Introduction from Julia Wright:
TO THE ATTENTION OF THE INTERNATIONAL MUMIA COLLECTIVES
[ I was asked by the Mumia German Collective to briefly introduce Mumia to the yearly Rosa Luxemburg Conference in Berlin to which Mumia never fails to send messages. Please find Mumia’s message below and my introduction.
Peace, Julia ].
“The voice you are about to hear is the voice of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
That voice has been coming to you year after year – for years. 42 years and counting,
For longer than some of you have been alive.
Mumia is Black, poor, a veteran Black Panther, a passionate MOVE defender, a journalist, an educator, a historian, a musician, a father and a grandfather and a leader – our leader. A respected elder.
Why are we fighting to keep the man behind the voice alive ? Why does it count ?
Ras Segal said Gaza is a textbook case of genocide. We have long been saying Mumia is a textbook case of injustice in the American so-called justice system. An injustice whose mindset goes back to slavery.
So the timeline of that injustice is long.
Time is long.
Those were the last public words of W.E.B. DuBois in Accra : ” Time is Long “.
Yes, the time of injustice is too long.
So what is Mumia’s timeline – and what have we done to prolong his lifeline?
After a racist and politicized 1982 trial after Mumia was illegally framed and found guilty of the shooting death of a white cop, Mumia was sentenced to death.He has always claimed his innocence.
We, the movement, saved him from the lethal injection but he went on to slow death row or death by incarceration – in other words, life without parole.
There in 2015, he almost died from Hepatitis C – had to sue the prison for a life saving drug considered too costly and again we saved him.
Then in 2020 when George Floyd was bloodchoked in broad daylight and the nine minutes plus of his agony went around the world, we let the world know that behind our prison walls there were thousands of George Floyds bloodchoked in darkness every day.
Then in 2021, Mumia caught COVID and had open heart surgery, double bypass.
Again we saved his life, brought him back. The world was ona move.
Finally Mumia’s last appeal took place last year on the basis of six boxes of exculpatory evidence – including witness bribery, racist jury manipulation – hidden from his lawyers for 36 years.
So many letters and petitions were sent to African American Judge Lucretia Clemons that they could fill several volumes – from the United Nations, judges, lawyers,trade unions worldwide, even children wrote.
The Judge took her time and said “No” and sent him back to slow death row where aged 70 he is resisting more than ever.
Mumia is everywhere !
Mumia won’t go away !
Which is a feat in itself because like all political prisoners Mumia is meant to be invisible – that is why he was locked away.
In the USA, political prisoners are not recognized as an official category even though they are de facto prisoners of the Police State’s wars against the radicals and revolutionaries resisting the onset of their own genocide.
The deep state needs its political prisoners to remain invisible to maintain the illusion of American democracy.
But every year, every day that passes, Mumia speaks and writes and stays visible and vocal with our help.
Today in spite of the concrete walls, in spite of the steel of his bars, in spite of the rejected appeals, in spite of a denied cardiac diet which is his human right, in spite of the arbitrary use against all our incarcerated elders of solitary confinement as torture,Mumia is still able to say loud and clear :
” There are No Borders to Consciousness “
” There are No Borders to Consciousness”.
Listen to Mumia Abu-Jamal ….”
Mumia Abu-Jamal 6:22
Who runs the world? Hallo Freunde, wie gehts{?). As we look out into the world, we once again view the spectacle of war. It is to be sure, a colonial war: one fought by a regional hegemon, Israel against what is essentially an unarmed population, Gaza, but one side has the most sophisticated weapons including fighter jets, while the other side has well, rocks. To be fair, the other side has missiles, yet, but most of them are unable to pierce, what has been called the Iron Dome, which safely detonates over 90% of all missiles, which are incoming. One is reminded of the overwhelming power of the US military when it launched the Iraq War, and later, the war in Afghanistan, in March and August of 2003 respectively. The Iraq War promised, in the words of former US President George W. Bush, weaponry that would evoke both shock and awe. It turned out to be disastrous, in the human and social costs, with millions becoming refugees, and both societies shattered. The wars began as a kind of neoconservative fever dream. Took trillions out to the US budget, and did little to support US objectives. The Iraq war pitched as a search for weapons of mass destruction, found nothing of value or strategic. As for Afghanistan, the US negotiated a withdrawal that left the Taliban in control of the ancient country that became known as the graveyard of empires. And although the neocons launched the wars to change the face of the Middle East, most foreign affairs scholars consider the Iraq-Afghanistan wars as two of the biggest blunders in American foreign policy and foreign affairs. What this shows us is that there is a limit to the reach of military power. Countries can mobilize truly, but if they can’t reach their objectives, that weaponry is wasted. The Iraq-Afghanistan wars are also instructive in another respect. They were preceded by the biggest anti-war protests in world history. But what’s the point you ask? Didn’t these protests around the world mass marches fail? Yes, if you mean they failed to stop the wars. But history has another judgment. For history shows that they the people were right, and their elected leaders, the neocon think tanks, much of the corporate media, and of course, the military industrial complex, were wrong. It also means that, in future protests may have to actually be bigger, bigger and bigger. And perhaps labor actions should be integrated into such protests. Those vast protests, show the leakages and to be honest, the weaknesses of representative democracy for when the so called representative ignores the will of the people, that’s not democracy. That’s the opposite of democracy. That’s autocracy, under a democratic mask. So who runs the world? The people do when they fight long enough, hard enough. The great black leader Frederick Douglass once said, power concedes nothing without demand. It never has, and never will. So make the demand and build, make the demand and build with love, not fear. Hier spricht, Mumia Abu Jamal, Auf Wiedersehen
