Amidst all the anti-Russia
brouhaha that has enveloped our nation, we shouldn’t forget that the U.S.
national-security establishment — specifically the Pentagon, CIA, and FBI — was
convinced that Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist agent who was spearheading
a communist takeover of the United States.
This occurred during the Cold War, when Americans were made to
believe that there was a gigantic international communist conspiracy to take
over the United States and the rest of the world. The conspiracy, they said,
was centered in Moscow, Russia — yes, that Russia!
That was, in fact, the justification for converting the federal
government to a national-security state type of governmental structure after
the end of World War II. The argument was that a limited-government republic type of
governmental structure, which was the nation’s founding governmental system,
was insufficient to prevent a communist takeover of the United States. To
prevail over the communists in what was being called a “Cold War,” it would be
necessary for the federal government, they said, to become a national-security
state so that it could wield the same type of sordid, dark-side,
totalitarian-like practices that the communists themselves wielded and
exercised.
The conviction that the communists were coming to get us became
so predominant, primarily through official propaganda and indoctrination,
especially in the nation’s public (i.e., government) schools, that the matter
evolved into mass paranoia. Millions of Americans became convinced that there
were communists everywhere. Americans were exhorted to keep a careful watch on
everyone else, including their neighbors, and report any suspicious activity,
much as Americans today are exhorted to do the same thing with respect to
terrorists.
Some Americans would even look under their beds for communists.
Others searched for communists in Congress and within the federal
bureaucracies, even the Army, and Hollywood as well. One rightwing group became
convinced that even President Eisenhower was an agent of the Soviet government.
In the midst of all this national paranoia, the FBI, the
Pentagon, and the CIA became convinced that King was a communist agent. When
King began criticizing U.S. interventionism in Vietnam, that solidified their
belief that he was a communist agent. After all, they maintained, wouldn’t any
true-blue American patriot rally to his government in time of war, not
criticize or condemn it? Only a communist, they believed, would oppose his
government when it was committed to killing communists in Vietnam.
Moreover, when King began advocating for civil rights, especially
in the South, that constituted additional evidence, as far as the FBI, CIA, and
Pentagon were concerned, that he was, in fact, a communist agent, one whose
mission was to foment civil strife in America as a prelude to a communist
takeover of America. How else to explain why a black man would be fighting for
equal rights for blacks in nation that purported to be free?
The website kingcenter.org points out:
After four weeks of testimony
and over 70 witnesses in a civil trial in Memphis, Tennessee, twelve jurors
reached a unanimous verdict on December 8, 1999 after about an hour of
deliberations that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.
Mrs. Coretta Scott King welcomed the verdict saying, “There is abundant
evidence of a major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband
Martin Luther King Jr…. The jury was clearly convinced by the extensive
evidence that was presented during the trial that, in addition to Mr. Jowers,
the conspiracy of the Mafia, local, state and federal governments were deeply
involved in the assassination of my husband.”
And why not? Isn’t it the duty of the U.S. national-security
state to eradicate threats to national security? What bigger threat to national
security than a person who is supposedly serving as an agent for the communists
and also as a spearhead for an international communist conspiracy to take over
the United States?
State-sponsored assassinations to protect national security were
among the dark-side practices that began to be utilized after the federal
government was converted into a national-security state. As early as 1953, the
CIA was developing a formal assassination manual that trained its
agents in the art of assassination and, equally important, in the art of
concealing the CIA’s role in state-sponsored assassinations.
In 1954, the CIA targeted the democratically elected president
of Guatemala for assassination because he was reaching out to Russia in a spirt
of peace, friendship, and mutual co-existence. In 1960-61, the CIA conspired to
assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the head of the Congo because he was perceived to
be a threat to U.S. national security. In the early 1960s, the CIA , in
partnership with the Mafia, the world’s premier criminal organization,
conspired to assassinate Fidel Castro, the leader of Cuba, a country that never
attacked or invaded the United States. In 1973, the U.S. national-security
state orchestrated a coup in Chile, where its counterparts in the Chilean
national-security establishment conspired to assassinate the democratically
elected president of the country, Salvador Allende, by firing missiles at his
position in the national palace.
The mountain of circumstantial evidence that has accumulated
since November 1963 has established that foreign officials weren’t the only
ones who got targeted as threats to national security. As James W. Douglas
documents so well in his remarkable and profound book JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters,
the U.S. national-security establishment also targeted President John F.
Kennedy for a state-sponsored assassination as well.
Why did they target
Kennedy? For the same reason they targeted all those other people for
assassination — they concluded that Kennedy had become a grave threat to
national security and, they believed, it was their job to eliminate threats to
national security.
After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy achieved a breakthrough
that enabled him to recognize that the Cold War was just one great big racket
for the national-security establishment and its army of “defense” contractors
and sub-contractors.
That’s
when JFK announced an end to the Cold War and began reaching out to the Soviets
and the Cubans in a spirit of peace, friendship, and mutual coexistence.
Kennedy’s Peace Speech at American University on
June 10, 1963, where he announced his intent to end the Cold War and normalize
relations with the communist world, sealed President Kennedy’s fate. That’s
also what had sealed the fate of President Arbenz in Guatemala and what would
seal the fate of President Allende in Chile. (See FFF’s bestselling book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why
Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas P. Horne, who
served on the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s. Also see FFF’s
bestselling book The Kennedy Autopsy by
Jacob Hornberger and his recently published The Kennedy Autopsy 2.”)
But what many people often forget is that one day after his
Peace Speech at American University, Kennedy delivered a major televised address to the nation
defending the civil rights movement, the movement that King was leading.
What better proof of a threat to national security than that —
reaching out to the communist world in peace and friendship and then, one day
later, defending a movement that the U.S. national-security establishment was
convinced was a spearhead for the communist takeover of the United States?
The loss of both Kennedy and King constituted conclusive
confirmation that the worst mistake in U.S. history was to abandon a
limited-government republic type of governmental system in favor of a
totalitarian governmental structure known as a national-security state. A free
nation does not fight communism with communist tactics and an omnipotent government.
A free nation fights communism with freedom and limited government.
There is no doubt what
both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. would have thought about a type
of totalitarian-like governmental structure that has led our nation in the direction
of state-sponsored assassinations, torture, invasions, occupations, wars of
aggression, coups, alliances with dictatorial regimes, sanctions, embargoes,
regime-change operations, and massive death, suffering, and destruction, not to
mention the loss of liberty and privacy here at home.
Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.