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Mumia Abu-Jamal

Marc Lamont Hill:  Peace family. This is your brother, Marc Lamont Hill, and this is

Mumia Abu-Jamal: Mumia. You know who that is.

Marc Lamont Hill:  You know the name y’all, that’s right – Mumia Abu-Jamal. I’m Marc Lamont Hill, here on The Classroom and The Cell Podcast. So glad to hear y’all voice as we enter this new year. This is the first official episode recorded in 2024. Happy New Year Mu!

Mumia Abu-Jamal: Happy New Year Marc. It’s a new year, but not a new struggle. 

Marc Lamont Hill:  You ain’t never lied, man, you ain’t never lied. I’ve been thinking a lot about this upcoming year. And I know people do resolutions and commitments and all of that stuff. I’m not a big fan of that stuff, because, you know, it fades away. As you think about the new year, is there anything that you hope we leave behind in 2023?

Mumia Abu-Jamal: Yeah, but guess what? It ain’t, you know, it’s kind of like old Doc, Cornell West. said “hope on a rope.” I mean, listen, you can hope all you want, but if you don’t work for it ain’t happening. Although, let me say this: I think we touched on this a little earlier, especially we were talking about the Middle East. I think that this is a moment of eye opening, not tied to the year, but to the events that we’re seeing as human beings. And what that means is, you know, when minds are open, new consciousness flows, new ideas emerge, and people begin seeing the world in new ways. Yeah, and I think this is the time for that.

Marc Lamont Hill:  I think that’s right. I’m hoping that – and I agree with you – you know. Ain’t nothing magical gonna to happen when the clock strikes to make us leave something in 2023 but if I had to hope that something is fading away, as you said, not because of the calendar, but because of the events, it would be the innocence, American innocence. We need an end to American innocence. You know, you talk about the Middle East. Just now you referenced it, and you’re right. I think that that gave us a window into not just how awful things are –

Facility Recording: This is a from Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution, Mahanoy. This call is subject to recording and monitoring.

Marc Lamont Hill: We didn’t just get a window into what’s happening abroad, we also got a window into how the US supports and funds that, and I’m hoping, you know what I’m saying? And so the end of American innocence. Why isn’t Biden calling for a ceasefire? Why are we sending money and weapons? We should have that view for every issue going on in the world.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: Yeah, absolutely, but it’s especially so when we talk about Israel, because, as I’ve suggested to you at least twice, Israel is a regional hedgemon. It is the most powerful military force in that part of the world, which is astonishing only because you know the American narrative and the Zionist narrative that we received for most of our lives is that Israel is this small, tiny, weak, little…

Marc Lamont Hill:  Right. That needs our help.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: Right. Yeah.

Marc Lamont Hill:  Yeah.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: I mean, come on, man, come on. It may have been that in 1948 and that’s doubtful, but…

Marc Lamont Hill:  Right.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: It certainly ain’t true today.

Marc Lamont Hill:  Yeah, no, I think that’s right. And I’m hoping that as we watch what’s happening in Haiti right now and as we observe the continued struggle in Sudan right now, we’ll be equally sort of sober and critical in saying, You know what? These revolutions, these struggles and this oppression…

Facility Recording: This is a from Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution, Mahanoy. This call is subject to recording and monitoring.

Marc Lamont Hill:  We’ll recognize that all of this stuff that happens around the globe happens because there’s a budget attached to it, because there’s weapons attached to it, because there’s policies attached to it. And we’re not just the peacekeepers of the world trying to figure out how to, you know, “everybody just calm down” like, that’s not a–we’re the people

Mumia Abu-Jamal: No that ain’t the role, that’s the rhetoric, but that ain’t the role, and, you know, think about this: I mean, you know, we all kind of come upon and play with contradictions, because life is rife with contradictions. You know, we’re contradictory because we’re human, but for a country that was born in an anti-royalty, anti-imperial revolution against the Great British Empire–how comes it that people struggling against their oppressors around the world, find that the United States plays a role in deepening their oppression, not lightening their oppression?

