The Government that Honors Dr. Martin Luther King with a National Holiday Killed Him

MLK showing a picture with the 3 martyrs of the Mississippi voting registration drive, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. killed in 1964 by the KKK. Toward the end of his life, MLK was beginning to transcend the purely racial aspect of his titanic struggle. At that point the system began to regard him as a serious existential threat. His fate was sealed.

A Review of The Plot to Kill King by William Pepper

Very few Americans are aware of the truth behind the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Few books have been written about it, unlike other significant assassinations, especially JFK’s. For almost fifty years there has been a media blackout supported by government deception to hide the truth. And few people, in a massive act of self-deception, have chosen to question the absurd official explanation, choosing, rather, to embrace a mythic fabrication intended to sugarcoat the bitter fruit that has resulted from the murder of the one man capable of leading a mass movement for revolutionary change in the United States. Today we are eating the fruit of our denial.

In order to comprehend the significance of this extraordinary book, it is first necessary to dispel a widely accepted falsehood about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. William Pepper does that on the first page.

“To understand his death, it is essential to realize that although he is popularly depicted and perceived as a civil rights leader, he was much more than that. A non-violent revolutionary, he personified the most powerful force for the long-overdue social, political, and economic reconstruction of the nation.”

In other words, Martin Luther King was a transmitter of a non-violent spiritual and political energy so plenipotent that his very existence was a threat to an established order based on violence, racism, and economic exploitation. He was a very dangerous man.

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. Forty-eight years after King’s assassination, the causes he fought for – civil rights, the end to U.S. wars of aggression , and economic justice for all – remain not only unfulfilled, but have worsened in so many respects. And King’s message has been enervated by the sly trick of giving him a national holiday and urging Americans to make it “a day of service.” Needless to say, such service does not include non-violent war resistance or protesting a decadent system of economic injustice.

Because MLK repeatedly called the United States the “greatest purveyor of violence on earth,” he was universally condemned by the mass media and government that later – once he was long and safely dead – praised him to the heavens. This has continued to the present day of historical amnesia.

But William Pepper resurrects the revolutionary MLK, and in doing so shows in striking detail why elements within the U.S. government executed him. After reading this book, no fair-minded reader can reach any other conclusion. The Plot to Kill King, the culminating volume of a trilogy that Pepper has written on the assassination, consists of slightly less text than supporting documentation in its appendices, which include numerous depositions and interviews that buttress Pepper’s thesis on the why and how of this horrible murder. It demands a close reading that should put to rest any pseudo-debates about the essentials of the case.

Pepper, an attorney who represented the King family in the 1999 trial that found U.S. officials of the federal (in particular, the FBI and Army Intelligence), state, and local governments responsible for King’s assassination, has worked on the King case since 1977. He met MLK in 1967, after King had read his Ramparts’ magazine article, “The Children of Vietnam,” that exposed the hideous effects of U.S. napalm and white phosphorous bombing on young and old Vietnamese innocents. The text and photos of that article reduced King to tears and were instrumental in his increased opposition to the war against Vietnam as articulated in his dramatic Riverside Church speech (“Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”) on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his execution in Memphis. That speech, in which King so powerfully and publically linked the war with racism and economic exploitation, foretold his death at the hands of the perpetrators of those abominations.

Devastated by King’s death, and assuming the alleged assassin James Earl Ray was responsible, Pepper retreated from the fray until a 1977 conversation with the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, King’s associate, who raised the specter of Ray’s innocence. After a five hour interrogation of the imprisoned Ray in 1978, Pepper was convinced that Ray did not shoot King and set out on a forty year quest to uncover the truth.

Before examining the essentials of Pepper’s discovery, it is important to point out that MLK, Jr, his father, Rev. M. L. King, Sr, and his maternal grandfather, Rev. A.D. Williams, all pastors of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, were spied on by Army Intelligence and the FBI since 1917. All were considered communist sympathizers and dangerous to the reigning hegemony because of their espousal of racial and economic equality. When MLK, Jr. forcefully denounced unjust and immoral war-making as well, 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 bowels of government spies and their masters. Seventy-five years of spying on black religious leaders here found its ultimate “justification.” As Stokely Carmichael, co-chairman of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, said to King in a conversation secretly recorded by Army Intelligence, “The man don’t care you call ghettos concentration camps, but when you tell him his war machine is nothing but hired killers, you got trouble.”

