MUMIA ABU-JAMAL (1954- )
An Afro-American political prisoner who was wrongly convicted of murdering a policeman in 1981
in what was clearly a grossly unfair trail. He has been on death row in Pennsylvania since then
awaiting execution, while attempting to win a new (and fair) trial through the legal appeal
process. There have been both temporary legal victories and serious legal setbacks for him,
but he has remained on death row for nearly three decades now. However, Mumia also has widespread
mass support in the U.S., and perhaps even more so in Europe and other parts of the world.
Most of the world considers the death penalty barbaric and uncivilized, and chooses to support
Mumia on that basis whether or not he is guilty of the crime he is charged with.
Mumia was born Wesley Cook in 1954, and
during the period of Black Liberation Struggle and revolutionary upsurge during the 1960s he
became a member of the Black Panther Party. In later
years he was a political activist, journalist, broadcaster and part-time cab driver. Since his
imprisonment he has written several books and broadcast a series of powerful news commentaries
under the title “Live from Death Row”.
Mumia’s case has generated enormous controversy,
with reactionaries rabidly determined to execute him for a whole variety of reasons: to set an
example for all those who kill cops (as they insist Mumia did despite the unfair trial); to show
that even killing a cop in self-defense is unacceptable (as some suspect may have been the
situation here); to stop protests about unfair trials (no matter how unfair they really are);
for racist reasons (because Mumia is Black); and for political reasons (because Mumia is and
remains a revolutionary). Because we Marxists are absolutely opposed to all these excuses to kill
Mumia, we must continue to firmly work in support of him, and insistently call for his freedom.
MUNICH AGREEMENT
“[The agreement] signed in Munich in September 1938 by British Prime Minister
Chamberlain and French Premier Daladier with the German and Italian fascist chieftains Hitler
and Mussolini.
“On the eve of World War II, the
insatiable German fascists openly threatened to gobble up Czechoslovakia, a small country in
Europe, shortly after they had annexed Austria. On the pretext that part of the German people
were living in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, Hitler, massing a large number of troops on
the border, threatened to invade the country. Britain, France and the other imperialist
countries had the illusion that they could save themselves at the expense of Czechoslovakia
and push the German fascists eastward to attack the Soviet Union, which was a socialist
country at that time. It was against this background that the Munich agreement was
concluded.
“The agreement consisted of eight
articles. The main stipulations were that Czechoslovakia should, within a fixed period of
time, cede to Germany the Sudetenland and the southern parts bordering on Austria and
transfer its military installations, industrial and mining enterprises and means of transport
in these areas to Germany without compensation, and that its remaining territory would be
‘guaranteed’ by Britain, France, Germany and Italy against any further invasion.
“Instead of reducing the danger of war,
the British and French policy of appeasement served only to inflate the German fascists’
arrogance and whet their appetite for aggression. Following their occupation of the
Sudetenland in November 1938, the German fascists invaded and occupied all of Czechoslovakia
in March 1939. And in September that year they attacked Poland, which had a treaty of alliance
with Britain and France, thus triggering off World War II.” —Note in Peking Review,
#45, Nov. 4, 1977, p. 43.
MY LAI MASSACRE
The most notorious massacre of unarmed civilians, mostly women and children, by mad-dog U.S.
imperialist troops during the Vietnam War. The massacre occurred on March 16, 1968, but the U.S.
government tried very hard to suppress any word about it, and it did not come to light until well
over a year later.
There were actually a great many other U.S.
massacres of civilians in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia during that war, including many far worse
even than the hundreds murdered at My Lai. But the majority of these horrible massacres were done
by bombings from the air, rather than face-to-face by soldiers on the ground. However, the
directness of this massacre, and its animalistic brutality, had a much greater impact than the
routine massacres from the air which could more easily be dismissed as “unfortunate mistakes.” The
actual fact of the matter is that virtually all wars by the imperialists inherently involve
mass murders and massacres, typically on a scale that can only be considered as outright genocide.
See also:
VIETNAM WAR—U.S. War Crimes In
“On March 16, 1968, two platoons of American soldiers arrived at the hamlet
of My Lai, in the district known as Son My in what was then South Vietnam. The men were from
Charlie Company of the First Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry
Division, and they were on a search-and-destroy mission. They entered the village around 8 in
the morning. Several hours later, between 300 and 500 villagers lay dead.
“Just how the massacre started has never
been precisely determined, but the details were horrific. Eyewitnesses described bayonetings,
clubbings, and close-range shootings, all without a single shot being fired at the Americans.
Many of the dead were women, children, and the elderly. Some were killed while kneeling in
prayer. Some were found with ‘C Company’ carved into their flesh. The men of Charlie Company
had been in Vietnam all of three months.
“The My Lai massacre is commonly called a
turning point in American support for the war. It wasn’t. By the time journalist Seymour Hersh
broke the story in the fall of 1969, the military investigation was well underway. The only
individual actually convicted was Lt. William Calley, who commanded the men of Charlie Company.
At home his conviction was unpopular. Private White House polling discovered that four out of
five Americans wanted him released.
“Support for the war, as John E. Mueller
points out in his 1973 book, War, Presidents and Public Opinion, had already begun to
drop a bit, especially among the less educated. After the massacre became known, public support
actually increased. At the time of the massacre, American ground forces had been in Vietnam for
three years. The killings at Kent State, which would galvanize antiwar forces, were still to
come.” —Stephen L. Carter, “My Lai Revisited After Afghanistan Massacre”, Newsweek,
March 26 & April 2, 2012, p. 19.
[Carter, a liberal journalist, claims that
massacres such as My Lai and more recent ones in Iraq and Afghanistan do not typify U.S. wars;
he even absurdly claims that “Nearly all of our military forces serve with enormous honor and
courage”. But the fact that U.S. imperialist troops perform such massacres at all speaks for
itself. And the “support” for such massacres on the part of the American public—to the extent
they actually do support it—also shows the horrifying hold of ruling class imperialist ideas on
the masses in the U.S. And although Lt. Calley was given a sentence of life imprisonment, he
was actually released from house arrest after three and a half years, and was never sent to
prison at all. —S.H.]