review: Murder, Incorporated: Empire, Genocide and Manifest Destiny.. by Mumia Abu-Jamal

Murder, Incorporated: Empire, Genocide and Manifest Destiny. 
Book One: Dreaming of Empire.

by Mumia Abu-Jamal and Stephen Vittoria. Foreword by Chris Hedges.    Prison Radio, 345 pp., $20.     Reviewed by Todd Steven Burrough

…..  PROUDLY, ABU-JAMAL and Vittoria—unafraid to balance profanity (as seen soon, they literally call America’s bullshit historical analysis bullshit), American mass-media popular culture, and historic racial irony—give the middle finger to America’s view of itself.

Published for the first time in print by Prison Radio, Abu-Jamal’s longtime commentary syndication arm and advocate in prison, this book is the first fully original work from Abu-Jamal since 2009’s “Jailhouse Lawyers,” and the (gonzo and scholarly) sweat put in is seen in the final product. They successfully prove Frederick Douglass right: that America is guilty of crimes that would make a savage nation cower in shame.

America’s right to exist, Abu-Jamal and Vittoria correctly argue, was not given by divine right or won through humanitarian acts. Instead, the United States is a land of criminals—founded by criminals, who committed violent criminal acts to keep and expand it and now do malicious actions to maintain it. These facts are stated in the strongest way possible.

From Christopher Columbus, the “kidnapper and slave trader,” to Thomas Jefferson, a rapist and white supremacist, to even the lies about the Revolutionary War being about a three-cent tax on tea and not about poor whites, who were radicalized by their masters, representatives of the British Empire, into violent action.

Native Americans are massacred by “a ravenous beast” they fatally befriended, South America is invaded by human “parasites” looking for gold, and America is founded by slave-trade finances: “Supporters of [Thomas] Jefferson, probably better described as apologists for Jefferson, usually defend and re-write his dark side with the idea that he was simply a product of his times and/or that he was wedged between a political rock and a hard place trying valiantly to hold together his new and precious republic.

Bullshit. It was about money. Jefferson was enamored with the money he was making on his slave holdings. All these bastards were.”

After listing and detailing centuries of America’s human rights violations to Africans and to indigenous peoples in the Americas, actions that this nation portrays as its historical and controversial founding conflicts, the reader emerges bloody and depressed.

This depression deepens when, along the way, the authors compare U.S. past foreign policy with its present. So “Murder, Incorporated” ends with profiles of resistance in the form of abolitionist Harriet Tubmanand activist the Rev. Malcolm Boyd, two religious heroes from different races and centuries who refused America’s socio-political hegemony, who showed it was possible to stand tall and strong in the eye of the red, white and blue hurricane.

ABU-JAMAL’S WRITING style—his dramatic narrative openings, followed by intellectual content, lyricism (“sometimes the world dwells in a proverb,” or describing Douglass as “hurling his own omen to history”), and closing with a naked, concluding contempt for the status quo—shine through.

His library of compiled Op-Ed columns/broadcast commentaries and original history books has continued to grow, despite his fighting to maintain his health while battling in 2018 for a new trial. This work, the first of a trilogy about America’s evil history, seems to be a magnum opus for both authors—a declarative statement, if not a final thought. At 64, Abu-Jamal is a burgeoning elder statesman of Black American radical letters.

But the core question remains: is this very decolonizing but ultimately regurgitating Left history book necessary? Needed?

The question can be answered depending on the point of the view of the questioner. If the questioner, for example, believes that facts are important in an age in which facts are under attack, then the answer is yes. To give another example: If American history just needs a white-liberal correction, if Zinn doesn’t need an update to get the gist, then the answer is no.

But if the Koches and people like them [link to Abu-Jamal audio excerpt] continue their fight to control American history, and their regressive versions becomes the accepted ones in sections of America, destroying decades of intellectual and physical activism from various groups, will the liberal consensus matter then?

Conversely, what if Pacifica Radio doesn’t survive, and one day, YouTube takes down all the radical historical material that Leftists, Black nationalists and others have placed there? Then what? History from below must be found somewhere that is controlled by those below, in places that white liberals—fair-weather friends at best, and even then, only when Republicans scare them—are too scared to go, in places that don’t help their careers.

The writers, both of whom can celebrate decades of producing nonfiction-as-resistance, think this book is necessary because imperialism—and the racism accompanying it—is portrayed as normative instead of a series of evil, greedy choices by evil, greedy white men, and that might be enough to justify it.

Approved or not (and it hopes not), “Murder, Incorporated” is proud to be from the margins of American history and polite company. The sledgehammer provided here may not be of use to many right now.

But, like Abu-Jamal’s nine other books, it should stay in a hidden, safe place, next to other less abstract just-in-case weapons.

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