Coming up to the 38th Martin Luther King Day, it is obvious to everyone that integration has failed. The Floyd and Black Lives Matter Hoax riots last year, the ridiculous debate over Critical Race Theory, invites a question no one, least of all the worthies who run Conservatism, Inc., wants to ask: Now what? And that question occasions a look back at two remarkably honest essays, one from Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Little Rock [Dissent, Winter 1959 (PDF)], and the other from Norman Podhoretz, My Negro Problem—And Ours for Commentary [February 1963(PDF). Both tacitly suggested that black-white racial problems were insoluble.

Arendt originally wrote her piece for Commentary, but the editors spiked it because her views “were at variance with the magazine’s stand on matters of discrimination and segregation.” That was rich given the atom bomb Podhoretz dropped four years later. Arendt wrote that federal intervention to desegregate southern schools was a dangerously stupid idea, particularly President Eisenhower’s deployment of the fabled 101st Airborne to Little Rock, AR enforce the U.S. Supreme Court’s post-Brown v. Board ruling to desegregate schools with “all deliberate speed.”

On this day in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower deploys troops from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division to Arkansas to enforce the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. pic.twitter.com/Rj0FIM8z5M

— Military History Now (@MilHistNow) September 24, 2020

Though “things had quieted down temporarily,” she wrote, but “[r]ecent developments have convinced me that such hopes are futile and that the routine repetition of liberal cliches may be even more dangerous than l thought a year ago.”

“The achievement of social, eco­nomic, and educational equality for the Negro may sharpen the color problem in this country instead of assuaging it,” Arendt wrote, and although this didn’t necessarily have to happen “it would be only natural if it did, and it would be very surprising if it did not.”

By “equality,” Arendt meant forced desegregation and integration. Predicting they would cause more racial trouble did not mean one opposed them, she wrote, but such foreknowledge should “commit one to advocating that government intervention be guided by caution and moderation rather than by impatience and ill-advised measures.”

The federal government must proceed cautiously:

It has been said, I think again by [Southern novelist William] Faulkner, that enforced integration is no better than enforced segregation, and this is perfectly true. The only reason that the Supreme Court was able to address itself to the matter of desegregation in the first place was that segregation has been a legal, and not just a social, issue in the South for many generations. For the crucial point to remember is that it is not the social custom of segregation that is unconstitutional, but its legal enforcement.

Thus the law must desegregate buses, hotels, and restaurants because they are required for a person to carry on life’s quotidian routine. With an apparently straight face, Arendt concluded “this does not apply to theaters and museums, where people obviously do not congregate for the purpose of associating with each other.”

They don’t?!

Then Arendt pushed the gas pedal. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 that inspired the Southern Manifesto “did not go far enough” to abolish “unconstitutional [state] legislation,” she wrote:

[F]or it left untouched the most out­rageous law of Southern states—the law which makes mixed marriage a criminal offense. The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one’s skin or color or race” are minor indeed.

But at least Arendt added a proviso. SCOTUS, which eventually banned anti-miscegenation laws in Loving V. Virginia, never would “have felt compelled to encourage, let alone enforce, mixed marriages.” Yet it did feel compelled to force integration .

That aside, Arendt lamented that Leftists were conscripting children to serve as human shields, and that forced integration meant parents would lose the right of free association:

It certainly did not require too much imagination to see that this was to burden children, black and white, with the working out of a problem which adults for generations have confessed themselves unable to solve. … [D]o we intend to have our political battles fought in the school yards? …

To force parents to send their children to an integrated school against their will means to deprive them of rights which clearly belong to them in all free societies—the private right over their children and the social right to free association. …

[G]overnment intervention, even at its best, will always be rather controversial. Hence it seems highly questionable whether it was wise to begin enforcement of civil rights in a domain where no basic human and no basic political right is at stake, and where other rights—social and private—whose protection is no less vital, can so easily be hurt.

It seems impossible to believe that a public intellectual, particularly a Jewish one, could or would write that public education is a “domain where no basic human and no basic political right is at stake.” Then again, that’s one obvious reason Commentary rejected Arendt’s piece.

An amusing note about Arendt’s piece, versus Podhoretz’s, is how she introduced it. “Like most people of European origin I have difficulty in understanding, let alone sharing the common prejudices of Americans in this area,” she wrote:

[A]s a Jew I take my sympathy for the cause of the Negroes as for all oppressed or underprivileged peoples for granted and should appreciate it if the reader did likewise.

Of course. Like most Europeans at that time, Arendt had no direct experience with blacks. This was in dramatic contrast to Norman Podhoretz, who very frankly reported that, during his Brooklyn childhood, black kids beat him to a pulp on his way home from school.

Podhoretz was mystified. Why do blacks hate Jews with the same ferocity they hate all other whites? he wondered.

“To me, at the age of twelve, it seemed very clear that Negroes were better off than Jews—indeed, than all whites” [in his neighborhood] he wrote. This was despite his older, radical sister’s claim that black were oppressed:

[I]n my world it was the whites, the Italians and Jews, who feared the Negroes, not the other way around. The Negroes were tougher than we were, more ruthless, and on the whole they were better athletes. What could it mean, then, to say that they were badly off and that we were more fortunate? Yet my sister’s opinions, like print, were sacred, and when she told me about exploitation and economic forces I believed her. I believed her, but I was still afraid of Negroes. And I still hated them with all my heart.

No one could blame him. The beatings were brutal, on par with attempted murder. He received a bat across the head for answering a question correctly in class that a black thug had missed. A track team that cheated and lost a meet against Podhoretz’s high school assaulted him and his teammates. The blacks wanted to steal the medals. And so on. Podhoretz learned early the wisdom encapsulated in the late Colin Flaherty’s book title: “Don’t make the black kids angry.”

Podhoretz bluntly noted that that blacks are low IQ academic underachievers, then tried to explain why “the Negro-white conflict had—and no doubt still has—a special intensity and was conducted with a ferocity unmatched by intramural white battling.”

Wrote Podhoretz:

[A] good deal of animosity existed between the Italian kids (most of whose parents were immigrants from Sicily) and the Jewish kids (who came largely from East European immigrant families). Yet everyone had friends, sometimes close friends, in the other “camp,” and we often visited one another’s strange-smelling houses, if not for meals, then for glasses of milk, and occasionally for some special event like a wedding or a wake. If it happened that we divided into warring factions and did battle, it would invariably be half-hearted and soon patched up. Our parents, to be sure, had nothing to do with one another and were mutually suspicious and hostile. But we, the kids, who all spoke Yiddish or Italian at home, were Americans, or New Yorkers, or Brooklyn boys: we shared a culture, the culture of the street, and at least for a while this culture proved to be more powerful than the opposing cultures of the home.

Why, why should it have been so different as between the Negroes and us?

Leftist homosexual James Baldwin “describe[d] the sense of entrapment that poisons the soul of the Negro with hatred for the white man whom he knows to be his jailer,” Podhoretz observed.

