Mumia Abu Jamal: Murder Incorporated

Murder Incorporated: Dreaming of Empire Book 1 (Empire, Genocide and Manifest Destiny)

By Mumia Abu Jamal* and Stephen Vittoria

Prison Radio (2018)

Inspired by Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, this book is a carefully compiled history of the genocidal racism that forms the bedrock of US history and culture.

Murder Incorporated begins by exploring the Aryan and New Israel mythology embedded in the writings of the early colonists and so-called founding fathers. This was the same Aryan mythology Hitler would borrow to justify the attempted extermination of European Jews. According to the myth,  a selected subgroup of Aryans  reportedly originating near modern day Iran) migrated north to Germany and west to England. They purposely kept their bloodline pure by annihilating all the inferior tribes they crossed paths with.

The writings of North American settlers are also full of New Israel “Manifest Destiny” mythology. The latter regards the continent as a “new Israel” promised to them by divine Providence – Just as Palestine was promised to Jewish slaves escaping Egypt.

Mumia and Vittoria quote extensively from  Thomas Jefferson, the founding father most commonly extolled for his “liberalism.” His writings are full of these myths, which he uses to justify both the extermination of Native Americans and the immensely profitable institution of African slavery. In his business journal about whipping boys as young as 10 to force them to work in his nail factory.

The authors also definitively settle the question of whether he “raped” Sally Hemings, the slave who bore him six additional slaves. They also refute modern accounts of Jefferson’s so-called “love affair” with Hemings – by pointing a 16-year-old slave girl is incapable of consenting to have intercourse with her 47-year-old master.

Moving on, the book describes the founding fathers’ deliberate decimation of dozens of indigenous civilizations over the next 75 years. They provide an equally graphic analysis of the western slave trade, which would cost the lives and/or freedom of 60 million Africans. This sections includes a fascinating discussion of the Arab trade in African slaves that preceded it.

The following chapter covers the brutal class war between farmers and workers and wealthy planters and merchants who forced them to fight in the War of Independence and later wrote the Constitution to strip them of their basic political and economic rights. Citing Zinn and others, the authors detail scores of food and debtor prison riots that began 50 years before the Declaration of Independence.

Setting the stage for two centuries of bloody foreign conquest, a long chapter on the Monroe Doctrine (1824) leaves no doubt the founding fathers knew they were building an empire from the outset. The Monroe Doctrine would be used to justify the US invasion of Mexico in 1846, of Cuba and the Philippines in 1898, of Colombia in 1983 (leading to the US occupation and annexation of Panama), of multiple Latin American invasions under Wilson and his successors and the 56 successful or attempted CIA coups to overthrow democratically elected governments.***

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*In 1982 Mumia Abu Jamal was sentenced to death for the murder of a Philadelphia police offer, despite a local gang member’s confession to committing the murder. In 2011 his sentence was commuted to life without parole. He continues to fight for a new trial. See Mumia Wins Right to Re-Open Appeals

**Allowing the US to occupy and annex more than half of Mexico (which at the time included California, Nevada, Texas, Utah, New Mexico and parts of Wyoming, Colorado and Oklahoma).

***Including Australia in 1975. See John Pilger: Gough Whitlam 1975 Coup that Ended Australian Independence

 

 

 

The Failing Empire: No Use Trying to Pretty It Up

Guest Post by Shelby Courtland

Shelby left this great comment on an article I posted yesterday by Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese (Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese: The Failing Empie). The original article raises important points but is a little too PC for my tastes. I think the time has come to be confront head on the obscene reality of 21st century America, which Shelby does very eloquently with her comment. You can read her blog at https://shelbycourtland.wordpress.com/

Basically, what this is saying is that, “The U.S. is dog shit!” That’s the truth of the matter and there’s no use attempting to pretty it up.

When the focus of this hole is to continuously roam around the globe starting up shit while neglecting what’s going on on the home front, what is going down, is going to go down. When the focus is continuously on building up a military, and I mean, missiles and drones, to the detriment of our infrastructure, education, health and welfare of our citizens, this is what happens. When the world gets fed up with the fact that the U.S. has taken hypocrisy to the extreme by shouting about how humanitarian it is while bombing countries for no reason, the world will eventually get tired of this and make this hole redundant which is what is happening now.

Millions of people in the United States are living in poverty; their situation is akin to them living in a third world country. Millions have simply given up looking for a job. And yet, the government would have you think that the jobs rate is excellent and that we are actually adding jobs. That is a lie! Adult children have moved back in with their parents because they cannot afford to live on their own. Rents are just too high and who can afford a mortgage and all that entails with owning a home? It is impossible for millions. Home ownership is a nightmare! It is no American dream. Homeless tent cities are in every state. Waiting lists for affordable housing would wrap around this globe times too numerous to count. But we have got fake money to pay for military weapons so that we can ignore what’s going down here and concentrate on dropping the Mother Of All Bombs on Afghanistan and for what? For nothing. It is merely a distraction and a ruse to continue to pay for more bombs while children sit in schools hungry while receiving a substandard education. This hole is done for and now the whole world is aware of this and is acting accordingly. Many of us called it and now, we are finally vindicated because what we said would happen is what is happening now!

And a Trump sideshow, dropping MOABs in Afghanistan and a fake ass ploy about Russia interfering with the elections is just another attempt to deflect from all that is going down because they’ve got nothing! And when you’re playing cards and yours is not the hand to beat, you bluff. Well, the bluff is being called, and the cards are on the table and they stink! So, yes, this ’empire’ is finally in its death throes. “Death to the empire!”

Empire Building US-Style

Apologies of an Economic Hitman

Directed by Stelios Kouloglou (2008)

Film Review

This is a very intriguing Greek documentary about John Perkins, author of the 2004 book Confessions of an Economic Hitman. In the film, Perkins summarizes his recruitment by the NSA to work as an “economic hitman.” Despite his close affiliation to US intelligence, he was technically under the employ of a private engineering company called Charles T Main Inc. It was his role to approach third world presidents with bribes to accept World Bank loans for massive infrastructure projects – which were usually built by major US companies such as Bechtel and Halliburton.

This was done with the deliberate intention of saddling the third world countries with debt they couldn’t repay. Their only option would be to seek refinancing from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which usually demanded they slash public services and open up their resources to further exploitation by Wall Street interests .

As Perkins describes it, this was the strategy of choice (as opposed to direct military intervention) for expanding US empire between 1945-2000. Any third world leader who refused to play ball was openly threatened with assassination. The first step in dealing with a recalcitrant leader was to send in the “jackals,” CIA officers and contractors who would try to instigate a military coup. If this failed, US intelligence would send in an assassination team. If this also failed, they would fall back on military invasion and occupation (always a last resort).

The film zeroes in on the assassination (via plane crash) of Ecuadorian president Jaime Roldós Aguilera and Panamanian president Omar Torrijos in 1981. It also provides interesting background to the US invasion of Iraq, following Saddam Hussein’s rejection of a massive Bechtel oil pipeline project.

I was previously unaware of the CIA effort to instigate a military coup against Saddam in 1996. The CIA discarded the option of assassinating him because he had too many doubles. Even his own bodyguards never knew if they were guarding the real Saddam.