If We Are to Understand How We Became Our Planet's Apocalypse Nation, We Must All Fearlessly Admit Our Blood-Drenched History
Memorial Day 1967, Tompkins Park, Manhattan's Lower East Side, New York City: an atrocity perpetrated by cops egged on by Ukrainian war criminals, then flushed down the Orwell hole and now nearly forgotten. Photograph by Loren Bliss © 1967, 2018.
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(Editor's Note: Never before have I rewritten a published blog post as thoroughly as I have rewritten this one, a challenging process that reveals by the delays it imposed on publication the extreme, mostly emotional difficulty I had in verbally focusing on my chosen material. I have therefore, in embarrassment so acute it borders on mortification, deleted the original version, an act of revisionism unprecedented in all my years of blogging. I have also expanded the text to include this weekend's updates, thereby avoiding back-to-back publication of two separate posts. While this version is unquestionably better than its predecessor -- attentive readers will recognize its improvements as motivated entirely by sharpened focus rather than correction or retraction -- such re-evaluation is probably never truly complete. That's why I have no doubt I will many times more revisit the subject -- how we (and myself in particular) reflexively wrapped our experiences of ever-intensifying USian malevolence in shrouds of complacency -- a sin of which we are all to some extent guilty regardless of how raised any one of us might have imagined our consciousness to be. Meanwhile I offer my heartfelt apology for the original text's premature expostulation./LB)
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"Robert Kennedy’s death, like the President's, was mourned as an extension of senseless violence; events moved on, and the profound alterations that these deaths…brought in the equation of power in America was perceived as random…. What is odd is not that some people thought it was all random, but that so many intelligent people refused to believe that it might be anything else. Nothing can measure more graphically how limited was the general understanding of what is possible in America."
Comment: again, as in my two preceding posts, we begin with never-avenged atrocities that define "what is possible" in the homeland of the U.S. Empire; again, as before, I take this approach because I am convinced we cannot truly comprehend the terminal magnitude of the horrors the United States is inflicting on ourselves, our species and our planet without first acknowledging at least some of the preceding outrages that regardless of the vehemence and constancy of our opposition nevertheless define us as citizens of the most wantonly murderous empire in all human history.
But this time I also confess my own guilt in acts of self-censorship that make me a telling example of how for years we the people reflexively adjusted, like the proverbial frog, to the stealthily imposed JesuNazism and fascism in general that is now bursting terribly into boil as demonstrated by our suddenly accelerated reduction to credit-card serfdom and for-profit prison slavery.
Here too is my own belated Memorial Day eulogy for some of our more politically revealing dead and wounded -- belated because (given how the warmongers have perverted Decoration Day's original post-Civil-War "memory and tears" into a grotesque celebration of the Empire's conquer-the-world agenda) -- I had originally planned to ignore the holiday entirely.
It was an easy choice; the sieg-heil, "USA! USA! USA!" militarism of all modern patriotic celebration contrasts gratingly with the quiet, thoughtful sadness of the few Memorial Day observances I witnessed during my childhood and teens, when I accompanied my maternal grandmother as she visited the rural Michigan cemetery where her Civil-War-hero father was buried. As best I recall this happened at least three times, 1948, 1949 and 1957, but it is only the last such episode, in my 17th year, that I remember with anything approaching reportorial clarity, and even that recollection has been rendered incomplete by the passage of time: the only participant my memory shows me these days is my grandmother herself.
Nevertheless there had to have been other family members involved; though my grandmother had been a skilled horsewoman who could rig and drive a horse-drawn carriage as adeptly as anyone, she never learned to drive an automobile, so someone else had to have driven us to the graveyard, and indeed I have a vague recollection of being crowded into the uncomfortably soft back seat of someone's big Detroit car and imprisoned there between two unyielding adults for the several-hour journey from Grand Rapids to wherever it is -- I know but I'm not telling -- my great-grandfather is buried.
What I see in almost painfully sharp focus is my grandmother kneeling to polish the bronze Grand Army of the Republic medallion that adorns her father's grave. The day is what the weather bureau calls "partly cloudy," the sky's bright coolness occasionally interrupted by quick intervals of hot sunlight, the midday temperature as variable as that in a small otherwise comfortable room where every so often someone intrudes to open and close the door of an oven maxed out at 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
Now in such a moment of sun my grandmother plucks the severely faded four-by-six-inch U.S. flag from the flag-socket atop the medallion and rolls the worn-out flag onto the drinking-straw-sized wooden dowel that serves as its pole and tucks it away in a briefcase-sized handbag made of closely-woven brown straw.
The day turns cloudy-bright again; the apparent temperature drops at least 10 degrees. When my grandmother lifts her hand back out of her handbag, she holds a can of polish wrapped in a gray rag as big as a dish towel. She pours a blob of the polish onto the rag and polishes the medallion for maybe 10 minutes until it shines like newly minted copper. Still kneeling, she puts the polish and the polish rag back into the handbag and this time comes up with a brand new four-by-six-inch U.S. flag the soda-straw-sized pole of which she thrusts into the socket on the medallion's top. She twists the pole to assure herself it is securely seated. Then she reaches into her handbag one more time and retrieves a small waxpaper-wrapped bouquet of red, white and purple flowers that she unraps and places at the foot of her father's tombstone.
Afterward she rises and stands motionless above his grave for a few moments, apparently not in silent prayer, instead with a curiously attentive expression on her face as if she listens for some proof her father had survived beyond the grave. Or maybe she is merely relishing the burial ground's quiet solemnity, its absence of human clamor gently underscored by the early summer buzz of insects in seldom-cut grass and the melodic chirping of the wild birds for whom the bugs are convenient fodder.
