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The following is an excerpt from a Paul Street article on today's ZNET:
As a left writer, author, and speaker, I often get e-mails and Facebook messages from predominantly white male 30-something conspiracy theorists who want me to jump on board with their elaborate “inside job” ideas about 9/11, the killings of the Kennedy brothers in the 1960s, the supposed CIA-sponsored childhood and education of Obama, and even the fake nature (I am not kidding) of the 1969 moon landing. Leaving aside the complexity and implausibility of their speculations, I generally write these theorists back with a question: “if you are so obsessed with government assassination conspiracies why don’t you seem to care about April 4, 1968 and the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King?” The King case is chock full of the sorts of unexplained loose ends and contradictory facts that the conspiracy crowd loves. (People who want to go down those dark roads can start by reading William F. Pepper’s book An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King [New York/London: Verso, 2003]) At the same time and more to my point, King was a plausible target for elite execution in a way that the Kennedy bothers simply were not. Liberal and Orwellian/Oliver Stonian rehabilitation efforts and wishful historical thinking aside, the Kennedys were ruling class men of American Empire and Inequality, incorporated. King was not. He was an actual radical-democratic threat to dominant domestic and imperial hierarchies and doctrines, which is why the Kennedy and Johnson administrations wiretapped and otherwise harassed him and his inner circle with impunity.
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As a left writer, author, and speaker, I often get e-mails and Facebook messages from predominantly white male 30-something conspiracy theorists who want me to jump on board with their elaborate “inside job” ideas about 9/11, the killings of the Kennedy brothers in the 1960s, the supposed CIA-sponsored childhood and education of Obama, and even the fake nature (I am not kidding) of the 1969 moon landing. Leaving aside the complexity and implausibility of their speculations, I generally write these theorists back with a question: “if you are so obsessed with government assassination conspiracies why don’t you seem to care about April 4, 1968 and the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King?” The King case is chock full of the sorts of unexplained loose ends and contradictory facts that the conspiracy crowd loves. (People who want to go down those dark roads can start by reading William F. Pepper’s book An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King [New York/London: Verso, 2003]) At the same time and more to my point, King was a plausible target for elite execution in a way that the Kennedy bothers simply were not. Liberal and Orwellian/Oliver Stonian rehabilitation efforts and wishful historical thinking aside, the Kennedys were ruling class men of American Empire and Inequality, incorporated. King was not. He was an actual radical-democratic threat to dominant domestic and imperial hierarchies and doctrines, which is why the Kennedy and Johnson administrations wiretapped and otherwise harassed him and his inner circle with impunity.
read the rest of the article @:
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