HELL ON EARTH by Mumia Abu-Jamal All Rights Reserved When most folks think of Hell, they think of depictions crafted by skilled artists, of fiery pits, of an underworld, or of red, tailed, horned beings. Whole religions have based their appeal on such visions, and in turn used fear to build their earthly mansions and cathedrals. But as the brilliant philosopher Schopenhauer asked, of Dante's Inferno, "For whence did Dante take the materials of his hell but from our actual world?" "And yet," he noted, "he made a very proper hell of it." There may well be a hell that is an underworld, but who among us will dare deny that hell has been an unquestionable reality on earth? It is not to the theologians, or other religious specialists, that one poses this question, but to average, everyday people of the world. And one must look, not to religious texts, but to literature, and to the history of the world, to perceive this reality. A true history of the Americas, while seemingly glorious for Europeans, can only be seen as hellish for the so-called Indians. Their history is one of massacre, genocide, and yes, holocaust. To the remainders of this nation's original people, a life of marginalization, of abject poverty, of rule and ridicule by the descendants of the invaders, must seem hellish indeed. And speaking of genocides and holocausts, one cannot ignore the experiences of millions of Jews, Poles, and Romani (so-called Gypsies) in 1930s-era Germany under the Reich. A Jewish poet, Kadya Molodovsky, speaks of a searing, hellish experience, in the poem "God of Mercy," which cries: O God of Mercy For the time being Choose another people. We are tired of death, tired of corpses, We have no more prayers. Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, Irring Howe, Ruth R. Wisse and Khone Shmeruk, Eds. (Viking). Decades before there was a holocaust in Europe there was an African holocaust, in which whole tribes were wiped out by colonizers. The term "concentration camp" didn't arise from Nazi usage. In 1904, German Gen. Von Trotha issued his notorious Vernichtungsbefehl (or "extermination order") against the Herreros of Southwest Africa (what is today called Namibia). Von Trotha's troops poisoned their wells, and drove the Herreros and their cattle into the desert. A report made by the colonial army's General Staff noted "the death rattles of the dying and their insane screams of fury...resounded in the sublime silence of infinity." Those few thousand who survived were penned into concentration camps. One of the colonial officials working with Von Trotha was Imperial Commissioner Heinrich Gšring, whose son would one day rise to the hierarchy of the Nazis. Hell? The Herreros knew hell perfectly, as did millions of Africans the world over. The English dramatist, Christopher Marlowes (1564-1593), in his play, "Doctor Faustus," has the devil respond to Faust's question, on the location of hell, thusly: Hell hath no limits nor is circumscribed In one self place, where we are is Hell, And to be short, when all the world dissolves, And every creature shall be purified, All places shall be hell, that are not heaven. Marlowe's Mephistopheles speaks, not of an underworld, but of the world at large: "...where we are is Hell," he explains. But enough about history and literature, for hell lies, not in the earth, but in the hearts and minds of men. When a child in poverty dies of starvation, there is hell. When people groan under the boot of oppression, there is hell. Where there is injustice, there is hell. The greatest Russian novelist Dostoyevsky described hell as "the suffering of being unable to love." This sounds like an apt description of far too much of the human condition. (c) 2001 MAJ