The Assassination and Resurrection of Martin Luther King
Edward Curtin
“I don’t believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadorian people…”
Archbishop Oscar Romero, martyred, 24 March 1980
Whether we are aware of it or not, we live by stories. We live by others’ stories while we tell our lives by how we live. Our actions tell our stories. Then when we die, others tell our stories as they wish.
This is the spiritual thread that links the meanings of our lives. It is the way we pass over to other lives and return to our own. But without truth, we end up in the wrong place, living the wrong stories.
And don’t the stories of certain special people inspire us to carry on their legacies because their spirits are far stronger than death? Their courage contagious? Their witness the triumph of life over death? Love over hate?
Don’t they challenge us to imitate them, to kindle in us the fire of their resurrected spirits?
For Christians, Holy Week is the time for deep reflection on the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus and what they mean for us today.
This year, the anniversary of the murder of the Christian prophet and martyr, Martin Luther King Jr, falls on Easter Sunday, April 4, which gives rise to doubly deeper thoughts that cross religious boundaries where people of all faiths or none can unite in the spirit of non-violent resistance to the forces of war, poverty, racism, and materialism – violence in all its forms.
Everything that stands in the way of what King called “the Beloved Community.”
That Jesus met violence with non-violent love and voluntarily entered the darkness of death and abandonment is at the heart of the Christian faith. So too his Resurrection.
If the Jewish radical Jesus had not been executed by the Roman state occupiers of Palestine, if all hope for his followers had not seemingly been lost, then his Resurrection could not have given birth to hope in his followers to carry on his spirit of love for the poor, the downtrodden, and the outcasts – his resistance to violence.
Like Oscar Romero in El Salvador, gunned down by U.S. trained death squads at the altar while offering Mass and subsequently named a saint by the Roman Catholic Church, Martin Luther King Jr’s witness and the truth about his death should be a central meditative focus this year.
For the convergence of King’s death on April 4, 1968 with Easter this April 4th and the last day of Passover offers us a way to contemplate what is now demanded of all people who yearn for the end to hatred, violence, and injustice, and the creation of a beloved world community where love and kindness reign.
The spirit of all the prophets and martyrs is about now, not then; about us, not them; it confronts us with the challenge to interrogate ourselves.
Shall we turn away from their witness? What truly animates our souls? Where do we stand? Do we support the state’s power to kill and wage war, to deny people freedom, to discriminate, to oppress the poor?
It is always about now; the living truth is now.
To contemplate the lives of the prophets takes us very deep into the darkness where we encounter the murders of Jesus, King, Romero, and all those who have died trying to make peace and justice a reality. But only if we go into the darkest truths will we be able to see the light that leads us to accept the resurrected spirit of their resistance to evil.
Another prophet of our broken world, the Hindu Mohandas Gandhi, soul brother to King, echoed the words that many have heard, that “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong,” when, in crossing over to the Christian tradition, he told us: “We dare not think of birth without death on the cross. Living Christ means a Living Cross, without it life is a living death.”[1]
So what do we need to know about MLK, and why does it matter?
King’s True Story
Very few Americans are aware of the truth behind the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, the United States’ celebrated civil rights icon. Few books have been written about it, unlike other significant assassinations, especially JFK’s. For more than fifty years there has been a media blackout supported by government disinformation to hide the truth.
And few people, in a massive act of self-deception, have chosen to question the official explanation, choosing, rather, to embrace a mythic fabrication intended to sugarcoat the bitter fruit that has resulted from the murder of one man capable of leading a mass movement for transformative change in the United States.
Today we are eating the fruit of our denial as racial discrimination, poverty, and police violence garner the headlines.
After more than a decade as America’s best-known and most respected civil rights leader, by 1968 Reverend Martin Luther King Jr had increasingly focused on poverty issues and publicly declared his intense opposition to the US war against Vietnam in a famous speech – Beyond Vietnam: The Time To Break the Silence – at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was assassinated.[2]
MLK speaking at Riverside Church, NYC, 4 April 1967
Having won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, he emerged in the mid-1960s as an international figure, whose opinions on human and economic rights and peaceful coexistence were influential world-wide. Shortly before his assassination, he was organizing the Poor People’s Campaign that would involve hundreds of thousands of Americans who would encamp in Washington, D.C to demand the end to economic inequality, racism, and war.
At the same time, Reverend King was hated by an array of racists throughout America, especially in the American South. Among his greatest declared enemies was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who seemed convinced that King’s backers were Communists out to damage America’s interests. In the late 1960s, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program created a network of informants and agent provocateurs to undermine the civil rights and anti-war movements with a special focus on King.[3]
After King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, William Sullivan, the head of the FBI’s domestic intelligence division, wrote in a post-speech memo:
Personally, I believe in the light of King’s powerful, demagogic speech that he stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.[4]
The FBI, after extensive eavesdropping on King, subsequently sent him an anonymous letter urging him to kill himself or else his extramarital sex life would be exposed. The FBI’s and its Director J Edgar Hoover’s hatred for King was so great that nothing was too low for them.[5]
This history is common knowledge as reported in the Washington Post, The New York Times, etc.
During the Senate Church Committee hearings in the mid-1970s, a parallel group within the CIA, code-named CHAOS, was uncovered. Despite its charter disallowing it from operating inside the United States, the CIA similarly used illegal means to disrupt the civil rights and anti-war movements.
Because MLK, in his Riverside Church speech, spoke clearly to what he identified there as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government” and continued to relentlessly confront his own government on its criminal war against Vietnam, he was universally condemned by the mass media and the government that later – once he was long and safely dead and no longer a threat – praised him to the heavens. This has continued to the present day of historical amnesia.
Today Martin Luther King’s birthday is celebrated with a national holiday, but his death day disappears down the memory hole. Across the country – in response to the King Holiday and Service Act passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994 – people are encouraged to make the day one of service (from Latin, servus = slave).
Etymological irony aside, such service does not include King’s commitment to protesting a decadent system of racial and economic injustice or non-violently resisting the warfare state that is the United States. Government-sponsored service is cultural neo-liberalism at its finest.
The word service is a loaded word; it has become a smiley face and vogue word over the past thirty-five years.
Its use for MLK Day is clear: individuals are encouraged to volunteer for activities such as tutoring children, painting senior centers, delivering meals to the elderly, etc., activities that are good in themselves but far less good when used to conceal an American prophet’s message.
After all, Martin Luther King’s work was not volunteering at the local food pantry with Oprah Winfrey cheering him on.
But service without truth is slavery. It is propaganda aimed at convincing decent people into thinking that they are serving the essence of MLK’s message while they are following a message of misdirection.
Educating people about who killed King, and why, and why it matters today, is the greatest service we can render to his memory.
What exactly is the relationship between King’s saying that “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government” and his murder?
Let’s look at the facts
Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated on April 4, 1968, at 6:01 PM as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was shot in the lower right side of his face by one rifle bullet that shattered his jaw, damaged his upper spine, and came to rest below his left shoulder blade.
The US government claimed the assassin was a racist loner named James Earl Ray, who had escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary on April 23, 1967. Ray was alleged to have fired the fatal shot from a second-floor bathroom window of a rooming house above the rear of Jim’s Grill across the street.
Running to his rented room, Ray allegedly gathered his belongings, including the rifle, in a bedspread-wrapped bundle, rushed out the front door onto the adjoining street, and in a panic dropped the bundle in the doorway of the Canipe Amusement Company a few doors down. He was then said to have jumped into his white Mustang and to have driven to Atlanta where he abandoned the car.
From there he fled to Canada and then to England and then to Portugal and back to England where he was eventually arrested at Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968, and extradited to the US.
