appear as a miracle that this book—or any of Mumia’s eleven previous books—was published at all. It was no miracle. It was the hard work of a movement.
Mumia’s relentless courage and resilience, and Stephen Vittoria’s triumphant accompaniment, created an intellectual bond that would not be denied. This, combined with the dedication and unswerving solidarity of hundreds of thousands of activists and artists and lawyers across the country and the globe, have forced this book through the bars of the prison into printing presses and into bookstores.
This book is a reminder of our individual and collective power. The great Howard Zinn once remarked that to be hopeful in catastrophic times is not naive. Rather, it reflects an understanding that history is as much about courage and sacrifice as it is about cruelty. Abu-Jamal and Vittoria teach us the same lesson.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, relegated to a carceral underworld, has funneled his harrowing experience of captivity into an extraordinary act of truth-telling that benefits our common survival.
Stephen Vittoria imparts his searing analysis, poignant honesty, and tremendous tenacity to craft this labor of courage and love and get it past the censors so that this vital work could be in our hands.
Mumia cautions us to remember that “What history really shows us is that today’s empire is tomorrow’s ashes, that nothing lasts forever.” It is humbling to be taught this lesson from one of our nation’s most famous political prisoners, who is also a scholar, a revolutionary, and an educator.
A gift to us, and a labor of love, this final book in the remarkable trilogy Murder Incorporated is the result of unwavering and courageous commitment. It elevates our human spirits and encourages us to have full faith in our ability to change the world.
Again we recall the wisdom of Ramona Africa: the truth is dangerous to those whose power depends on the lie. This book is dangerous. This is why slaves were never taught to write. This is what happens when prisoners contribute to the bank of political thought.
Empires hold their power through the silence of their victims; by breaking that silence, Mumia deals a devastating blow to the empire that cages him. Murder Incorporated exposes all the dirty, vulgar, shameful actions of the United States—hundreds of pages of the state’s blunt secrets revealed, exposing the continuous and deadly hypocrisy of the empire.
This historic collaboration between Stephen Vittoria and Mumia Abu-Jamal stands amid the pantheon of social dissent against tyranny and despotism. Its hope and optimism stand as testimony to the unstoppable resilience of the human spirit.
--For more information, please visit: www.murder-incorporated.org
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