It is against this “trouble” that Pepper’s investigation must be set, as that “trouble” is also the background for the linked assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, and RFK. Understanding the forces behind the military, the spies, and the gunmen who, while operating in the shadows, are actually the second layer of the onion skin, is essential. The government and mainstream corporate media form the outer layer with their collusion in disinformation, lying, and truth suppression, but Pepper correctly identifies the core as follows.

“Bombastic, chauvinistic, corporate propaganda aside, where the slaughter of innocents is, and always was, justified in the name of patriotism and national security, it has always and ever been about money. Corporate and financial leaders trusted with the keys to the Republic’s treasure moved from boardrooms to senior government positions and back again. Construction, oil and gas, defense industry, and pharmaceutical corporations, their bankers, brokers, and executives thrive in a war economy. Fortunes are made and dynasties created and perpetuated and a cooperating elite permeates an entire society and ultimately contaminates the world in its drive for national resources wherever they are ….Vietnam was his [King’s] Rubicon …. Here, as never before, would he seriously challenge the interests of the power elite.”

MLK 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 U.S. 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 driven to Atlanta where he abandoned the car. From there he fled to Canada and then to England where he was eventually arrested at Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968 and extradited to the U.S. 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, shades of Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, had committed a despicable deed.

In the years leading up to Pepper’s 1978 involvement, only a few lonely voices expressed doubts about the government’s case – Harold Weisberg in 1971 and Mark Lane and Dick Gregory in 1977. The rest of the country put themselves and the case to sleep. They are still sleeping, but Pepper is trying with this last book to wake them up. Meanwhile, the disinformation specialists continue with their lies.

While a review is not the place to go into every detail of Pepper’s rebuttal of the government’s shabby claims, let me say at the outset that he emphatically does so, and adds in the process some tentative claims of which he is not certain but which, if true, are stunning.

As with the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother, Robert (two months after MLK), all evidence points to the construction of patsies to take the blame for government executions. Ray, Oswald, and 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 Abernathy 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 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 thirty-seven years.

Pepper’s decades-long investigation, not only refutes the government’s case against James Earl Ray, but definitively proves that King was killed by a government conspiracy led by 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 and over seventy witnesses, found the U.S. government guilty in the killing of MLK. The King family had brought the suit and William Pepper represented them. They were grateful that the truth was confirmed, but saddened by the way the findings were buried once again by a media in cahoots with the government.

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 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 (shades of Sirhan Sirhan who still languishes in prison). During all those 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. The government has always denied that Raul existed.

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 U.S. citizens, a former U.S. 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 NY 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 (including book reviews), 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 $1,000,000 to facilitate the assassination. He also said that he had been visited by a man names 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-three 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 The Plot to Kill King, proves that Martin Luther King was killed by a conspiracy masterminded by the U.S. government. Much of his evidence was presented at the 1999 trial, while other 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. A reader should read the book to understand the full scope of the plot, its execution, and the cover-up.

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 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 and Sirhan Sirhan 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 Jim Douglass’s important interview with Donald Wilson in The Assassinations, pp.479-491.)
Pepper interviewed four other witnesses who confirmed that they had seen Raul with Jack Ruby in Dallas in 1963 and that they were associated.
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 operative of U.S. Army Intelligence, 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 902^nd 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 patsy, 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 proves 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, the owner of Jim’s Grill, who said he took the rifle from the shooter in the bushes and brought it into the bar where he hid it. 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.) Pepper implicates that Reverends Billy Kyles, Jesse Jackson, and, to a lesser extent, Ralph Abernathy were involved in these machinations. He uncovers of the role of black military intelligence agent Marrell McCollough, attached to the 111^th MIG, within the entourage. McCollough can be seen kneeling over the fallen King, checking to see if he’s dead.
Pepper confirms that all of this, including 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 4^th, 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 names and confirms the presence of Alpha 184 snipers at locations high above the Lorraine Motel balcony.
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 Loyd 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.