The state claims that the money Ray needed to purchase the car and for all his travel was secured through various robberies and a bank heist. Ray’s alleged motive was racism and that he was a bitter and dangerous loner.
When Ray, under extraordinary pressure, coercion, and a payoff from his lawyer to take a plea, pleaded guilty (only a few days later to request a trial that was denied) and was sentenced to 99 years in prison, the case seemed to be closed, and was dismissed from public consciousness. Another hate-filled lone assassin, as the government also termed Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, had committed a despicable deed.
Ray had received erroneous advice from his attorney, Percy Foreman. Foreman had a long history representing government, corporate, intelligence, and mafia figures, including Jack Ruby, in cases where the government wanted to keep people silent. Ray was told that the government would go after Ray’s father and brother, Jerry, and that he’d get the electric chair if he didn’t plead guilty,
Ray initially acquiesced. He entered what is known as an Alford plea before Judge Preston Battle. In making his plea, Ray did not admit to any criminal act and asserted his innocence. The following day, he fired Percy Foreman, who, by offering money to induce a guilty plea, had committed a criminal offense.
Foreman had also lied to Judge Battle about his contract with Ray. And, the transcript of Ray’s testimony was doctored to help support the government’s case. Ray was sentenced to life in prison. After three days, Ray tried to retract his plea and maintained his innocence for almost 30 years until his death.
The United State government’s case against James Earl Ray was extremely weak from the start, and in the intervening years has grown so weak that it is no longer believable. A vast body of evidence has accumulated that renders it patently false.
But before examining such evidence, it is important to point out that MLK, Jr, his father, Rev. ML King Sr, and his maternal grandfather, Rev. AD Williams, all pastors of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, were spied on by Army Intelligence and the FBI since 1917.[6]
All were considered dangerous because of their espousal of racial and economic equality. None of this had to do with war or foreign policy, but such spying was connected to their religious opposition to racist and economic policies that stretched back to slavery, realities that have been officially acknowledged today.
But when MLK Jr forcefully denounced unjust and immoral war-making as well, especially the Vietnam war, and announced his Poor People’s Campaign and intent to lead a massive peaceful encampment of hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C., he set off panic in the inner sanctums of the government.
Seventy-five years of spying on black religious leaders here found its ultimate “justification.”
The corporate mass media has for more than fifty years echoed the government’s version of the King assassination. Here and there, however, mainly through the alternative media, and also through the monumental work and persistence of the King family lawyer, William Pepper, the truth about the assassination has surfaced.
Through decades of research, a TV trial, a jury trial, and three meticulously researched books, Pepper has documented the parts played in the assassination by F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, Army Intelligence, Memphis Police, and southern Mafia figures. In his last two books, An Act of State (2003) and later The Plot to Kill King (2016), Pepper presents his comprehensive case.
William Pepper’s decades-long investigation not only refutes the flimsy case against James Earl Ray, but definitively proves that King was killed by a government conspiracy led by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, Army Intelligence, and Memphis Police, assisted by southern Mafia figures. He is right to assert that :
we have probably acquired more detailed knowledge about this political assassination than we have ever had about any previous historical event.”
This makes the silence around this case even more shocking.
This shock is accentuated when one is reminded (or told for the first time) that in 1999 a Memphis jury, after a thirty-day trial with over seventy witnesses, found the US government guilty in the killing of MLK.
In that 1999 Memphis civil trial (see complete transcript) brought by the King family, the jury found that King was murdered by a conspiracy that included governmental agencies.[7]
The corporate media, when they reported it at all, dismissed the jury’s verdict and those who accepted it, including the entire King family led by Coretta Scott King[8], as delusional.
Time magazine called the verdict a confirmation of the King family’s “lurid fantasies.” The Washington Post compared those who believed it with those who claimed that Hitler was unfairly accused of genocide. A smear campaign ensued that has continued to the present day and then the fact that a trial ever occurred disappeared down the memory hole so that today most people never heard of it and assume MLK was killed by a crazy white racist, James Earl Ray, if they know even that.
The civil trial was the King family’s last resort to get a public hearing to disclose the truth of the assassination. They and Pepper knew, and proved, that Ray was an innocent pawn, but Ray had died in prison in 1998 after trying for thirty years to get a trial and prove his innocence.
During all these years, Ray had maintained that he had been manipulated by a shadowy figure named Raul, who supplied him with money and his white Mustang and coordinated all his complicated travels, including having him buy a rifle and come to Jim’s Grill and the boarding house on the day of the assassination to give it to Raul. The government has always denied Raul existed. Pepper proved that that was a lie.
Slowly, however, glimmers of light have been shed on that trial and truth of the assassination.
On March 30, 2018, The Washington Post’s crime reporter, Tom Jackman, published a four-column front-page article, “Who killed Martin Luther King Jr? His family believes James Earl Ray was framed.”
While not close to an endorsement of the trial’s conclusions, it is a far cry from past nasty dismissals of those who agreed with the jury’s verdict as conspiracy nuts or Hitler supporters. After decades of clouding over the truth of MLK’s assassination, some rays of truth have come peeping through, and on the front page of the WP at that.
Jackman makes it very clear that all the surviving King family members – Bernice, Dexter, and Martin III – are in full agreement that James Earl Ray, the accused assassin, did not kill their father, and that there was and continues to be a conspiracy to cover up the truth. He adds to that the words of the highly respected civil rights icon and now deceased US Congressman from Georgia, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who said:
I think there was a major conspiracy to remove Dr King from the American scene,
and former U.N. ambassador and Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, who was with King at the Lorraine Motel when he was shot, who concurs:
I would not accept the fact that James Earl Ray pulled the trigger, and that is all that matters.
Additionally, Jackman adds that Andrew Young emphasized that the assassination of King came after that of President Kennedy, Malcolm X, and a few months before that of Senator Robert Kennedy.
“We were living in a period of assassinations,” he quotes Young as saying, a statement clearly intimating their linkages and coming from a widely respected and honorable man.
In the years leading up to Pepper’s 1978 involvement in the MLK case, only a few lonely voices expressed doubts about the government’s case, such as, Harold Weisberg’s Frame Up in 1971 and Mark Lane’s and Dick Gregory’s Code Name “Zorro” in 1977. While other lonely researchers dug deeper, most of the country put themselves and the case to sleep.
As with the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother, Robert (two months after MLK), all evidence points to the construction of scapegoats to take the blame for government executions. Ray, Oswald, and Sirhan Sirhan all bear striking resemblances in the ways they were chosen and moved as pawns over long periods of time into positions where their only reactions could be stunned surprise when they were accused of the murders.
It took Pepper many years to piece together the essential truths, once he and Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Dr King’s associate, interviewed Ray in prison in 1978. The first giveaway that something was seriously amiss came with the 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations’ report on the King assassination.
Led by Robert Blakey, suspect in his conduct of the other assassination inquiries, who had replaced Richard Sprague, who was deemed to be too independent, “this multi-million-dollar investigation ignored or denied all evidence that raised the possibility that James Earl Ray was innocent,” and that government forces might be involved.
Pepper lists in his book over twenty such omissions that rival the absurdities of the magical thinking of the Warren Commission. The HSCA report became the template “for all subsequent disinformation in print and visual examinations of this case” for the past forty-two years.
Blocked at every turn by the authorities and unable to get Ray a trial, Pepper arranged an unscripted, mock TV trial that aired on April 4, 1993, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the assassination. Jurors were selected from a pool of US citizens, a former US Attorney and a federal judge served as prosecutor and judge, with Pepper serving as defense attorney.
