I think what I found so ennobling about JFK and the Unspeakable and what may have triggered my guess about Thomas Merton's assassination and possible connections to MLK's assassination is that JFK's turn on Vietnam, Cuba and Russia was really seen as so dangerous to the establishment, dangerous enough to be assassinated. I think this shows that what they were for really jeopardized and continues to the present power structure.
It is bleak to consider that the power structure killed these messengers but in many ways killing them validated their message. In a sense we don't need messengers anymore. We have their legacy and teachings to put into practice now.
Or as MLK's son puts it better in the Jim Douglass article from earlier:
http://www.ratical.com/ratville/JFK/MLKconExp.html"Dexter King, the plaintiffs' final witness, said the trial was about why his father had been killed: "From a holistic side, in terms of the people, in terms of the masses, yes, it has to be dealt with because it is not about who killed Martin Luther King Jr., my father. It is not necessarily about all of those details. It is about: Why was he killed? Because if you answer the why, you will understand the same things are still happening. Until we address that, we're all in trouble. Because if it could happen to him, if it can happen to this family, it can happen to anybody.
"It is so amazing for me that as soon as this issue of potential involvement of the federal government came up, all of a sudden the media just went totally negative against the family. I couldn't understand that. I kept asking my mother, `What is going on?'
"She reminded me. She said, `Dexter, your dad and I have lived through this once already. You have to understand that when you take a stand against the establishment, first, you will be attacked. There is an attempt to discredit. Second, [an attempt] to try and character-assassinate. And third, ultimately physical termination or assassination.'
"Now the truth of the matter is if my father had stopped and not spoken out, if he had just somehow compromised, he would probably still be here with us today. But the minute you start talking about redistribution of wealth and stopping a major conflict, which also has economic ramifications . . . "
In his closing argument, William Pepper identified economic power as the root reason for King's assassination: "When Martin King opposed the war, when he rallied people to oppose the war, he was threatening the bottom lines of some of the largest defense contractors in this country. This was about money. He was threatening the weapons industry, the hardware, the armaments industries, that would all lose as a result of the end of the war.
"The second aspect of his work that also dealt with money that caused a great deal of consternation in the circles of power in this land had to do with his commitment to take a massive group of people to Washington. . . . Now he began to talk about a redistribution of wealth, in this the wealthiest country in the world."
Pepper went a step beyond saying government agencies were responsible for the assassination. To whom in turn were those murderous agencies responsible? Not so much to government officials per se, Pepper asserted, as to the economic powerholders they represented who stood in the even deeper shadows behind the FBI, Army Intelligence, and their affiliates in covert action. By 1968, Pepper told the jury, "And today it is much worse in my view" -- "the decision-making processes in the United States were the representatives, the footsoldiers of the very economic interests that were going to suffer as a result of these times of changes [being actived by King]."
To say that U.S. government agencies killed Martin Luther King on the verge of the Poor People's Campaign is a way into the deeper truth that the economic powers that be (which dictate the policies of those agencies) killed him. In the Memphis prelude to the Washington campaign, King posed a threat to those powers of a non-violent revolutionary force. Just how determined they were to stop him before he reached Washington was revealed in the trial by the size and complexity of the plot to kill him.
Dexter King testified to the truth of his father's death with transforming clarity: "If what you are saying goes against what certain people believe you should be saying, you will be dealt with -- maybe not the way you are dealt with in China, which is overtly. But you will be dealt with covertly. The result is the same.
"We are talking about a political assassination in modern-day times, a domestic political assassination. Of course, it is ironic, but I was watching a special on the CIA. They say, `Yes, we've participated in assassinations abroad but, no, we could never do anything like that domestically.' Well, I don't know. . . . Whether you call it CIA or some other innocuous acronym or agency, killing is killing.
"The issue becomes: What do we do about this? Do we endorse a policy in this country, in this life, that says if we don't agree with someone, the only means to deal with it is through elimination and termination? I think my father taught us the opposite, that you can overcome without violence.
"We're not in this to make heads roll. We're in this to use the teachings that my father taught us in terms of nonviolent reconciliation. It works. We know that it works. So we're not looking to put people in prison. What we're looking to do is get the truth out so that this nation can learn and know officially. If the family of the victim, if we're saying we're willing to forgive and embark upon a process that allows for reconciliation, why can't others?"
If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
