Wednesday, January 19, 2011
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Great show. Fascinating to hear at last some stories from Fetzer's long and winding road.
ReplyDeleteYes, I enjoyed the diversion into autobiography, too. Did not know Fetzer was a student of Hempel. Good pedigree.
ReplyDeleteI find it difficult to believe that King was assassinated by political opponents when enough was known about his private affairs that could destroy his reputation overnight were it revealed. The only people to benefit from King's assassination were those who shared his professed, but I think ratherly shallowly held, political ideals.
King the Martyr gave moral authority to the 'Civil Rights' movement (or at least was used to attached guilt to its opponents), King the real man fully exposed before public opinion would be personally destroyed and his politics sullied by association.
The narrative that Herman serves up makes no sense on its face.
fellist takes on a burden of proof he fails to meet. The civil court case, and consistent with the family of Martin King's understanding of the facts, found the US government guilty of his assassination.
ReplyDeleteThis is not "Herman's narrative." This is a legal verdict with evidence to understand, evaluate, and then (and only then) be in a position to discuss. fellist meets zero professional or academic standards in his/her "argument from ignorance" without meeting the burden of proof to address the evidence.
- Carl Herman
Mr Herman thanks for the response. Now read what I said.
ReplyDeleteI don't dispute that USG or elements within it are responsible for King's assassination (along with non-state actors). We disagree on what the government agents' motives most likely were.
I'll put together some stuff on my alternative theory and post it.
Ok; I'm interested in your analysis. The conclusion that Martin was murdered to prevent his summer DC encampment until the Vietnam War was ended and that money was delivered for employment and infrastructure is from the family and William Pepper, Martin's attorney and friend.
ReplyDeleteApologies in advance for typos and other errors, I haven’t had long to put this together but wanted to do it while I had the time and motivation.
ReplyDeleteWhat spurred me to join this discussion was the idea voiced at around the 16/17 minute mark by host and guest that we should not judge Martin Luther King on the content of his character. Kind of ironic. And silly. You certainly get a better estimate of a man’s character from the way he conducts his daily, private affairs, than by what slogans he signs up to publicly. ‘End Poverty’ -- we’d all echo that, but not all of us live on the donations of religious and political supporters, some no doubt quite poor themselves, spending their contributions on prostitutes and booze!
But there is a better reason to dwell momentarily on the matter of MLK’s known peccadilloes. Political enemies of MLK, those who opposed him on race, Vietnam, or poverty, could quite easily have destroyed his reputation and by association tarnished his ideas, by simply revealing what was known to everyone in Washington about the man: the many adulterous affairs, the prostitutes, the violence against women, the communist handlers, the kind of language he used in private … To expose these facts to the public at large would have been quite simple and would destroy completely King’s credibility and the ‘moral’ force behind his political crusades, so why on earth would political enemies bother with an assassination and all its attendant risks? It makes no sense -- especially as history has unfolded in the decades since. The same political, media, legal, and academic establishment we all agree is responsible for the assassination and cover-up also made King into a secular saint and his headline politics taboo to question.
Think also of the man they framed for his murder - James Earl Ray. Even if King’s political opponents had decided on a complex and risky assassination plot rather than simply expose him for the degenerate thug he was - which seems unlikely - why wouldn’t they frame one of their own opponents for the crime, one of King’s political fellow-travellers, another Black activist, or a drugged out peacenik or a communist? Why frame Ray and bring King’s opposition into disrepute? What kind of frame-up was this? William Pepper has expressed surprise at the fact that Ray, who’s White of course, was not a racist motivated by opposition to the ‘civil rights’ movement. And why did he suppose Ray to be a racist? Because that’s the impression we’ve all been implanted with by the controlled corporate media that Carl Herman rightly says has lied to us about these affairs for five decades. It would appear that the racial element of King’s crusading matters more to the criminal establishment than the anti-war or anti-poverty stances -- and that they side with King.