He presented extensive evidence clearly showing that authorities had withdrawn all security for King; that the state’s chief witness was falling down drunk; that the alleged bathroom sniper’s nest was empty right before the shot was fired; that three eyewitnesses, including the New York Times’ Earl Caldwell, said that the shot came from the bushes behind the rooming house; and that two eyewitnesses saw Ray drive away in his white Mustang before the shooting, etc.
The prosecution’s feeble case was rejected by the jury that found Ray not guilty.
As with all Pepper’s work on the case, the mainstream media responded with silence. And though this was only a TV trial, increasing evidence emerged that the owner of Jim’s Grill, Loyd Jowers, was deeply involved in the assassination. Pepper dug deeper, and on December 16, 1993, Loyd Jowers appeared on ABC’s Primetime Live that aired nationwide.
Pepper writes:
Loyd Jowers cleared James Earl Ray, saying that he did not shoot MLK but that he, Jowers, had hired a shooter after he was approached by Memphis produce man Frank Liberto and paid $100,000 to facilitate the assassination. He also said that he had been visited by a man named Raul who delivered a rifle and asked him to hold it until arrangements were finalized…The morning after the Primetime Live broadcast there was no coverage of the previous night’s program, not even on ABC… Here was a confession, on prime-time television, to involvement in one of the most heinous crimes in the history of the Republic, and virtually no American mass-media coverage.
In the twenty-eight years since that confession, Pepper has worked tirelessly on the case and has uncovered a plethora of additional evidence that refutes the government’s claims and indicts it and the media for a continuing cover-up.
The evidence he has gathered, detailed and documented in An Act of State and The Plot to Kill King, proves that Martin Luther King was killed by a conspiracy masterminded by the U.S. government. The foundation of his case proving that was presented at the 1999 trial, while other supporting documentation was subsequently discovered.
Since the names and details involved make clear that, as with the murders of JFK and RFK, the conspiracy was very sophisticated with many moving parts organized at the highest level, I will just highlight a few of his findings in what follows.
- Pepper refutes the government and proves, through multiple witnesses, telephonic, and photographic evidence, that Raul existed; that his full name is Raul Coelho and that he was James Earl Ray’s intelligence handler, who provided him with money and instructions from their first meeting in the Neptune Bar in Montreal, where Ray had fled in 1967 after his prison escape, until the day of the assassination. It was Raul who instructed Ray to return from Canada to the U.S. (an act that makes no sense for an escaped prisoner who had fled the country), gave him money for the white Mustang, helped him attain travel documents, and moved him around the country like a pawn on a chess board. The parallels to Lee Harvey Oswald are startling.
- He presents the case of Donald Wilson, a former FBI agent working out of the Atlanta office in 1968, who went with a senior colleague to check out an abandoned white Mustang with Alabama plates (Ray’s car, to which Raul had a set of keys) and opened the passenger door to find that an envelope and some papers fell out onto the ground. Thinking he may have disturbed a crime scene, the nervous Wilson pocketed them. Later, when he read them, their explosive content intuitively told him that if he gave them to his superiors they would be destroyed. One piece was a torn-out page from a 1963 Dallas telephone directory with the name Raul written at the top, and the letter “J” with a Dallas telephone number for a club run by Jack Ruby, Oswald’s killer. The page was for the letter H and had numerous phone numbers for H. L. Hunt, Dallas oil billionaire and a friend of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Both men hated MLK. The second sheet contained Raul’s name and a list of names and sums and dates for payment. On the third sheet was written the telephone number and extension for the Atlanta FBI office. (Read James W. Douglass’s important interview with Donald Wilson in The Assassinations, pp.479-491.)
- Pepper shows that the alias Ray was given and used from July 1967 until April 4, 1968 – Eric Galt – was the name of a Toronto U.S. Army Intelligence operative, Eric St. Vincent Galt, who worked for Union Carbide with Top Secret clearance. The warehouse at the Canadian Union Carbide Plant in Toronto that Galt supervised “housed a top-secret munitions project funded jointly by the CIA, the U.S. Naval Surface Weapons Center, and the Army Electronics Research and Development Command …. In August 1967, Galt met with Major Robert M. Collins, a top aide to the head of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group (MIG), Colonel John Downie.” Downie selected four members for an Alpha 184 Sniper Unit that was sent to Memphis to back up the primary assassin of MLK. Meanwhile, Ray, set up as the scapegoat, was able to move about freely since he was protected by the pseudonymous NSA clearance for Eric Galt.
- To refute the government’s claim that Ray and his brother robbed the Alton, Illinois Bank to finance his travels and car purchase (therefore no Raul existed), Pepper “called the sheriff in Alton and the president of the bank; they gave the same statement. The Ray brothers had nothing to do with the robbery. No one from the HSCA, the FBI, or The New York Times had sought their opinion.” CNN later reiterated the media falsehood that became part of the official false story.
- Pepper shows that the fatal shot came from the bushes behind Jim’s Grill and the rooming house, not from the bathroom window. He presents overwhelming evidence for this, showing that the government’s claim, based on the testimony on a severely drunk Charlie Stephens, was absurd. His evidence includes the testimony of numerous eyewitnesses and that of Loyd Jowers (a nine-and-a-half-hour deposition), the owner of Jim’s Grill, who said he joined another person in the bushes, and after the shot was fired to kill King, he brought the rifle back into the Grill through the back door. Thus, Ray was not the assassin.
- He presents conclusive evidence that the bushes were cut down the morning after the assassination in an attempt to corrupt the crime scene. The order to do so came from Memphis Police Department Inspector Sam Evans to Maynard Stiles, a senior administrator of the Memphis Department of Public Works.
- He shows how King’s room was moved from a safe interior room, 201, to balcony room, 306, on the upper floor; how King was conveniently positioned alone on the balcony by members of his own entourage for the easy mortal head shot from the bushes across the street. (Many people only remember the iconic photograph taken after-the-fact with Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, et al., standing over the fallen King and pointing across the street.) He uncovers the role of black Memphis Police Department Domestic Intelligence and military intelligence agent Marrell McCollough, attached to the 111th MIG, within the entourage. McCollough can be seen kneeling over the fallen King, checking to see if he’s dead. McCollough officially joined the CIA in 1974 (see Douglass Valentine’s “Deconstructing Kowalski: The DOJ’s Strange MLK Report”)
- Pepper confirms that all of this, including that the assassin in the bushes was dutifully photographed by Army Intelligence agents situated on the nearby Fire House roof.
- He presents evidence that all security for Dr. King was withdrawn from the area by the Memphis Police Department, including a special security unit of black officers, and four tactical police units. A black detective at the nearby fire station, Ed Redditt, was withdrawn from his post on the afternoon of April 4th, allegedly because of a death threat against him. And the only two black firemen at Fire Station No. 2 were transferred to another station.
- He confirms the presence of “Operation Detachment Alpha 184 team,” a Special Forces sniper team in civilian disguise at locations high above the Lorraine Motel balcony, and he names one soldier, John D. Hill, as part of Alpha 184 and another military team, Selma Twentieth SFG, that was in Memphis.
- He explains the use of two white mustangs in the operation to frame Ray.
- He proves that Ray had driven off before the shooting; that Lloyd Jowers took the rifle from the shooter who was in the bushes; that the Memphis police were working in close collaboration with the FBI, Army Intelligence, and the “Dixie Mafia,” particularly local produce dealer Frank Liberto and his New Orleans associate Carlos Marcello; and that every aspect of the government’s case was filled with holes that any person familiar with the details and possessing elementary logical abilities could refute.
- So importantly, Pepper shows how the mainstream media and government flacks have spent years covering up the truth of MLK’s murder through lies and disinformation, just as they have done with the Kennedy and Malcom X assassinations that are of a piece with this one.
