Borrowing the line from Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore: “Things are seldom as they seem, Skim milk masquerades as cream.” It’s as true here in the US today as it was in 19th century England, and its message explains how to understand and view our affairs of state and why the title of this essay was chosen – to reflect on our national federal holidays that, in fact, represent something much different than the stated reasons we commemorate them for. Eleven such holidays are reviewed below moving chronologically through the year post-New Year’s Day discussed briefly at the end because it’s part of the Christmas holiday season celebration.
Martin Luther King Day
Martin Luther King was a Baptist minister, political activist, renowned orator, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the most noted leader of the American civil rights movement until his assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968, two months before Robert Kennedy met the same fate in a Los Angeles hotel a day after he won the Democrat primary in his campaign for the office of president that year. In mid-January, King’s January 15 birthday is commemorated as a federal holiday as it has been since it was for the first time on January 20, 1986 after Ronald Reagan reluctantly signed the legislation authorizing it in November, 1983. He did it in spite of his personal opposition, only capitulating after the bill authorizing it was passed in both Houses of Congress with veto-proof margins.
After King’s death in 1968, Representative John Conyers introduced a bill in the House to make his birthday a national holiday. It was a long struggle from then till it was finally achieved because of racist opposition in the Congress against honoring a black man led by former Senator Jesse Helms who accused Dr. King of having communist ties as well as making other outlandish slurs against his good name and accusing him of opposing the Vietnam war which he certainly did with passion and eloquence that may have led to his death.
Helms was a hard-liner throughout his public life (like too many others in the Congress then and now), and his career was characterized by mean-spiritedness and a lifelong opposition to democracy, diversity and affirmative action as well as his racist support for segregation and efforts to deny black people their constitutionally mandated rights. Some may also remember his 1990 reelection campaign waged against Harvey Gantt, the first black mayor of Charlotte, NC, in which Helms disgracefully used a racist ad to counter his opponent’s lead in the polls. It was called “Hands” and showed a pair of white hands crumpling a job-rejection letter with a narration explaining he was best qualified and needed the job a racial quota gave to a less deserving black man. It worked, overcoming Gantt’s lead and helped reelect Helms undeservedly.
Martin Luther King Day is the only national holiday commemorating an African American, but it took over 15 long years of campaigning to get it authorized and over two more before it was first observed. It took even longer for Dr. King’s day to be finally recognized in all 50 states for the first time on January 17, 2000. It likely only happened at all because the Congress finally was moved to act after receiving a petition with six million signatures that was the largest number ever collected supporting a national issue. Sadly, it happened because an assassin’s bullet took his life much too soon.
To this day, the question remains: who killed Martin Luther King, but it’s not hard to imagine why. James Earl Ray was accused of being the lone assassin, at first pleaded guilty in 1969 after being arrested earlier and held in jail for eight months. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison, never got a trial, and retracted his guilty plea three days after making it claiming his lawyer deceived him – to no avail. The case was closed and his fate was sealed even though later evidence uncovered casts great doubt on his guilt. He nonetheless spent the rest of his life in prison dying on April 23, 1998 at age 70. Today his name is hardly ever mentioned in the dominant media nor is any attempt made to clear it, which is no surprise.
But if Ray didn’t do it, who then had a motive and might have. Every year commemorating his birth, we note and honor Dr. King’s memorable “I have a Dream” speech while ignoring the most important of his dreams including the speeches he made supporting them. King was the foremost of our nation’s civil rights advocates, but he also wanted to end the country’s long history of exploitative materialism and culture of militarism supporting it. He wanted everyone’s civil rights respected and honored but also was dedicated to pursuing social justice, promoting non-violence, and was unreservedly against war, becoming increasingly vocal in his opposition to the one raging in Vietnam using powerful language like calling the US government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”
King had already won great victories in his civil rights battles with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 that for the first time gave African Americans the rights guaranteed them under the Constitution that Jim Crow laws in the South denied them for decades. It was his public stand on the other great issues driving him that caused those in power concern. No King commemorative today ever mentions his memorable “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered to clergy and the public on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was assassinated in Memphis. It was an heroic and spellbinding moment with Dr. King at his eloquent best calling for an end to the war and violence. It also may have been a defining moment in his life that had a single year left in it.