As if in response to our silence the sun glares for a moment then hides again behind the sky's cooling blanket of light gray clouds. A soft breeze tugs at my attention by fluttering with its ghostly breath the diminutive U.S. flags that decorate the many Civil War veterans' graves. It is not a big cemetery; it is perhaps half the size of a football field. But the GAR graves are the obvious majority. Some of their flags are brightly new atop GAR medallions as freshly polished as my great-grandfather's, but most are faded and tattered, their whispers of neglect, abandonment, dead kindred and dying familial lineages confirmed by the tarnish that darkens the medallions beneath. By 1957 that war was 92 years old and all its veterans were dead; the last surviving member of the GAR had made his final permanent change of station in 1956.
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I have no idea how or why I came to be there in that cemetery with my maternal grandmother on that or any other Memorial Day. But I have a sense that in 1957 I was not there by invitation; it was rather that I was not trusted to remain alone in my grandparents' house. Left alone, I might have invited a girlfriend over for an evening of teenage sex, and oh-my-gosh what would the neighbors think?
Nor is this hyperbole: with the notable exception of one aunt, who in 1948 by her life-changing response to my dyslexia became literally my all-time savior (a tutor-as-healer story for another time), all my other maternal relatives including my grandmother herself were intellectually hamstrung by their reactionary Middle West Republican outlook. Thus they saw me not as a person but as a problem and therefore as more of an object than a living being; they regarded me not only as an unwanted reminder of my mother's insanity, but as the animated mechanism of its potential disclosure -- disclosure they feared would generate a scandal disgracing them socially and forever crippling their financial prospects. Indeed that is why I do not identify them further as to name and locale; as far as I know they are all not only successful Capitalists but probable devotees of Ayn Rand and therefore fanatical supporters of the Trump/Pence Regime, and though I surely bear no fondness for them, neither do I wish to cause them additional embarrassment and aggravation.
However those moments in the cemetery came to pass, they seemed of minimal and therefore dwindling importance, and for the next six decades, what I assumed to be nothing more than random memory gave me only the most fleeting glimpses of them, images involuntarily evoked once each year by their association with the annual Memorial Day holiday itself, which during my most productive years as a writer and photographer had shrunk in significance to become what it is for most of us: merely another welcome occasion for 24 hours away from work, in my case with the privilege of holiday pay and often with the possibility that sometime within those 24 hours maybe I'd get a welcome opportunity for an afternoon or evening of trout fishing on some mountain stream.
The one exception -- the notably violent Memorial Day 1967 -- is a story we'll get to in a moment.
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By late 1986 I had finally admitted to myself the 1983 house fire had destroyed not only all my life's work but all my career prospects as well, and broken by despair so overwhelming I cannot possibly describe it now or ever, I had returned to deeply rural western Washington state, where I would live for the next 18 years, 11 of them in the charitable shelter of friends' property amidst the densely forested foothills of Mount Rainier.
Under these circumstances Memorial Day lost even more personal significance; now it was meaningful only in terms of its relationship to the moon phases that governed the horticultural calendar in The Old Farmer's Almanac, the bible with which in post-fire, ruined-expectations mode I had replaced an earlier such authority, The Associated Press Style Book, the text on modern English that had always bibled my journalistic prose. As the Style Book dictated usage, so did the Almanac dictate the gardening schedule: if Memorial Day was beneath a waxing moon, it might be a good day -- always consult the Almanac first -- to plant beans, sunflowers, corn and pumpkins and other surface crops; if beneath a waning moon, it might be good for potatoes, beets, carrots, turnips and other root crops. (I contrast these guidebooks -- grammaring versus gardening -- only to exemplify the magnitude of the change in consciousness forced on me by the fire.)
Then this year the approach of Memorial Day was emotionally reanimated (Surprise!) when recollection's process of quilt-by-association stitched Memorial Day 2018 to my memory of my grandmother at her father's grave in 1957 and resurrected it, this time accompanied by a poignancy I had not hitherto recognized or more likely had never before allowed myself to experience.
No doubt this new emotional honesty was the product of the many late-night episodes of geriatric reflection encouraged by my present circumstances: these days I survive not by my efforts with keyboard or camera but on one of those already lethally meager Social Security retirement pensions the Trump/Pence Regime intends to genocidally downsize to quicker and more certain deadliness; I dwell in an urban apartment complex, recently renovated and thereby threatened by gentrification though at present set aside to house lower-income elders in minimal comfort while we (theoretically) do nothing more productive than await death, a presumptively barren interval of existence that requires neither English grammar nor lunar grammarie).
Though the peripheral details of my 1957 cemetery experience were as I said blurred beyond recovery, my recollection of my grandmother herself remained so vivid I now realized a photograph of her kneeling to polish the GAR medallion in front of the tombstone would have been a telling, portfolio-quality image had I possessed the forethought to capture it with the Agfa Press Miniature my father had given me on my 15th birthday and that in early 1957 was still my primary camera.
Now in 2018 and without any conscious decision to do so I found myself contemplating the soft sad achy sense of loss now suddenly and perplexingly evoked by my memory of my grandma in the graveyard, and I soon realized it is probably a classic example of how a personal experience can sometimes spontaneously transform itself into a political metaphor seemingly without any intellectual effort whatsoever. The evidence of the processes' spontaneity is the fact I never mourned my maternal grandmother, not for a minute, nor will I ever mourn her in the future, simply because the chilly remoteness by which she expressed her hostility to me left me absolutely nothing to grieve.