Marc Lamont Hill:  Right.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: How does that happen? And it happens because when countries take on new roles, they become new things. You know…

Marc Lamont Hill:  Ooh, that’s good, yeah.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: There is no such thing as imperial democracy. The terms are…

Marc Lamont Hill: (laughing) Inherently contradictory. 

Mumia Abu-Jamal: inherently contradictory. It’s like the saying “military intelligence,” come on, you know. Those two roles are antagonistic to each other. And you know, when you become an empire, democracy has to die, it has to be sacrificed to create that empire. 

Marc Lamont Hill:  And I think people are awake, are awakening to the reality that the United States is an empire. That’s obvious for some academics, it’s obvious for a lot of radical activists, but for the average person, we’re just a country doing our thing, and they’re just a country doing their thing. But the idea that we are an empire, or the idea that while, you know, land acquisition by force is kind of a relic of, you know, the pre-World War eras, we still do it just by other means. We have proxies, we have clients, we have agents. And again, what you pointed out what’s going on in the Middle East is one piece of it. But we have to look at Latin America. We have to look at Africa. We have to look at the Caribbean. And when we see it in all those places, and we see the same familiar fingerprints, the United States, France, Germany, Britain, you know, we start to see that the age of empire didn’t leave. It just went–it just changed clothes to changed its MO, but it’s the same practice. And so…

Mumia Abu-Jamal: Right.

Marc Lamont Hill:  from–Yeah, and that’s why I say the end of innocence. The end of innocence. We can’t vote anymore as if we’re innocent. We can’t say, “Oh, if Biden could just do a little more, if Congress could just vote a little better, we’d be okay.” We gotta understand that this is not a bug of our system. It’s a feature.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: That’s right, that’s right. It’s constituent. It’s constitutive of it, in fact. You know, unless we kind of carry that with us in our consciousness, you know, we’ll fall prey, you know, to the foolishness, 

Marc Lamont Hill:  Yeah.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: because it’s easy for us to forget, because that truth is so powerful and so overarching, right?

Marc Lamont Hill:  Yeah.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: But it’s not reinforced. I mean, you know, you won’t read this in The Times, or whatever you know, the daily paper you have in your neighborhood, if you still have one. But you remember the cat Chalmers Johnson?

Marc Lamont Hill:  Mm, yeah.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: Oh, man, he wrote the book, his biggest book of his lifetime was Blowback, and people began ordering and reading it after 911 because he explained it all. And this was a cat who was essentially a rightist, you know, right-wing thinker, who grew up in the Navy and had a very militaristic view. And then, you know, he was an autodidact. So he learned very quickly. A friend of his on the boat, taught him Japanese, not just how to speak it, but how to read it and write it. So during the Second World War, when he went over there, he began reading the royal–the records of the empire, the Japanese Empire, at that time, right? And he got a great awakening. He was like, “Whoa! This is like, familiar.” (laughing)

Marc Lamont Hill: (laughing) Real familiar.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: Because, yeah, because an empire is essentially the same thing. No matter what kind of empire it is, it has an imperial identity. 

Marc Lamont Hill:  (laughing) Yeah.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: And he matched that to the American imperium. And he began noticing things that he had never noticed before, like in Blowback, he talks about there over 800–think about this–800 military bases by the United States, all around the world. 

Marc Lamont Hill:  Wow, wow.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: 800!

Marc Lamont Hill:  That’s a stunning number.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: It’s astonishing. I mean, Rome didn’t have nothing like that, you know.  And Rome was the prototype, right?

Marc Lamont Hill:  Yeah.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: And you know, it–he became a right, rightist, I don’t want to say right wing, but a right leaning, anti-imperialist. Because he saw that essentially empires eat up and destroy democratic features of the country in which it emerges–its home country. And that was not cool with him. And I read like four of his books, and every one was like an eye opener and fascinating. But to read this cat from that kind of anti-imperialist land was remarkable. You know, he wasn’t a Marxist, he wasn’t a leftist, he wasn’t a radical, but he believed in democracy.

