The Murder Of An American Saint

April 4^th is the 45^th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 by the CIA, with the connivance of the FBI, Memphis police, and U.S. military. King was in Memphis, Tennessee, answering the pleas of striking sanitation workers, who were under vicious economic assault by the city rulers at the time.

First, why do I call King a saint? My definition of a saint is a person who willingly sacrifices him or herself for the good of humanity. Very few people will ever do that. The sacrifice is of the individual's self-interest to an unusual degree. It can be the sacrifice of one's physical existence, or of one's well-being in some lesser way. And it is something that is manifested over an extended span of one's lifetime. It is a consistent devotion to working on behalf of the greater good at personal cost and risk.

King obviously qualifies, both because of his record of exposing himself to physical danger, his sacrifice of his own political and economic advancement for the good of others, (contrast that with such sleazebag “leaders” as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who are allowed to live precisely because they are ultimately no threat to the system and in some ways harmful to attempts to create organized resistance to it- Sharpton was actually an FBI informer! as revealed by the Village Voice, although he should get credit for not letting police murders of black people slip under the radar) and finally his persistence in the face not only of FBI and other white racist death threats, but in the seemingly certain knowledge that his murder was imminent. (Watch his “I have been to the mountaintop” speech, his eyes glassy with tears, and it's obvious he knew what was coming.)

Let us briefly review some salient facts about the assassination that the establishment propaganda system has so assiduously suppressed, and that the alternative media inexplicably overlooks or ignores. These important facts bear constant repetition because they are important facets of American history and should be made common knowledge in people's minds. But first some context.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was for years a target of the FBI and other U.S. “security” and “law enforcement” agencies before they finally murdered him. J. Edgar Hoover got the Kennedys to “authorize” constant bugging, wiretapping, and surveilling of King by intoning the magic word, “communist.” This grants the secret policeman all power to persecute. Hoover had probably been doing these things already, but wanted to implicate the Kennedys by making them accomplices. This compromised them and gave Hoover leverage. Hoover also blackmailed JFK with info about JFK's sexual trysts, but that's another story. Hoover later ordered information about King's sexual dalliances obtained from hotel room bugs to be planted in the media. (1)

Hoover hated King, viscerally and passionately. His animus was both political and personal. A closeted homosexual and cross dresser, the intolerant hypocrite Hoover was actually enraged by King's sexual promiscuity. He felt that King did not deserve the respect people had for him, and shouldn't command the moral leadership he did, because of his private sex life. (As if a secret police chief had the right to judge.) Hoover routinely used sexual blackmail, as well as other “dirt,” to bring politicians under his thumb. This open secret was only acknowledged by the “mainstream” media, and only briefly, after Hoover's death. Since then, the knowledge of the political extortion system Hoover ran against Congressmen and others has been tossed into the memory hole. (2)

Hoover was also very racist, despised the civil rights movement, and believed in the oppression of blacks. (For many years the only black FBI agent was Hoover's chauffeur.) The FBI infiltrated and manipulated the KKK, not to take down the Klan, contrary to such propaganda as the movie Mississippi Burning but to control its activities as part of the repression of the civil rights movement. (3) This racism served the interests of business in the sense of keeping wages low by maintaining an oppressed black underclass. It also kept the working class divided by race, and thus weak and easier to exploit. (This is still the case in America.) Finally it preserved a structure of white relative privilege. Of course, such a racist system is ultimately a dead end, as apartheid in South Africa demonstrates. Enlightened capitalists realized that it would actually be healthier for U.S. capitalism to allow blacks to advance educationally and economically, that the system as a whole would be more productive, and wealthier blacks would consume more, which is obviously good for business. Plus the cost of maintaining a repressive system of enforcement could be reduced. These more astute capitalists could be called “liberals,” although applying that term to them obfuscates rather than elucidates. And of course many people in all social strata had enough decency and moral sense to gradually withdraw support from overt and de jure racism, and some whites even risked their lives- and were killed- acting in solidarity with blacks in the civil rights struggle.

Hoover considered the Black Panther Party the “greatest threat” to U.S. so-called internal security- internal security meaning the security of the power of those in power. He orchestrated murderous attacks on the Panthers by accomplice police departments in various cities, most notoriously in Chicago, where Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were assassinated in their beds by the Chicago PD. (Hampton had first been drugged by FBI “informer” William O'Neal, who also provided the floor plan of the Panthers' home for use by the police death squad and got a hundred dollar bonus from the FBI for his good work. The charismatic Hampton was 21 years old. "We expected about twenty Panthers to be in the apartment when the police raided the place. Only two of those black niggers were killed, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark," moaned FBI “Special” Agent Gregg York afterwards. Maybe that's why black Judas O'Neal only got a hundred bucks for aiding and abetting murder. His masters were disappointed in the body count. They were big on body counts in Vietnam War days.)