There is such a mass of evidence through depositions, documents, interviews, photographs, etc. in Pepper’s An Act of State and The Plot to Kill King that makes it abundantly clear that the official explanation that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King is false and that there was a conspiracy to assassinate him that involved the FBI and other government agencies. Only those inoculated against the truth can ignore such evidence and continue to believe the official version.
Martin Luther King was a transmitter of a radical non-violent spiritual and political energy so plenipotent that his very existence was a threat to an established order based on institutionalized violence, racism, and economic exploitation. He was a very dangerous man to the U.S. government and all the institutional and deep state forces armed against him.
Revolutionaries are, of course, anathema to the power elites who, with all their might, resist such rebels’ efforts to transform society. If they can’t buy them off, they knock them off.
Fifty-three years after King’s assassination, the causes he fought for – civil rights, the end to US wars of aggression, and economic justice for all – remain not only unfulfilled, but have worsened in so many respects.
They will not be resolved until this nation decides to confront the truth of why and by whom he was killed.
For the government that honors Dr. King with a national holiday killed him. This is the suppressed truth behind the highly promoted MLK Day of service. It is what you are not supposed to know.
But it is what we need to know in order to resurrect his spirit in us, so we can carry on his mission and emulate his witness.
The time is now.
Many thanks to my good friends Dave Ratcliffe and Jim Douglass for all their help.
Edward Curtin is an independent writer whose work has appeared widely over many years. His website is edwardcurtin.com and his new book is Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies.
Notes
[1] As quoted in James W. Douglass, The Non-Violent Cross, New York, 1968, p. 57. [back]
[2][2] See “50 Years Ago: Riverside Church and MLK’s Final Year of Experiments With Truth,” David Ratcliffe, rat haus reality press, 4 April 2017.
A significant moment in Dr. King’s odyssey occurred on 14 January 1967 when he first saw a photographic essay by William Pepper about the children of Vietnam. Initially, while he hadn’t had a chance to read the text, it was the photographs that stopped him. Bernard Lee, who was present at the time, never forgot Martin King’s shock as he looked at photographs of young napalm victims:
“Martin had known about the [Vietnam] war before then, of course, and had spoken out against it. But it was then that he decided to commit himself to oppose it.”
The truth force in these photographs led directly to Dr. King’s Riverside Church exhortation in April.
See “The Truth of The Children of Vietnam: A Way of Liberation – How Will We Challenge Militarism, Racism, and Extreme Materialism?, David Ratcliffe, rat haus reality press, 30 November 2017.[back]
[3]Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Case Study, US Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (“Church Committee”), Final Report – Book III: Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, 23 April 1976, pp. 79-184.[back]
[4] “MLK’s speech attracted FBI’s intense attention,” Tony Capaccio, Washington Post, 27 August 2013.[back]
[5] “What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals,” Beverly Gage, New York Times, 11 November 2014.[back]
[6] “Army feared King, secretly watched him, Spying on blacks started 75 years ago,” Stephen G. Tompkins, The Commercial Appeal, 21 March 1993.[back]
[7] An overview of the trial with links back into the court transcript is “The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis,” Jim Douglass, Probe Magazine, Spring 2000. Apart from the courtroom participants, Douglass was one of only two people who attended the entire thirty-day trial.[back]
[8] See Transcript of the King Family Press Conference on the Martin Luther King Assassination Conspiracy Trial Verdict, Atlanta, Georgia, 9 December 1999.[back]
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Wow, another gullible member of the “Pepper knows everything” crowd. Great job investigating Bill’s stories, or did you bother to read anything other than his printed fairy tales? The only thing more absurd than Pepper’s lies is the willingness of people like you to swallow them hook, line, and sinker.
Charles Barkley, basketball commentator and former NBA star, on the assassination of MLK.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/were-so-stupid-following-our-politicians-charles-barkley-unleashes-one-minute-truth
‘If the Jewish radical Jesus had not been executed by the Roman state occupiers of Palestine, if all hope for his followers….’ this really is specious regarding Pax Roma. Life of Brian aside, what have the Romans…. There are articles by non biased social historians who put Dr Luther in a human perspective. I do not intend to bother with his peccadilloes because that is what humans do. But to backtrack two thousand years and invoke an entity essentially confabulated after the events of a radical with seven avatars running around a land which for all this confabulated entity no historical records can be found in the secular and non sectarian chronicles at the time. By the very fact that the four confabulations of the apostles are so diverse one would believe of four avatars not one. The change in the laws in the US regarding Amerikans who happened to… Read more »
There were 3 black leaders during the time of the assassinations that had they lived could have led whatmight have been a genuine socialist revolution. All of them were killed by the state which recognized and feared that fact. The best known were Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
But the most potentially significant one was Fred Hampton chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, gunned down while he slept by a squad of FBI and Chicago police, Dec 4, 1969.
Hampton was a Marxist-Leninist who spoke passionately of working class unity across racial divides. He was making progress with his ideas to bringing poor whites, blacks and Hispanics together.
Fred Hampton was 21 years old at the time of his murder. In an alternate history of the USA he might well have been the first black president.
Karl Marx used the N word. He was a robust supporter of slavery until 1847 if not later. His third cousin was Lionel R0thschild. He was also related to the hugely wealthy Samuel and Philips families. I am not aware of the downtrodden benefitting from Marxists. The nominally Marxist regimes in the USSR and China were/are the grimmest dystopias in history.
Words can be used as weapons; clearly this neo-Nazi has his own agenda regarding social comment. This poison should be banned from Off-G, why let the enemy here, let him pontificate on his own site.
Ban people you disagree with? Classy.
Neo-mazi: is an oxymoron. You have no clue what National Sozialismus is about. As for the allusion to a venomous analogy -this poison- is exactly the very language used by Herr Streicher in the Völkischer Beobachter.
Read the book Wall Street and the Russian revolution. The United States helped the Russian revolutionaries. Communism is a way for central bankers to get a monopoly.
As is normal for governments we kill em and then we laud em. Things don’t change. We are all but pawns in a Devilish game called the national security. We are all governed by at least two bodies and probably a lot more. What is the worst of all that the government was found guity but not one person was found responsible and faced punishment. Maybe we all get the leadership we deserve. What appears to be coming with the great reset will make governments non accountatbility to new levels. Anyone got any ideas what we can do to stop it?
These people are trying
https://thefreedomcycle.com/pub/?__cf_chl_jschl_tk__=4e38d375b7cc4d6b881b84ba23c470d47dffecf6-1617654369-0-AdyQDgBbbVzEH4Xo78WT1XuY2iqEV_6pl0evcVLKOZ2zt4WNpgURHSv4ausAliVXxNcM7PWCzVnOVF3A0A8buItYeytivYVIaXgYo4VQfFUeX5E9UzeWMTX07gWUS_OasseveenF0iN9T5JkbMqM_89ECegBNOI7m7xJKBzL47HxVGkbuzczvUtdjJHkGrrGmM1DZXdxbtBYFPG9wTphRtlpHADKxaFJeU-4mFsceN6clzUbMqwZIkKppSAxcN37Dk36PACpwkjGiuc_XTcec4npmmz3r61O_Hq_6ltZuDlWfuFWZc09KJ8S_BxDXemErwzHzdqR8ihP6EBsYhuCcz29FaWFYSSzWIXXxixrZX2ByX7iJ6FLQdkOCebjlnHGnw
king was a charlatan and alphabet man…. maybe he went of piste….
like most of the ‘sick centuries’ heroes and ‘visionaries’ he was merely an operation moving the herd into check-mate..
endlessly recycled and quoted like the degenerate imbecile and scion of the kennedy crime clan JFK..
the usual suspects writing the hand out sheets ‘their’ mannequins recite to the drooling masses..