But now as our overlords shackle us with JesuNazi theocracy, that vignette-like mental image of the photograph I should have made of her tending her father's grave has somehow quite unexpectedly metamorphosed into my primary personal symbol for the forever lost realm of the New Deal United States and how it felt to live there before the long decade of the death squads stole all its potential from all of us whether we are white or people of color and how that colossal theft has now reduced our nation to just another imperial perpetrator in our species' 5000-year history of patriarchal malevolence.
My boyhood memory of my grandma in the graveyard has thus become, in my own private lexicon, the vital contextual preface to my photographically confirmed memories of 1967's irremediably adult Memorial Day. The yin of my grandmother's ritual is the gentle yin of context; it gives us a glimpse of what was overrun and conquered and destroyed by the harsh yang of unprovoked governmental violence. That the violence is archived first by my own pictures and then again by the variety of news outlets that published them -- journals ranging from the East Village Other to Newsweek and Paris Match -- makes the dire exclamation point of its prophetic obscenity undeniable.
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What happened in Tompkins Square Park on Memorial Day in 1967 was a true police riot, an ominous harbinger of the tyranny that has become our everyday norm, with cops running amok arresting people whose only offense was their presence in a public place and then beating them emergency-room bloody.
In one of the day's more indicative atrocities, the cops reportedly beat a pregnant woman on her fetus-swollen belly, smashing her repeatedly with their riot batons and nightsticks, injuring her so badly she miscarried and gave birth to a dead child. Supposedly this happened not in Tompkins Square Park but in a police van on the way to the deservedly notorious Women's House of Detention, which is why the beating was not recorded either by myself or by the legion of Working Press by which I and a couple of East Village Other staffers had soon been reinforced.
But after the blatantly illegal arrests we had witnessed in the park it seemed an entirely credible probability, an oft-discussed atrocity some of my colleagues and I tried diligently but unsuccessfully to confirm. People who said they were friends and acquaintances of the abused mother repeatedly told us the cops had confronted her immediately after the stillbirth and warned her, while she was still reeling from shock, that if she dared file an official complaint she would suffer the same fate as her dead daughter. Thus she was apparently terrified to silence, yet another allegation we who had witnessed the astonishing criminality of the police riot now had no difficulty believing was true.
As the self-help people would say in their relentless, One-Percent-commanded efforts to dissuade us from real revolution -- "by now I should have put it all behind me"-- but as I have just discovered in the past few days of introspection, that is something my conscience will never allow me to do. In thinking through all this I realized I will always consider myself guilty for having abandoned the quest for the young woman whose fetus was allegedly aborted by police brutality. The story had quickly become part of the mixture of fact and fantasy that was the legend of the Lower East Side, which made it important to discover whether it was true or false. That its abandonment was a collective decision by all of us who otherwise covered in depth the broader atrocity of the police riot itself does not lessen its wrongfulness.
There is also an important factual omission of which we are all guilty, again a decision the collective nature of which does not lesson my nagging personal sense of having done wrong on this occasion as well. We knew who had actually provoked the police riot -- we knew his name and ethnicity and the ideology that spawned his provocation -- but after considerable debate we chose not to report it for what at the time seemed the very best of reasons: we did not want to further inflame the neighborhood's long-simmering, potentially explosive racial hostilities and bring the cops back again for yet another display of our overlords' sadistic brutality.
What had summoned the police to the park on that most memorable of Memorial Days to rip apart the musicians' city-issued troubadour permit and beat and arrest the musicians and their companions were enraged complaints from an obviously influential representative of the community of Ukrainian Nazi war criminals to whom the United States Government had given sanctuary on the Lower East Side.
Thus by withholding the motive for the NYPD's invasion of the park, we unintentionally collaborated with the government's then-clandestine but unmistakably self-defining policy of protecting as many Nazis as possible from the properly vengeful Soviet authorities who wanted them all working off their humanitarian debts in Siberian labor camps or better yet dead. And there's no doubt these Nazis were real Nazis, so Nazified they sicced the cops on a racially mixed group of human beings who were merely attempting to make peaceful music during a war holiday -- a holiday the Nazis had seemingly already appropriated as their own.
That the police responded as promptly and brutally as they did has always left me wondering: how many unreported thousands of Nazi war criminals did the U.S. actually hide? And what deep-spook connections did these Lower East Side Ukrainian Nazis have that a couple of telephone calls could command an immediate police assault -- an illegal police assault -- on a licensed and therefore entirely legal event? The FBI's COINTELPRO? The CIA's lesser known but far more lethally effective Operation CHAOS?
Apparently -- again unbeknownst to me until the realizations of the present -- the assumptions that underlay my image of the (partially) benign United States as personified by grandma in the graveyard and the thought of thousands of other grandmothers doing much as she had done on Memorial Day 1957 had until now kept me from articulating these specifically subversive questions. It is yet another example of the consequences of white privilege -- how even those of us whose political understanding has presumably been honed to unflinching clarity by Marxism remain deficient in our comprehension of what horrors are "possible in America."
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However none of these specific realizations came about until after the investigative report from Global Research detailing the oft-suppressed truths about Senator Kennedy's assassination reached my email inbox on 28 May. For me there was really nothing new in the report; I had long ago concluded the deaths of both Kennedys had been ordered by our Capitalist overlords, and I had almost as long ago concluded the future histories of the United States -- if indeed the United States leaves alive anyone to write or read them -- would identify the first of those murders as the date we began our descent into the publicly declared JesuNazism with which the Trump/Pence Regime now assails us. But the report nevertheless brought to wrenching memory the anger and bitterness and sense of utter betrayal with which I privately wept a few minutes after I learned my presidential candidate had been murdered.