Hoover got his start organizing and carrying out the Palmer raids, a mass roundup and deportation of thousands communists, socialists, and anarchists after World War I. There was no judicial involvement. His work doing that led directly to the creation of the FBI to continue such political repression and “anti-subversive” activities, with Hoover as its head, a position he held until his death. A sinister figure, Hoover was obsessed with amassing power. One of his key routes to power was amassing information, especially information he could use to blackmail politicians, or derail careers with “leaks” to allied reactionaries in the media.

The tawdriest aspect of Hoover's 50 or so year reign as the top U.S. domestic secret police chief is that the bourgeoisie let this abusive fascist freak amass such power and persecute countless thousands of people for so long. That is the real scandal. That is an indictment of their entire system.

The FBI tried to blackmail King into committing suicide when he won the Nobel Peace Prize. They sent him a package of audio tapes they'd made of his trysts with women in various hotels with a thinly veiled demand that he kill himself before going to accept the Nobel. And one FBI veteran who served on the “get King” squad- the FBI's informal name for it- later described another squad member yelling “they finally got that son of a bitch!” when news came of King's murder. Like all fascists, these creeps are extremely malevolent and full of hate. They also have lifelong obsessions with the objects of their hatred. That is not to say that everyone inside the FBI, CIA, various police departments and military are fascists. They aren't. But the levers of power apparently are mostly in the hands of fascists or extreme reactionaries. And these organizations are conducive to conspiracies by cabals of political extremists within them.

The U.S. establishment decided King was intolerable when he began speaking out against the genocidal U.S. war on Vietnam. A year before the final solution to the “problem” of King was implemented, the Washington Post, the main in-house organ of the empire's capital elite, planted a kiss of death on him with a scathing denunciation of his political activities. This acted as a green light for the fascists inside the “security” establishment who had long wanted to murder King. And the fact that the establishment media has covered up the truth about the assassination ever since proves their complicity as accessories after the fact.

As long as King limited himself to the narrow issue of civil rights for blacks, he was tolerated, if still persecuted. But towards the end of his life, he was making linkages between different issues and different victims of U.S. oppression. This is highly dangerous for the U.S. ruling class. Their rule depends on the separation of their victims so opposition to their repression remains fragmented. Divide and rule, an old and basic principle of domination, is one of their guiding practices. King started to make connections between labor issues, the rights of workers, and by speaking out against the genocidal U.S. war in Indochina, drawing ties between the anti-war movement and black empowerment. King was the most prominent of all the public oppositional leaders at that time. Even on the issue of civil rights, once he expanded his analysis and agitation beyond voting rights and equal access to public accommodations and restaurants and spoke of economic justice and empowerment, this threatened the status quo of the power structure and economic system in a much more profound way. (Merely trying to ride on buses, eat in restaurants, go to schools, and register to vote, was enough to bring violent state terrorism in retaliation.)

1968 was a presidential election year. Nixon was the GOP candidate. Part of his strategy was running on a “law and order” theme, a coded appeal to both white racists and whites fearful of black anger and unrest, and a veiled threat to repress the anti-war movement, which the establishment media painted as violent and anarchistic. More broadly, the “traditionalist” “silent majority” of Americans who were discomfited or felt threatened by or who despised the social ferment of the time would also be attracted to Nixon's implicit promise to “get tough” with the hippies and protesters and marijuana smokers and assorted riffraff and malcontents. “No more nonsense,” Nixon could have said. (He probably did say that, actually. In 1970 he did help instigate the Kent State massacre by excoriating “these bums burning up the campuses.”)

The predictable result of the Government murder of King was riots by blacks in 100 American cities. Naturally, this directly benefited Nixon, with his “law and order” campaign theme. The media of course did its part to fan the flames of white fear and backlash. But the CIA needed to murder Robert Kennedy too, two months later in June of 1968, so Nixon could be elected. As it turned out, Nixon barely beat the Democratic candidate, VP Hubert Humphrey, by less than a percentage point. The charismatic and popular Kennedy would have beaten Nixon easily. Kennedy inspired millions of people with his anti-war, socially inclusive message. Humphrey, a parrot of LBJ's pro-war line, was despised by millions, and the brutal repression of the Chicago Police at the Democratic convention that “nominated” Humphrey, beating up not just protesters in the streets but delegates of other candidates- even reporter Dan Rather was punched in the stomach by Mayor Daley's goons on the convention floor, on live TV, to the disgust of anchor CBS Walter Cronkite- only helped Nixon running on a promise to restore social order. [Note to rulers: best to keep your repression and brutality invisible.]