Yet he was still “troubled and puzzled”:

How could the Negroes in my neighborhood have regarded the whites across the street and around the corner as jailers? On the whole, the whites were not so poor as the Negroes, but they were quite poor enough, and the years were years of Depression. As for white hatred of the Negro, how could guilt have had anything to do with it? What share had these Italian and Jewish immigrants in the enslavement of the Negro? What share had they—downtrodden people themselves breaking their own necks to eke out a living—in the exploitation of the Negro?

Baldwin himself answered that question four years later in The New York Times under this refreshingly frank headline: Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White [April 9, 1967].

The opening paragraphs indicted Jews by stereotyping them as unscrupulous, moneygrubbing landlords, grocers, and merchants who kept blacks in debt:

The butcher was a Jew and, yes, we certainly paid more for bad cuts of meat than other New York citizens, and we very often carried insults home, along with the meat. We bought our clothes from a Jew and, sometimes, our secondhand shoes, and the pawnbroker was a Jew—perhaps we hated him most of all. The merchants along 125th Street were Jewish—at least many of them were; I don’t know if Grant’s or Woolworth’s are Jewish names—and I well remember that it was only after the Harlem riot of 1935 that Negroes were allowed to earn a little money in some of the stores where they spent so much.

But in the end, that exploitation didn’t matter. White Christians were Baldwin’s real enemy:

The crisis taking place in the world, and in the minds and hearts of black men everywhere, is not produced by the star of David, but by the old, rugged Roman cross on which Christendom’s most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not by Jews.

Baldwin certainly knew not to rile the people who bankrolled and provided legal and intellectual firepower to the Civil rights movement that got blacks everything they demanded and more, not least anti-white discrimination.

Fast forward 50 years.

Blacks are angry and unhappy despite being among the most powerful politicians and wealthiest athletes, doctors, lawyers, entertainers, professors, and public intellectuals in the world. Blacks are angry and unhappy 30 years after the federal government canonized rapist Martin Luther King. Blacks are angry and unhappy 13 years after Americans elected a black president, then elected him again.

Almost 70 years after Brown, almost 60 years after the Civil and Voting Rights acts, decades after Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, and Barack Hussein Obama became household names—the farther away we go from Jim Crow and segregation—the angrier and unhappier blacks become.

• They demand reparations for slavery despite trillions of white tax dollars dumped into their communities;
• Despite their wanton criminality often directed at whites, they are “exhausted” from dealing with imagined “microaggressions.”
• “Systemic racism” is still our arrant, defining moral failure.
• Whites are censored, fired, and professionally ruined if they disagree in the slightest with leftist racial dogma.
• “Whiteness,” we are told, is a pandemic-level disease more dangerous than the Flu Manchu.

Podhoretz could think of only one solution, an early blueprint of The Great Replacement. A black man’s color must “disappear as a fact of consciousness,” Podhoretz wrote:

[I]t will ever be realized unless color does in fact disappear: and that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation. …

[T]the wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned. … [T]he Negro problem can be solved in this country in no other way.

If eliminating the white race is the only solution to Podhoretz’s “Negro problem and ours,” then it may never be solved. Most whites won’t go along, including Leftists whose zeal for black liberation, Podhoretz confessed, did not match their desire not to live anywhere near or put their kids in school with blacks.

As Joe Sobran once quipped, college gives white leftists all the right attitudes about minorities…and the education and income to move as far away from them as possible.

They have good reason. Even Leftists know, to rephrase Rodney King, that we just can’t get along.

When will we admit it?

unz.com

There is a vast literature on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who died on this date, November 22, 1963.  I have contributed my small share to such writing in an effort to tell the truth, honor him, and emphasize its profound importance in understanding the history of the last fifty-seven years, but more importantly, what is happening in the U.S.A. today. In other words, to understand it in its most gut-wrenching reality: that the American national security state will obliterate any president that dares to buck its imperial war-making machine. It is a lesson not lost on all presidents since Kennedy.

Unless one is a government disinformation agent or is unaware of the enormous documentary evidence, one knows that it was the U.S. national security state, led by the CIA, that carried out JFK’s murder.

Confirmation of this fact keeps arriving in easily accessible forms for anyone interested in the truth.  A case in point is James DiEugenio’s posting at his website, KennedysandKing, of James Wilcott’s affidavit and interrogation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, declassified by the Assassinations Record Review Board in 1998.  In that document, Wilcott, who worked in the finance department for the CIA and was not questioned by the Warren Commission, discusses how he unwittingly paid Lee Harvey Oswald, the government’s alleged assassin, through a cryptonym and how it was widely known and celebrated at his CIA station in Tokyo that the CIA killed Kennedy and Oswald worked for the Agency, although he did not shoot JFK.  I highly recommend reading the document.

I do not here want to go into any further analysis or debate about the case.  I think the evidence is overwhelming that the President was murdered by the national security state. Why he was murdered, and the implications for today, are what concern me. And how and why we remember and forget public events whose consequences become unbearable to contemplate, and the fatal repercussions of that refusal.  In what I consider the best book ever written on the subject, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (2009), James W. Douglass explains this in detail, including the James Wilcott story.

Realizing what I am about to say might be presumptuous and of no interest to anyone but myself, I will nevertheless try to describe my emotional reactions to learning of John Kennedy’s murder so long ago and how that reverberated down through my life. I hope  my experiences might help explain why so many people today can’t face the consequences of the tragic history that began that day and have continued to the present, among which are not just the other assassinations of the 1960s but the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent endless and murderous “war on terror” with its mind-numbing propaganda and the recent anti-Russia phobia and the blatant celebration of the so-called “deep-state’s” open efforts to overthrow another president, albeit a very different one.

On November 22, 1963 I was a college sophomore. I was going down three steps into the college dining hall for lunch. (Many of my most significant memories and decisions have taken place on steps, either going up or going down; memory is odd in that way, wouldn’t you say?) I remember freezing on the second step as a voice announced through a PA system that the president had been shot in Dallas, Texas. When I finally recovered and went down into the building, another announcement came through saying the president had died. The air seemed to be sucked out of the building as I and the other students with a few professors sat in stunned silence. Soon little groups on this Catholic campus joined together to pray for John Kennedy. I felt as if I were floating in unreality.

Later that day when I left the campus and drove home, I thought back to three years previously and the night of the presidential election. Everyone at my house (parents, grandparents, and the five sisters still at home) had gone to bed, but I stayed up past 1 A.M., watching the television coverage of the vote count. My parents, despite their Irish-Catholicism, were Nixon supporters, but I was for JFK. I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would vote for Nixon, who seemed to me to personify evil. When I finally went up the stairs to bed, I was convinced Kennedy would win and felt very happy.

It wouldn’t be for another tumultuous decade before I would hear Kris Kristofferson sing

Never knowin’ if believin’ is a blessin’ or a curse

Or if the going up is worth to coming down….

From the rockin’ of the cradle to the rollin’ of the hearse

The goin’ up was worth the coming down

and I would ask myself the same question.