Marc Lamont Hill:  If you believe in democracy in any form or fashion and you engage the nation state, the modern nation state, you’re always going to have your hopes dashed. You’re always going to get some cold water splashed in your face, you know, because it’s not what these things are.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: No, no. It has the rhetorics of democracy, but it never has the practice,

if we just organize a little more,

Marc Lamont Hill:  Right. And the problem is, we continue to operate as if that is, again, a bug, right? That’s something that we can fix if we just do our democracy a little better, if we just elect the right leader, if we just

Mumia Abu-Jamal: Right!

Marc Lamont-Hill: organize a little more

Mumia Abu-Jamal: (laughing)

Marc Lamont Hill: we can get we can close the gap.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: Yeah!

Marc Lamont Hill: And what we don’t seem to understand is that that’s not how this thing works, that nation states are inherently violent. They are, by design, exclusionary. They only live through forms of various forms of violence. It’s not that, as Weber talked about, you know, Max Weber, it’s not. It’s about having this: they have a monopoly on violence. States don’t want to end violence, they want the monopoly on violence. And so, as long as that’s happening, whenever you go out looking for democracy or dreaming about democracy, or fetishizing democracy, as some folks do, you’re going to end up thoroughly, thoroughly disappointed. And that’s why I, you know, don’t preach that, you know, like I said in my opening, I say in my conclusion, before the benediction. And as we move forward, as we age, we gotta end this expectation of innocence. We gotta shed ourselves of the innocence, because the innocence will set us up for more, not just disappointment, but it’ll undermine our ability to get more free. It’ll undermine our struggle for liberation, because we keep pretending that this structure, this system, this institution, has the capacity to produce something that it just can’t do – it just ain’t got it.

Facility Recording: You have one minute left.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: Well said, brother, but let me put a twist on that, if I may?

Marc Lamont Hill:  Yes, sir.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: Innocence is for babies. (laughing)

Marc Lamont Hill:  Right, right.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: We need to, like, grow up and be adults about it, it’s that real. I mean, it’s one thing, if kids believe in, you know, Santa Claus and, you know, the Moon Fairy or Easter Bunny – that’s cute. But for us to believe in a democracy that we have never seen…

Marc Lamont Hill:  Never seen.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: Or have seen more in its violation than its application, then we have to, like, kind of grow up, you know, put on our big boy and big girl pants and like, act like we know.

Marc Lamont Hill:  That’s so real. We can’t just grow old. We got to grow up too. That’s the charge for all of us, man, that’s the charge for all of us. My brother, it is so good to talk to you in this new year. I couldn’t imagine a better way of starting my new year, my first day of the year.

Facility Recording: Thank you for using Securis.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: Love you brother.

Marc Lamont Hill:  Love you too man. On the MOVE. Man, you just heard the first episode of the new year 2024, of The Classroom and The Cell Podcast. Make sure you check this episode out, as well as the previous seven episodes that have been recorded. They’re all on the Marc Lamont Hill official YouTube channel. You can check them out just by visiting YouTube and going to Marc Lamont Hill. You can also hit the “Subscribe” button. That way you can get episodes regularly and get notifications of new episodes as you check out the old episodes. And of course, you can get a whole lot of other great content on the Marc Lamont Hill official YouTube channel. And if you’re so inclined, hit the “Join” button, become a part of the official channel family, so that you can not just listen and subscribe, but also support the expansion and the growth and the maintenance of this channel, where we’re trying to give you radical political education, we’re trying to give you critical analysis. We’re trying to give you something different than you can get in the normal news outlet. So check us out, Marc Lamont Hill on the official YouTube channel. And, of course, support Mumia Abu-Jamal by purchasing all of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s books. He is one of the most prolific authors of our time. Check out Prison Radio to listen to Mumia’s voice in other venues. And of course, as always, let’s keep struggling. All right, family, have a wonderful 2024 we hope to be a part of it every step of the way. Peace.

These commentaries recorded by Prison Radio.