King knew he lived on the edge because of his beliefs and his ability to reach and profoundly influence a vast audience in the country and throughout the world. He rightfully believed his life was in danger and it might just be a matter of time before it was taken. We don’t know for sure who, in fact, killed him if it wasn’t James Earl Ray which seems very unlikely based on the best evidence now known. We do know who had motive, cause and easy opportunity to do it most any time or place. We also know if the US government was behind it, what part of it likely got the assignment.
It may have been the FBI with its long record of abuse against targeted enemies of the state that includes extensive documentation of its Cointelpro operations from the 1950s till the early 1970s but likely never stopped and has to be more active than ever now in the age of George Bush and its culture of illegal surveillance, witch-hunting, and imperial justice. In earlier years, the FBI targeted organizations and individuals on the left as well as those considered radical including non-violent ones like The Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Dr. King himself because of Director J. Edgar Hoover’s obsession with the civil rights leader and his near-fanatical efforts to defame and defile him.
The CIA has an even more disturbing record of lawlessness as part of its overall mandate to collect and analyze intelligence about foreign governments, corporations, organizations and individuals as well as conduct whatever covert, “black bag,” or extrajudicial state-sponsored assassinations assigned it that in half a century ran into the hundreds.
Since it was created in 1947, the CIA’s record has been documented in detail including in the works of author, researcher and former State Department employee William Blum in his books Rogue State and Killing Hope detailing the shameful record of US foreign policy and the CIA’s role in it since WW II. It includes carrying out state-sponsored assassinations including those against foreign leaders unwilling to surrender their nation’s sovereignty to ours based on imperial management with no outliers allowed – reason enough to remove them with CIA operatives often assigned the task but taking care to do it with enough discretion to make it look like the long arm of Washington was uninvolved.
Through the years the methods used have included a “rogue element’s bullet, a hard to detect poison or an “unfortunate” plane crash that was the method of choice to murder Panamanian president Omar Torrijos in 1981 and Ecuadorian president Jaimi Roldos in a helicopter crash the same year. Sometimes other “plane accidents” are like the one CIA-trained Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) personnel, led by Ugandan-born and US-trained Paul Kagame (at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas’ Command and General Staff College), arranged with surface-to-air missiles to shoot down the aircraft carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundi President Cyprien Ntaryamira on April 6, 1994 that led to the ethnic slaughter that year. It elevated “our guy” Major-General Kagame to power and later to be president of Rwanda where he let US forces operate freely in the country using it as a base to pursue the greater prize Washington sought in the resource-rich Congo (DRC)even though it took hundreds of thousands of innocent lives to do it and millions in Congo where war for its spoils still continues but gets little attention.
Probably the best known and most infamous state-sponsored assassination was the CIA-orchestrated coup and murder of Chilean president Salvador Allende on another September 11 in 1973. It ended the most vibrant democracy in the Americas replacing it with the brutal 17 year dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, who unfortunately died on December 10 without ever having to answer for his crimes against humanity. So far neither have those in authority at CIA or higher-ups in the Nixon administration like Henry Kissinger. He played a key role in the coup plot, ironically the same year he won a Nobel Peace Prize, as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State and now must check with the State Department for legal advice before traveling abroad for assurance he won’t be served with a warrant for his arrest and detention.
That kind of record through the years shows CIA and its operatives may have been behind the murder of Martin Luther King to remove a powerful voice whose influential opposition to war and support for non-violence and social justice conflicted with this government’s agenda of imperial conquest for power and profit.
If one or more FBI, CIA or other US government assassins murdered Martin Luther King, the federal holiday commemorating his birth mocks him and stands as a shameless deceptive act dishonoring all he stood and worked for in his short 39 year life. It also makes his day of observance an act of collective guilt by the nation responsible for ending a noble life that might have accomplished far more if he’d had a chance to continue pursuing the goals he hoped to achieve but never got the chance. Maybe that was the whole idea and the reason he wasn’t allowed to go on with his work.