Kremlin makes a facepalm about Washington (they dont want to end up the same way).
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/04/01/russia-warns-of-anti-white-aggression-in-us-a73446
The deep state liquidated MLK in 1968.
They liquidated Magufuli in 2021.
What is the -deep state-. I visitied The DDR and they were rather upfront about their way of governing. Maybe the hidden cabal is a more realistic allusion to what is normal in politics: conspiracy. Especially those one aligns or identifies with. I have seen identities appear in movements, groups, union meetings who have one aim: disruption. Who wants this to occur are the usual suspects. Leaders. Nothing deep about them. That’s what makes them so above board. The -deep state- is great camouflage.
” The refusal to acknowledge policing as a persistent concern in its own right is especially noticeable in the public amnesia around Martin Luther King Jr.’s address to the March on Washington. While the final, “I have a dream” portion of the speech may well be the most frequently cited act of public oratory of the twentieth century, the speech in its entirety is seldom cited, particularly the middle portion where King extols “[t]he marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community.” Rather than mentioning policing in passing as a local impediment to hid campaigns, King presents it as core to the movement’s goals, as a sort of summary of actually existing racism in the United States. “There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, ‘When will you be satisfied ? ‘We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the… Read more »
Sitting at home (my family), in my room, doing homework, listening to WABC New York top 40 AM station, and suddenly right after 7:30PM the radio goes silent for a few seconds, and the DJ comes on to tell us the news bulletin from Memphis,…. 53 years ago today, and the memory is so vivid.
Now exchange every time the word “black” appears in this article with the word “white” and you have 2021. Disagree? Just look at the vitriol, anger and calls to violence that follow here.
You’re confused.
No. You are projection.
I was 21 years old when Dr. MLK was assassinated. I remember watching the funeral and crying. I asked myself, “Why am I crying”?
opps. Let me try this again. Sorry.
I was 21 years old when Dr. MLK was assassinated. I remember watching the funeral and crying. I asked myself. “Why am I crying, I never met the man”? I realized at that moment that the love that Dr. King had and the impact that he had on so many people, touched me very deeply. I was also very depressed with the war in Vietnam and the total waste of lives that were being lost on both sides of the war.
I would encourage everyone to read the book “A Testament Of Hope” that has many of Dr. King’s sermons and speeches. Peace.
My memories are in a desperate struggle with Oldtimers Disease, but there’s a visual of having stuck a picture of the man, torn out of Readers Digest, to the back of my wardrobe door…It makes me wonder what i was thinking about as a pre-20year old. .I painted the surrounds with gold paint… i must have had it bad…
Damn, we’re still working on this one (and JFK, etc.) and we’ve got these new ones piling up. So many conspiracies to uncover, so little time.
Seriously, the war OF terror is almost 20 years old. It’s a little depressing.
MLK’s execution by the U.S. government is covered up by the State Corporatist Media — but that is because governments are still afraid of his words. This is the real crime. MLK knew the state planned to kill him. He told us he was ready to go to his death for the sake of his message. And the press continues to hides his message. The liberal elite pretend to honour him, while silencing him even in death. At the height of last year’s BLM protests the press went out of its way to belittle Martin Luther King and to paint him as irrelevant. Now, as our five basic freedoms hang in the balance — speech, religion, press, assembly, and the right to petition the government — MLK’s words are more vital than ever. “All we say to America is, be true to what you said on paper. Somewhere I read of the… Read more »
”The liberal elite pretend to honour him”
No Liberals do honour him, it is the far-right who are pretending to honour him, aren’t you.
The far-right are trying to claim black civil rights leaders as their own…really? . Just so you know, your political grandparents were doing the lynching at the time of his speeches. .
And you try yo throw BLM under the bus in the name of Martin Luther King…..really?
Just so you know MLK, would have been behind BLM and would see you for the fraud you are.
It is BLM that has an issue with MLK. Ask them.
I use the phrase liberal elite very loosely and only because of the confection of pretending to identify with MLK while suppressing him.
Event Covid shows us cliché of political sides is a dead duck. There are those who are for inalienable rights and there are totalitarians.
If I had a dollar for every neo-Nazi who told me ….”the left and right have no meaning any more”. ……Yes that’s right sweetheart, we’re all Nazis now….aren’t we? is that’s what you want to hear?
What Covid has taught us is that the CIA continual their war on the left. They know the left is their enemy, as do you.
“we’re all Nazis now”???
That’s not what he’s saying AT ALL! And one has to wonder what sort of circles you mix in. Sounds like you spend an inordinate amount of time hanging out with neo-Nazis!
Moneycircus is on the money. It’s not left vs right any more. It’s Libertarianism vs Authoritarianism. Or, if you prefer, Totalitarianism. I think I know which side you’re on…
Are a Soros operative or an ADL operative or both ?
If you can’t even see that Black Lives Matter are controlled opposition, and sheep herders for the Democrats, and are as Fake as a Hong Kong Rolex, then I almost feel sorry for your naivety.
Liberals support the wars that King oposed
I’m glad you called out Chomsky – another wolf in sheep’s clothing masquerading as a “progressive”. Or is it “Anarchist”?
I have a ‘friend’ who regards himself as a socialist, and literally has Chomsky on a pedestal, along with Amy Goodman, and who also reads The Guardian.
Yet he wanted the police to hand out free facemasks last year, fully ignored the police brutality here in Australia, believes people should be “sensible about covid measures” (comply) and still thinks there is a pandemic. There are a lot like that who regard themselves as “leftists” or “progressives” who are in full lockstep with the Covid1984 pysops. They support it.
Sadly, there is not a great deal of difference between the enormity of those government assassinations and the current governmental MO, is there. The dozen or so political assassinations produced generations of people who not only did not believe the actions of the alphabet soups, but in many cases lead to levels of activism that still exist today. And yet here we are, feeling confused and overwhelmed and impotent when we should be drawing strength from the past and pledging, then as now, to stop this madness. Then as now, we need real, actual leadership. We need someone who is willing to stand up to the lies just as Mr King and others stood up to the horrors of the war, the poverty, the racism, and the corporate capitalist greed. We really do not want to be sitting here twenty years from now, lamenting the fact that we saw what… Read more »
You fight your way out of tyranny. Each and every person. You don’t sit there waiting for someone to come along and save you. If that’s your attitude you deserve to perish.
Good article. The government that gets paid with taxpayer’s money to resolve crime turns out to be the most criminal in the world.
HE gathered men and women around him and went with them through the country teaching. The authorities had him in their sights. HE was preparing to overthrow the public order, even the financial system. Didn’t HE enjoy chasing peaceful merchants and money changers out of the temple with a whip, healing the sick without approved remedies and only with devine power? HE is even said to have magically raised the dead and revealed strictly hidden religious secrets. HE accused the honorable priests – according to today’s usage – a conspiracy against the people. A charlatan and esoteric, and of course, a Querdenker -a lateral thinker- and divider of society, a conspiracy theorist and dangerous rebel.
Whishing everbody offGuardionista a Happy Easter!
Lockdown never really worked around Easter
Boris abandons introducing vaccine passports for pubs in big win for drinkers – source
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1418780/boris-johnson-pubs-vaccine-passports-covid-19-hospitality-conservatives-ont
Perhaps just another ‘lull before the storm’, after which we’ll need passports to breathe air with any significant oxygen content…?
I’m sure they started demanding a passport for everything so they could settle for it to be applied on theatres and cinemas as a gift to Netflix, Amazon TV and Apple TV. Killing our culture for American empire and Hollywood propaganda is half the battle to occupation.
Naomi Klein sees vaccine passports as step 10/10, the last stand — in conversation with Del Bigtree.
http://thephaser.com/2021/04/are-vaccine-passports-the-end-of-america/
Don’t you mean Naomi Wolf?