For these reasons it has always seemed to me that, all else being equal, the evidence suggests that the elements within the government involved in the King assassination and cover-up were vastly more likely to have been King’s fellows in left-wing, ‘civil rights’, or anti-war politics than to have been opposed to these initiatives. And there are obvious potential motives that stand out for assassination by these elements:
1) Fear that the right, or the pro-war faction, would expose the truth about the content of King’s character, damaging the common interests he shared with the conspirators.
2) Fear that King, having been built up into a chief spokesman for these common interests was about to go off the reservation on some or other issue in opposition to the conspirators.
The first speaks for itself and I think it’s very likely that the King assassination was designed in part to prevent such an occurrence. The second I shall flesh out in another post.
Was King about to go off the reservation?
ReplyDeleteThe first point I think worth considering with regard to this potential motive for the assassination is the revelation a few years ago of an imminent change in King’s public position on racial integration. And, whatever else, King was primarily associated with the race issue, anti-war and anti-poverty concerns were a secondary matter and even they were somewhat race-related.
It’s important to note that King represented a real shift away from the most notable and popular Black American leaders of previous generations. Men like Marcus Garvey and Farad Muhammad in the first half of the 20thC. were Black separatists, all about true self-help and entrepreneurship at the basic level, but with the principle extending ultimately to their seeking a sovereign state in North America for African Americans or a return to Africa. These leaders and their movements, despite attracting huge support among American Blacks, were never able to attract support from the major political parties or (because of media running interference) the wider American population, even though separate development was the preferred solution to the race problem for most Whites as well as Blacks. Yet the competing NAACP of the same period, and then King and the ‘Civil Rights’ movement for government forced ‘integration’ and various remedial programs, were able to attract the support of establishment politicians across the spectrum and, with media help, eventually a critical mass of Americans both Black and White. Isn’t it striking that the idea popular with both races of peaceful separation and self-reliance could not get a look-in, while ‘integration’, though so unpopular that it had to be imposed legally and even militarily, mysteriously became a moral and political imperative?
Who directed and benefited from the anti-Garveyite, anti-free-range-negro NAACP of earlier times and the ‘civil rights’ movement of King’s day (and for that matter was aligned with King on Vietnam and domestic spending issues, too)?
Well, unlike the authentically Black organisations of Garvey, Muhammad, and others, the ‘civil rights’ movement was principally an instrument of Jews. And by the 1960s Jews represented the only significant element of the interlocking financial, political, legal, academic, media, and criminal elite able to independently mobilise unchallenged in its ethnic self interest. The remaining Whites who dared do so came under heavy attack, and Blacks who dared do so outside the channels of the Jewish controlled organisations associated with the ‘Civil Rights’ movement - the Panthers, Elijah Muhammed, Malcolm X - also found themselves attacked.
Easiest just to quote to explicate this point:
(to follow)
The following is from Kevin MacDonald’s essential book Culture of Critique, MacDonald quoting Levering-Lewis:
ReplyDeleteBy mid-decade [c. 1915], the NAACP had something of the aspect or an adjunct of B'nai B'rith and the American Jewish Committee, with the brothers Joel and Arthur Spingarn serving as board chairman and chief legal counsel, respectively; Herbert Lehman on the executive committee; Lillian Wald and Walter Sachs on the board (though not simultaneously); and Jacob Schiff and Paul Warburg as financial angels. By 1920, Herbert Seligman was director of public relations, and Martha Greuning served as his assistant ... Small wonder that a bewildered Marcus Garvey stormed out of NAACP headquarters in 1917, muttering that it was a white organization. (Levering-Lewis 1984,85)
Wealthy Jews were important contributors to the National Urban League as well: "Edwin Seligman's chairmanship, and the presence on the board of Felix Adler, Lillian Wald, Abraham Lefkowitz, and, shortly thereafter, Julius Rosenwald, principal Sears, Roebuck Company stockholder, forecast significant Jewish contributions to the League" (Levering-Lewis 1984, p. 85). In addition to providing funding and organizational talent (the presidents of the NAACP were Jews until 1975), Jewish legal talent was harnessed on behalf of African American causes. Louis Marshall, a prominent player in the Jewish efforts on immigration (see below), was a principal NAACP attorney during the 1920s. African Americans played little role in these efforts: For example, until 1933 there were no African American lawyers in the NAACP legal department (Friedman 1995, 106). Indeed, a theme of revisionist historians reviewed by Friedman is that Jews organized African Americans for their own interests rather than in the best interests of African Americans. In the post- World War II period the entire gamut of Jewish civil service organizations were involved in black issues, including the AJCommittee, the AJCongress, and the ADL: "With professionally trained personnel, fully equipped offices, and public relations know-how, they had the resources to make a difference" (Friedman 1995, 135).