But since this is a book review and not a book, I will stop listing Pepper’s very detailed and convincing findings. While he may not have answered every aspects of the case, and may be mistaken in some small details, he has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt the basic fact that James Earl Ray did not kill Martin Luther King, but that this great and dangerous leader was killed by a conspiracy organized at the highest levels of government.

The Plot to Kill King will mesmerize any reader seeking the truth about MLK’s assassination. Even when Pepper, towards the end of the book, offers circumstantial and non-corroborated testimony from witnesses Ronnie Lee Adkins and Johnton Shelby, the reader can’t help but be intrigued and to consider their stories highly plausible given all that Pepper has proven. Adkins claims that his father, a friend of Clyde Tolson, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s deputy, and then he himself, were part of the plot to kill King. This involved politicians, the FBI, MPD, and mafia, including the aforementioned produce dealer Frank Liberto and others, making payoffs with FBI money to various people, including Jesse Jackson (whom Adkins, Jr. claims was a paid FBI informer) and working closely on the details of the assassination. Johton Shelby’s story as recounted in his deposition (2014) to Pepper (reproduced, together with Adkins’ (2009), as appendices in the book), is that his mother, who was working as an emergency room aide at St. Joseph’s Hospital when King was brought there, inadvertently witnessed men spitting on Dr. King as he lay in the emergency room and a doctor putting a pillow over his head and suffocating him to death. Pepper tends to accept these accounts, but says he isn’t completely convinced of all aspects of them. The reader is offered plenty of food for thought concerning these claims.

Besides clearly proving the government’s part in killing Martin Luther King, this book is very important for the way Pepper links the case to those of JFK and RFK, who was murdered two months after King. At the center of all these murders is a trinity of men who were devoted to the ending the Vietnam War and all wars, restoring economic justice for all Americans, and eliminating racial inequality. That their goals were the same provides a motive for their murders by forces opposed to these lofty objectives. That their murders clearly involved highly sophisticated operations and cover-ups that could never have been pulled off by “crazed lone assassins” points to powerful forces with those means at their disposal. And when it comes to opportunity, when did the shadowy forces of the deep state ever lack for that?

The ramifications of the MLK assassination profoundly inform our current condition. For anyone who truly cares about peace, love, and justice, The Plot to Kill King is essential reading. William Pepper should be saluted. He has carried on Martin King’s noble legacy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Educated in the classics, philosophy, literature, theology, and sociology, Ed Curtin teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His writing on varied topics has appeared widely over many years. He states: "I write as a public intellectual for the general public, not as a specialist for a narrow readership. I believe a non-committal sociology is an impossibility and therefore see all my work as an effort to enhance human freedom through understanding." His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/ .

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

Disembodied Americans and the Crucifixion of the World

“The existent, the body, disappears. We live within a spectacle of empty clothes and unworn masks….Nobodies and no Necessity – for Necessity is the condition of the existent. It is what makes reality real.” – John Berger, “Steps Toward a Small Theory of the Visible”
..
“The real body. To be real, it must be bodily; and to be a body is to be eaten. The humiliation in incarnation; to become bread. To be eaten: to be consumed by sorrow, sickness, and death. – Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body
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“If Marx were functioning today he would have been hard put to avoid saying that imaginary sex is the opiate of the people.” – John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards

Why are so many Americans indifferent to the savage slaughter of millions of people around the world carried out by their own government under a long string of presidents? Why were they stone-cold silent during eight years of Obama’s many wars and drone killings of which he boasted? Why are they silent in the face of the Trump administration’s continuation and expansion of those wars and its push for a nuclear war with Russia? Why this incestuous turning in and away from the bloody havoc their government keeps inflicting on the world?

