By Mumia Abu-Jamal
January 24, 2025

Below is Mumia Abu-Jamal’s message to the 3,000 people attending the Jan. 11, 2025, Rosa Luxemburg Conference in Berlin in person plus 25,000 viewers on livestream, organized by junge Welt daily newspaper. (jungewelt.de)

As we look at this world, as the new year dawns, we must admit that the world is on the march, and if we’re honest it’s a march to the right. Why is this so? It is so in my view, because rightist politicians have mastered the art of fear. And the politics of immigration is all about the manipulation of that fear for political purposes. Fear moves us, not hope, nor altruism. For fear taps into our survival instincts; it also draws us to the polling places and makes us vote.

That explains what has been happening in Europe and in the U.S. as well. In fact, the recent U.S. election was a contest between love and fear. And guess what, fear won. In his first inaugural address in March of 1933, former U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Well, that was then, 1933, almost a century ago.

Today fear breeds more fear. And fear of what? Fear of Blacks, smart women, fear of trans people. Politicians who know about how to motivate populations know well the pull and power of deep emotions like fear. They use it the way a violinist uses his strings. Many people are so engaged in fear of “the other” that they don’t really see the game behind the curtain. That is because fear disrupts our ability to analyze and think things all the way through.

Much of this anti-immigrant hysteria is occurring in Europe, as many refugees from former colonies are trying to make their way back to the lands of the former colonizers’ countries. In the U.S., much of the anti-immigrant energy is aimed at Mexicans and other Latino communities. Some see this explosion of anxiety as the fear of a “browning” of the U.S. Latinos constitute the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population. Europe, meanwhile, is anxious about Arab and African refugees.

Remember the lies about Haitians! “They are eating our dogs, they are eating our cats and other pets.” Remember that [claim by Donald Trump]? Of course you do. It was a lie. But it made Haitians the object of fear. How many folks know that the Haitians helped Americans fight against the British in the revolutionary war? The Haitians were “otherized,” thus easier to fear.

A few weeks ago, I heard a radio broadcast of someone complaining about refugees entering their country, with significant anger in his voice. Guess who the speaker was? He was a Turkish citizen complaining about refugees from the civil war in Syria. This shows that the problems are not always as simple as they seem.

Marx: Workers have no nation

Over a century ago Marx said that “a worker had no nation and neither did the working class.” As members of a class, all workers were brothers and sisters of other workers. Then they had two world wars, the awesome carnage of those wars, and people were firmly held in the grip of nationalism. Still in war mode — but this time locked in the so-called Cold War.

The wars had severely weakened several European empires, and during the sixties we saw a wave of anti-colonial struggles, with many countries winning independence. The Algerian revolution erupted in North Africa, and France, already weakened by its fall at Diên Biên Phu in Vietnam, lost Algiers after some six years of anti-colonial war and popular resistance.

Algerian [Anti-colonial] revolutionary Frantz Fanon called repeatedly for decolonization, not just in Algeria, but in the whole of Africa. In fact, the world must be decolonized. Now as many of those Arab and African states experiencing “flag independence,” a term that really means false independence, and those countries being in the grips of neo-colonialism, their populations were uncared for and had to flee to find new places to live.

With governments failing to serve the needs of their people, they became refugees of states that failed. The capital accumulation that Europe has experienced looked pretty damned attractive to millions of people in the former colonies.

This present era is not just one of rightists’ drift; it’s also a time of neoliberalism and the domination of the market. It’s not a coincidence that these three features are merging, for rightist drift, also known as neoliberalism, and anti-immigrationist anxieties go hand-in-hand.

We’re not surprised. Markets don’t work to make communities better. They work for profit. Period. They work to exploit, not to serve. We need to know that, so we can organize together against it. Refugees aren’t our enemies, only our fears are. And fear ain’t nothing but an emotion.

Danke. Danke sehr. With love not fear, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.

These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.