I had cried a bit too at his brother's murder; my eyes had briefly teared up as I read the first wire-service dispatches from Dallas, but journalistic discipline did not allow me the freedom to truly weep until 25 November when I was at a friend's house watching the president's funeral rebroadcast on evening television and heard the Black Watch momentarily skirl their pipes before joining the procession. That ancient ritual sound of tribal lamentation finally freed my Celtic emotions from the professional jail within which I had kept them safely imprisoned, and for just a moment I sobbed like an injured child.
But when Robert Kennedy was slain, it overwhelmed me with an awful sense of cliche made real, as if the ground had truly opened under my feet and I were being swallowed by some hitherto-inconceivable but now everlastingly triumphant horror. It is a sense that lingers to this day, given new intensity by the Trump/Pence Regime's astoundingly public brutality.
Here too is the one element of historical analysis about which age and experience compel me to serious disagreement with my younger ideological comrades. They cannot fathom how psychologically different the United States of the 1960s was from the United States of today. That difference, which includes the psychological mechanism by which we hid from ourselves the true extent of our nation's Capitalist malignancy, is so great I suppose only those of us who were alive and politically aware in the earlier era can accurately measure it.
I surely can; I was an aware, often painfully conscious young adult during those years, caught up in their events not just by the discipline of my occupation but by the demands of my intellect and emotions as well. But I have yet to find a metaphor adequate to describe the attitudinal contrast between then and now.
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The one and only time in my long journalism career I gave a "stop-the-presses" order was in response to the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I was the only one in the newsroom when the story broke and I suppressed my emotions and responded with the same icy calm that enabled all of us at The Oak Ridger that day in Oak Ridge Tennessee to thrust aside our heartbreak and make over the interrupted edition and then after it was printed, write the obligatory local-reaction stories for an Extra that if memory serves was printed about 9 p.m. By the time we were done our normal eight-hour workday had grown by an additional nine hours but none of us cared; we had all done our best under difficult circumstances, and now we could go off by ourselves or to our families or lovers or friends and cope with our anguish in private whether alone or together.
At another daily newspaper nearly four years later, the editor-in-chief, the managing editor and I the news editor were forceful enough in our demands we finally convinced the reluctant publisher to let us put the telegraph desk, the entire mechanical department and the circulation department on one hour of expensive overtime to bridge the three-hour East-Coast/West-Coast time-zone difference. Normally The Daily Record of Morristown and Morris County New Jersey put its first edition to bed at 2 a.m., but if we held until 3 a.m., we could publish the results of California's 1968 presidential primary.
Nearly everyone on the 49-person editorial staff hoped the slain president's brother New York Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy would win it because then he would win the Democratic nomination and win the presidency and save us all from Nixon. By 2:30 there was no doubt: it was our Bobby by a landslide. I headlined Page One with his triumph, locked it up at 3 a.m., went home to bed feeling more than a little triumphant myself and gloated myself to sleep contemplating how one might write Richard Milhous Nixon's political obituary.
Witness the folly of an optimist: I would not learn until early the next afternoon our beloved Bobby had been murdered at just about the time I was falling asleep.
Until that moment such a double assassination -- a president and less than four years later his presidential candidate brother -- was literally unimaginable. It was something we thought could occur only in banana republics or in medieval-type quarrels of hereditary royalty.
But on 5 June 1968, that imaginary United States in which we had enjoyed relative comforts that now today are unimaginable -- the fantasy United States that despite its troubles had seemed a realm of vast progressive potential -- was dead. I knew it the moment I walked into the neighborhood candy store to which I had gone to pick up my reserved copy of that morning's New York Times and buy a pack of Long Marlboros and there learned Senator Robert Francis Kennedy had been murdered at about the same time The Daily Record's presses were printing the news of his victory. Though most white people have yet to admit it, the last realistic hopes of the entire U.S. 99 Percent under Capitalism were slain by the murder of Senator Kennedy, just as all the hopes ever cherished by our nation's people of color were terminated by the murder of Reverend King two months earlier on 4 April.
People of color immediately recognized the slaying of King as another more emphatic iteration of the exclusionary message the rulers of lynch-mob nation had always sent them. Meanwhile we whites had allowed ourselves to be be privileged to stupidity; that is why we are much slower learners than our brothers and sisters of color. Even now 50 years later we have trouble comprehending what the two murdered Kennedys have been telling us ever since they were killed: that under Neoliberalism -- the euphemism crafted to hide the genocidal brutality of U.S. Capitalism's inevitable maturation into JesuNazism -- we 99 Percenters are all expendable regardless of our color -- and if we want to survive, we had damn well better set aside our differences and unite in militant solidarity.
Prior to the second Kennedy killing, I could still sometimes delude myself; the United States had seemed, even after the assassination of President Kennedy, to yet be permanently defined by the New Deal as a genuinely reformable realm. President Johnson, whom most of us despised because of his warmaking in Vietnam, continued to radically expand domestic social services. I had thus foolishly believed -- as did every one I knew -- the humanitarian momentum of the New Deal would eventually save us: that sooner or later it would evolve into a United States socialist enough and democratic enough and comfortably diverse enough to live up to its perpetually hyped but inevitably violated constitutional principles.
It is precisely that era's reflexive optimism -- an optimism shared by all but the most narrowly doctrinaire Marxists -- that so radically differentiates it from today, an era of pessimism so darkly bottomless it has no counterpart in our species' history.