And why all this denial while focusing on the pornographic media spectacles of Stormy Daniels (the porn queen turned “Adult Film Actress”), Monica Lewinsky, and a host of others paraded before the cameras to distract and entertain a population of spectators?

I, like many people, wonder why. What follows is an attempt at an answer, with the focus of my thinking being primarily on middle to upper class Americans, for the poor and working classes have a hard enough time making ends meet and keeping alive themselves, since they are the victims of a domestic war waged by the same heartless ruling class that kills so many overseas.

For when people lose touch with the physicality of life and embrace spectral images, mediated reality, and abstractions as real, they have stepped into a totally nihilistic world. A disembodied world. When this is joined to a narcissistic self-preoccupation with one’s own well-being and comfort, indifference to the suffering of others becomes the norm. This is the world of unreality populated today by so many Americans, who have grown progressively indifferent to the slaughter by their own government of people throughout the world – heaps of millions of dead bodies, blood, and body-parts everywhere. In “Song in the Blood” the French poet Jacques Prevert says:

There are great puddles of blood on the world

where’s it going all this spilled blood….

murder’s blood…war’s blood

misery’s blood…

and the blood of men tortured in prison….

Where’s it going all this spilled blood

the earth that turns and turns and turns

with its great streams of blood.

To the bodiless bloodless insouciant ones, however, the blood of “others” is invisible. It is our lives that matter. What is being done to these “others” is of little consequence because it is experienced as an abstraction – unreal – as if it weren’t happening, even as it is. And in a twist of fate straight from Greek tragedy, those who embrace this delusion are in denial of the very real possibility that they too will be “disappeared” by a nuclear war being provoked in their names. Having turned their backs on nature and the corporeal reality of all living beings, having denied the passion play that is life on earth for all people, having denied that there are limits to American hubris and the West’s clearly insane and nihilistic push for nuclear war with Russia, they will pleasure themselves “until the atom too bursts into flames,” as Albert Camus warned, “and history ends in the triumph of reason and the death agony of the species.”

In an incisive article, “It is Us,” John Steppling recently asked a series of Tolstoyan questions about the ruling class (and by extension most Americans): “What does the ruling class want?” he asked. How much money do these people need? Is it power they are after with their mad quest to gobble up the world and slaughter as they go? Power for what? For more money? Why are they provoking a nuclear war with Russia? Are they simply crazy? Don’t they know they too will die? And what about all those affluent liberals and conservatives, the narcissistic bourgeoisie, the average person, are they all suicidal?

It is generally assumed that the United States is a materialist society where the voluptuous life of bodily existence is affirmed and celebrated. Big breasts and bigger butts, skinny jeans and streaming sex scandals to the contrary, I think this is not true. American society has joined its Puritan tradition to instrumental reasoning and its go-go-get-it-done practicality to create a culture where the human body has become, like everything and everyone else, a thing to be manipulated – an instrument to be masturbated, a thing to be pampered, paraded, and presented in a society of looking-glass selves. Selfies in flight from others and human encounters where care and communion of consciousness lead one to love the world as one’s body and to feel compassion for others far away in other lands who are being slaughtered by our guns and bombs. And to say No, not in my name, not over my dead body. To burst the bubble of the self. W. H. Auden put it this way in the poem Are You There?

Whatever view we hold, it must be shown

Why every lover has a wish to make

Some other kind of otherness his own:

Perhaps, in fact, we never are alone.

This is as far from eroticism as one can get, if one grasps the true meaning of Eros, the god of love, life, joy, and becoming, whose growth was stunted until his mother Aphrodite was oracularly told that “Love cannot grow without Passion.” And passion is a reaching out for others, not for oneself, or one’s phantom image. The brilliant psychologist Rollo May summed up our situation by saying that when “eros has lost passion,” it has become “insipid, childish, and banal.” And when the cult of technique and technology becomes a social addiction, feeling, passion, and individual identity is blotted out and, “mirabile dictu, we discover that the myth [of Eros] proclaims exactly what we have seen happening in our own day, eros, then, even loses interest in sex.” Except on screens.

