A Quiet and Deadly Violence 
Mumia Abu-Jamal 
September 19, 1998 

The deadliest form of violence is poverty. 
--Ghandi  

It has often been observed that America is a truly violent nation, as shown by the thousands of cases of social and communal violence that occurs daily in the nation.  

Every year, some 20,000 people are killed by others, and additional 20,000 folks kill themselves. Add to this the nonlethal violence that Americans daily inflict on each other, and we begin to see the tracings of a nation immersed in a fever of violence.  

But, as remarkable, and harrowing as this level and degree of violence is, it is, by far, not the most violent features of living in the midst of the American empire.  

We live, equally immersed, and to a deeper degree, in a nation that condones and ignores wide-ranging "structural' violence, of a kind that destroys human life with a breathtaking ruthlessness. Former Massachusetts prison official and writer, Dr. James Gilligan observes;  

By "structural violence" I mean the increased rates of death and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, as contrasted by those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least a demonstrably large proportion of them) are a function of the class structure; and that structure is itself a product of society's collective human choices, concerning how to distribute the collective wealth of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting "structural" with "behavioral violence" by which I mean the non-natural deaths and injuries that are caused by specific behavioral actions of individuals against individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide, soldiers in warfare, capital punishment, and so on. --(Gilligan, J., MD, Violence: Reflections On a National Epidemic (New York: Vintage, 1996), 192.)  

This form of violence, not covered by any of the majoritarian, corporate, ruling-class protected media, is invisible to us and because of its invisibility, all the more insidious. How dangerous is it--really? Gilligan notes: 
[E]very fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed in a nuclear war that caused 232 million deaths; and every single year, two to three times as many people die from poverty throughout the world as were killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world. [Gilligan, p. 196]  

Worse still, in a thoroughly capitalist society, much of that violence became internalized, turned back on the Self, because, in a society based on the priority of wealth, those who own nothing are taught to loathe themselves, as if something is inherently wrong with themselves, instead of the social order that promotes this self-loathing. This intense self-hatred was often manifested in familial violence as when the husband beats the wife, the wife smacks the son, and the kids fight each other.  

This vicious, circular, and invisible violence, unacknowledged by the corporate media, uncriticized in substandard educational systems, and un-understood by the very folks who suffer in its grips, feeds on the spectacular and more common forms of violence that the system makes damn sure -that we can recognize and must react to it.  

This fatal and systematic violence may be called The War on the Poor.  

It is found in every country, submerged beneath the sands of history, buried, yet ever present, as omnipotent as death. In the struggles over the commons in Europe, when the peasants struggled and lost their battles for their commonal lands (a precursor to similar struggles throughout Africa and the Americas), this violence was sanctified, by church and crown, as the 'Divine Right of Kings' to the spoils of class battle. Scholars Frances Fox-Piven and Richard A Cloward wrote, in The New Class War (Pantheon, 1982/1985):  

They did not lose because landowners were immune to burning and preaching and rioting. They lost because the usurpations of owners were regularly defended by the legal authority and the armed force of the state. It was the state that imposed increased taxes or enforced the payment of increased rents, and evicted or jailed those who could not pay the resulting debts. It was the state that made lawful the appropriation by landowners of the forests, streams, and commons, and imposed terrifying penalties on those who persisted in claiming the old rights to these resources. It was the state that freed serfs or emancipated sharecroppers only to leave them landless. (52)  

The "Law", then, was a tool of the powerful to protect their interests, then, as now. It was a weapon against the poor and impoverished, then, as now.  

It punished retail violence, while turning a blind eye to the wholesale violence daily done by their class masters.  

The law was, and is, a tool of state power, utilized to protect the status quo, no matter how oppressive that status was, or is.  

Systems are essentially ways of doing things that have concretized into tradition, and custom, without regard to the rightness of those ways. No system that causes this kind of harm to people should be allowed to remain, based solely upon its time in existence. Systems must serve life, or be discarded as a threat and a danger to life.  

Such systems must pass away, so that their great and terrible violence passes away with them. 

© 1998 Mumia Abu-Jamal 
All Rights Reserved 
©1998MAJ