Jews contributed from two thirds to three quarters of the money for civil rights groups during the 1960s (Kaufman 1997, 110). Jewish groups, particularly the AJCongress, played a leading role in drafting civil rights legislation and pursuing legal challenges related to civil rights issues mainly benefiting blacks (Svonkin 1997, 79-112). "Jewish support, legal and monetary, afforded the civil rights movement a string of legal victories... There is little exaggeration in an American Jewish Congress lawyer's claim that 'many of these laws were actually written in the offices of Jewish agencies by Jewish staff people, introduced by Jewish legislators and pressured into being by Jewish voters"' (Levering-Lewis 1984, 94).
/endquote Culture of Critique
I’m happy to forward a PDF of Culture of Critique to anyone who wishes to chase up the references.
The following is from Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State:
ReplyDeleteJews are, as a group, wealthier and better educated than virtually all other segments of American society, and, as noted earlier, Jews have risen to positions of leadership throughout American society. Nevertheless, Jews who have achieved positions of prominence in the United States have most often done so in the public economy of government agencies, universities, foundations, law firms, and public interest groups as well as the mass media that is so closely associated with these institu¬tions.
According to one recent national survey comparing Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and blacks who have attained some measure of prominence in the United States, Protestants tend to derive their positions mainly from activities in the private sector and Catholics from trade union leadership. Jews, on the other hand, have de¬pended primarily upon the media, foundations and public interest groups, and appointive governmental posts to achieve positions in the American political and social elite.
***
During the administrations of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, a coalition of Jews and liberal Protestants and a smaller number of liberal Catholics within the Democratic party sought both to increase their power inside the fed¬eral government and to expand the power of the federal government vis-a-vis the states and local governments. Alliance with blacks on a platform of civil rights was the critical instrument that served both these purposes. Enfranchising blacks while discrediting Southern and conservative forces as racists increased the power of liberal forces at the federal level. At the same time, civil rights and, later, Great Soci¬ety programs served to increase the federal government's power vis¬-a-vis the states and other jurisdictions.
***
For Jews and other middle-class liberals, support for civil rights was not only a moral commitment but also an important political tactic. By allying themselves with blacks, enfranchising black voters, and delegitimating Southern white state and local governments, Jews and other liberals hoped to undermine the power of the same forces that had accused them of disloyalty, and had subjected them to anti-Communist witch hunts during the previous two decades. For Jews, additionally, gains achieved on behalf of blacks in terms of equality of opportunity also promised to serve their own interest in eliminating discrimination. Jews, moreover, had been suspicious of conservative Southerners at least since the 1920 Leo Frank case and were only too happy to help reduce their influence in American politics.
****
Jews served as major financiers and strategists for the civil rights movement. Jews served as well as the key liaisons between the civil rights movement and the government during both the Kennedy and Johnson eras.
***
Jewish contributors provided a substantial share of the funding for such civil rights groups as the NAACP and CORE. Jewish attorneys were at the forefront of the legal offensive against the American apartheid sys¬tem. Stanley Levinson, a longtime official and fund-raiser for the American Jewish Congress, became Martin Luther King's chief aide and advisor, having previously served as a major fund-raiser for Bayard Rustin. Harry Wachtel was a major legal advisor and fund¬raiser for the SCLC. Levinson and Wachtel were often called King's twin Jewish lawyers. Jack Greenberg, head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund was the most important single civil rights lawyer in the United States. Jews comprised a large segment-perhaps one-third of the whites who participated in civil rights marches and protests in the South during the 1960s.