To be human is to be embodied, incarnated, to love and suffer passionately, body and soul. Sexual passion and tenderness in the service of life, not death. Eros, not Thanatos. Passion for a suffering world and victims everywhere. I think one important reason why so many Americans have turned their backs as their government crucifies the rest of the world is because they have lost their bodies not their minds, and in exchanging shadows on the wall for flesh and blood they have abandoned the world and embraced the unreality of things that a capitalist, consumer society proffers in lieu of life. And as so many great thinkers (Coleridge, Swift, Brown, et al) have pointed out, to try to rise above the body is ironically to equate the body with excrement. Norman O. Brown writes, “Thus the morbid attempt to get away from the body can only result in a morbid fascination in the death of the body.” From this flows the narcissistic focus on self-preservation and the spending of one’s life energies on the acquiring of dead things rather than the carefree letting go of one’s love and care into the whole world that is crying out for redemption from an orgy of violence.

Of course, the paradox of the disappearance of the living body into spectral images and things is the departure of the soul as well, the embodied soul. And a soulless country is a place where reality no longer exists and one can, for example, view Michelangelo’s Pietà and think, “What an amazing sculpture, how did he do it?” but fail to feel heartache and rage that so many mothers across this planet are now weeping and cradling the crushed and crucified bodies of their children, victims of American weapons of war. Our weapons. Our wars.

When will we dead awaken?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

Further Signs of More War: A Most Dangerous Game

MAKE SURE YOU CIRCULATE THESE MATERIALS! BREAKING THE EMPIRE'S PROPAGANDA MACHINE DEPENDS ON YOU.

The dangerous role played by prostituted politicians like Theresa May—a glorified imperial puppet— in the service of the anglozionist mafia is to be expected, but why aren't more people rising in anger and revulsion at these interminable criminal charades? The only answer has to be found in the empire's unrelenting war on truth, reaching now totalitarian dimensions.

Donald Trump’s days of playing the passive/aggressive host of a reality-television game show are coming to an end. Either he fires all the apprentices who might slightly hesitate to wage a much larger world war and lets the bombs fly, or he will be replaced by one who will. Signs are that he has learned what his job entails and the world will suffer more death and destruction as a result.

Back in the days of the first Cold War – the late 1950s to early 1960s when our little world came close to extinction – my very large family appeared on many American television shows. Their names told the story of those times: “Who Do You Trust,” “To Tell the Truth,” “Charades,” “Play Your Hunch,” and “Beat the Clock,” to name a few. It was as if those silly game shows were unconsciously suggesting we probe a little deeper behind the headlines to discover what was really going on before the Doomsday Clock ran out.

Today things are far more sophisticated and sinister, with a massive and unrelenting war on truth being waged by the Western corporate media, an arm of the CIA, capitalism’s invisible army. It is a twisted game show with deadly consequences. Its method is Janus-faced. From one face, repeat over and over again bold-faced lies always lacking in evidence – e.g. Russiagate, WMD in Iraq, the Syrian government used chemical weapons, Russia is an aggressor planning to invade Eastern Europe, three World Trade Center buildings fell into their own footprints in virtual free fall speed because of fires, etc.; from the other face, play the game of suggesting to the public that they know more than they do because they watch CIA-backed shows like “Homeland,” movies like “Zero Dark Thirty,” and are being informed by all the so-called ex-CIA and intelligence commentators that populate the corporate media and explain what’s really going on. The old adage that “you never leave the CIA” has somehow imperceptibly morphed into “Yes, we can; trust us.”

Now we have the British Prime Minister Theresa May accusing Russia of poisoning in England the double-agent Sergei Skripal and threatening Russia to give a “credible” explanation why they killed this man or else, a man who sold the identities of Russian agents to the UK for cash, putting them in serious danger. Or else, she says, the UK “will conclude that this action amounts to an unlawful use of force by the Russian state against the United Kingdom.” Naturally she presented no evidence for Russian involvement, but the BBC, as is its wont, speculates on how the British may punish Russia, and the other corporate media chime in. But we are left to wonder where this is leading. Could it be Syria? Former British diplomat Craig Murray suggests it could be a false-flag setup aimed at raising Russiaphobia to hysterical proportions. But to what end?