In the meantime, the next few years would bring the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile crisis, and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, among other significant events, and for a high school student interested in politics and world events it was a heady and frightening few years. It was a country of newspapers back then, and I would read perhaps 3-4 each day and sensed a growing animosity toward Kennedy, especially as expressed in the more conservative NYC papers. I can remember very little talk of politics in my home and felt alone with my thoughts. As far as I can remember, this was also true at the Jesuit high school that I attended. And of course nothing prepared me for the president’s murder and the feeling of despair it engendered in me, a feeling so painful that I couldn’t really acknowledge it. At nineteen, I felt traumatized but couldn’t admit it or tell anyone. After all, I was a scholar and an athlete. Tough.

The next day a friend and I went to the Fordham University campus to visit a Jesuit priest who was a mentor to us. He had the television on for JFK’s funeral and we sat and watched it for a while with him. After a few hours, it became too painful and the two of us went outside to a football field where we threw a football back and forth. Perhaps subconsciously we were thinking of Kennedy’s love of football; I don’t know. But I remember a feeling of desolation that surrounded us on that empty cold field with not another soul around. It seemed sacrilegious to be playing games at such a time, yet deep trauma contributes to strange behavior.

Then I went on with my college life, studying and playing basketball, until the day after Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965. Those New York newspapers that didn’t like Kennedy, hated Malcom even more and were constantly ripping into him. I vividly remember talking to my college basketball teammate the next day. He had been in the Audubon Ballroom during the assassination. His sense of devastation as a young African American struck me forcefully. As we walked to basketball practice and talked, his sense of isolation and gloom was palpable. Visceral. Unforgettable. It became mine, even though I didn’t at the time grasp its full significance.

In 1968 when Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, I was driving to visit a girlfriend and remember hearing the news on the car radio and feeling deeply shocked. I felt immediately oppressed by the first warm spring evening in the New York area. It was as if the beautiful weather, usually so uplifting after winter and so joyously stimulating to a young man’s sexuality, was conspiring with the news of King’s death to bring me down into a deep depression.

Soon the country would awaken on June 5 to the surreal news that Senator Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles the night before. Like so many Americans, when he died not long after, I felt his death was the last straw. But it was far from it. For all the while Lyndon Johnson had lied his way to election in 1964 and escalated the Vietnam war to savage proportions. Death and destruction permeated the air we were breathing. The year 1968 ended with the suspicious death in Thailand of a hero of mine, the anti-war Trappist Monk Thomas Merton. Subsequent research has shown that that too was an assassination. And while all of this was going on and my political consciousness was becoming radicalized, I became a conscientious objector from the Marines. I was 24 years old.

By the late 1970s, having been fired from teaching positions for radical scholarship and anti-war activities, and mentally exhausted by the unspeakable events of the 1960s, I retreated into the country where I found solace in nature and a low-key life of contemplation, writing literary and philosophical essays, a novel, book reviews, and becoming a part-time newspaper columnist. By the 1990s, I gradually returned to teaching and a more active political engagement, primarily through teaching and writing.

Then in 1991 Oliver Stone jolted me back in time with his film JFK. I found powerful emotional memories welling up within me, and growing anger at what had happened to the U.S. in the previous decades. Soon JFK Jr., who was investigating his father’s assassination and was about to enter politics and take up his father’s mantle, was killed in a blatantly rigged “accident.” A month before I had been standing in line behind his wife in the bakery in my little town while he waited outside in a car. Now the third Kennedy was dead. I called my old friend the Jesuit priest from Fordham, but he was speechless. The bodies kept piling up or disappearing.

When the attacks of September 11, 2001 happened, I realized from day one that something was not right; that the official explanation was full of holes. My sociological imagination took fire. All that I had thought and felt, even my literary writing, came together. The larger picture emerged clearly. My teaching took on added urgency, including courses on September 11^thand the various assassinations.

Then in 2009 I read and reviewed James Douglass’s masterpiece, JFK and the Unspeakable, and my traumatic memories of 1963 and after came flooding back in full force. I realized that those youthful experiences had been so difficult for me to assimilate and that I therefore had to intellectualize them, for the emotional toll of reexperiencing them and what they meant was profound. The book really opened me to this, but so too did the awareness of how sensitive I was to John Kennedy’s death, how emotional I felt when reading about it or hearing him speak or listening to a song such as “The Day John Kennedy Died” by Lou Reed. It was as though a damn had burst inside me and my heart had become an open house without doors or windows.

I tell you all this to try to convey the ways in which we “forget” the past in order to shield ourselves from powerful and disturbing memories that might force us to disrupt our lives. To change. Certain events, such as the more recent attacks of September 11, have become too disturbing for many to explore, to study, to contemplate, just as I found a way to marginalize my feelings about my own government’s murder of President Kennedy, a man who had given me hope as a youngster, and whose murder had nearly extinguished that hope.

Many people will pretend that they are exposing themselves to such traumatic memories and are investigating the events and sources of their disquietude. It is so often a pretense since they feel most comfortable in the land of make-believe. What is needed is not a dilettantish and superficial nod in the direction of having examined such matters, but a serious in-depth study of the facts and an examination of why doing so might make one uncomfortable. A look outward and a look inward. Just as people distort and repress exclusively personal memories to “save” themselves from harsh truths that would force them to examine their current personal lives, so too do they do the same with political and social ones. When I asked two close relatives of mine, both of whom came close to death on September 11, 2001 at The World Trade Towers, what they have thought about that day, they separately told me that they haven’t really given it much thought. This startled me, especially since it involved mass death and a close encounter with personal death in a controversial public event, two experiences that would seem to elicit deep thought. And these two individuals are smart and caring souls.

What and why we remember and forget is profoundly important. Thoreau, in writing about life without principle, said, “It is so hard to forget what is worse than useless to remember.” This is so true. We are consumed with trivia, mostly by choice.

Perhaps a reason we remember so much trivia is to make sure we forget profound experiences that might shake us to our cores. The cold-blooded public execution of President John Kennedy did that to me on that melancholy Friday when I was 19, and by trying to forget it and not to speak of it, I hoped it would somehow go away, or at least fade to insignificance. But the past has a way of never dying, often to return when we least expect or want it.

So today, on this anniversary, another November 22, I have chosen to try to speak of what it felt like once upon a time on the chance that it might encourage others to do the same with our shared hidden history. Only by speaking out is hope possible. Only by making the hidden manifest.

T. S. Eliot wrote in “Journey of the Magi” words that echo ironically in my mind on this anniversary of the day John Kennedy died:

All this was a long time ago, I remember

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and Death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

Remembering in all its emotional detail the day John Kennedy died has been a long and cold journey for me. It has allowed me to see and feel the terror of that day, the horror, but also the heroism of the man, the in-your-face warrior for peace whose death should birth in us the courage to carry on his legacy.

Killing a man who says “no” to the endless cycle of war is a risky business, says a priest in the novel Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone. For “even a corpse can go on whispering ‘No! No! No! with a persistence and obstinacy that only certain corpses are capable of. And how can you silence a corpse.”

John Kennedy was such a man.

Eliot was right: Sometimes death and birth are hard to tell apart.

President Kennedy’s courage in facing a death he knew was coming from forces within his own government who opposed his efforts for peace in Vietnam , nuclear disarmament, and an end to the Cold War – “I know there is a God-and I see a storm coming. I believe that I am ready,” he had written on a slip of paper, and his favorite poem contained the refrain, “I have a rendezvous with death” – should encourage all of us to not turn our faces away from his witness for peace.