I do. Thank you! I had my anger at Klein’s sellout to Rockefeller interests in mind and my obsession came back to bite me )
For a moment i thought Klein had come back to her senses.
No such luck. Her ‘senses’ are bought and paid for.
Modern China is a creation of the central banking cartel. Blame those that control them. Modern dystopian China is now the model the rest of the world will have to emulate. The banksters need dystopia to depopulate.
Perhaps the worldwide plan to move from a faulty test system to a virtually unknown technology jab should be seen as an acknowledgement that we will be returning to normal, no matter, in a ‘few weeks.’
It is little more than an inept Hail Mary pass meant to shock The Hesitant Ones into throwing caution to the wind and start making plans for a late summer beer at the local.
And once again, these proclamations are not isolated. They are being made all over the world. As usual.
firstly it a rumour article
and stella this is what they would do in PR if their was something big coming up like the local selection in may and this would cause number s to be loss they would wait until after then and bring it or example.
say after after spike of cases around may 26 you see this happening as the problem reaction solution with a possible 2 week lockdown
(i hope not)
The New South Wales govt let us know it intends covid passports, so too has the Queensland govt…Thus we’ll continue to have “mysterious” “Covid Outbreaks”, for what’s the point of track’n’trace gadgets otherwise ?
MLK Jr. was assasinated by the “Deep State” and matyrd by them in the process.
MLK Jr.’s death served multiple purposes on behalf of the hidden hand that has controlled humanity for centuries. To divide and conquer. To destroy hope and faith. Just to name a few.
My apologies if the following link offends or angers anyone.
Stated in the thread itself:
‘This is a fascinating and depressing case to examine.’
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.http://cluesforum.info/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=1496&sid=1ae96212cbd5d01ddb4976b14b567eb2
“This is not a revelation. It is been discussed for decades. King was not exactly Frederick Douglass, W E B. Du Boise, Paul Robeson or Malcolm X; although he did become somewhat more radicalized in the last few years of his life. He was more along the lines of Booker T Washington. But, still, yes, Jay Edgar Hoover probably still had him whacked.”
Du Bois and Robeson were both Freemasons.
“The implication being that they joined to be members of a secret dark society/cabal/cult of Devil worshipping psychotics and psychopath criminals thats goal was to take over the world, instead of two guys joining a social club for networking purposes? Not every Freemason, Elk, Oddfellow, Shriner etc is JD Rockefeller and associates.”
Edward Curtin is a brilliant writer, and also a very holy man.
Yes, yes, and yes. But, no, Jesus was not a “Jewish radical”. That cheap label belies what He was. He was a spiritual teacher and prophet, besides the rest of what He claimed Himself. But he had nothing to do with politics (“Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”), and that very fact disqualifies Him from ‘radical’ status. He pointed to another world – a spiritual world, which was fundamentally different from our everyday material world (“My Kingdom is not of this world”) and encouraged those who sensed the reality of that world to “Follow Me”. This parallel world was not visible to the ordinary five senses of man, which is why a teacher was required in the first place, just as nobody without at least a basic grasp of harmony, melody and rhythm can hear the reality of great music, and just as nobody without artistic feeling can respond… Read more »
Slavery ended in the 1860s, segregation ended in the 1960s, will the mass imprisonment of the black population in US Corporate slave prison camps end in the 2060s?
The picture from the balcony is of men who were no different from Judas.
Everyone pointing was an FBI informant.
Andrew Young? I never suspected him as letter-agencied.
Time to rename the Day – “Assassination Day” and commemorate all four+… the point needs driving home that this is ONE Assassination Bureau and the modus operandi are identical.
Much ado…
The CIA know that socialism and democracy are the enemies of the Corporate military industrial complex, it is a shame that many here don’t.
socialism zionism bolsheik ism satan ism all the ism is
lu e cipher and his little helpers
You can say that because you have no idea what any of those terms mean. You are ignorant. If you understood any of those terms you could not say that.
Speaking to power…….Doctors for Covid Ethics threaten the European Medicines Agency with serious legal action, citing the Nuremberg Code, because the EMA is recommending dangerous, experimental, untested mRNA “vaccines” to people who have zero risk from covid but very real risk from the “vaccine” (which is not even technically a vaccine). The word “vaccine” has been cynically applied to these experimental, unlicenced injections, in order to generate familiarity and comfort, rendering the victims far more susceptible to being tricked. None of the people taking this crap have any idea that what they are ebing given is totally experimental. This has been deliberately skewed in favour of the message that these novel agents have been “rigourously tested for safety” etc, which is total bullshit and would not stand up in a court of law. Pure trickery and deception, all the way, they are like double glazing salesmen, except double glazing salesmen… Read more »
Dave McGowan had a theory that Jesus was a Roman asset used to deflect attention away from the true political threat – John the Baptist.
He has become a deep state far-right asset. That is all you need to know.
Jesus is an allegory. He was an ancient recycled story. If you objectively study the history of religion, the story of Jesus keeps recurring, from thousands of years ago. There is absolutely no historical evidence of Jesus existing as a real person 2021 years ago. I don’t doubt that there were real people like Jesus at that time and that place, but they never got a mention in the well documented history of that time. The story of Jesus is wonderful, except it has been used to abuse and control populations by very evil people, and still is.
I liked Dave McGowan too. It’s entirely possible that he was assassinated. He did however smoke a lot but hardly anyone had ever heard of him, so he was hardly worth the bother of killing, even though I thought he was pretty much spot on about everything.
Tony
Here’s the theory:
https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/random-thoughts-at-the-dawn-of-the-year-2012/
Love the way it begins:
You’ve just got to love this guy!
I haven’t found anyone since his death that could even shine Dave McGowan’s shoes. He had terrible things to tell us, but did so with a warmth, humility and sense of humor that I miss every day. RIP.
Only the good die young. (Well he was 55 – that’s young to me!) Meanwhile the shits go on and on. But then maybe they really are reptiles shedding their skin every hundred years?
Geez– er, I mean, “shucks”– I’m a fan of McGowan, but here I’ve been sarcastically suggesting that Jesus was certainly either “controlled opposition” or a “crisis actor”; I had no idea that the former had been seriously floated, even casually.
I am aware that the Gnostics, or at least one Gnostic faction, indeed assigned a virtual “crisis actor” status to Jesus– claiming that the person crucified by the Romans wasn’t the real Jesus, but a substitute who miraculously replaced him somewhere along the line.
JFK, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, RFK, and probably Jim Morrison, as well as John Lennon.
Olof Palme, Yasser Arafat, three Gandhi’s and so many more.
Curtin strangely omits one of Pepper’s most revelatory accusations from the book
that MLK was, in fact, alive upon arrival at hopsital and was allegedly murdered THERE by a doctor. Am going on memory but I believe a nurse witnessed this and her son later spilled the beans.
That is far too speculative and circumstantial, and there is no corroboration for it, rather the opposite. It detracts from Pepper’s factual case.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-plot-to-kill-martin-luther-king-survived-shooting-was-murdered-in-hospital-an-interview-with-william-pepper/5544005
Now that’s journalism! Hats of to you sir. If only the mainstream media employed such journalistic integrity.
And FWIW, this claim was also made about Lee Harvey Oswald.
In both cases, it’s plausible, possible, and attractive to critics of the preposterous official narrative, but as you point out is not substantiated by competent evidence.
Yes, I’ve heard Pepper tell that story in a couple of interviews. Harrowing.
That is some great stuff from Mr. Curtin, but you have to scroll down to LET’S LOOOK AT THE FACTS.