"Today things are far more sophisticated and sinister, with a massive and unrelenting war on truth being waged by the Western corporate media, an arm of the CIA, capitalism’s invisible army. It is a twisted game show with deadly consequences. Its method is Janus-faced..."

If we look to the United Nations and the accusations and threats flying from the mouth of the US Ambassador Nikki Haley, Obama’s UN Ambassador Samantha Power’s doppelganger in war lust, we see that the picture expands. Haley threatened that the US will take unilateral action in Syria against Syrian and Russian forces if the UN didn’t adopt her resolution that would have allowed anti-government terrorists plenty of time to escape from East Ghouta. She said, echoing words we have heard numerous times:

It is not the path we prefer, but it is a path we have demonstrated we will take, and we are prepared to take again….When the international community fails to act, there are a times when states are compelled to take their own action(s).

In response we have the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warning that another US strike on Syrian government forces would have serious consequences. And the Chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov saying,

We have reliable information about militants preparing to falsify a government chemical attack against civilians. In several districts of Eastern Ghouta, a crowd was assembled with women, children, and old people, brought from other regions, who were to represent the victims of the chemical incident.

He added that “White Helmets” activists (proven to be financed by the US and UK) had already arrived at the scene with satellite video transmitters ready to film the scene and that the Russians had discovered a “laboratory for the production of chemical weapons in the village of Aftris which was liberated from terrorist.” After the planned false-flag attack, the US was going to bomb government held districts in Damascus fulfilling Haley’s threat.

And here in the US, Col. Lawrence Wilkinson, who was Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff when Powell lied at the UN in 2003 to garner support for the criminal attack on Iraq, spoke to The Israel Lobby and American Policy 2018 conference ten days ago and said, speaking of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, that:

They’re both headed for war. Of that I’m convinced. They will use Iran’s allegedly existential (sic) to Israel presence in Syria which is becoming even more so from a military perspective every day, Hezbollah’s accumulation of some 150,000 missiles if we believe our intelligence agencies. The need to set Lebanon’s economy back yet again, that’s important. Look at what they’re deliberating right now with regard to the new very, very rich gas find in the Eastern Mediterranean with Israel claiming Section 9 and Lebanon claiming Section 9. Take that, Lebanon. We’re going to bomb you, then you’ll let us have it. And that will be their excuse.

Now Rex Tillerson is out as Secretary of State and the head of the CIA, the far more war minded Mike Pompeo slides naturally into the role. Musical chairs for the power elite. As Trump has said of Pompeo, “We are on the same wavelength.” Riding that same wavelength is Nikki Haley, a trio whose alliance bodes very poorly for Middle Eastern peace or for any rapprochement with Russia. The game turns deadlier as the Presidential Apprentice learns the rules and the empire prepares to shed more innocent blood in an unholy alliance with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other “team players.”

But this time the game won’t be, in the words of another CIA liar, “a slam dunk.” The opponents are ready this time. The game has changed.

And in eastern Ukraine, the snow should be melting in the next 3-4 weeks.

Play your hunch.

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

The Slick and Sick Propaganda Coming from Russia and Muslim Terrorists

MAKE SURE YOU CIRCULATE THESE MATERIALS! BREAKING THE EMPIRE'S PROPAGANDA MACHINE DEPENDS ON YOU.

What!? Offering peace and a live and let live arrangement? Who needs peaceful coexistence between nuclear superpowers? How dare he, the scoundrel!

As anyone even slightly aware knows, Americans are being inundated with endless Russian and Muslim propaganda aimed at convincing the American people that it is the United States that stands in the way of peace around the world. Sophisticated and crude in turns, what the psychologists call passive aggressive, these efforts at mind-control can be seen all across the internet. For years, The Washington Post, always somehow attuned to the latest intelligence, has been sounding the alarm about hundreds of Russian-linked websites aimed at gulling the American public into complacency. These efforts are about far more than creating fake news, hacking emails, and manipulating our elections. Everyone knows these have happened as overwhelming evidence has piled up and been repetitively reported by our finest media such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, etc. They have made it clear that our democracy is at stake from without, ably and seditiously supported from within. We are under attack.