We must stop being at ease in a dispensation where we worship the gods of war and clutch the nuclear weapons that our crazed leaders say they will use on a “first-strike” basis. If they ever do, Eliot’s question – “were we led all that way for Birth or Death?” – will be answered.

But no one will hear it.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

globalresearch.ca

The fact that these riots have occurred at a moment when America finds itself seriously reviving the spirit of JFK’s space vision is an irony that in many ways parallels the earlier “pregnant moment” of 1968. (In case you are not aware, NASA has officially revived manned space launches on May 28 for the first time since Obama killed the constellation rocket program in 2011, establishing a new program to return to the Moon before going to Mars under the Artemis Program established in 2017. The Artemis Accords of May 15 lay out the framework for international cooperation in space closely dovetailing similar commitments made by Russia and China).

In 1968, the seeds of two opposing futures clashed for dominance in America and the world more broadly. On the one hand, humanity landed for the first time upon another celestial body and great hopes for a space-based economic system were felt by the entire world, while on the other hand race riots gripped America while an insane war in Vietnam was taking on a new anthrax-filled life ultimately killing over 500 000 young Americans and millions of Vietnamese. In this dystopian nightmare, endless sums of money were absorbed into the American Military Industrial Complex that John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had died resisting.

Faced with these two futures, the citizens of 1968 chose poorly, and acquiesced to be put onto a path of insanity as Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights Movement became replaced by FBI-funded radicals under Cointel Pro, America’s space program was atrophied with Apollo’s moon program being killed in 1973 and the Vietnam war destroyed the last remnants of patriotism in the hearts of young moral Americans.

Fortunately, the study of the past affords us more than simply reasons to be depressed by stories of assassination and failure.

Along with a proper sense of history, come the insights needed to prevent tragic choices and impulses from repeating themselves into the future, and with this fact in mind, it is important to observe the life of a particular non-tragic personality in America who overcame his fears in order to take to the stage of history, when others would not during a time of great crisis: Senator Robert Kennedy (aka: The man who should have been president), whose anniversary of assassination on June 5, 1968 is upon us.

Robert Kennedy as a Force in World History

While serving as Attorney General-first under the leadership of his brother John, then under Lyndon Johnson (until 1965), Robert Kennedy’s life was always defined by a strong commitment to peace, development and cooperation with justice for all races.

Exemplifying his intention to bring people into the process of historical change, Robert spoke to crowds in Apartheid South Africa in 1961 (after the ruling government refused to meet him) saying:

“Few have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. … It is from numberless acts of courage and belief such as these that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

After quitting his job as Attorney General in 1965 in order to become a Senator and later presidential candidate, Kennedy focused his energy on reviving his brother’s Peace Corps, attacking the growing war in Vietnam, opposing racism at home and ending the despair of ghetto poverty that no one wished to look at.

In the midst of the July 1967 Detroit riots that resulted in 43 dead, 1189 injured and 2000 buildings destroyed, Robert was asked what he would do if he were president. In response RFK said that he would force the media to show all of America what life is really like in the Ghettos:

“Let them show the sound, the feel, the hopelessness, and what it’s like to think you’ll never get out. Show a black teenager, told by some radio jingle to stay in school, looking at his older brother- who stayed in school who is out of a job. Show the Mafia pushing narcotics; put a candid camera team in a ghetto school and watch what a rotten system of education it really is. Film a mother staying up all night to keep the rats from her baby… Then ask people to watch it… and experience what it was like to live in the most affluent society in history- without hope.”

Later that Summer, Martin Luther King and Bobby began a close collaboration with Martin telling his associates that the Civil Rights Movement would put its full support behind Bobby in the run up to the 1968 elections. Bobby had earlier intervened into Martin Luther King’s October 1960 arrest in Atlanta for the crime of driving with an invalid licence in racist territory. Both leaders advanced civil rights on their respective paths during the next few years but their peak collaboration only began during the Summer of 1967 as both men made their resistance to the war in Vietnam known publicly.

In an interview on Face the Nation in November 1967, Bobby Kennedy gave a lesson to Americans that could have applied as easily to today’s regime change-crazed America, asking rhetorically:

“Do we have the right in the United States to say we’re going to kill tens of thousands of people, make millions of people, as we have… refugees, kill women and children? I very seriously question whether we have that right… Those of us who stay in the United States, we must feel it when we use napalm, when a village is destroyed and civilians are killed. This is our responsibility.”

Martin Luther King’s untimely death on April 4, 1968 resulted in a new wave of urban race riots that took America by storm sweeping through 120 cities and resulting in 39 deaths (mostly black) and 2600 injured. Over 75 000 troops were deployed to the streets of America during this time of tension.

Bobby Kennedy was on a plane to a presidential campaign rally in Indianapolis when he received news of King’s murder and was advised by both the Indianapolis police chief and his own staff to cancel the rally for his own safety. Not only did RFK not listen to this advice, but the statesman went straight into the ghettos of Indianapolis, stood on a flatbed truck and gave a speech to thousands of poor, broken hearted Americans who sat on a razors edge, as he delivered the news of King’s death. Choosing to stand with the people totally unprotected, Robert’s words held such potent love and empathy that they cut through the anger and rage of the mob resulting in a miracle as Indianapolis became the only major city in which no riots occurred. If you have not yet listened to this speech, take the 6 minutes to do so now.

King’s close associate Ralph Abernathy reported to Arthur Schlesinger:

“I was so despondent and frustrated at King’s death, I had to seriously ask myself- can this country be saved? I guess the thing that kept us going was that maybe Bobby Kennedy would come up with some answers for the country… I remember telling him he had a chance to be a prophet. But prophets get shot.”

Indeed, just one day after his victory of the democratic primaries in California on June 4, 1968, Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed at the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles. Although a young Palestinian man named Sirhan Sirhan was made the lone scape goat, mountains of evidence accumulated over the years has pointed to a much darker story. Such evidence includes the findings of RFK’s coroner who proved that the killing bullet entered not from the front but rather at close range from the back of the neck.

Today’s world desperately needs citizens and statesmen with the wisdom of such figures as Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy if a similar tragedy will not unfold again today as it did in 1968. In those days, covert intelligence operations transplanted King’s Civil Rights movement with its effective use of civil yet peaceful disobedience, with the “New Left”, featuring armed and violence-prone operatives running bomb creating organizations like the Weather Underground that littered bombs (and STDs) across America. With the rise of the drug-loving anarchists of the new left who would later become leading figures of today’s sociopathic establishment, a new ethic was created on the basis of equating all aspects of western civilization (including the space program, atomic technology, the American constitution and western values more broadly) to be as evil as the war in Vietnam, corporate greed and the military industrial complex.