Presidents’ Day
Presidents’ Day is observed on the third Monday of February, was formerly celebrated as Washington’s Birthday, and now states have the option to use either designation or some other one if they choose as Alabama does commemorating Washington and Jefferson Day. They can also pick another day as Georgia does observing Washington’s birthday the day after Christmas.
The period around this time is often used as an occasion for schools to teach students the history of US presidents, especially Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and some of our other noted ones. If only that occasion were used to teach real history (like found in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States) instead of the fiction leading young minds to believe these historic leaders were larger than life heros, noble in purpose and service to the nation in its highest office, and now deserving to be revered and remembered with a few further immortalized in granite sculpture carving at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial on stolen Lakota Sioux land in South Dakota’s Black Hills.
No past president gets more reverential treatment than our first, the general who led the Continental Army against the British in the nation’s war of liberation from the Crown. He became our first president by coronation because he ran unopposed twice, and he’s now known as the “Father of the Country” because he was its leader in war and then “selected” as its first head of state. Students are never taught that Washington expressed great aspirations referring to the new nation as a “rising empire” even at its birth and backed his sentiments with deeds to help make it one. He did it during the Revolutionary War by his savage acts against native Indians, all of whom he considered subhumans (or American Untermenschen). He compared them to wolves and “beasts of prey” and called for their total destruction much like the way George Bush today calls for defeating “terrorists” less well-defined than the ones Washington’s had in mind and went about destroying ruthlessly.
He dispatched General John Sulivan and 5,000 troops to attack the noncombatant Onondaga people in 1779 with orders to destroy all their villages, homes, fields, food supplies, cattle herds and orchards in a scorched earth campaign to annihilate them. He wanted to kill as many as possible and did. He also wanted their land (like Bush today wants Iraq’s oil) and took it by force, including from the Onieda people who aided Washington when he most needed help at Valley Forge. The truth about the nation’s “Father,” kept out of young minds in school, was our first president and all others after him pursued a policy of genocide against the nation’s original inhabitants who lived mainly in peace for thousands of years on the lands we came uninvited to and took from them.
It began in 1492 when Columbus and those with him first arrived in what’s now Haiti exterminating virtually the entire estimated eight million native Arawak, or Taino, people. The genocidal slaughter of all North, South and Central American Indian peoples followed reducing their population by about 100 million or as much as 98% of their original numbers. This is our shameful legacy of a new nation conceived as a great democratic experiment never tried before in the West outside of ancient Athens for a few decades but only for a privileged minority in it then and now.
It was never intended to be one for the nation’s indigenous peoples. Their presence impeded what came to be known by the 1840s as the our “Manifest Destiny,” or virtual divine right, to expand west and south seizing all the land from coast to coast south of Canada from the people living on it who were exterminated as well as Texas and the northern half of Mexico we wanted including the prized possession of California.
Also excluded from our grand vision were the many millions of black African captives sold into slavery and sent to their harsh fate in the new world “democracy” where those surviving the oppressive Middle Passage voyage, at the cost of 50 million lives lost some believe, were held in brutal bondage as human property to serve against their will or be sold like commodities to another master.
This is the true legacy of Presidents’ Day. It commemorates the nation’s leaders who led the nation making it grow by a state policy of genocide and imperial expansion for wealth and power at the expense of those in the way of the privileged class whose only concern for ordinary people was and still is the use they could get from them. Try finding that history in a secondary or college text (unless Howard Zinn or a few others wrote it) or mentioned in the corporate-controlled media the next time this day of dishonor is observed.
Easter
Easter is a day of great religious significance, but only for Christians who worship Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus Christ. It’s not observed by many around the country or world of other religious faiths or none at all. Still, in the US, Christian observances take on special meaning in a nation first settled and founded by those of Christian faith even though most came for secular reasons, not to escape religious persecution. The Founders believed church and state should be separated, and Jefferson first spoke of “a wall of separation” between the two in 1802 after freedom of religion was mandated in the First Amendment to the Constitution that came into force in 1791.
