NEUTRALIZING/EXTERMINATING Human Beings IS USA Policy – home & Abroad

The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.

In December 1963, four months after the large civil rights march on Wash, DC, a nine-hr conference was held at FBI HQ to discuss ways to “neutralize” Martin Luther King, Jr. A prepared list of 21 proposals was discussed – “using” ministers, “disgruntled” acquaintances, “aggressive” newsmen, “colored” agents, Dr. King’s housekeeper, & a suggestion to use King’s wife or “placing a good looking female plant in King’s office” to develop info for use “at an opportune time in a counterintelligence move to discredit him” w/o embarrassment to the Bureau. [Pepper, W. F. (2003). "An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King." London: Verso, p. 11].

The reason King Finally had to be completely neutralized:

After King’s radical speech on April 4, 1967 against the Viet Nam War, that included a call for a revolution away from capitalism toward a socially just society, he began discussing strategies to address the widening gap between rich & poor, i.e., taking the class problem head-on. By November 1967, his plan for a Poor People’s Campaign was taking shape. This included a permanent tent city of as many as 500,000 people to be called “Resurrection City” encamped on Wash., DC’s mall starting May 1968, to remain until the government re-directed all its money devoted to the barbaric war to a new socially just society at home. The plan was based on need to “disrupt” cities to create a crisis without destroying life or property. King wanted to create an action that did “not count on government good will,” that would be a “force that interrupts its functioning.” The plan was to be “dislocative and even disruptive” because “pressureless persuasion does not move the power structure.” He had concluded that the “old style” kind of march on Washington “isn’t sufficiently crisis-packed.” King’s words were simply becoming too threatening to maintenance of the status quo: “There must be a radical reordering of our national priorities…We’re not going to Washington to beg. I hope we are beyond that stage. We are going to Washington to demand what is ours.” [Pepper, W. F. (2003). "An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King." London: Verso, p. 7; Garrow, D. J. (1988). "Bearing the Cross." NY: Vintage, pp. 574-624].

On March 3, 1968, one month before King’s April 4 assassination, a memo by J. Edgar Hoover identified an FBI “Counter-Intelligence Program” directed against “Black Nationalist Hate-Groups:”

1. “Prevent the coalition of black nationalist groups…[which] might be the first step toward a real ‘Mau Mau’ in America, the beginning of a true black revolution.”

2. “Prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement…King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed ‘obedience’ to ‘white liberal doctrines’ (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism…” [Trager, J. (1992). "The People’s Chronology." NY: Henry Holt and Co., p. 1015].

Neutralization in Viet Nam

In Viet Nam at the same time in 1968, the US was carrying out a separate program called PHOENIX to “neutralize” as many as 3,000 Vietnamese community leaders/month, using CIA-trained assassination squads, some known as Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRU). [Sheehan, N. (1988). "A Bright Shining Lie." NY: Random House, p. 732]. As many as 87,000 Vietnamese were neutralized – imprisoned, tortured, murdered, or converted. [Prados, J. (1996). "President's Secret Wars." Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, p. 309].

US ORIGINS In Genocide/Extermination:

But this policy of eliminating people, whether in the form of genocide of whole peoples, or of key individuals who possessed followers, when they are perceived in the way of White Man’s “progress” – prosperity for the few through expansion at any cost – has been the guiding cultural ethos of USAmerica since our origins.

Starting in 1600s:

The British arrived in Jamestown, VA in 1607. A policy of intentional extermination of the native population began almost immediately. “Hundreds of Indians were killed in skirmish after skirmish. Other hundreds were killed in successful plots of mass poisoning. They were hunted down by dogs, ‘blood-Hounds to draw after them, and Mastives to seize them.’ Their canoes and fishing weirs were smashed, their villages and agricultural fields burned to the ground. Indian peace offers were accepted by the English only until their prisoners were returned; then, having lulled the natives into false security, the colonists returned to the attack. It was the colonists’ expressed desire that the Indians be exterminated, rooted ‘out from being longer a people upon the face of the Earth.’ In a single raid the settlers destroyed corn sufficient to feed four thousand people for a year. Starvation and the massacre of non-combatants was becoming the preferred British approach to dealing with the natives.” [Stannard, D. E. (1992). "American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World." NY: Oxford University Press, p. 106].