Now the weight of that long decade of unavenged murders that began in 1963 and all the offenses against liberty that came afterward is pressing into our brains. It is forcing even our most stubborn optimists to acknowledge the ever-more-irresistible black-hole gravity of truths we might wish to ignore but cannot: that Capitalism is too Evil to reform; that to continue to pursue its reform is therefore absurd; that either we overthrow Capitalism or we die -- not just some of us, but our entire species, and with us every other plant and animal species the survival of which might save our Mother Earth from reduction to a brown orb of radioactive bug-planet wasteland.
Perhaps because I have witnessed first-hand the indescribably inhumane aftermath of war, I can visualize our downfall in horrific detail; I can also sense the intensifying malignancy of the approaching apocalypse as it is summoned ever closer by our morally imbecilic overlords. So can nearly every adult I know, every adult of every age from 18 to 86.
For once the so-called "generation gap" is healed; too bad its only cure is the potentially terminal darkness of pessimism and hopelessness.
Such is the legacy of U.S. Capitalism's death-squad decade of serial political murder.
Say their names: President Kennedy and Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Kennedy and Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller and Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder and Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green and Karen Silkwood.
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Say His Name: President John Fitzgerald Kennedy
"Most people under 60 will not remember the harrowing Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the world was brought to the brink of nuclear war. With the US leading the long-range missile race, short-range Soviet missiles had been quietly installed in Cuba. Tension ignited when a US reconnaissance pilot was shot down over Cuba and killed. Kennedy, opposed to a war with Cuba, feared that his generals would overthrow him and escalate the crisis to a nuclear war that they believed to be winnable. In desperation Kennedy turned to urgent, secret negotiations with his Cold War enemy, Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Disaster was narrowly averted through the vital historical meeting of October 27. Horrified by the event and under pressure from senior advisors to pursue a first-strike capability, Kennedy made a decisive turn towards peace. He began urging the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and withdrawal from Viet Nam. In June, 1963 he made an impassioned plea at the American University to make peace with the Soviets: 'If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. 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 futures. And we are all mortal.' But he would not be long for this world, for he had bitterly alienated the hawks who placed 'winning the Cold War' above the life of a President."
See also: "This is a story of how key nazis, even as the Wehrmacht was still on the offensive, anticipated military disaster and laid plans to transplant nazism, intact but disguised, in havens in the West. It is the story of how honorable men, and some not so honorable, were so blinded by the Red menace that they fell into lockstep with nazi designs. It is the story of the Odd Couple Plus One: the mob, the CIA and fanatical exiles, each with its own reason for gunning for Kennedy. It is a story that climaxes in Dallas on November 22, 1963 when John Kennedy was struck down. And it is a story with an aftermath -- America's slide to the brink of fascism."
And by all means this by Jimmy Breslin: "He noticed the tall, dark-haired girl in the plum dress that had her husband’s blood all over the front of the skirt. She was standing out of the way, over against the gray tile wall. Her face was tearless and it was set, and it was to stay that way because Jacqueline Kennedy, with a terrible discipline, was not going to take her eyes from her husband’s face."
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Say His Name: Malcolm X
"Malcolm X was assassinated on 21 February 1965 at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. The subsequent murder trial convicted three men, Talmadge Hayer, Norman 3X Butler, and Thomas 15X Johnson. For most commentators (e.g., Breitman), Malcolm’s death left a number of questions unanswered. Not only did the trial fail to definitively answer who murdered Malcolm, it also failed to answer who sponsored the assassination. The prosecution team quickly assumed the involvement of the Nation of Islam (NOI), and failed to track leads that did not match their assumptions. Focused solely on winning the case as they defined it, the prosecution worked with the circumstantial evidence they had without attempting to find hard facts or the real motive behind the assassination. To their discredit, the defense teams shared part of the blame; they failed to introduce evidence or raise questions that would seriously weaken the prosecution’s case. Proponents of various theories have since attempted to solve some of the questions left unanswered, by positing the involvement of not only the Nation of Islam but also other groups with possible motives and means, including the Harlem Drug Lords, the New York Police Department (NYPD), the CIA, and the FBI."
***
Say His Name: Reverend Martin Luther King Junior
"...in 1999, in Memphis, Tennessee, more than three decades after MLK's death, a jury found local, state and federal government agencies guilty of conspiring to assassinate the Nobel Peace Prize winner and civil rights leader. The same media you would expect to cover such a monumental decision was absent at the trial, because those news organizations were part of that conspiracy... Read the testimonies yourself if you don't want to take my word for it."
See also: "After the civil right victories and his move to advance community empowerment, Dr. King prophetically warned of the rise of the right-wing in the United States. 'The line of progress is never straight,' he said. 'For a period a movement may follow a straight line and then it encounters obstacles and the path bends….we are encountering such a period today. The inevitable counterrevolution that succeeds every period of progress is taking place.'”
***
Say His Name: Senator Robert Francis Kennedy
"Robert Kennedy, Jr. has concluded there may have been a second gunman and is now publicly urging a re-investigation into the assassination his father, Sen. Robert Kennedy (D-NY)
See also: "The Robert Kennedy Assassination, a gripping documentary by the acclaimed producer Chris Plumley, exposes how the CIA planted two operatives within the Los Angeles Police Department who manipulated the investigation of Kennedy's killing. Robert Kennedy's killing seemed an open and shut case, yet in spite of 77 witnesses, it remains shrouded in mystery. Many witnesses at the time complained of pressure by the LAPD to change their testimony. For the first time, we expose how evidence was changed: how an FBI officer saw bullets being removed from the scene of the assassination and how LAPD officers who didn't toe the line found themselves suspended on ridiculous charges or taken off the case. This hard-hitting documentary is produced in the gripping style of The Day The Dream Died, the documentary which catapulted Chris Plumley to international prominence and formed the backbone of Oliver Stone's acclaimed film JFK."
