Hello. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal, and I’m giving you an excerpt from the new book Murder Incorporated written by myself and my coauthor Stephen Vittoria from chapter four, “The Murderers of the World Arrive in the Americas.”
When the smoke cleared over, two-thirds of the dead were Lakota women and children. Wounded Knee would mark the bookend of the last chapter of the so-called Indian wars. It would be the harbinger of a century of such bloodletting that the world would regard it as an era of nightmare.
But long before Verdun, before Dachau, Manchuria, or Hiroshima, there were massacres like Wound Knee for five centuries blessed by priests and promoted by politicians. The tormentors, genocidiers rapists, and torturers were Spanish, English, Portuguese, and Danish.
They were Europeans sent by a crucified Jew to vanquish paradise and bring hell to this green earth. They purified this new space with fire, blood, dung, and bones, and called it holy before the Lord. Of the people they met who once radiated such beauty and health like demigods in a terrestrial heaven, they left a bare remnant less than one half of 1%.
Their job done, they celebrated the death of an estimated 100 million people by pronouncing them savages and praising Christopher Columbus,l the discoverer. An indigenous writer from the Maya would preserve the following words into the texts. Chilam Balam, regarding the white Lords who invaded Mayan life.
He wrote, “They taught fear and they withered the flowers so that their flower should live. They maimed and destroyed the flowers of others. Marauders by day, offenders by night, murderers of the world.”
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.