Victory?  A Letter to Steve Wiser 
[title added by webmaster] 
Mumia Abu-Jamal 
March 22, 1998 

I received the following in a letter from Mumia today, and wanted to get it around. Greetings -- Steve  

I've been trying to do some school work, but w/out school books, how can it be done?  

That reality forced me to find the enclosed article, which I thought was in LfDR [Live from Death Row]. I don't have a copy, so I can't be sure. At any rate, I find, it's main points chillingly accurate, and nothing the state has done has disabused me of that notion. (Take a moment - read it; you'll see it for yourself)  

It's in that regard that I address the subject of our earlier discussion - re: victory. There's an old saying, I think, from Mao Tse-Tung (China), which was used to educate the guerrilla army - "Tell no lies; claim no easy victories."  

I say that because to say we've gained any kind of "victory" is to lie. We were told some things by administrators that, if applied, would be a step in the right direction; but, it ain't hardly a "victory". It's as if a man who was armed with a stick tied you up, looted your apartment of almost all your property, stole from your wallet to pay for it's shipment, or destroyed it, and then returned 2 weeks later w/ a shoebox of some of your stuff and said you could have it, if you paid for it! "Victory?" Hardly.  

There is something obscene about a state crowing about men "capitulating" to gov't repression. How do you "capitulate" to lies? There is something sinister about the gov't agency that calls itself "corrections" attacking the ability of men to learn, to educate themselves, and to grow in the human pursuit of knowledge. If there was any "victory," it was the gov't's: for they succeeded in stripping men on Death Row of most of their property; It was a "victory" for ignorance clothed in the rags of state power over human enlightenment. It was a "victory" of deadly political expedience over the forces of life-affirmance.  

It's for this reason that the words of the General-Secretary of Amnesty International were all but ignored by the corporate press; If he said similar things about Cuba, China, Nigeria or Iraq the capitalist corporate/white majoritarian press would have echoed his words from here to New Caledonia. But no - he criticized the US, Pennsylvania and Greene County Gulag - That, apparently is not news "fit to print."  

He was right then - he's more right now.