From Mumia Abu-Jamal on death row
In praise of princes and presidents - Ford
Published Jan 13, 2007 7:48 AM
Following is a transcript of a Jan. 5 audio column. Go to
www.prisonradio.org to hear Mumia’s political messages.
I have struggled to not write about the passing of U.S. President Gerald Ford.
I sought to not do so for days.
Yet, the imperial fashion adopted by most of the American press, which praised
his administration almost unanimously as “his
salvation of the republic,” forced me to put pen to paper.
Much of the reporting that we have seen has simply been dishonest, historically
inaccurate and a national amnesiac.
What I found particularly perturbing was the virtually unanimous official
opinion that former President Ford’s pardon of Richard M. Nixon was an
act of “courage.”
Why? Because he opposed the will of the majority of the American people?
There is something unseemly about issuing a pardon to a man before he was
criminally charged with anything, and further, one who built much of his
political career on law and order.
Ford, to hear the corporate press tell it, simply made a deep, inner decision
to save the nation the trauma of a trial against Nixon by issuing a preemptive
pardon.
The problem with this official reading is that there’s plenty of evidence
that it just ain’t true.
Acclaimed historian Howard Zinn, in his phenomenal A People’s History of
the United States (New York: Harper Collins Perennial, 2003), tells us that
months before the Nixon resignation, “top Democratic and Republican
leaders in the House of Representatives had given secret assurance to Nixon
that if he resigned they would not support criminal
proceedings against him.” (p. 546)
The New York Times reported that what Wall Street wanted in case Nixon resigned
was “the same play with different players.”
It took a French journalist to voice what no mainstream American paper
would—that U.S. political leaders wanted a change of face,
but not a change of politics.
Zinn writes: “No respectable American newspaper said what was said by
Claude Julien, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique in September 1974. ‘The
elimination of Mr. Richard Nixon leaves intact all the mechanisms and all the
false values which permitted the Watergate scandal.’ Julien noted that
Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, would remain at his
post—in other words, that Nixon’s foreign policy would continue.
‘That is to say,’ Julien wrote, ‘that Washington will
continue to support General Pinochet in Chile, General [Ernesto] Geisel in
Brazil, General [Alfredo] Stroessner in Paraguay, etc.’ ” (p.
545)
Clearly, for millions of people in the U.S., and in Latin America, “the
long national nightmare” was far from over.
Nixon’s regime was criminal to the core, despite his rhetoric about law
and order. It was a government that broke laws frequently and flagrantly, and
got away with it. Slush funds, burglaries, illegal corporate campaign
contributions, illegal wiretaps, corruption— you name it.
A deal, a pardon, a swift goodbye and the imperial press applaud.
“Law and order” was a program for Blacks, Hispanics, poor people,
political opponents and radicals. For the wealthy and well-to-do, it was
business as usual.
Ford was part of that program.
And because he played his part, the media played their part: “The king is
dead. Long live the king.”
From Shakespeare’s Richard II, the immortal lines are written: “For
God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death
of kings.”
The stories, we see, are still being told.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
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