Wages of Rebellion (18 page)

Edelman condemned Adam Czerniaków, the Jewish leader of the ghetto, for committing suicide by swallowing cyanide on July 23, 1942, the day after the mass deportation of the Jews to Treblinka began. Czerniaków, Edelman said, should have informed everyone in the ghetto of the deportations. He should have dissolved all public institutions, especially the Jewish police. “They would have believed him,” Edelman said. “But he had committed suicide. That wasn’t right: one should die with a bang. At that time this bang was most needed—one should die only after having called other people into the struggle.” Edelman went on to say that Czerniaków’s suicide was the “only thing we reproach him for.”

“We?” Krall asked.

“Me and my friends,” Edelman said. “The dead ones. We reproach him for having made his death his own private business. We were convinced that it was necessary to die [publicly], under the world’s eyes.”
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Traditional concepts of right and wrong, Edelman pointed out, collapse in moments of extremity. Edelman spoke to Krall about a doctor
in the ghetto hospital who poisoned the sick children on her ward as the Germans entered the building. She saved children from the gas chamber. She became, to those who remained in the ghetto, “a hero.”

“So what, then, in that world turned upside down, was heroism?” Krall asked. “Or honor? Or dignity? And where was God?”

“God,” Edelman said, “was on the side of the persecutors. A malicious God.”
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Edelman said that as a heart surgeon in Poland after the war, he felt that he was always battling against this malevolent deity who sought to extinguish life.

Edelman came upon a crowd of people on Zelazna Street in Warsaw after the occupation but before the ghetto was established. The crowd was standing around a “simple wooden barrel with a Jew on top of it. He was old and short, and he had a long beard.” Edelman went on:

There will be no moral hierarchy to resistance. We will be pulled one way or another by fate and love. And these different routes of resistance will all be legitimate as long as we do not, as Edelman said, attempt “to survive at the expense of somebody else.” Many of those in the developing world, as climate change makes human habitation where they live difficult and then impossible, will be faced with the terrible moral quandary endured by Edelman. They will be denied the luxury of nonviolence. But if the ecosystem continues to disintegrate, we will all have to grapple with forms of resistance that, in the end, will permit us only to protect our dignity until the inevitable comes.

“The majority of us favored an uprising,” Edelman told Krall. “After all, humanity had agreed that dying with arms was more beautiful than without arms. Therefore we followed this consensus. In the Jewish Combat Organization there were only two hundred and twenty of us left. Can you even call that an uprising? All it was about, finally, was that we not just let them slaughter us when our turn came. It was only a choice as to the manner of dying.”
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I
drove four hours one rainy, cold morning to SCI (State Correctional Institution) Mahanoy in Frackville, Pennsylvania, from my home in Princeton, New Jersey, to see the black revolutionary Mumia Abu-Jamal,
America’s best-known political prisoner. We met in the reception area for the prisoners and their families. He sat hunched forward on the gray plastic table, his dreadlocks cascading down the sides of his face. The room resembled a high school cafeteria. It had vending machines on the wall by the entrance, which the prisoners were not allowed to operate, plastic chairs, a few tables, and a booth for the corrections officers. Small children, visiting their fathers or brothers, raced around the floor or wailed in their mothers’ arms.

Abu-Jamal, like the other prisoners in the room, was wearing a brown jumpsuit bearing the letters DOC—Department of Corrections. We dove immediately into a discussion about books. He spoke intently about the nature of empire, which he was currently reading voraciously about, and effective forms of resistance to tyranny throughout history.