But the propaganda campaign aimed at Americans of good will has taken a far more sinister turn. Giving speeches – ostensibly to their own people but really aimed at a U.S. audience – that sound sweet and reasonable is part of their game. Americans should beware.

Recently we heard from Vladimir Putin, a statement surely meant to soften the resistance to Russian aggression among well-meaning but easily deluded liberal Americans. You wouldn’t have heard such cultivated, smooth talk coming from communist leaders in the days of the U.S.S.R. with their blunt desk-thumping threats and ideological frontal assaults lacking in all reason.

Words such as these are meant to appeal to reason and melt the human heart:

Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and families were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland.

Today, should total war ever break out again – no matter how – our two countries will be the primary target. It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours. And even in the Cold War, which brings burdens and dangers to so many countries, including this nation’s closest allies – our two countries bear the heaviest burdens. For we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combat ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle with suspicion on one side breeding suspicion on the other, and new weapons begetting counter-weapons. ⁽¹⁾

But as we all know, Putin has recently told us that Russia has enough nuclear weapons to repel any attack and to destroy the United States many times over. The strategy: First sweet talk, then the hammer. Convince us to renounce our weapons and decrease our defense spending, and then - you can guess.

And if there is any further doubt about the Muslim terrorists and their religious fanaticism that would murder women and children, rape and pillage in their maniacal quest for world domination, this religious extract (with excisions for brevity sake) from a so-called holy book should be enough to remind readers that we in the West are the bearers of a sacred responsibility to preserve civilization no matter what the cost against barbaric people who would religiously countenance what follows:

[So, at God’s command] they waged the campaign….put every male to death….took the women captive with their young children, and plundered all their cattle, all their flocks and all their goods. They set fire to the towns where they lived and all their encampments. Then, taking all their booty, all that they had captured, man and beast, they took the captives, spoil and booty [to their leader who said] ‘Why have you spared the life of all the women? …. So kill all the male children. Kill also all the women who have slept with a man. Spare the lives only of the young girls who have not slept with a man, and take them for yourselves. ⁽²⁾

Of course they don’t publicly announce such filth that is written in their scriptures, for to do so would undermine their rhetoric about only defending themselves from attack from outside enemies who are always deemed the aggressors. For how could they justify such sick talk?

Unless we in the West don’t wake up soon, our enemies from Russia and the Muslim world will gull us asleep, and in our naïve innocence, all we hold sacred will be lost. It is time to follow the lead of the CIA and their motto engraved on CIA Headquarters: “The Truth Shall Set You Free.” Our liberty is at stake.

Wake up America!

End notes
Some people have taken this essay to be the straight dope on the perverse situation obtaining in the United States and its coterie of client states in regard to Russia, but, folks, sorry, it is a satire. Our webmaster left out the notes below due to a technical error. Our apologies, TGP would never run such an article in earnest, as we are a leading site exposing the Orwellianism of the empire and its filthy Neocon agenda. —PG

These are the words of President John F. Kennedy in his profound American University speech of June 10, 1963 in which he called for the end of the Cold War, the abolishment of nuclear weapons, and reconciliation with the Soviet Union. It is a speech that led to his execution by the U.S. National Security State. In that speech JFK said, “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” In his recent, enlightened speech, Russian President Vladimir Putin used a fine metaphor to say those who are provoking a nuclear war should “stop rocking the boat we are all in and which is called the earth.”

The holy book here referenced is the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Numbers 31, where Moses, following Yahweh’s command, instructs the Jews to finish their military operation against the Midianites and kill all the boys and women and take the girls as their reward.