Long before Thomas Jefferson’s desire to “exterminate” the Indians,  and George Washington had said that Indians were “wolves and beasts” who deserved nothing from the whites but total ruin, the MASSACHUSETTS BAY COLONY in 1630 made it illegal to “shoot off a gun in any unnecessary occasion, or at any game EXCEPT an Indian or a wolf.” [Stannard, D. E. (1992). "American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World." NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 240-41].

“Founding Fathers”

In 1812, Thomas Jefferson, now a senior sage out of office, concluded that White Americans were “obliged” to drive the “backward” Indians” with the beasts of the forests into the Stony Mountains”; in 1813 Jefferson stated that the American government had no other choice before it than “to pursue [the Indians] to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach.” In other words, the Native Americans are to be given the choice “to be extirpated from the earth” or to remove themselves out of the White Americans way. Thus, to the majority of White Americans the choice for Indians was one of expulsion or extermination.  [Stannard, D. E. (1992). "American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World." NY: Oxford University Press, p. 120].

Scalping Bounties

Extermination was officially promoted by a “scalp bounty” on dead Indians. “Indeed, in many areas it [Indian-killing] became an outright business.”

Thomas Jefferson, writing to his Secretary of War in 1807, instructed that any native resistance to U.S. expansion into their territories should be overcome militarily, with the object that the Indians be “exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi.” This was sound policy, he claimed, because “in war, they [Indians] will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.” [Churchill, W. (1997). "A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present." San Francisco: City Light Books, pp. 150, 181-182].

Washington’s Orders to Sullivan:

Continental Army Supreme General George Washington’s orders to General Sullivan in 1779 during the Revolutionary War made it clear he wanted the Iroquois threat completely eliminated:

Orders of George Washington to General John Sullivan, at Head-Quarters May 31, 1779:

“The Expedition you are appointed to command is to be directed against the hostile tribes of the Six Nations of Indians, with their associates and adherents. The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements, and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.

I would recommend, that some post in the center of the Indian Country, should be occupied with all expedition, with a sufficient quantity of provisions whence parties should be detached to lay waste all the settlements around, with instructions to do it in the most effectual manner, that the country may not be merely overrun, but destroyed.

But you will not by any means listen to any overture of peace before the total ruinment of their settlements is effected. Our future security will be in their inability to injure us and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.”

[Writings of George Washington. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, XV, pp. 189-93; Drinnon, R. (1980). Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, p. 331].

US Historical Operating Principles (several of which are explicit in George Washington’s orders):

1. Total War, civilians and combatants alike considered legitimate targets

2. Preventing/Not Wanting Peace

3. Preventive and Pre-emptive War

4. Terror

5. Torture

6. Revenge

The political-economic market system we have grown up with and support with our tax dollars and voting patterns is a significant contributor to the problem.

Part of the revolutionary antidote, if it occurs, will be in radically changed choices each of us makes as to how we travel, what we eat, what we consume or don’t consume, etc. Take travel, for example. Air and private auto travel not only emit massive amounts of carbon molecules, accumulating as particles of mass destruction in our biosphere, they also consume inordinate amount of petroleum for each passenger mile traveled. 

If we are not committed to taking radical leaps in our own consciousness that manifests in corresponding radical changes in our lifestyles, then we choose complicity in business as usual, i.e., continuing to live as we have been conditioned and to which we are now addicted – comfortable materialism. It is absolutely and totally unsustainable. We now have an evolutionary opportunity for a leap in consciousness to integrate ourselves into a cosmological reality of living in mutual respect with all other life. So, we are the antidote, not the government or the market. As we become conscious, each daily choice we make from eating, traveling, and consuming, or not, is a revolutionary act.

“Behold my brothers, the Spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love!

Every seed is awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land. 

Yet, hear me, people, we have now to deal with another race – small and feeble when our fathers first met them but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.

They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. The nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all that are in its path. 

We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that away from us. My brothers, shall we submit or shall we say to them: “First kill me before you take possession of my Fatherland…”

Our love of possession is our disease.

