This shock is accentuated when one is reminded (or told for the first time) that in 1999 a Memphis jury, after a thirty day trial with over seventy witnesses, found the U.S. government guilty in the killing of MLK. The King family had brought the suit and Pepper represented them. They were grateful that the truth was confirmed, but saddened by the way the findings were buried once again by a media in cahoots with the government.
The civil trial was the King family's last resort to get a public hearing to disclose the truth of the assassination. They and Pepper knew, and proved, that Ray was an innocent pawn, but Ray had died in prison in 1998 after trying for thirty years to get a trial and prove his innocence (shades of Sirhan Sirhan, who still languishes in prison seeking a new trial). During all these years, Ray had maintained that he had been manipulated by a shadowy figure named Raul, who supplied him with money and his white Mustang and coordinated all his complicated travels, including having him buy a rifle and come to Jim's Grill and the boarding house on the day of the assassination to give it to Raul. The government has always denied Raul existed.
Pepper refutes the government and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, through multiple witnesses, telephonic and photographic evidence, that Raul existed; that he was Ray's U.S. intelligence handler, who provided him with money and instructions from their first meeting in the Neptune Bar in Montreal, where Ray had fled in 1967 after his prison escape, until the day of the assassination. It was Raul who instructed Ray to return to the U.S. (an act that makes no sense for an escaped prisoner who had fled the country), gave him the money for the white Mustang, helped him attain travel documents, and moved him around the country like a pawn on a chess board.
Raul, this man who allegedly never existed, has also been tied by multiple, reliable witnesses to Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald's killer, and therefore to the JFK assassination. This, too, is history you are not supposed to know.
Pepper not only demolishes the government's self-serving case with a plethora of evidence, he shows how the mainstream media, academia, and government flacks have spent years covering up the truth of MLK's murder through lies and disinformation. Another way they have accomplished this is by convincing a gullible public that "service" is a substitute for truth. As Douglass Valentine points out in his important new book, The CIA as Organized Crime, the symbolic transformation involved in word usage and the archetypal power of myth creation underlie the vast system of propaganda we are subjected to. And the implied power of "positive thinking" - as in "service" - is a case in point.
But service without truth is slavery. It is propaganda aimed at convincing decent people into thinking that they are serving the essence of MLK's message while they are obeying their masters, the very government that murdered this great American hero.
It is time for a slaves' revolt against the mind manipulation served by the MLK Day of Service.
We need a Martin Luther King Day of Truth.
(Article changed on January 16, 2017 at 20:18)
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