Mumia Abu-Jamal - Murder Incorporated, Book Two: Americas Favorite Pasttime

Copyright Street Legal Cinema,

Stephen Vittoria, Mumia Abu-Jamal

Published by Prison Radio

San Francisco

First Published in 2019

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher:

Prison Radio, P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94141

Edited by Justin Lebanowski

Cover Design by Robert Guillory

Interior Design by Rocco Melillo

eBook / April 2019

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Abu-Jamal, Mumia Vittoria, Stephen. Murder Incorporated: Empire, Genocide, and Manifest Destiny/Book Two1st ed. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1.HistoryAmerican Empire.

2. HistoryWar.

3.HistoryManifest Destiny.

ISBN: 978-0-9989600-7-4 (eBook PDF)

ISBN: 978-0-9989600-8-1 (EPUB)

ISBN: 978-0-9989600-9-8 (Mobipocket)

Printed in the USA

It was our original desire to dedicate Murder IncorporatedBook Two, Americas Favorite Pastime to an actual murder victim in one of Americas many wars of imperial vanity. But its not that easy. Who do we embrace? Who do we pick? There are millions of victims. How about the throngs of children, like ten-year-old Ha Mi, who ran for her life as a Boeing B-52 Stratofortress dropped precision-guided ordnance from a silent and invisible 45,000 feet above Hanoi?

Or maybe Mamana Bibi, a grandmother in Pakistan who was out in the family field picking vegetables when a Hellfire missile hit her flush on? USA! USA! God bless the CIA or USAF or whichever murder outfit pulled the cowardly trigger in their air-conditioned trailer in Florida or the Nevada desert or wherever they house their cute joystick video games. But wait, we almost forgot, because two minutes later, after they whacked the grandmother, her eighteen-year-old grandson, Kaleem, ran out to help her, not knowing she was killed on impact. As he arrived, the drones returned with more U.S. taxpayer-funded Hellfire missilesand now Kaleem gets fucked up real bad, wounded and riddled with shrapnel. (Note: the drones returning is a clever little strategy called a double-tap strikeheres how this shit works: After the initial strike, the drones wait a few minutes while people in the area rush into the scene, obviously to help the victims, but then wham-bam, here come the drones for act two, striking again, this time killing the rescuers and other poor bastards who wandered into the bulls-eye.)

Then there was six-year-old Takato Michishita who lived in Nagasaki, Japan, in the middle of the American Century. On 9 August 1945 his mother decided to keep Takato and his sister home from school. She said she had a bad feeling. Takato said this never happened before, but good thing for them it did because around noon on this bright sunny summer day, an American B-29 bomber piloted by Massachusetts native Charles Sweeney dropped a plutonium implosion nuclear bomb on Nagasaki. The bomb, nicknamed Fat Boy because of its wide, round shape, detonated over the helpless Japanese city. Takatos school was wiped outincluding every child and teacher inside. We could have dedicated this book to all of them.

Or what about the one hundred or so merciless savages, also known as the Pomo People in Northern California, who were wiped out by Nathaniel Lyon and his U.S. Army cavalry on 15 May 1850 in what was called the Bloody Island Massacre? Lets dedicate the book to them. We could also dedicate this work to the murdered tens of thousands at the hands of Reagan-era U.S. covert killing sprees in Central America, bolstered (to this day) by the vicious training of Latin American torturers and assassins inside the U.S. Armys School of the Americas (now repackaged as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation).

You get it. The beat goes on, and on, and on

Lets try this lets dedicate this book to the future brothers and sisters who do not become murder victims, who are not slaughtered by the American Empire, who live long and fruitful lives because this nation finally wakes up to its violent DNA and says nonot in my name, a nation that is woke (If Youre Woke You Dig It), and stays woke, and learns to love rather than kill.

Maybe says Don Quixote. Probably not says Sancho Panza.

MAJ & SV

Postscriptum: Ten-year-old Ha Mi actually survived the Christmas bombings of Hanoi, part of Richard Nixons Operation Linebacker II, during which the U.S. Air Force flew more than 700 nighttime sorties over North Vietnam, dropping more than 20,000 tons of killing force. Please note that Washington suspended the vicious and devastating murder spree on Christmas Dayin honor of Jesus birthday.

W ho births a book? Who gives it blood, sinews, limbs, brain, and spine? Books are born, more often than not, by other books, which light flames in the psyche, passing light to those flung far into the river of time.

When I think of great books, it is hardly or ever the official Canon. It is often little known people who wrote against the storm, their minds ablaze by fires from another eralike J.A. Rogers, a self-taught historian who appeared in a slew of Black newspapers, like the Pittsburgh Courier, the Afro American, and who also wrote numerous books, filled not only with texts, but photographs to affirm his theories. He traveled across continents to salvage some tidbit, some morsel of knowledge that would amaze readers, of Black names, Black nations, Black princes who emerged in worlds we had never known.

This work, therefore, was sparked when a curious teenager found more fun in a bookstore than on a baseball diamond. For, there he read Yosef Ben-Jochannon, Ivan Van Sertima, Herbert Aptheker, C.L.R. James, George Nash, Ishakamusa Barashango, Runoko Rashidi, Ward Churchill, Du Bois, et al.

Often the works of these historians were emblazoned with deftly drawn dark figures in majestic poses, speaking to us across eons, saying softly, almost imperceptibly: I am Here. I am Here.

Many, if not most of these historians were (a term few would use themselves) outlaw historiansrebels, who turned their backs on the Guild, for their work was so disruptive of the accepted Canon.

They searched and searched and unearthed Canons from Antiquity that preceded the works of Europe by centuries. For example, who knows that the phrase Black is Beautiful! so evocative of the proverbial 60s, was echoed in spirit more than a thousand years before that era? As a man of that era (really, a teen), I thought we were breaking new ground, speaking thoughts that bubbled in our breasts for the first time.

Well, Dr. Ben (as Yochannon was affectionately known by his students) certainly knew, for in many of his typewritten texts, he cited Al-Jahizs Book of the Glory of the Black Race, written by a Black Arab of Basra, Iraq, decades after Islams founding. This work, written between 776868 A.D., reads as if it were written at the height of the Black Power Movement, circa 1968!

These writers dared to break new ground, and to not only learn new things, but to unlearn old canonical verities that were as traditional as they were misleading.

Of course, this work is inspired by the remarkable Howard Zinn, who, burned by the savagery of World War II, and inspired by the true courage of civil rights activists (many of whom were his students, like the acclaimed novelist, Alice Walker), learned not from the classics, but from his students, among them men and women who marched on the front lines of history.