***
Say Their Names: Mark Clark and Fred Hampton
"I remember Fred Hampton. For the last year of his life, which was the whole time I knew him, he was Deputy Chairman of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party. Fred was a big man whose inexhaustible energy, keen insight and passionate commitment to the struggle made him seem even larger still. We called him Chairman Fred. Chairman Fred was murdered by the FBI and Chicago Police Department in the pre-dawn hours of December 4, 1969. He was just 21 years old. Fred’s family and comrades mourned him for a little while and have celebrated his life of struggle, service, intensity and sacrifice ever since."
See also: "... the heavily armed police team arrived at the site, divided into two teams, eight for the front of the building and six for the rear. At 4:45 a.m., they stormed into the apartment. Mark Clark, sitting in the front room of the apartment with a shotgun in his lap, was on security duty. He was shot in the chest and died instantly."
***
Say Their Names: Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller
and Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder
"When Ohio National Guardsmen fired sixty-seven gun shots in thirteen seconds at Kent State University (KSU) on May 4, 1970, they murdered four unarmed, protesting college students and wounded nine others. For forty-two years, the United States government has held the position that Kent State was a tragic and unfortunate incident occurring at a noontime antiwar rally on an American college campus. In 2010, compelling forensic evidence emerged showing that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) were the lead agencies in managing Kent State government operations, including the cover-up. At Kent State, lawful protest was pushed into the realm of massacre as the US federal government, the state of Ohio, and the Ohio National Guard (ONG) executed their plans to silence antiwar protest in America. The new evidence threatens much more than the accuracy of accounts of the Kent State massacre in history books. As a result of this successful, ongoing Kent State government cover-up, American protesters today are at much greater risk than they realize, with no real guarantees or protections offered by the US First Amendment rights to protest and assemble. This chapter intends to expose the lies of the state in order to uncensor the 'unhistory' of the Kent State massacre, while also aiming toward justice and healing, as censoring the past impacts our perspectives in the present."
***
Say Their Names: Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green
"But the media has largely forgotten what happened just ten days after the Kent State shootings. On May 14, 1970, local and state police opened fire on a group of students at the predominantly black Jackson State College in Mississippi. In a twenty-eight-second barrage of gunfire, police fired hundreds of rounds into the crowd. Two were killed and a dozen injured. We speak with Gene Young, a former student at Jackson State who witnessed the shooting."
***
Say Her Name: Karen Silkwood
"Karen Silkwood and her death...(have) seemingly been forgotten by America... Karen was active in her union, calling attention to the radioactive contamination in the plant, and spent months compiling evidence to show that the company was deliberately covering up the fact that their fuel rods contained imperfections, which could put millions of lives at risk if they sparked a meltdown. The night of her death, many believe Karen was deliberately driven off the road by another car, and her family was later able to sue Kerr-McGee for $1.3 million in damages, but the company admits no wrongdoing."
See also: "'Karen Silkwood — Dead Because She Knew Too Much?' The FBI had closed the case, leaving many questions officially unanswered. Then the top executive of the company that employed Silkwood interfered with a congressional reopening of the case, and the Justice Department joined in hamstringing that inquiry. In the opinion of a congressional investigator, the official handling of the case amounted to a cover-up.
(Don't tell anybody, but these unavenged murders prove "American Democracy" to be the biggest Big Lie our species has ever uttered.)
*****
Also in Memoriam (I): Dr. Tiller's Death Exemplifies JesuNazi Murderousness
"To those working in the world of abortion, May 31 is an unforgettable date. Nine years ago on this day, Dr. George Tiller was assassinated at his church as he was waiting to enter Sunday morning services. Dr. Tiller was murdered for one reason—because he provided abortions."
***
Also in Memoriam (II): MOVE Massacre Exemplifies Capitalist Governance
"(13 May 2015) marks the 30th anniversary of a massive police operation in Philadelphia that culminated in the helicopter bombing of the headquarters of a radical group known as MOVE. The fire from the attack incinerated six adults and five children, and destroyed 65 homes. Despite two grand jury investigations and a commission finding that top officials were grossly negligent, no one from city government was criminally charged."
*****
Weekend Update: U.N. Report Condemns U.S. Economic Savagery
"Donald Trump is deliberately forcing millions of Americans into financial ruin, cruelly depriving them of food and other basic protections while lavishing vast riches on the super-wealthy, the United Nations monitor on poverty has warned."
*****
Weekend Update: "Shocking" Increase in Deaths of U.S. Children
"A report released Friday shows a shocking rise in deaths between 2013 and 2016 among US children and teens aged 10-19. While deaths in this age group declined between 1999 and 2013, from 2013 to 2016 the total number of deaths, as well as the death rate, increased by 12 percent."
*****
Genocidal Abandonment of Puerto Rico: Racism+Censorship=5000 Deaths
"More people were killed by Maria than by the terrorist attacks of 9/11. This time, we can't blame anyone but ourselves."
See also: "On Tuesday, Harvard researchers published a study estimating that approximately 5,000 deaths can be linked to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. The same day, ABC canceled Roseanne Barr’s eponymous show Roseanne after Barr sent a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett, an adviser to former President Barack Obama. Cable news covered Barr’s tweet and her show’s cancellation 16 times as much as the deaths of U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico."