So here we are once more, standing on the precipice of a new age of cooperation, space exploration and international development vs a Deep State-managed dystopian world order that would make Orwell turn in his grave. If even a modicum of the wisdom expressed by MLK, JFK or Bobby Kennedy is alive in the heart of Donald Trump, and a few other world leaders, then I would say the chance of a bright future for mankind is not lost.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

The scandal was featured in the June edition of Standpoint magazine by internationally renowned Martin Luther King “authority” David Garrow and aimed at destroying the myth of King as a moral leader of America by showcasing the ugliness of King’s true self as a an orgy-loving abuser who had over 40 affairs and laughed as a friend raped a parishioner. Garrow states that his expose “poses so fundamental a challenge to his historical stature as to require the most complete and extensive historical review possible.”

The fact that so many news outlets are jumping on the bandwagon should cause one to wonder why is this happening at this moment in history? Could this strange hysteria over a mediocre slander piece have anything to do with the fact that the polarized cages of left and right are finally breaking down? Could it have anything to do with the fact that as America comes closer to a potential alliance with Russia and China, an era of cooperation and economic justice may awaken something within the collective psyche of Americans which many had thought was long dead?

The timing is especially strange since the supposed “ground breaking evidence” which the heroic Garrow is bringing to light was actually first made public in November 2017, and on closer inspection, it wouldn’t qualify by any lawyer’s standard as “evidence”.

The “Scandal” Being Exposed

In November 2017, a batch of 19,000 formerly classified government documents, and wiretap transcripts relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy were made public as per the JFK Records Collection Act of 1992. Although nothing very dramatic was found among that otherwise highly redacted bundle, a strange 20 page FBI report on Martin Luther King Jr did cause some to take notice. In this report published weeks before his murder, an anonymous FBI agent records his assessment that MLK was a paid and loyal member of the Communist Party who had his speeches approved by Communist controllers. Not only that, but the report paints King as a sexual deviant of the highest order.

In the last two pages, the report explains how King engaged in a “two day drunken sex orgy in Washington D.C., Many of those present engaged in sexual acts, natural as well as un-natural, for the entertainment of onlookers. When one of the females shied away from engaging in an unnatural act, King and other of the males present discussed how she was to be taught and initiated in this respect”.

The conspicuous quality of this FBI report, is that it is so reminiscent of Christopher Steele’s 30 page “dodgy dossier” which justified FBI surveillance on President Trump in the lead up to the 2016 elections. Without ever taking a moment to prove any of its claims, the Steele dossier asserted dozens of instances of Trump’s sexual perversity and his adherence to the nefarious agenda of the Kremlin.

Similarly ignoring all actual evidence, the 1968 FBI report advances an image of King as a degenerate using only hearsay, conjecture, and third hand reports. For example, the FBI, not known for their honesty, are convinced that King fathered a child with a mistress in Los Angeles purely because they were informed by “a very responsible Los Angeles individual in a position to know”. The audio tapes, if they exist at all, have never actually been heard by anyone and we are told will supposedly be made public in 2027.

Garrow’s Sleight of Hand

Before going further, it is worth taking a moment to ask who is this David Garrow who has found the courage to reveal the “true Martin Luther King”?

Garrow is celebrated by the Mainstream Press as an international authority on Martin Luther King due largely to his Pulitzer Prize winning 1986 book “Bearing the Cross” which has somehow given him the authority to be the last word on the narrative of King’s life for the next 33 years. Since that book Garrow has worked as a professor of history at various universities has found himself writing for proven CIA-sponsored mainstream rags such as the Washington Post, NY Times, Financial Times, New Republic and has more recently been stationed in England as a senior research Fellow at Cambridge University from 2005-2011. Today Garrow has become the official biographer of Barack Obama, and also an authority on the fraud of Russia-Gate attracting hordes of Trump supporters to his analysis.

Garrow has also made himself an enemy of the King family by leading slander campaigns against Coretta Scott King and her children who have managed the King Family Estate by labelling them as corrupt conspiracy theorists due to the family’s crazy belief that the government had anything to do with King’s assassination.

The Forgotten 1999 Civil Court Case

Garrow was first deployed to attack the family in the wake of the Memphis Civil Court trial in December 1999 wherein a four week long hearing of 70 witnesses ended with a Jury unanimously concluding not only that James Earl Ray (who had died in prison the year earlier) was innocent of the murder of Dr. King, but that the FBI and highest echelons of government conspired in the assassination.

During a press conference Coretta Scott King said: “There is abundant evidence of a major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. And the civil court’s unanimous verdict has validated our belief. I wholeheartedly applaud the verdict of the jury and I feel that justice has been well served in their deliberations. This verdict is not only a great victory for my family, but also a great victory for America. It is a great victory for truth itself. It is important to know that this was a SWIFT verdict, delivered after about an hour of jury deliberation.”

Coretta’s son Dexter (who is now the president of the King Center) spoke after his mother saying: “We can say that because of the evidence and information obtained in Memphis we believe that this case is over. This is a period in the chapter. We constantly hear reports, which trouble me, that this verdict creates more questions than answers. That is totally false. Anyone who sat in on almost four weeks of testimony, with over seventy witnesses, credible witnesses I might add, from several judges to other very credible witnesses, would know that the truth is here.”

While a fuller expose of the FBI/Anglo-Canadian intelligence behind the King assassination will be documented elsewhere (which cannot be fully appreciated outside of the context of ALL of the major assassinations of the 1960s), it is sufficient to note for now that during this period of constant O.J. Simpson trial coverage across all press agencies, hardly a word on these hearings was covered by the media.

David Garrow stepped into the mud early on to slander the family and the court case as a whole saying of the family “The King youngsters are part of a larger population of American people who need to believe that the assassination of a King or a Kennedy must be the work of mightier forces… Individuals need to see something of a harmony amongst impact and cause. That if something has a large evil effect, it ought to be the result of a huge evil cause”.

By denying the existence of causality, or conspiracy in regards to historical processes, this “world renowned historian and MLK expert” essentially admitted that he is either extremely dumb or a part of the conspiracy himself.

Exhibiting the height of hypocrisy, Garrow said of King’s children in 2009 “I fear we are at the point where the behaviour of the children is doing lasting, indelible damage to King’s reputation”.

Philip Madison Jones, a Hollywood producer and best friend of Dexter King has stated that Garrow’s anti-King family malice is due to the fact that King’s late wife Coretta Scott King refused to put Garrow in charge of a project involving King’s papers. Apparently, Garrow wished to do to King what Edgar Poe’s “official” biographer Rufus Griswold did in 1850 (1).

Obama as a Superior Role Model

It was while working in Cambridge in 2008 that Garrow became obsessed with Barack Obama and with the idea of writing an untouchable biography that would render all other biographies obsolete for all time. This work was so magnificent and all-encompassing that it would require 9 years to write and would finally put an end to all speculation about Obama’s birth and shady life before politics. The effect of this work was a 1500 page fluff piece called “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama”.

Describing his motive for writing his book Garrow said: “my very purposeful intent with this book has been to produce a book of record that folks will still be using and relying upon 25, 35 years from now. All throughout 2008, I was disappointed by the quality and depth of journalism about his earlier life. I thought the mainstream media was being insufficiently curious about him and on the other hand, we simultaneously had all of these whacky oppositional actions out there regarding where was he born was wee really a Muslim? And so I came to this really with a professional belief that someone with my background and experience should really tackle this.”