continuing the quotations from Fatal Embrace:
ReplyDeleteDuring the 1950s and 1960s, Jews and African Americans were closely allied in the civil rights movement, and, indeed, Jews played a prominent role in the leadership of most, if not all, of the major civil rights organizations. As noted earlier, Stanley Levinson, a Jewish attorney, was Dr. Martin Luther King's chief advisor. Kivie Kaplan, a retired Jewish businessman from Boston, served as president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and was, as well, one of Dr. King's major fund-raisers and financial contributors. Marvin Rich, another Jewish attorney, was the chief fund-raiser and key speech writer for James Farmer, head of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Rich was later succeeded by yet another Jewish attorney, Alan Gartner. Attorney Jack Greenberg headed the NAACP Legal Defense Fund after former Su¬preme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, was named to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals by President Lyndon Johnson.
Jewish intellectuals and the journals of opinion that they con¬trolled, including Commentary, spoke out forcefully on issues of civil rights. Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Commit¬tee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League provided financial, legal, and organizational support for civil rights groups.
In the civil rights struggle, Jewish morality and Jewish interests pointed in the same direction. Morality dictated that Jews support the efforts of African Americans to free themselves from the apartheid system. To a generation of liberal Jews this was a supreme moral imperative. At the same time, however, many Jews and Jewish orga-nizations, in particular, also recognized that they had an interest in supporting the civil rights movement. First, the goal of a society in which discrimination based on race was outlawed served the inter¬ests of Jews as much as - perhaps even more than - blacks.
***
With the possible exception of blacks, Jews had a greater stake than any other element of the liberal coalition in domestic institu¬tions, programs, and expenditures. Jews, more than members of most other groups, had risen to positions of power and prominence through their roles in the public and quasi-public institutions of the domestic state-municipal social service agencies, universities, think tanks, and public interest law firms as well as federal and state agen¬cies. These institutions were, in turn, dependent upon high levels of domestic social spending which were now threatened by the Vietnam War. As a result, Jews were far more likely than members of other groups to oppose the war. One national survey taken in 1967 indi¬cated that 48% of the nation's Jews were against the war as com¬pared to only 16% of the Protestants and 27% of the Catholics sur¬veyed. At the time this was seen as a reflection of some naturally "dovish" tendency on the part of Jews. It is worth recalling, how¬ever, that barely a quarter century earlier Jews were among the na¬tion's most vehement "hawks."
/endquote Fatal Embrace
I am not the first to point out that these same American Jews were not so dovish toward the Arabs during the Six Day war, nor so sympathetic to the Palestinians enduring ‘apartheid’ in Israel. This may tell us something about how large a role Jewish self-interest played in their agitations ‘on behalf’ of Blacks.
Also worth noting, in 1993 a former ADL official, one Henry Schwarzschild, revealed that at least some of the toxic material the FBI had on MLK originated with the ADL who had spied extensively on him. So organised Jewry was manipulating in its own sectional interests not only King and the ‘civil rights’ movement but also the opposing side, here the FBI, but more generally the sleeping White majority. Here is Stephen Steinlight, former Director of National Affairs at the American Jewish Committee (in Backgrounder. (Center for Immigration Studies: October, 2001):
ReplyDeleteFor perhaps another generation, an optimistic forecast, the Jewish community is thus in a position where it will be able to divide and conquer and enter into selective coalitions that support our agenda. /endquote
Reminds me of the Cloward–Piven strategy of 1966, to:
deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor ... Conservative Republicans are always ready to declaim the evils of public welfare, and they would probably be the first to raise a hue and cry. But deeper and politically more telling conflicts would take place within the Democratic coalition … Whites – both working class ethnic groups and many in the middle class – would be aroused against the ghetto poor, while liberal groups, which until recently have been comforted by the notion that the poor are few... would probably support the movement. Group conflict, spelling political crisis for the local party apparatus, would thus become acute as welfare rolls mounted and the strains on local budgets became more severe
/endquote Cloward-Piven.
It boggles the mind that racial strife is something hoped and planned for but everything they do (organised Jewry, government, ‘security’ services, academia, media -- it’s usually the same thing) -- tends to that end. Everything.