Plus this: "For those who argue that the media has misplaced priorities when it comes to coverage choices, this week has provided a case study to support their position. While media outlets from cable news to digital publishers obsessed over the cancellation of ABC’s Roseanne, a report on the staggering death toll in Puerto Rico has, in comparison, been met with relative silence."
*****
Weekend Update: Fraudulent Science Tries to Silence Flint Water Protests
"The lead crisis, after all, has been declared over. This, according to a statement Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder released in April to justify closing Flint’s free bottled water distribution centers...(but the) decision was met with pushback from Flint Mayor Karen Weaver, state representatives and thousands of residents. All noted a lack of trust, resources and proof that the water is safe.
*****
Weekend Update: How Murderous Chicago Cops Exemplify Genocide Nation
"The Chicago police are a perfect emblem of Trump’s America: white police killing Black people without consequence, and marching proudly for their right to do so."
*****
Venezuela's Not the Hellhole the Empire's Propaganda Says It Is
"Jimmy Carter has called Venezuela’s electoral system “the best in the world,” and what I witnessed was an inspiring process that guarantees one person, one vote, and includes multiple auditing procedures to ensure a free and fair election. I then came home to the United States to see the inevitable “news” coverage referring to Venezuela as a “dictatorship” and as a country in need of saving. This coverage not only ignores the reality of Venezuela, it ignores the fact that the U.S. is the greatest impediment to democracy in Venezuela, just as the U.S. has been an impediment to democracy throughout Latin America since the end of the 19th century."
See also: "Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are all targets of the U.S. government because they challenge control of Latin America and the Caribbean by Western corporate elites and their local allies"
*****
Weekend Update: at Least Eight Dead in Nicaraguan Mass Shooting
“...a Mother's Day march in Managua, where mothers of dead protesters and students headed a 5-kilometer-long stream of hundreds of thousands, ended when shooters opened fire on the crowd... The shooters are still unknown, but videos show groups of police and masked men carrying rifles in the vicinity...(the murder of at least eight participants and the wounding of at least 50 more) in what was likely the largest single demonstration since 1979 signals that the 45 days of demonstrations, which began with students and pensioners protesting IMF-dictated pension cuts on April 18, are trending toward more violent and wider social explosions.”
*****
Weekend Update: Gaza Palestinian Immolates Himself in Protest
"Fathi Harb should have had something to live for, not least the imminent arrival of a new baby. But last week the 21-year-old extinguished his life in an inferno of flames in central Gaza. It is believed to be the first example of a public act of self-immolation in the enclave. Harb doused himself in petrol and set himself alight on a street in Gaza City shortly before dawn prayers during the holy month of Ramadan. In part, Harb was driven to this terrible act of self-destruction out of despair."
*****
Border Guard Guns Down Guatemalan Woman
"Claudia Patricia Gómez González, a young Indigenous woman from Guatemala, was shot and killed by a Border Patrol agent on May 23 while crossing from Mexico into Rio Bravo, Texas."
See also: "...González was headed to Virginia to reunite with her boyfriend. For more, we go to Houston, where we speak with Astrid Dominguez, director of the ACLU's Border Rights Center. We also speak with Sarah Macaraeg, an award-winning investigative journalist, in St. Louis, Missouri."
Plus this: "US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have detained nearly 250 undocumented immigrant workers in May as part of escalating operations across the Midwest."
*****
Sick Transgender Woman Dies of Neglect in ICE Concentration Camp
“...a transgender woman died while in custody at a facility in New Mexico...The 33-year-old woman from Honduras, identified by advocates as Roxana Hernandez...asked for asylum, after traveling with the caravan more than 2,000 miles...U.S. immigration authorities finally recognized (despite her having been in government custody for over a week) that she needed medical attention...”
*****
Jersey Cops Beat Young Mother as Her Infant Daughter Screams in Terror
As of the end of April, there have been at least 418 people killed by police in the US according to figures tracked by killedbypolice.net...Rampant police brutality has become an everyday part of American life. Not a day goes by without someone in the US being killed by law enforcement or subjected to an egregious beating...Police questioned 20-year-old Emily Weinman about a bottle of liquor she appeared to possess...pinned her to the ground, put her in a chokehold and repeatedly punched her in the face. As her nearby 18-month-old daughter cried...
See also: "A video that has been seen by several million people shows the cop pummeling the young mother in the head."
*****
Weekend Update: Cops Increasingly Murder with Impunity
"The media can’t be bothered to spend too much time on killings that have become routine, unless, of course, there’s grisly video footage. In the twenty-four-hour period that witnessed Clark’s death, at least five other men were killed by police across the country, including Michael Holliman in Lone Rock, Arkansas, Reuben Ruffin, Jr. in Daviess County, Kentucky, Manuel Borrego in El Monte, California, Jermaine Massey in Greenville, South Carolina and Osbaldo Jimenez in Escondido, California. Only the nightly protests in Sacramento kept Clark’s murder in the news, to the extent that it was covered at all. So many killings, so little airtime. Two weeks after the Sacramento shooting, the Supreme Court handed down an appalling decision that will only encourage more police shootings."
*****
Electronic Voting Ensures Election Theft Remains Highly Likely
"More than 140 of November's congressional elections will be decided using electronic voting machines with no verifiable paper trail, leading to concerns among election officials that any hacking or tampering will be undetectable—and accurate recounts or audits in the event of extremely close races, difficult to verify."