When asked in an interview how he managed to have so many long meetings with Obama in the White House (who took apparently took the time out of his busy schedule to read the entire opus), Garrow stated that it was arranged by his personal friend Bob Bauer who just so happened to be Obama’s personal attorney. Amongst other crimes, Bauer had been known for providing the “legal justification” for Obama’s unconstitutional bombing of Libya in 2011. Both Bauer and Garrow are currently playing two sides of the anti-Trump operation with Bauer acting as a loud voice for impeachment and advocate of the Russia-Gate narrative and Garrow playing an anti-Russia-Gate liberal socialist who now appears on Fox News regularly as he is a rare case of a liberal intellectual attacking Russia-Gate. While promoting neo-liberal order embodied by Barack Obama on the one hand, Garrow has somehow managed to walk the fine line of convincing both left and right ideologues that he is trustworthy whose lofty intellect transcends partisanship.

Where do we go from Here?

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the FBI became recognized as just one branch of the Deep State/5 Eyes international intelligence apparatus which had made every effort to undermine America and bring the republic back under firm control of the British Empire as outlined by Cecil Rhodes in his 1877 will.

Just as the FBI often controlled the most reactionary and violent elements of anti-establishment movements during COINTELPRO, recent reports have proven that the vast majority of those “prevented” terrorist attempts which have occurred in America since 1993 have actually first been instigated by the FBI demonstrating conclusively that the bureau never reformed.

We stand at a moment which is shaped by a great hope for a new set of relationships based on the potential alliance between western cultures increasingly purged of the Deep State and Eastern nations led by Russia, China and the Belt and Road Initiative, let us remember the words of Martin Luther King Jr in his August 1967 speech titled “Where do we go from Here?”

“I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about “Where do we go from here?” that we must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society…

Now, don’t think you have me in a bind today. I’m not talking about communism. What I’m talking about is far beyond communism. …Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated…

And I must confess, my friends, that the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will still be rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. And there will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again, with tear-drenched eyes, have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs. But difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future….

When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

In his closing remarks to the 1999 jury trial that found King to be a victim of a vast conspiracy, Martin’s son Dexter King left a challenge to all who would come into contact with this news:

“The question now is, “What will you do with that?” We as a family have done our part. We have carried this mantle for as long as we can carry it. We know what happened. It is on public record. The transcripts will be available; we will make them available on the Web at some point. Any serious researcher who wants to know what happened can find out.”

___________

(1) The idea that Poe was a deviant, alcoholic and opium addict was entirely generated by the pen of Poe’s enemy Rufus Griswold who managed to purchase the entire body of Poe’s personal writings from the poet’s financially strained aunt and then proceeded to “lose everything” while publishing a biography that became the authoritative book on Poe for the next 170 years.

When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals. In the current governmental climate, where laws that run counter to the dictates of the US Constitution are made in secret, passed without debate, and upheld by secret courts that operate behind closed doors, obeying one’s conscience and speaking truth to the power of the police state can render you an “enemy of the state.”

That list of so-called “enemies of the state” is growing.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is merely the latest victim of the police state’s assault on dissidents and whistleblowers.

On April 11, 2019, police arrested Assange for daring to access and disclose military documents that portray the U.S. government and its endless wars abroad as reckless, irresponsible, immoral and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.

Included among the leaked materials was gunsight video footage from two U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters engaged in a series of air-to-ground attacks while American aircrew laughed at some of the casualties. Among the casualties were two Reuters correspondents who were gunned down after their cameras were mistaken for weapons and a driver who stopped to help one of the journalists. The driver’s two children, who happened to be in the van at the time it was fired upon by U.S. forces, suffered serious injuries.

There is nothing defensible about crimes such as these perpetrated by the government.

When any government becomes almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting—whether that evil takes the form of war, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity—that government has lost its claim to legitimacy.

These are hard words, but hard times require straight-talking. It is easy to remain silent in the face of evil.

What is harder—what we lack today and so desperately need—are those with moral courage who will risk their freedoms and lives in order to speak out against evil in its many forms.

Throughout history, individuals or groups of individuals have risen up to challenge the injustices of their age. Nazi Germany had its Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The gulags of the Soviet Union were challenged by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. America had its colour-coded system of racial segregation and warmongering called out for what it was, blatant discrimination and profiteering, by Martin Luther King Jr.

And then there was Jesus Christ, an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his day—namely, the Roman Empire—but provided a blueprint for civil disobedience that would be followed by those, religious and otherwise, who came after him.

Indeed, it is fitting that we remember that Jesus Christ—the religious figure worshipped by Christians for his death on the cross and subsequent resurrection—paid the ultimate price for speaking out against the police state of his day.

A radical nonconformist who challenged authority at every turn, Jesus was a far cry from the watered-down, corporatized, simplified, gentrified, sissified vision of a meek creature holding a lamb that most modern churches peddle. In fact, he spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire.

Much like the American Empire today, the Roman Empire of Jesus’ day had all of the characteristics of a police state: secrecy, surveillance, a widespread police presence, a citizenry treated like suspects with little recourse against the police state, perpetual wars, a military empire, martial law, and political retribution against those who dared to challenge the power of the state.

For all the accolades poured out upon Jesus, little is said about the harsh realities of the police state in which he lived and its similarities to modern-day America, and yet they are striking.

Unfortunately, the radical Jesus, the political dissident who took aim at injustice and oppression, has been largely forgotten today, replaced by a congenial, smiling Jesus trotted out for religious holidays but otherwise rendered mute when it comes to matters of war, power and politics.

Yet for those who truly study the life and teachings of Jesus, the resounding theme is one of outright resistance to war, materialism and empire.

What a marked contrast to the advice being given to Americans by church leaders to “submit to your leaders and those in authority,” which in the American police state translates to complying, conforming, submitting, obeying orders, deferring to authority and generally doing whatever a government official tells you to do.

Telling Americans to march in lockstep and blindly obey the government—or put their faith in politics and vote for a political savior—flies in the face of everything for which Jesus lived and died.

Ultimately, this is the contradiction that must be resolved if the radical Jesus—the one who stood up to the Roman Empire and was crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be—is to be an example for our modern age.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we must decide whether we will follow the path of least resistance—willing to turn a blind eye to what Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the “evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination, to the moral degeneracy of religious bigotry and the corroding effects of narrow sectarianism, to economic conditions that deprive men of work and food, and to the insanities of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence”—or whether we will be transformed nonconformists “dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood.”

As King explained in a powerful sermon delivered in 1954, “This command not to conform comes … [from] Jesus Christ, the world’s most dedicated nonconformist, whose ethical nonconformity still challenges the conscience of mankind.”

We need to recapture the gospel glow of the early Christians, who were nonconformists in the truest sense of the word and refused to shape their witness according to the mundane patterns of the world.  Willingly they sacrificed fame, fortune, and life itself in behalf of a cause they knew to be right.  Quantitatively small, they were qualitatively giants. Their powerful gospel put an end to such barbaric evils as infanticide and bloody gladiatorial contests. Finally, they captured the Roman Empire for Jesus Christ… The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood.

truepublica.org.uk

Apart from the bizarre notion that educators should set aside one month to salute the historical achievements of one race apart from and above the historical achievements of other races, Black History Month appears to omit a lot of black history.