”I Am Not Your Negro” | James Baldwin on the Dick Cavett Show
The CIA also murdered John Lennon in the 80s, but the question is how many people in the music business, cinema, politics or business are they murdering today around the world to steer us away from socialism. It must be happening on an industrial scale since Obama assumed the right for the deep state to assassinate anyone they fancy domestically or overseas.
I’d love to hear the true story of the 60s. Dave McGowan reckoned many of the stars of Laurel Canyon were manufactured (many had connections with the military). I know the CIA had a file on Lennon and I dare say every major star. Bob Dylan’s case intrigues me. After a gaining a highly political image, he had a convenient motor cycle accident, disappeared for the Woodstock year and returned with a religiously flavoured album and then retreated into country and western for a while. Self preservation?
and left us all with his best conclusion/justification… ‘you gotta serve sombody’
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody,
Yes indeed you’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be ….
….nah it’s the devil alright!
OMG…i’m boycotting this site if you’re allowing serious concerns to be expressed about He Who Wrote “Dear Landlord, please dont put a price on my soul. I know you’ve suffered much….”
Yeah he wrote a lot of crap too. cf. “Neighbourhood Bully” an apology for those poor Zionists under siege from the nasty Arabs. But our boy had slumped into knee jerk neo-conservatism by that stage.
Populism is what they can’t allow. The big guys can’t have anyone around “who can move masses” as Dr. King did. Re: socialism, Trump desperately needed to create an election issue of some kind, had just hired vile criminal Elliott Abrams who earned fame supposedly “fighting Communism.” Right after this grotesque hire Trump resurrected “socialism” as a lame election issue for himself, flogging the word for two years since he couldn’t talk about anything meaningful. So the word got much more attention than it deserved.
The CIA love populism, it ticks all the boxes. Framed as God, Guns, nationalism, small government, low taxes, and xenophobia. It is the CIA’s political wing. A complement to the Corporate, military, deep state.
the CIA hate socialism for good reason, it empowers and enriches the population against their power.
I couldn’t agree more Stella. There’s a reason why the last three Bilderberg meetings have had ‘Popularism’ as a sub heading for discussion. They are not against it. They are creating and fostering it.
I dont know about that, Susan…Australians elected a couple of populists to the senate (upper house)…One was originally elected as a rep of the major party currently in charge of destroying livelihoods…They vote for the government onmost major issues…I think they act as outriders that, while giving voters the illusion of choice, actually herd any strays back into the fold…You might as well have voted for a major party…….
Haven’t we seen over the last 12 months, both “left” and “right” politicians supporting the corona fraud? Even Trump, I suspect, is an agent provocateur. What they are really afraid of is “unity” of the masses. Great piece here by Teodrose Fikre, in the Ghion Journal* a couple of years back: “Foxes and wolves usually are of the same breed. They belong to the same family—I think it’s called canine. And the difference is that the wolf when he shows you his teeth, you know that he’s your enemy; and the fox, when he shows you his teeth, he appears to be smiling. But no matter which of them you go with, you end up in the dog house.” https://web.archive.org/web/20190201093434/https://ghionjournal.com/observations-malcolm-x/ We need to stop waiting for “saviours” and do what we can as individuals, when we can. Be your own hero. Set an example for your kids. Give them something… Read more »
I read somewhere that the wayback machine was to be “fact checked”. Just like Winston smith altering past issues of the Times and all records of history and replacing the copies in libraries, etc. Orwell really was a prophet.
Still a valuable resource, but it pays to diversify. If you find something good, save it, everywhere.
And within one of his speeches lies the identification of the greatest voting right you have.
A daily voting right, everyone ignores.
And that is, the decision to with whom you spend you $ or £.
If there is one thing that scares them, more than anything is a movement that ‘moves’ and with it where the spend it.
Don’t believe me. Ask Starbucks how they felt when a ‘movement’ stopped using their services because of their tax issues.
That is the great neoliberal /propaganda lie, that you have rights via your spending power.
How do you express those rights in a monopoly or Cartel? All US Corporations strive for monopoly, that is the only way they can succeed, first they destroy their competition then price gouge. That is the model for Windows, Apple, Amazon, Walmart, Google, Uber, Mastercard, Visa, Boeing etc….US Corporations cannot compete.
Boycotts.
Unfortunately, unions sold us out so we need to start from scratch and form our own unions again.
Not always possible, but try and avoid spending money with corporations whenever and wherever you can. Get a local group started. Start a website.
Corporations are the problem.
They did not sell us out they were occupied and discredited, like the Labour party is today.
Same result. The point is, they used to organise workers, now they don’t. We need to form new collectives. From the ground up.
A friend and I have a site, not huge, but hopefully will grow. Gotta start somewhere. It wasn’t expensive to set up. See below.
https://fnqcitizenscollective.com/home/
Name one single example where you don’t have an alternative, because none that you mentioned meet that criteria. I run Linux, have an Android phone (rooted, on a partial Linux kernel), shop at neither Amazon nor Walmart, alternate between Brave and Tor, own a car (for which there is a dizzying array of makes and models to choose from; and my husband uses Lyft sometimes), Mastercard and Visa are competitors, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are competitors to Boeing in the war-profiteering business, etc. It is the great Marxist lie that you don’t have a choice, that monopolies can exist without the protection of government, and that socialism allows anything but monopolies. I pity people who believe they are worthless, mere passengers in their own lives, with no agency of their own. I pity them in the same way I pity small children throwing tantrums. They are ripe for manipulation toward… Read more »
”Mastercard and Visa are competitors”
I can read your comment as satire. otherwise it is ridiculous.
Do you really think we are so dumb….this is not an American web site.
Guns God, free-markets, xenophobia, nationalism low taxes and small government was a recipe the Corporate elites wrote for idiots, and the idiots are still cheering its idiocy. Ron Paul works in the interests of the capital owning class as do you,
Ya, let’s conflate those things even more off-topic and pretend like you said something other than a childish string of logical fallacies. I realize it will probably come as a shock to someone whose foundational literature (which I bet you haven’t actually read) demands forced labor and genocide, but we’re not all in competition to dominate each other as if it’s 25 thousand BCE, so I don’t have to justify myself to you anymore than to George Bernard Shaw. No, actually, after your comment I think you’re way more dumb than that. What were the conditions before there were “corporate elites”? Oh those poor helpless politicians had no choice but to accept bribes. If only they were empowered with some mechanism to arrest rent-seeking parasitic CEO’s, including the ones that fund their re-election campaigns. Oh wait … Who’s more at fault – the one offering the bribe or the one… Read more »
God only knows what you are trying to say, do you even know.?
All governments tend toward totalitarianism, but not all private companies are rent-seeking parasites. Those kids in Portland had scores of options for where to buy the Soviet Union’s flag while wearing Che Guevara t-shirts out of their deep concern for human rights and no sense of irony.
Why would I care about Portland or flags? I know what socialism is and I know the CIA have spent 70 years trying to discredit it.
You would fixate on that singular example not because you care about it, but because you want attention drawn away from the rest of my comment.
I am not interesting in your random crap, so I ignore it.
No, that is the great John Waiting lie, that you don’t/can’t exercise your rights via spending power.
You confuse a lack of rights via spending power, with people being lazy.
It really helped Americans after all….. it got you healthcare you can’t afford to use, it got you education you can’t afford, it got you zero paid vacation, no maternity leave, no union power, bad working conditions, no workers rights, below poverty minimum wage, no redundancy money, no employment rights, no pensions…….etc… that buying power is working working real fine for you guys isn’t it?
……we fools in ‘Europe’ got everything via electing socialist governments 60 years ago. how silly are we. Or are we just lazy?