*****
Weekend Update: Record Number of JesuNazis Seeking Office
"At least eight white nationalists are running for state or federal office, according to The Southern Poverty Law Center. Anti-hate groups have reported that this is more than in any other election in modern history."
*****
Radioactive Wastewater Genocidally Poisoning Roads in At Least 13 States
"Wastewater from the oil and gas industry that's being spread on roadways to control dust and ice in at least 13 states, including Pennsylvania, poses a threat to the environment and to human health, according to a study released this week."
Comment: what is revealed here is of course yet another of the post-deathcamp methods of genocide employed by the Capitalist One Percent and their Ruling Class vassals; yes, our overlords really do intend to exterminate as many of us as they can. But thanks to the journalistic incompetence of Kristina Marusic, who focused only on Pennsylvania when she wrote the story; thanks to the even greater incompetence of the Truthout editors who published it in its present form, and thanks to the academics-only censorship that prohibits access to the source document from which Marusic lifted the story, there is no way to learn the names of the other 12 states.
Though perhaps some very brave academic whistle blower will sneak me a copy of that source document...
*****
Weekend Update: Capitalism's U.S. Serfs Labor Longer for Much Less Pay
"...the US could have Danish levels of well-being and work 2.2 fewer months each year, but instead it works way more than Denmark and has wild levels of inequality, poverty, and absolute material deprivation."
*****
Canadian Government Will Bail Out Trans Mountain Pipeline Investors
"The Canadian Finance Minister Bill Morneau has just announced to reporters that they will purchase the Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline — a controversial pipeline that runs from the Alberta oil sands to the country’s pacific coast — for $3.45 billion (C$4.5bn)."
*****
How School Shootings Serve Our Capitalist Overlords, Dividing Us in Terror
"Another week, another mass shooting and still the discourse remains primarily about individual violence. The goal is to inject a fear into the (population). The goal is to divide us. The goal is to make us afraid of each other. The goal is to justify further control of the people and to continue to obliterate civil liberties."
*****
Hormel Food Recall Includes Spam, Pork and Chicken
"Hormel Food is recalling more than 220,000 pounds of their canned pork and chicken products, including Spam." With thanks to TigerLille1 for sending me he link.
*****
How Your Smart Home Will Rat You Out
When do police have legal access to the trove of personal information that our smart homes collect?
*****
Making Abortion Available in Ireland Will Take More Than Votes
"Ireland voted in a landslide to support abortion rights. But making abortion care available will take much more...The question of abortion care...is intrinsically tied to questions about the broader health-care system. The Catholic Church remains deeply involved in the hospitals...The question remains of what kind of country Ireland will be...”
See also: "The overwhelming “Yes” vote in the Irish referendum on abortion rights, by a margin of 1,429,981 votes for to 723,632 votes against, is a landmark victory both for the Irish working class and for the defense of democratic rights internationally."
*****
White Supremacists' Favorite Black Sycophant Sacked by Harvard
“Roland Fryer is an economics professor at Harvard University. He...posited that perhaps black people are genetically inferior to whites or that black children don’t succeed in school for the same reason. He wondered if black children need to be paid in cash in order to excel...Instead of doing the work of an economist and analyzing the tremendous profits generated by the trans-Atlantic slave trade he wondered if salty black bodies were more able to survive the middle passage...he claimed in a 2016 paper that there was no evidence of racial bias in police shootings.Every white supremacist and their apologists quote from Fryer’s phony findings...But Fryer’s stock went down recently with the announcement that he has been accused of sexually harassing two students. Harvard University banned him from his own lab and the state of Massachusetts is investigating him.”
*****
Proecutors' Lies Prompt Dismissal of More Inauguration Protest Cases
In a series of victories for civil disobedience rights on Thursday, the U.S. Attorney's Office (USAO) dropped charges and dismissed several cases against people involved with the #DisruptJ20 march during President Donald Trump's inauguration, and a federal judge sanctioned prosecutors for lying about evidence...more than 200 anti-Trump demonstrators, legal observers, and journalists were 'indiscriminately' swept up in mass arrests carried out during inauguration protests. Although a jury found the first group of protesters not guilty of all charges...federal prosecutors have continued pursuing cases against 59 of the rounded-up demonstrators...seeking to imprison them for decades on felony charges, and relying heavily on recordings by the right-wing activist group Project Veritas.
*****
Why 19 May Should Be an International Holiday
"Each year, the collective May 19th birthday of Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh and Yuri Kochiyama passes only to be followed by the racist, imperialist Memorial Day celebration. The lack of attention the former receives compared to the latter reveals the true character of US imperial society. May 19th is a special day to those in the US who are invested in the struggle for a world free of US imperial domination, a struggle that Malcolm, Yuri, and Uncle Ho represent at its best. In stark contrast, Memorial Day is canonized by corporate criminals from Washington to CNN as a day to celebrate the active duty mercenaries for the Empire. These hired mercenaries conduct murderous pillages of lands beyond US borders to secure corporate profit and military dominance worldwide".
See Also: "One of the signature achievements of the Black Lives Matter movement was the outright rejection of Reverend Al Sharpton. Sharpton had been paid handsomely for decades to stifle Black rage whenever it emerged from the blood-soaked claws of white supremacy...King Rat Sharpton was at it again on May 19th of this year, the day of the so-called 'Royal Wedding'...
*****
Last Words: Why the White Majority Rejects Democracy
"...when intolerant white people fear democracy may benefit marginalized people, they abandon their commitment to democracy." Thanks to TigerLille1 for the link.
LB/31 May 2018
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