But what if King were intending to shake off his Jewish management? If King was about to announce his conversion to the traditional African American ideal of Garveyite self-empowerment and a separatist policy of live and let live with European Americans, and was going to ditch the ‘Civil Rights’ agendas of government empowerment and White dispossession at the point of a gun, wouldn’t that be quite an alarming shift for tptb -- i.e., the Jews in ‘positions of prominence … in the public economy of government agencies, universities, foundations, law firms, and public interest groups as well as the mass media’ whose interests were served by those agendas ‘perhaps even more than blacks’?
http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/2008/03/23/met_191994.shtml
quote:
Dr. King's death also stopped him from carrying through on a plan that would have charted a new and highly controversial course for the civil rights movement, according to Mr. Watkins. In his book, he wrote that Dr. King shared his frustrations about the economic inequities blacks faced in America over dinner at a hotel after his speech. He then whispered to Mr. Watkins what he hoped to eventually do, something the former Augustan decided not to put in his book.
But after 40 years of secrecy, and initially saying he would probably take it to his grave, he revealed what it was: Dr. King was going to propose a separate state for blacks so they could eventually achieve economic parity that he believed wouldn't happen on its own in America.
/endquote
Important?
And there is a second ‘King goes off the reservation’ possibility. Was King about to speak up on behalf of the Palestinians?
ReplyDeleteFirst of all there’s this article which shows a remarkable history of academic and media dishonesty regarding King’s position on Israeli/ Palestinian affairs. Not indicative of his inclination to express support for the Palestinians, but revealing a concerted effort on the part of several prominent Zionist Jews to use King’s manufactured legacy for their own ends, to claim him as one of their own, and when the pro-Israel quotes attributed to King are challenged simply to make up new ones. The ADL, who spied on King and furnished the FBI with incriminating evidence about him, shamelessly get in on the act exploiting King’s golden reputation and bogus quotes. Even such a prominent public intellectual as Seymour Martin Lipset appears not to have been above a little self-serving bullshitting (at best) or shoddy scholarship (at worst):
Israel's apologists and the Martin Luther King Jr. hoax
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article2356.shtml#top
Then, making the Palestinian issue much more solid, there’s Michael Collins Piper in Final Judgement who writes about Pepper’s findings:
William Pepper has noted, in his book, An Act of State, connections between Jack Ruby and James Earl Ray's ubiquitous handler, "Raul," to a Mossad-linked arms smuggling operation that was active at the time of the JFK assassination. So that's a Mossad connection [to the MLK assassination] any way you cut it.
***
Pepper's assertion involving the Mossad link to the arms smuggling operation involving Ruby is based on statements made to one of Pepper's investigators by former Colonel John Downie of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group, a unit based inside the Department of Defense.
According to Downie, the mysterious figure "Raul"—whom King's accused assassin, James Earl Ray, claimed had helped frame him (Ray) for King's murder—was part of a U.S.-based international arms smuggling operation that Pepper had already determined—through other sources—involved Jack Ruby.
The link between "Raul" and Ruby was by no means tenuous: "Raul" and Ruby were placed together by Pepper's sources on numerous occasions prior to the JFK assassination—five years before King's murder.
/endquote Final Judgement
Piper goes into some detail on this and related evidence that would be too confusing to post here. But then he quotes James Earl Ray in an early appeal conviction, claiming his handler ‘Raul’ was:
among other things, an agent of a Mideast organization distressed because of King's reported, forthcoming, before his death, public support of the Palestinian Arab cause.
/endquote
And Ray again to the House Assassinations Committee:
I don't want to get into this libel area again and say something that might be embarrassing to—disservice some group or organizations . . . he [King] intended, like Vietnam, to support the Arab cause . . . someone in his organization making contact with the Palestinians for an alliance.
/endquote
Ray is obviously an important witness for the Pepper thesis so these statements should be very significant to defenders of that book. If Ray is dishonest Act of State is much less credible, but if he was telling the truth, than his handler was an agent of the Mossad, anxious about King’s imminent declaration of solidarity with the Palestinians, and we have another potential Jewish motive for the assassination worthy of serious study.