I’m not taking any political sides here, and maybe I misunderstand your comment Stella, but I live in USA. While I think that Healthcare in America is a racket – we do have affordable health care. I have had a very up and down income for years, but I have always managed to have health insurance. Is our system perfect – by no means. It’s insane at some levels. But we do have healthcare, and we do provide healthcare if you have not income. We do have paid vacation. At least for full time employees. And it quite often accrues. We also have sick leave, sick days. Not as generous as Europe, I will grant you, but we have it. We do have public education. Unfortunately, only through high school, but we do have it. We do have maternity leave. Not as generous as Europe, granted. But we do have… Read more »
You do not have paid vacation by law at all…. NONE.
You do not have maternity leave at all….NONE
You do not have free university like many European countries.
MILLIONs of Americans cannot afford to get medical treatment because their (copay) is 5,000 dollars or more.
Many millions more cannot afford the drugs prices.
Medical bills are the leading cause of Bankruptcy in the USA.
You may be able to cover you health insurance cost BUT you are NO DOUBT prying that you don’t get ill, because it will not be covered fully by your insurance.
I could go on……..
Vacation BY LAW, no, but it’s pretty much a given.
I guess I was thinking that having paid time off after you’d had a baby was maternity leave. Yes, we do have that.
I already stated that we do not have free University. Very unfortunate, I agree.
I think the healthcare business is deplorable but we do have it. And it is affordable for millions. Yes, I do wonder about a catastrophic medical event but for now we do not have universal coverage so I will do the best I can. I am praying for other things like the end of this nightmare.
Same for drug prices.
Thank you for not going on. I am not proud of much of what the country I call home has done or is doing. But I am damn sure it’s not the only culprit nationality on the planet.
Stella, “we wont be fooled again”. Right ? Southfront (via Zerohedge) brings attention to the rise of The German Greens to being the second most supported party…”They would not be the first “green” party to go neo-conservative.”
If you’ve ever come across Joachim Jachnow’s “What’s Become of the German Greens ?” new left review #81 may-june
2013,you’ll probably agee that “We can be fooled again !”
and again !
speechless.
Not so useful on a comments page.
you might look up the definition and realize it speaks volumes. more than your endless, article-after-article, comment-after-comment blathering on about everyone else’s viewpoints. i’m sincerely surprised they allow you to troll and spam this site.
perhaps it was better you said nothing…..So much hate.
I guess it’s official – the civil rights’ movement is the current substitute religion and MLK its Jesus. Does it seem likely real revolutionary heroes get national days? Or are they either forgotten or their memories dragged through the dirt? I don’t particularly trust Miles Mathis but I don’t trust the official MLK conspiracy theory either – too much is written out like the final “I’ve been to the mountain top” speech being made in a masonic lodge. Some suspicious things mentioned in the article: 1) The time of the shooting being 6.01 – this is an inverted 19. 19s occur in their ops all the time (19 hijackers, Covid-19 etc. 2) The white Mustangs – this looks very like pale horse imagery. They did the same in the OJ Simpson case using a white Bronco. 3) The lawyer’s name is Pepper – another symbol that recurs a few too… Read more »
faux occult drivel… almost on a par with roddis’s bizarre concoctions of a couple of days ago but not quite
”I guess it’s official – the civil rights’ movement is the current substitute religion and MLK its Jesus.”
Civil rights battles is how you got your rights. It is amazing that you now try to debase them. I suppose many were fought in Europe over the past 500 years ago so you have no idea how you were made free, but you have benefitted from other peoples deaths and battles.
Even an uneducated medieval surf understood their interests better than most Americans do today.
Jesus has become a deep-state, Alt-right, neocon agent of white supremacist & homophobic prejudice.
James Baldwin Discusses Racism | The Dick Cavett Show
James Baldwin is the best and most enlightened speaker I have ever heard talk on the subject of racism. He is remarkable for his era, and he also died far too young.
check out the book the secret relationship between the blacks and the deleted
about the slave trade
part 1 book 1
any black man on tv is allowed on tv for a reason
brando called out the deleted malcolm x 2
brando had to beg for forgiveness
malcolm x well
Is that where the blacks are blamed for their own slavery?
This is absolutely – you are right – most enlightened speaker on the subject of racism. He was indeed remarkable for his era. And sadly, he is remarkable for THIS era. You never see people speak the way JFK, RFK, MLK, did. (as far as I’m concerned) Thank you so much for this link. I have had the dvd “I am not your Negro” on my shelf with the intent to watch it one day. I will do that now. Kudos to Dick Cavett. Can you imagine a talk show like this nowadays? Can you imagine a James Baldwin nowadays? I wonder if most people realize the enormity of that dialogue. ( I wonder if there was a studio audience.) The self assurance, the calmness of Baldwin. It is astounding to me. I sensed the same when listening to Malcolm X toward the end of his life. They were so… Read more »
A link.
The Israeli Mossad And Anti-Defamation League Connections To The Assassination Of Martin Luther King | Christians for Truth
Is it so hard for you to believe that the Americans did it themselves?
The USA like Europe, Russia ,China and India is an Israeli satellite.
Israel is a US dependent state. It is a subcontractor of empire, and you try to make it a scapegoat for US crimes. It is very anti-semitic to claim they control the USA, and again helpful to the CIA to hide US empire.
I had no idea that Dr. King publicly protested the Vietnam war until a month ago when I happened to read, “On March 25, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. led 2,000 anti-war marchers through Chicago in protest of the Vietnam war.” I thought, that’s why they killed him. The US “anti-war movement” no longer exists. It pretended to exist for 8 years during Bush #2, but as soon as Obama was elected, “anti-war” protests ended. During his last year in office, Nobel Peace Laureate Obama dropped 26,171 bombs, 3 bombs every hour, 24 hrs. a day, per CFR study. Thanks for this article.
One of several reasons, but definitely one of the primary reasons. And in his place, from TFIC you get their guy…
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/06/06/the-stupefying-mediocrity-of-barack-obama/
Yup. After segregation ended, TPTB no longer had any use for King. And once he started publicly opposing the war and endorsing the labor movement (he was in Memphis for a garbage collectors’ strike), he was living on borrowed time.
The system would rather that we all remember King for the ‘I have a dream speech’ and forget everything that followed. In fact, given the increasingly cultural-Marxist turn that the contemporary left (BLM, Antifa, etc.) has taken, the system may well prefer that we all forget MLK entirely.
Ya, he wanted his kids to be judged on their conduct and character, not the color of their skin, which would get him cancelled as a hardcore violent racist today. Not to mention that so many people have been lulled to sleep in their comfortable echo chambers online, I’m pretty sure his “I Have a Dream” speech would get 2 billion “likes” on ThemTube but only 50 people, who the tabloid disaster porn we refer to as “news” would dutifully call domestic extremists, would actually show up to witness him deliver it in person.
I came to the same realization some years ago after learning about that Riverside speech concerning the Viet Nam war. It made sense to me. There are certain powers you don’t go up against. JFK did, and so did RFK.
I would venture to say Michael Hastings did also.
The US peace movement against the invasion of Iraq (not Afghanistan – it never had serious opposition) really only existed from about December of 2002 until the presidential electoral season began about February 2007 when liberal and progressive media all shifted their attention from the illegal war in Iraq to support for Democratic candidates. So, more like 4 years, not 8. The membership in peace organizations plummeted. My group went from over 50 people to 15 almost overnight. Ostensibly, these organizations were not controlled by the Democratic Party. However, that view had to be seriously re-evaluated. That the peace “movement” could be turned on and off like a light switch taught me a lot about the power of US media and its ability to control the populace. I was a peace activist from late 2002 thru 2013. From 2007 to 2013 (5 years!) our small group’s protests were pretty lonely.… Read more »