The CIA Makes Science Fiction Uninteresting #1- The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
This zine was an obvious purchase for me: it tells some lesser-known history of the political left, it's designed well, and it only cost a buck. You can get a copy of it from the publisher Microcosm (in fact, looks like they have an updated version, and you can read the text here). I finally got around to reading it this week, as it happened to be on the top of a pile of comics on MLKjr's birthday.
While it's somewhat poorly written, the zine provides a lot of information in a small package and could be seen as a basic introduction to the case, and a starting point for someone to pursue the topic further. The zine presents a lot of unanswered questions and unexplained details surrounding the assassination, many of which raise suspicions of the FBI and Memphis authorities. I won't get into the details here, but it's hard to deny they clearly lead to a conspiracy.
One of the most disturbing things is the undisputed fact that the FBI had King under surveillance since 1961 as part of COINTELPRO, and had repeatedly harassed and tried to blackmail and discredit him. According to the zine, the same FBI intelligence detail was assigned to investigate his murder. If you don't know anything about COINTELPRO, you would learn a lot about our nation's idea of justice by researching it.
The skeptic in me doesn't like the lack of direct citations in the zine, so I would need to do further research to get to any sort of belief on the matter. One of the books cited was written by Mark Lane, a Charlottesville resident whom I saw speak a year ago at the Virginia Film Festival. At that time, he was talking about the Jonestown suicide/massacre, an incident in which he was personally involved and also suggests a conspiracy (in another of his book). I have to say, the man was fairly convincing in person, and was able to raise a reasonable doubt.
Anyway, where does this leave us? Well, assuming there was a conspiracy in the murder of King, and that members of the government were possibly involved... it leads to a lot of distrust. I think this can be healthy, though, as elements of the government clearly don't always have our best interests in mind (COINTELPRO being an egregious example of this).
But also, when we mourn him, we should hold close the memory that he died in a struggle against sinister forces of oppression which still exist in the power structures we live with today.
If this is a downer and you want to be lifted back up, again let me recommend Democracy Now's broadcast of his speeches the other day.
What are your thoughts on this? Let me know in the comments.
2 comments:
I got a chance to visit Memphis and the National Civil Rights Museum at the beginning of 2007. It's mindblowing because it's actually located in the renovated and repossessed Loraine Motel, the place where King was gunned down. But the wildest thing is that you can go upstairs in the building across the street, which the museum has also renovated, and actually look out of the same window from which James Earl Rey took aim.
The rest of that building is dedicated to the mystery and conspiracy theories surrounding the assasination. Ultimately they protray the whole event as largely unsolved and unclear. I figure that this kind of national discourse has been a long time coming in a country which until only four years ago kept all Native American exhibits in the Natural History building.
Regarding conspiracy theories with or without government involvement:
I would only suggest that before one makes that kind of a jump a much further reading of the events is in order. After having read over 5 books on JFK conspiracy theories one is left with the fact that the Warren Commission was pretty much right.
Post a Comment