Just to make sure Humphrey would lose, Nixon secretly told the “South” Vietnamese fascist generals to stymie the peace talks Johnson was conducting with the Ho Chi Minh regime in the North, so there wouldn't be light at the end of the tunnel to help Humphrey prevail. This of course broke Federal law, specifically the Logan Act, which bars private foreign policy. The GOP apparently pulled the same trick in 1980, with Reagan and Iran, which was holding U.S. imperialist apparatchiks as “hostages” at the time, helping Jimmy Carter lose his reelection bid. [Carter's desperate attempt to look “strong” and free the “hostages” by force failed disastrously with the accidental collision of U.S. aircraft at a landing site in the Iranian desert while on their way to raiding the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The plan was to massacre the “students” occupying the embassy, and anyone else who got in the way. By the way, a key fact blacked out by the U.S. propaganda system is why the Iranians seized the embassy in the first place: because the U.S. gave the Shah sanctuary in the U.S. Remember that. They want you to forget.]

As for the details of the murder of Martin Luther: in all the three major domestic political assassinations of the 1960s (the Kennedys being the other two), the CIA handled the actual “wet job,” the local PD (Memphis in this case, Dallas and LA in the cases of the Kennedys) were accomplices, especially in the destruction of evidence and cover-up, and the FBI had the duty of “proving” the predetermined guilt of the designated fall guy, and throwing dirt over the CIA's trail to protect it. In the King case, the designated fall guy was a petty “career” criminal and racist, James Earl Ray. (I put “career” in quotes because the cheap crimes the mangy Ray committed as a way of life should hardly be dignified with the word career. How about “habitual criminal” instead?)

Ray had no marksmanship skills, which the shooter obviously had. More conclusively, there was no explanation, until years later, of how this low-level, unsophisticated criminal had managed to obtain four fake Canadian IDs in the names of four actual Canadians who physically resembled him, as well as money to take it on the lam.

The explanation eventually came, I believe it was in Rolling Stone, when a retired CIA officer, who had been the CIA's “resident” in Canada, whose job it was to provide operational support, revealed that he had obtained those IDs on orders, finding Canadians to fit the required descriptions and obtaining documents in their names that were then given to Ray, unbeknownst to the CIA resident. (This is an example of both “compartmentalization” and “need to know.” By keeping people in the dark, this makes it possible to use them in crimes they might balk at aiding if they knew what the true purpose of their tasks were. It also makes it harder to expose and unravel the conspiracies, as only a few have the whole picture.)

Years later, some of King's relatives won a civil suit in which they convinced a jury that King had been murdered by a Government conspiracy. For some reason, this got very little media attention and is never mentioned anymore. (Gee, I wonder why. Guess it's not important.)

These days, the King assassination is ignored by the corporate media. In fact, the entire King assassination story and its historical context has been buried under a treacly blanket of plaster saint worship, complete with a national holiday on King's birthday and even a chunky statue in Washington, D.C., home of the rag that planted the kiss of death on King's cheek, the Washington Post, and headquarters of the agency that played a key role in aiding and abetting the murder and protecting the murderers, the FBI. Guess you could call that irony. How about calling it pathology, instead? Or is it an example of hypocrisy being the tribute that vice pays to virtue? Maybe all three. You decide.

King should not be idolized. No one should be. Idols always have feet of clay. That is because those who are made into idols are just human beings, like the rest of us. We should be inspired by and perhaps attempt to emulate those qualities in them, and those actions by them, that are admirable in that they advance the human condition. Respect yes, idolatry never.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was better than America deserved. Black “militants” merely propounded the sensible, logical, normal reaction of any people under sustained, violent assault, to enforce centuries-long oppression. They advocated self-defense. (Note that the Black Panther Party was originally titled the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.) Black militants argued for defensive violence. They had had enough of police murders of blacks, of Klan murders of blacks, of the daily beatings, of all the violent intimidation that were part and parcel of black subjugation in America. King argued in effect for Gandhian principles of nonviolent resistance. The establishment loves to cynically preach those principles to the oppressed while employing extreme violence itself all over the world, and crushing nonviolent movements for social change everywhere in its empire, including in the homeland.