So we have to look at thought itself as a major cause of our problems. We accept the political and economic structures that exist as if they are written in stone, and have been with us forever. It is helpful to remind ourselves that everything cultural is a creation of human beings, and can be changed at any time it is deemed important or necessary to enhance species survival and enjoyment. Modern Western man has become addicted to materialism which has contaminated our thinking process and values such that we have become individualistic rather than communitarian beings, acquisitive rather than inquisitive, and competitive rather than cooperative. We are working against our intrinsic, archetypal nature.

The wise Australian archaeologist, V. Gordon Childe, in his classic work, Man makes Himself (1936), concluded (now the language would substitute “human(s)” for “man/men”): “Just because tradition is created by societies of men and transmitted in distinctively human and rational ways, it is not fixed and immutable: it is constantly changing as society deals with ever new circumstances. Tradition makes the man, by circumscribing his behavior within certain bounds; but it is equally true that man makes the traditions. And so, we can repeat with deeper insight, Man makes himself.”

Sitting next to me at breakfast were a couple from Connecticut who, it turns out, were on a healing vacation recovering from having lost their son, their only child, a month earlier in combat in Viet Nam. He had been a draftee, reluctantly serving his conscriptive assignment, hoping to return to start a career in the healing profession.

When all this news converged — 500,000 people celebrating at Woodstock, my excitement as a fresh war returnee that a new spirit was in the wind, the couple’s mourning over their killed son, and my deep sadness about their son’s death, I started sobbing. Those mourning parents then gently reached for my hands, and as I clasped theirs, we cried together.

More than resistance at that moment, we wanted a revolution in our society that would make war impossible ever again. That is how we experienced Woodstock in that moment! I was stirred by feeling part of a collective energy for emergence of a new man, and a new woman.

I am still wanting to feel the stir of a zeitgeist of consciousness that recognizes deeply within that when others are suffering and hurting, I am also, and that everyone else is feeling similarly. If we could grasp in the depths of our archetypal souls that there is a boomerang force inherent in any toxic energy thrust at others, meaning that that dark energy will return in one form or another, sooner or later, to the thruster, then war would end, just like that. It would be an evolutionary breakthrough.

Nonetheless, most of us were raised to believe that the United States is an “exceptional” civilization, superior to all others in history. Americans have historically died and killed to maintain this belief. After my military experience, however, I was motivated to seriously study history for the first time.

Captain John Smith of the Virginia colony in the early 1600s referred to our original inhabitants as “subanimals” and “beasts” worthy only of “extermination.” Puritan leader John Endicott of the Massachusetts Bay Colony regularly ordered “death” to the Pequot Indians. Our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, refers to our original inhabitants as “merciless savages” and George Washington termed them “beasts of prey” to be “destroyed.” European settlers regularly called them “brutes” or “vermin” to be “eliminated.” General William Tecumseh Sherman in the 1870s ordered “extermination” as the “final solution” to the “Indian problem.” Hitler later took note.

During what we call the Spanish-American War, 1898-1902, U.S. forces fought against Filipino citizens, calling them “goo-goos,” while murdering upwards of a half million of them under orders such as “burn and kill the natives” issued by General Jacob H. (”Hell-Raising”) Smith to U.S. Marines.

The explicit origins of preventive/pre-emptive war through use of terror can be discerned in the behavior of our leading Founding Father. Continental Army Commanding General George Washington ordered Revolutionary War General John Sullivan in the summer of 1779 “to lay waste all the [Iroquois, especially Seneca] settlements around . . . that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed. . . . But you will not by any means, listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected. . . . Our future security will be in their inability to injure us . . . and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them” [italics added]. There it is — preventive war using terror.

Sullivan’s scouring of the countryside with axe and torch soon transformed that beautiful region from the character of a garden to sickening desolation. Sullivan’s campaign was nothing other than a scorched-earth policy, bearing comparison with Sherman’s Georgia march to the sea or the search-and-destroy missions of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. The Iroquois Confederacy was the most advanced Indian federation in the new World. It had made a territory that embraced the central portion of New York State into an area of flourishing farms, well-cultivated fields and orchards, and sturdy houses. In a little more than a month all of this had been wiped out.