Abu-Jamal was transferred in January 2012 to the general prison population after nearly thirty years in solitary confinement on death row. During those three decades, he was barred from physical contact with his wife, his children, and other visitors. He had been sentenced to death in 1982 for the December 9, 1981, killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. His sentence was amended to life without parole. The misconduct of the judge, flagrant irregularities in his trial, and tainted evidence have been criticized by numerous human rights organizations, including Amnesty International.
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Abu-Jamal, who was a young activist in the Black Panthers and later one of the most important radical journalists in Philadelphia, a city that a few decades earlier produced I. F. Stone, has long been the bête noire of the state. The FBI opened a file on him when he started working with the local chapter of the Black Panthers at the age of fifteen. He was suspended from his Philadelphia high school when he campaigned to rename the school for Malcolm X and distributed “black revolutionary student power” literature. Abu-Jamal has published seven books in prison, including his best-selling
Live from Death Row
, and he was at work on an eighth. Dick Gregory says in
Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary
, the documentary about Abu-Jamal, that he has single-handedly brought “dignity to the whole death row.” The late historian Manning Marable is quoted in the film saying: “The voice of black journalism in the struggle for the
liberation of African American people has always proved to be decisive throughout black history. When you listen to Mumia Abu-Jamal, you hear the echoes of David Walker, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and the sisters and brothers who kept the faith with struggle, who kept the faith with resistance.”
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The authorities, as they did before he was convicted, have attempted to silence him in prison. Pennsylvania banned all recorded interviews with Abu-Jamal after 1996. In response to protests over the singling out of one inmate in the Pennsylvania correction system, the state banned recorded access to all its inmates. The ban is nicknamed “the Mumia Rule.” And the state did not stop there. In October 2014, days after Abu-Jamal gave a pre-recorded commencement address to graduates of Goddard College, the governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett, signed into law the Revictimization Relief Act. The law permits crime victims and prosecutors to go to court to prevent prisoners from making public statements that cause mental anguish. Governor Corbett was surrounded by police officers, victims’ advocates, and Faulkner’s widow, Maureen Faulkner, at the signing. He said that Mrs. Faulkner “has been taunted by the obscene celebrity that her husband’s killer has orchestrated from behind bars. This unrepentant cop killer has tested the limits of decency, while gullible activists and celebrities have continued to feed this killer’s ego at the expense of his victims.” In November 2014, Abu-Jamal and supporters filed a federal lawsuit in an attempt to overturn the law.
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“I was punished for communicating,” Abu-Jamal said.

Philosopher Cornel West says in the documentary, “The state is very clever in terms of keeping track, especially [of] the courageous and visionary ones, the ones [who] are long-distance runners. You can keep track of them, absorb ’em, dilute ’em, or outright kill ’em—you don’t have to worry about opposition to ’em.

“If you tell them the truth about the operation of our power, this is what happens to you,” he goes on. “Like Jesus on the cross. This is what happens to you.”

I was not permitted a pencil or paper during my four-and-a-half-hour conversation with Abu-Jamal. I wrote down his quotes immediately after I left the prison. These restrictions mirror the wider pattern of
a society where the poor and the destitute, and especially those who rise up in rebellion, are rendered invisible and voiceless.

The breadth of Abu-Jamal’s reading, which along with his writing and 3,000 radio broadcasts has kept his mind and soul intact, was staggering. His own books are banned in the prison. In conversation he swung from discussions of the Opium Wars between 1839 and 1860 to the Black Panthers to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to the series of legislative betrayals of the poor and people of color by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Democratic Party.

He quoted Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Huey P. Newton, Assata Shakur, Eric Foner, Gore Vidal, Cornel West, Howard Zinn, James Cone, and Dave Zirin. We talked about Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, Joseph Cinqué, Harriet Tubman, Charles Deslondes, Denmark Vesey, and Sojourner Truth. He was simultaneously reading
Masters of War
by Clara Nieto,
How the World Works
by Noam Chomsky,
The Face of Imperialism
by Michael Parenti, and
Now and Then
by Gil Scott-Heron. He wondered what shape the collapse of empire will take. And he despaired of the political unconsciousness among many incoming prisoners, some young enough to be his children.

“When I first got out in the yard,” he said, “and I heard groups of men talking about how Sarah was going to marry Jim or how Frank had betrayed Susan, I thought,
Damn, these cats all know each other and their families. That’s odd
. But after a few minutes I realized they were talking about soap operas. Television in prison is the great pacifier. They love
Basketball Wives
because it is ‘T and A’ with women of color. They know how many cars Jay-Z has. But they don’t know their own history. They don’t understand how they got here. They don’t know what is being done to them. I tell them they have to read, and they say, ‘Man, I don’t do books.’ And that is just how the empire wants it. You can’t fight power if you don’t understand it. And you can’t understand it if you don’t experience it and then dissect it.”

Abu-Jamal’s venom is reserved for liberal politicians such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, whom he excoriates for callously disempowering the poor and the working class on behalf of their corporate patrons. And he has little time for those who support them.

“It was Clinton that made possible the explosion of the prison-industrial complex,” he said, speaking of the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill.

He looked around the visiting area at the thirty-odd prisoners with their families.

“Most of these people wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Bill Clinton,” he said. “He and Barack Obama haven’t done anything for poor people but lock them up. And if our first African American president isn’t going to halt the growth of the prison-industrial complex, no president after him is going to do it. This prison system is here to stay. The poor and the destitute feed it. It is the empire’s solution to the economic crisis. Those who are powerless, who have no access to diminishing resources, get locked away. And the prison business is booming. It is one of the few growth industries left. It used to be that towns didn’t want prisons. Now these poor rural communities beg for them. You look down the list of the names of the guards and see two or three with the same last names. This is because fathers, brothers, spouses, work here together. These small towns don’t have anything else.”