About slavery, do our mostly left-wing educators teach that slavery was not unique to America and is as old as humankind? As economist and author Thomas Sowell says: "More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed. White slaves were still being bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire, decades after blacks were freed in the United States."

Are students taught that "race-based preferences," sometimes called "affirmative action," were opposed by several civil rights leaders? While National Urban League Executive Director Whitney Young supported a type of "Marshall Plan" for a period of 10 years to make up for historical discrimination, his board of directors refused to endorse the plan. In rejecting it, the president of the Urban League in Pittsburgh said the public would ask, "What in blazes are these guys up to? They tell us for years that we must buy (nondiscrimination) and then they say, 'It isn't what we want.'" A member of the Urban League in New York objected to what he called "the heart of it — the business of employing Negroes (because they are Negroes)." Bayard Rustin was one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s key lieutenants and helped to plan and organize the civil rights march in D.C. that culminated in King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Rustin, an openly gay black man, also opposed race-based preferences.

Do our left-wing educators, during Black History Month, note that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's celebrated New Deal actually hurt blacks? According to Cato Institute's Jim Powell, blacks lost as many as 500,000 jobs as a result of anti-competitive, job-killing regulations of the New Deal. Powell writes: "The flagship of the New Deal was the National Industrial Recovery Act, passed in June 1933. It authorized the president to issue executive orders establishing some 700 industrial cartels, which restricted output and forced wages and prices above market levels. The minimum wage regulations made it illegal for employers to hire people who weren't worth the minimum because they lacked skills. As a result, some 500,000 blacks, particularly in the South, were estimated to have lost their jobs. Marginal workers, like unskilled blacks, desperately needed an expanding economy to create more jobs. Yet New Deal policies made it harder for employers to hire people. FDR tripled federal taxes between 1933 and 1940. … By giving labor unions the monopoly power to exclusively represent employees in a workplace, the (1935) Wagner Act had the effect of excluding blacks, since the dominant unions discriminated against blacks."

Are students taught that gun control, widely embraced by today's black leadership, began as a means to deny free blacks the right to own guns? In ruling that blacks were chattel property in the Dred Scott case, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney warned of that the consequences of ruling otherwise would mean that blacks would be able to own guns. If blacks were "entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens," said Taney, "it would give persons of the Negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one state of the union, the right … to keep and carry arms wherever they went … endangering the peace and safety of the state."

Are students taught that generations of civil rights leaders opposed immigration — both legal and illegal immigration? After the Civil War, black abolitionist Frederick Douglass implored employers to hire blacks over new immigrants. Twenty-five years later, Booker T. Washington pleaded with Southern industrialists to hire blacks over new immigrants: "One third of the population of the South is of the Negro race. … To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South: Cast down your bucket where you are. Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your fireside."

About illegal immigration, an issue that nearly all of the today's so-called black leaders simply ignore, Coretta Scott King signed a letter urging Congress to retain harsh sanctions against employers who knowingly hire illegal workers. The letter said: "We are concerned … that … the elimination of employer sanctions will cause another problem — the revival of the pre-1986 discrimination against black and brown U.S. and documented workers, in favor of cheap labor — the undocumented workers. This would undoubtedly exacerbate an already severe economic crisis in communities where there are large numbers of new immigrants."

These are just a few historical and inconvenient notes left on the cutting room floor during Black History Month.

creators.com

The King family, along with everyone who paid attention to the evidence, knew that they and the public were officially handed a cover-up. After years of effort, the King family managed to bring the evidence to light in a civil case. Confronted with the real evidence, it took the jury one hour to conclude that Martin Luther King was murdered by a conspiracy that included governmental agencies.

For more information see.

Martin Luther King, like John F. Kennedy, was a victim of the paranoia of the Washington national security establishment. Kennedy rejected General Lyman Lemnitzer’s Northwoods Project for regime change in Cuba, opposed the CIA’s invasion plan for Cuba, nixed Lemnitzer’s plans for conflict with the Soviet Union over the Cuban missile crisis, removed Lemnitzer as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and negotiated behind the scenes with Khrushchev to tone down the Cold War. Consequently, members of the military/security complex had it in for Kennedy and convinced themselves that Kennedy’s softness toward communism made him a security threat to the United States. The Secret Service itself was drawn into the plot. The films of the assassination show that the protective Secret Service personnel were ordered away from the President’s car just before the fatal shots.

King was only 39 years old and had established himself as a civil rights leader. The FBI convinced itself that King had communist connections and that the movement he led would develop into a national security threat. In those days, emphasis on civil rights implied criticism of America that many confused with communist propaganda. Criticizing America was what communists did, and here was a rising leader pointing out America’s shortcomings and beginning to foment opposition to the war in Vietnam.

The conflation of justified criticism with treason is always with us. Not long ago Obama appointee Cass Sunstein advocated that the 9/11 truth movement be infiltrated and discredited before Americans could learn that they had been deceived into accepting wars and the loss of civil liberties. Before Janet Napolitano left her post as head of Homeland Security to become chancellor of the University of California, she said that the focus of Homeland Security had shifted from terrorists to “domestic extremists,” which included war protesters, environmentalists, and government critics.

Throughout history thoughtful people have understood that truth is the enemy of government.

Most governments are privatized. They are controlled by small groups who use the government to pursue their private agendas. The notion that government serves the public interest is one of the great deceptions.

People who get in the way of these interests are not treated kindly. John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were murdered. Robert Kennedy was murdered, because he knew who the government operatives were who murdered his brother. Robert Kennedy was well on his way to becoming the next President and implementing his murdered brother’s plan to “break the CIA into a thousand pieces.” If Robert Kennedy had become president, elements of the national security state would have been indicted and convicted.

The Warren Commission understood that Oswald was a fall guy, but the commission also understood that at the height of the Cold War to tell the Americans the truth of the assassination would destroy the public’s confidence in the national security state. The commission felt it had no alternative to a coverup.

Experts’ dissatisfaction with the Warren Commission led to a second inquiry, this time by the Select Committee on Assassinations of the US House of Representatives. This report, released in 1979, 16 years after JFK’s assassination, was also a coverup, but the Select Committee could not avoid acknowledging that there had been a conspiracy, more than one gunman, and that “the Warren Commission’s and FBI’s investigation into the possibility of a conspiracy was seriously flawed.”

In 1997 the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board released the top secret Northwoods Project submitted to President Kennedy in 1962 by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Pentagon plan was to murder US citizens and to shoot down US airliners in order to blame Castro and create public support for an invasion that would bring regime change to Cuba. President Kennedy rejected the report, a decision that increased the doubts of the national security state that Kennedy had the strength and conviction to stand up against communism.

Washington’s response to the government’s murder of Martin Luther King was to create a national holiday in his name. Honoring the man that elements of the government had murdered was a clever way to bring the controversy to an end and dispose of troublesome questions.

paulcraigroberts.org

Today (January 19) is Martin Luther King Day, a national holiday.