King was a Christian in a way almost no one who calls themselves Christian is. He truly advocated turning the other cheek, and “loving one's enemies” in the sense of a deep compassion for the oppressors that counseled the victims to absorb the violence of the oppressors without retaliating. Christ on the cross is apocryphally said to have uttered the words “forgive them Father, for they know not what they do,” the victim expiating the crime (sins) of his own murderers. He practiced what the apologists for U.S. apartheid advocated, “patience,” “go slow.” His form of patience was not acceptance and waiting for the racist oppressors to change of their own volition (which they made clear would never happen) but to apply moral pressure and have the forbearance to persist, to struggle, to absorb the blows of the oppressors. That takes patience, but not passivity. Passivity is what the system demands of its victims. One of King's crimes in its eyes was to arouse resistance. When the system's dual track strategy of secret police persecution and attempts at cooptation failed to stop the growing menace of King, whose influence was growing as he linked the crimes of empire abroad with economic exploitation and class warfare by the rich at home, the decision was made inside the secret recesses of the deep state to “take him out,” in their gangster language, their native tongue, the language of violence.(4)

The U.S. power structure deliberately rejected King's offer of peaceful change, rejected the chance to repent its sins. Instead it deliberately chose violence. It preferred that blacks be violent. It was utterly predictable that there would be violent rage from blacks in reaction to the murder of King. This surely entered the calculations of the deep state, the hidden power structure. They wanted violence. Violence suited them better, because they knew their superior means of violence would crush the uprising of blacks. Violence by the oppressed is used by the propaganda system to justify its repression and violence. Violence also made destroying black militant organizations child's play for these masters of murder and mayhem. They could not win against a nonviolent resistance movement, because they could not win on the grounds of morality. They could only win on the field of brute force. They crushed the threat of pacifism, of nonviolence, of moral witness against he immorality of the state by resorting once again to violence, as they had done consistently for 200 years and indeed as they did throughout the modern civil rights era. They took out their most dangerous foe, M.L. King, Jr. Contrary to the psychotic Hoover, the Panthers were not the main threat. It was the saint, and he had to be eliminated.

King's gamble was that moral superiority would trump state violence. But the U.S. proved that Mao's dictum, political power flows out of the barrel of a gun, as it did in Memphis on April 4, 1968, could trump mere morality.

Time and time again, the deep state destroys the possibility of reform, through violence, repression, and assassinations. The assassinations of the Kennedys and King each changed American history. Killing the Kennedys was necessary to invade Vietnam and to continue that war. Killing King was necessary to destroy the threat of a moral awakening in America that would spread to questioning the economic and class structure of the U.S. King's challenge to U.S. genocide in Vietnam was also a threat to the continuation of that war, undercutting support and acquiescence of the population. What is black men started refusing to be drafted?

The tragedy of America is that it is destined to go down in history as an evil empire. It could have reformed and used its power as a force for good. Of course it cynically pretends to do just that, an increasingly hollow lie that is only believed by the most brainwashed. As in the late Soviet Union, the cynical parroting of official rhetoric replaces actual belief in the dogma of the system. I don't mean that the Kennedys were reformers; they just weren't aggressive enough Imperialists to satisfy the rabid militarists within the U.S. deep state. And of course after offing his brother, the CIA could hardly risk letting RFK become President. I mean that the U.S. is being prevented from evolving into a more humane society by the established power structure. That structure is fanatically dedicated to making the super-rich ever richer, and repressing any opposition to the status quo, here or anywhere on earth. As it has shown throughout its history, it is willing to commit atrocious crimes to enforce this system. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the plan is to make dissent as difficult and dangerous as possible with the erection of the current total police state, with the NSA for example stealing and storing every single email, phone call, Internet search etc., with all financial, credit, and other records caught in the secret police web, with the deployment of tens of thousands of surveillance camera centrally accessible and using facial recognition technology to track “persons of interest” (the FBI and various police departments are in the early stages of doing this), with the idea of making resistance impossible, a la the nightmare world of George Orwell's 1984. The only thing that could stop it is if a large majority of the American population were to suddenly understand this reality and offer strong resistance to it. Unfortunately that does not seem likely. The Occupy Movement was premised on precisely the idea of sparking such a mass awakening, which is why the system so brutally repressed it (under Obama's direction, a vicious oppressor, let it be noted) before it might grow.

Like all empires, some day the U.S. empire will end. It will wane and fade away or implode. (Because of its geographical advantages and weak neighbors it won't be conquered.) It will have squandered the opportunity to be unique in history, instead of merely flattering itself with the conceit that it is in fact exceptional. The only thing exceptional about it is that as empires go, it is exceptionally powerful and globally ubiquitous. An empire founded on the twin pillars of genocide and slavery will unfortunately be remembered for its serial destruction of democracy in countries around the world (the opposite of what it claims to do, inverting ordinary language in exactly the way portrayed by Orwell) and the massive physical and human destruction it wreaked with its weaponry, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the present. Oh, and the hollowness of its claimed values. We can only hope that the very concepts of freedom and democracy, having been so debased by cynical authoritarian Imperialists, do not share the fate of “communism” and “socialism” and become totally discredited by their cynical alleged avatars.