Postscript: “It is difficult not to write satire.” Juvenal

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

The Shadow of an Israeli/U.S. Attack Grows Larger by the Day

Despite its capable population, Iran has a competent defensive land military force, but lacks the ability to project much direct power beyond its borders. Inflating Iran’s military threat and lying about its intentions is a maneuver to facilitate a possible attack by US imperialism. And the nation does not have a nuclear deterrent. (Image: The Sejjil Missile, one of Iran’s more effective deterrents at the moment against US-Israeli aggression,)

Last week I wrote that “all signs point toward an upcoming large-scale Israeli/U.S. attack on Lebanon and Syria, and all the sycophantic mainstream media are in the kitchen prepping for the feast. Russia and Iran are the main course, with Lebanon and Syria, who will be devoured first, as the hors d’oeuvres.” Those signs are growing more numerous by the day.

Israel’s mainstream newspapers, Haaretz, and the more conservative Jerusalem Post, both announce in headline news that Iran has built a new base in Syria with missiles capable of hitting Israel. One look at these newspapers with their talk of Israeli war preparations and the potential in assassinating the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah makes it very clear that an expanded Middle Eastern war is fast approaching. Russia, Syria, and Iran are being demonized as mind control propaganda spews forth. The mainstream corporate media in the United States and other countries are sure to follow.

In Lebanon, the Prime Minister Saad Hariri has returned to Saudi Arabia to meet with his Saudi patrons for the first time since his shocking resignation on November 4, 2017, which he later withdrew. The timing of his visit suggests another anti-Iranian and anti-Hezbollah announcement will follow. Will Hariri issue another statement accusing Iran and Hezbollah of destabilizing Lebanon to add to the war rhetoric coming out of Israel at the same time that Lebanon is making a military agreement with Russia? The moves on the chessboard are happening fast and furious. Divide and conquer is clearly the strategy of Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States.

Here in the United States, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retired intelligence workers, has just issued a public warning, or what they call a memo, to Donald Trump ( Why bother? Do they actually think he is listening or is in charge?) Growing Risk of U.S.-Iran Hostilities Based on False Pretexts. This group, which shares some suspicions regarding Iran and is therefore not its apologist, nevertheless says the following:

dominated states to create unrest and is also expanding its role in neighboring Iraq and Syria.

VIPS also suggests that because Netanyahu may be indicted on corruption charges: “it is conceivable that he might welcome a ‘small war’ to deflect attention from mounting political problems at home.” One may say the same of Donald Trump, but as history has taught us ‘small wars’ lead to large wars, and as is well known, the ultimate target of these warmongers is Russia, and such a war would be far from small.

One of the signers of the VIPS’ aforementioned article is Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer who in a separate article, Donald Trump’s foreign policy: Made in Israel? (No need for the question mark), rightly says that Trump is aligned with the most hardline elements in Israel and that “some pretext for war [with Iran] will surely follow with the United States having to bear much of the burden as well as most of the consequences, including what is likely to be a large casualty list as the Iranians will surely fight back.” Furthermore, Giraldi says that the U.S., with an active presence on the ground in Syria aimed at destabilizing the country and ousting Assad, is supporting alleged Israeli intelligence that allows it to bomb another sovereign country under the claims it is protecting Israel by attacking Iranian, Hezbollah and Russian targets.

While the American public is inundated with news about Jared Kushner and Hope Hicks, propaganda about how the Syrian government is slaughtering civilians in East Ghouta ( see Jonathan Cook’s excellent article, The Authoritarians Who Silence Syria Questions, and is further depressed by news of the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School, shares are rising in the US military-Industrial Complex and the Academy Awards ceremony will soon give a Hollywood deluded society a “needed distraction” from all the news. Meanwhile, the bloodthirsty warmongers are licking their lips in anticipation. They are beating the war drums, and not very slowly right now. The beat has quickened. You can hear it if you listen.

Perhaps the propaganda film The Post, about the CIA’s favorite newspaper, The Washington Post, will take home the golden fetish at the Oscars while Israel and the U.S. assumes their responsibility to protect the innocent by killing more of them and expanding their deadly arms toward their ultimate targets.

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found