King was an American civil rights leader who was assassinated 47 years ago on April 4, 1968, at the age of 39. James Earl Ray was blamed for the murder. Initially, Ray admitted the murder, apparently under advice from his attorney in order to avoid the death penalty, but Ray soon withdrew his confession and unsuccessfully sought a jury trail.

Documents of the official investigation remain secret until the year 2027.

As Wikipedia reports, “The King family does not believe Ray had anything to do with the murder of Martin Luther King. . . . The King family and others believe that the assassination was carried out by a conspiracy involving the U.S. government, and that James Earl Ray was a scapegoat. This conclusion was affirmed by a jury in a 1999 civil trial against Loyd Jowers and unnamed co-conspirators.”

The US Department of Justice concluded that Jowers’ evidence, which swayed the jury in the civil trail, was not credible. On the other hand, there is no satisfactory explanation why documents pertaining to the investigation of Ray were put under lock and key for 59 years.

There are many problems with the official story of King’s assassination, just as there are with the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy. No amount of suspicion or information will change the official stories. Facts don’t count enough to change official stories.

Many Americans will continue to believe that having failed to tar King as a communist and womanizer, the establishment decided to remove an inconvenient rising leader by assassination. Many black Americans will continue to believe that a national holiday was the government’s way of covering up its crime and blaming racism for King’s murder.

Certainly, the government should not have fomented suspicion by settling such a high profile murder with a plea bargain. Ray was an escapee from a state penitentiary and was apprehended at London’s Heathrow Airport on his way to disappear in Africa. It seems farfetched that he would imperil his escape by taking a racist-motivated shot at King.

We should keep in mind the many loose ends of the Martin Luther King assassination as we are being bombarded by media with what Finian Cunningham correctly terms “high-octane emotional politics that stupefies the public from asking some very necessary hard questions” about the Charlie Hebdo murders, or for that matter the Boston Marathon Bombing case and all other outrages that prove to be so convenient for governments.

Those gullible citizens who believe that “our government would never kill its own people” have much understanding to gain from knowledge of Operation Gladio and Northwoods Project, about which much information is available on the Internet and in parliamentary investigations and officially released secret documents.

The Northwoods Project was presented to President John F. Kennedy by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. It called for shooting down people on the streets of Washington and Miami, shooting down US airliners (“real or simulated”), and attacking refugee boats from Cuba in order to create an atrocity case against Castro that would secure public support for a full-fledged invasion to bring regime change to Cuba. President Kennedy refused the plot and removed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, an action that some researchers conclude led to his assassination.

Operation Gladio was revealed by the prime minister of Italy in 1990. It was a secret operation coordinated by NATO and operated by European military secret services in cooperation with the CIA and British intelligence.

Parliamentary investigations in Italy, Switzerland, and Belgium and testimony by secret service operatives have established that Gladio, originally established as a “stay-behind” secret army to resist Soviet invasion, was used to commit bombing attacks on Europeans, especially women and children, in order to blame communists and keep them from gaining political power in Europe during the Cold War era.

In answer to questioning by judges about the 1980 bombing of the central train station in Bologna resulting in the deaths of 85 people, Vincenzo Vinciguerra said: “There exists in Italy a secret force parallel to the armed forces, composed of civilians and military men . . . a super-organization with a network of communications, arms and explosives [which] took up the task, on NATO’s behalf, or preventing a slip to the left in the political balance of the country. This they did, with the assistance of the official secret services and the political and military forces.”

Vinciguerra told the UK newspaper The Guardian that “every single outrage that followed from 1969 fitted into a single, organized matrix . . . mobilized into the battle as part of an anti-communist strategy originating not with organizations deviant from the institutions of power, but from within the state itself, and specifically from within the ambit of the state’s relations within the Atlantic Alliance.”

There is no doubt about Gladio’s existence. The BBC did a 2.5 hour documentary on the secret terrorist NATO organization in 1992. There are a number of books, articles and reports in addition to the parliamentary investigations and testimonies from participants.
There are reasons to believe that, although exposed, Gladio is still in operation and is behind terrorist attacks, such as Charlie Hebdo, in Europe today. Of course, today Washington has such control over Europe that no parliamentary investigations comparable to those that exposed Operation Gladio are possible.

With the documented and officially admitted existence of many official government conspiracies against their own peoples resulting in numerous deaths, only witting or unwitting agents of government conspiracies respond to valid questions about alleged terrorist events by trying to shout down truth-seekers.

The function of shutting down suspicion of official stories has been well performed by the “mainstream” print and TV media in the Western world. This presstitute function has been joined by many tabloid internet sites, such as Salon, and other such sites that originate in money or desire for profit.

Money flows to those who serve the establishment. The way to riches is to cover for the powerful private interest groups that comprise the One Percent and control the government.

Many websites unwittingly contribute to the power of the One Percent to control explanations and to discredit truth-seekers. This is the main function of comment sections on Internet sites where paid trolls operate.

Studies have concluded that the largest percentage of a population is too insecure to take a position different from peers. Most Americans simply do not know enough to have confidence in making independent decisions. They go with the flow and rely on their peers to tell them what is safe to think.

Trolls are hired for the purpose of making disparaging and ad hominem attacks on those who diverge from accepted opinion. For example, I am constantly attacked in personal terms in comment sections by people hiding behind first names and aliases. Others employ left-wing and progressive hatred of Ronald Reagan to discredit me on the grounds that anyone so wicked and evil as to serve in the Reagan administration cannot be trusted. Many of my denigrators worship the ground that Hillary Clinton walks on.

Today in the so-called “western democracies,” it is permissible to be politically incorrect against Muslims and to invoke denigration and hatred against them. However, it is not permissible to criticize the government of Israel for indiscriminate and murderous attacks on Palestinian citizens. The position of the Israel Lobby and its obedient and well-intimidated presstitutes is that any criticism whatsoever of Israel is anti-semitism and an indication that the critic desires a new holocaust. In other words, the Israel Lobby defines any critic of any Israeli government policy as an incipient mass murderer.

This effort to silence all critics of Israeli policies applies also to Israelis and Jews themselves. Israelis and Jews who legitimately criticize Israeli policies in hopes of steering the Zionist State away from self-destruction are branded “self-hating Jews” by the Israel Lobby. The Lobby has demonstrated its power to destroy academic freedom and to reach into private Catholic universities and public state universities and both block and withdraw tenure appointments of candidates, both Jews and non-Jews, who have incurred the Lobby’s disapproval.

I see Martin Luther King as an American hero. Whatever his personal failings, if any, he stood for justice and for the safety of every race and gender under law. King actually believed in the American dream and wanted to achieve it for everyone. I am confident that had I confronted King with criticism, he would have considered my case and responded honestly regardless of any power he might have held over me.

I cannot expect the same consideration from any western government or from the trolls that operate in comment sections provided by Internet sites in hopes of boosting their readership.

Gullible and credulous people are incapable of defending their liberty. Unfortunately these traits are the principal traits of western peoples. Western liberty is collapsing in front of our eyes, and this makes absurd the desire by Vladimir Putin’s Russian opponents to integrate with the collapsing western states.

paulcraigroberts.org