1) One of the reactionary media allies of the FBI who was fed sexual “dirt” on King with which to smear him was Patrick Buchanan, which Buchanan, a fascist and anti-Semite as well as a racist who despised the civil rights movement, was elated to receive in order to “expose” King to the public via the reactionary capitalist rag St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in the historically racist state of Missouri, which provided him a perch from which to pour his putrid right-wing poison into people's minds. Buchanan seemed a permanent fixture of multiple capitalist media outlets for decades.

Of course the idea was to discredit King, and thus in the right-wing mind implicitly refute the morality of anti-racism by painting King as sexually “immoral.” Which is a logical sleigh of hand, since personal sexual morality and morality in the societal sphere are not the same thing in any event, and King's personal behavior could not invalidate his critique of U.S. society and “prove” the justness and correctness of racist oppress, regardless of how one feels about monogamy vs. promiscuity. If King has been a serial killer that wouldn't have proven the racists right. Personally, I think one should not deceive one's life partner into believing one is monogamous if one isn't, as a matter of ethical behavior, as that would be a betrayal of their trust. I do not know when King's wife learned of his “infidelities,” or her attitude towards them. In any event, that would take us into a lengthy side discussion on sexual morality, interpersonal relations, and sexual mores and attitudes. And this is just a footnote! In a blog post!

It would be nice, if before he dies, Buchanan expresses remorse, or at least regret, for his political knifing of that rarest of rarities, an American saint. If he were alive, King would forgive him. But I doubt Buchanan will.

2) Former FBI agent William Turner wrote several books about his experiences in that secret police agency. He describes a room dedicated to monitoring numerous wiretaps on politicians in Washington. Another story he tells is of a time he was tasked with surveilling Tom Hayden, a founder of SDS and anti-war activist. A carload of men drove up and savagely vandalized Hayden's parked car. When Turner traced the plate on the car, it turned out to belong to the LAPD.

3) Mississippi Burning stood reality on it's head. As anyone who's read up on the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s in the South knows, the FBI was at best indifferent toward the victims of white racist terrorism, intimidation, and violation of Constitutionally “guaranteed” rights of assembly, speech, and protest, and at worst accomplices to crimes including murder. For example, Gary Rowe, an FBI informer, was one of a carload of Klansmen who murdered civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo.

There's your “liberal” Hollywood again. Speaking of inverting reality, remember the Reagan-era fascist agitprop movie Red Dawn, in which Nicaraguan, Cuban, and Soviet troops invade the U.S.? This at a time of massive U.S. atrocities against Nicaragua. And the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Predator opens with extended anti-Sandinista propaganda demonizing them. There's only about 10,000 other examples of how reactionary Hollywood product is. Dirty Harry, all the crap glorifying the FBI and CIA, etc. The “left-wing” movies are few and far between. Two of the best were Missing, about the murder of Charles Horman by the Chilean Pinochet junta and U.S. government, and The China Syndrome, about a nuclear plant meltdown. Interestingly, both starred Jack Lemmon. Man, that guy must have had a thick FBI file! Like lots of actors, writers, politicians, activists, whoever. Oh, but they aren't a political police, they're just a “law enforcement” agency, don't you know!

Jane Fonda was also in The China Syndrome . Of course, she has a file. After all, she's a traitor, right?

Speaking of actresses under FBI duress, the FBI did drive actress Jean Seberg to suicide. They objected to her support of the Black Panther Party, so they waged a relentless campaign of smears, harassment, and career sabotage against her. Nice. But they aren't a secret police force. Don't say that. You'll hurt their feelings.

4) Personally I am an atheist and not a pacifist. And of course the legend of Christ on the Cross is sadomasochistic. So I am not endorsing King's philosophy and approach. The fascists and racists in and out of the U.S. power structure had no idea how lucky they were that King became the preeminent leader of the black civil rights movement. They never appreciated it. Instead, now the U.S. state cynically coopts the dimming memory of King and turns it into Hallmark-style pseudo history and a self-celebration of how they fixed everything and now there's no racism in America. (Us, racist? Are you blind? We have a black President! Yeah, and you had a black Secretary of State, Vietnam war criminal, who helped whip up war hysteria to invade Iraq. And there's rich black capitalists. Wasn't that King's vision?)