But that simply prepared our civilization for the rest of the (his)story. Immediately after the Civil War, General Philip H. Sheridan described his mission to clear the west of Indigenous: “We took away their country and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among them, and it was for this and against this that they made war.” [SEE 200 Years: A Bicentennial Illustrated History of the United States, Vol. 2, U.S. News & World Report (1973).]

On hearing of the loss of Captain Fetterman’s entire detachment in 1866 near Fort Phil Kearney, General William Tecumseh Sherman wrote Commanding General Ulysses S. Grant: “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children. Nothing else will reach the root of this case.”

Thirty-five years later on Sumar (Philippines), General Jacob H. (”Hell-Roaring”) Smith issued Christmas Eve orders “to adopt a policy that will create in the minds of all the people a burning desire for the War to cease.” “Burn and kill the natives” soldiers appreciatively called the campaign. General Smith, an old Indian fighter, adopted tactics that had worked against Geronimo’s Apaches when they were captured, imprisoned, and finally herded into a reservation. He began by ordering all Filipino natives, under pain of death, out of the interior. Those who streamed down to the coast were immediately thrown into concentration camps.

Elihu Root, Secretary of War, under Presidents McKinley and T. R. Roosevelt, 1899-1904, justified the conduct of military operations in Samar by the “history and conditions of the warfare with the cruel and treacherous savages who inhabited the island,” citing two sustaining “precedents of the highest authority”: (1) General George Washington’s orders to general John Sullivan in 1779 to destroy the Iroquois, and (2) the “severity” General William Tecumseh Sherman proposed against the Sioux after the 1866 Fort Phil Kearny massacre. [Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), p. 329].

Root unwittingly revealed two important truths. The first was that the national past contained authorizations of terror. The second was that throughout our past, justifications of traditional forms of violence had remained relatively fixed.

Nothing has changed!

I have often thought that Swiss psychologist Carl Jung’s concept of the “projection of shadow” has been operating at the national level in the United States, as well as at the personal level of most of us living in the U.S. As a kid I grew up listening to the Sunday afternoon radio show, “The Shadow,” in which Bret Morrison’s eerie voice, over a background of scary music, asked, “Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men? Only the Shadow knows.” The radio show was launched in July 1930, not long after Jung publicly articulated his shadow concept, and I sometimes wonder if Jung’s ideas contributed to the concept for the show, which was popular for 24 years. The Shadow was transformed into a pop culture icon by legendary pulp writer Walter B. Gibson.

The shadow self, the personal unconscious dark side of one’s personality, is a theory of evil. Jung maintained that the dark side of our personality, a part that we are often ashamed of and afraid to express in the open, is often repressed to the unconscious, forming a more-or-less autonomous splinter personality called the “shadow.” Eventually, the shadow does find its own expression, particularly through projections of images onto others. These projections, often seemingly irrational or illogical, and sometimes dangerous, actually represent aspects of the repressed personality within the projector him or herself. Thus a kind of dishonest jujitsu is performed so as to avoid the pain of emotional and intellectual honesty and accountability to oneself and in one’s public persona.

As individuals, we project evil traits onto those whom we believe, in our jujitsu thinking, are causing us consternation or threatening our well being. This leads to racism, sexism, classism, etc. Spouse abuse is a common result of a projection, as is lynching of African Americans by Whites, or discrimination against immigrants. Feelings of nationalism and patriotism leading to violence against others is another result of shadow projection. On the national level, these projections often lead to diabolical efforts to eradicate the evil we project onto others. The Vietnamese, the Nicaraguans, the Japanese, the Iraqis — i.e., the enemy of the day — must then be bludgeoned in our futile effort to feel secure, but this outward warring behavior only delays our honestly addressing issues within our own nation while further compounding our problems.

As a nation, just as individuals, we need to discover our own shadow if we are to become healthy and whole. We can actually discover our shadow by paying close attention to the images we project onto others, and the language used to demonize them. The images and descriptions are of our own evil impulses! To become conscious of our shadow, to become knowledgeable about all of our selves, we must be willing to recognize the shadow in our projections so that we can distinguish our own flaws and take responsibility for healing them rather than continuing to accuse others. Failing that, we will constantly create enemies.