Still, throughout our history, many believed the nation was a Christian one and tried to tear down the separation wall the Founders erected. That view became especially prominent since the ascendancy of neoconservative influence, beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, as these hard-liners want the country governed by Christian principles, including Judaic ones as well, but give short shrift to others and demonizing them the way Islam is now condemned as something synonymous with “terrorism” and “Islamofascism.”
In the US today, all Christian holidays of importance get prominent mention and due reverence paid them, especially Christmas and Easter, the two holiest days in the Christian calendar. Prominent Jews, too, aren’t ignored, many have near-equal status with Christians, and most non-Jews in the country know about special Jewish holy days like the Yom Kippur Day of Atonement and Rosh Hashanah New Year even if they’re not sure why they’re commemorated.
But try finding any mention of a Muslim holy day other than a general recognition of Ramadan (established in the year 638) without explanation of what the month-long observance in the 9th month of the Islamic calendar signifies. This period is considered the most important and blessed month of the Islamic year, and it’s believed there are about as many Muslims in the US as Jews as well as about 1.8 billion of them worldwide (compared to an estimated 13.3 million Jews overall in 2002), a number surely large enough to warrant its adherents respect but instead only finds them wrongly condemned as a collective Antichrist and threat to national security.
Easter is commemorated between late March and late April (and early April to early May in Eastern Christianity little known about in the US) and is also known as Resurrection Day. It’s the most important religious feast of the Christian liturgical year and thus gets due prominence in prayer and public displays of religious observance. But Americanized flair goes much further taking full advantage of a chance to commercialize almost anything. So around this period there are Easter Sunday parades and other non-religious promotional activities and expressions that always manage to be emphasized – even on the day celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which observers believe occurred on the third day following his death by crucifixion between 27 and 33 AD. The Roman Catholic Church gives this period special recognition with an eight day feast called the Octave of Easter. It’s also the time of year when the Jewish seven day period of Passover is commemorated, marking the Exodus of the Israelites from enslavement in Egypt, that also now gets more prominent mention in the country as part of the effort to market anything, even important religious days and periods of observance, but only ones celebrated by Christians and Jews.
In a nation obsessed with and addicted to a culture of consumerism, even marketing the Almighty is fair game. Easter then, like other holidays and special days in the calendar, is just another day to be exploited for profit along with it being observed for the event and significance it commemorates. It’s a subject left for the end of this essay when its most frenzied expression arrives between Thanksgiving and the New Year celebration. It’s the time of year when corporate America’s only interest in the spirit of the season is how to make a buck out of it – as many as possible because that’s the make-or-break time of year they rely on and must do well in to have the year overall be successful for owners and/or shareholders. So with Thanksgiving dinner still being digested, they practically scream “let the holiday shopping begin,” and let it continue right into the new year almost unabated.
It happens on Easter as well, whether it’s new outfits for the season, a day or two on the town, vacation travel or any other way the business community can exploit an occasion to get the public to part with its resources spent on everything imaginable people never knew they needed or wanted until the power of round the clock advertising convinced them their lives would be unfulfilled without them. Discussion of this subject will be picked up later in this essay to show it’s quite acceptable to exploit a religious holy day for profit even if it corrupts the reason it’s commemorated that should be an occasion for solemnity and not for the consumerism that defiles it. But corporate bottom lines aren’t enhanced by religious reverence or observance – at least not until the big business finds ways to sell its wares in places and at times of worship and can get away with it. It’s hard to imagine they’re not trying to figure out how to do it.
Memorial and Veterans Days
Because both days are related, they’re discussed under a single heading. The first, Memorial Day, is commemorated on the last Monday in May and was first observed in 1866 and called Decoration Day beginning in 1868. Usage of Memorial Day wasn’t common until after WW II and wasn’t the holiday’s official name until federal law called it that in 1967. The day is an occasion to honor the nation’s men and women who died in military service to the country. More on that in a moment.
Veterans Day was formerly known as Armistice Day, or Remembrance Day in Europe, that originally commemorated the end of WW I on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of the year in 1918 when the guns went silent, or were supposed to. It was first observed in the US in 1919 and made a legal holiday here in 1938. In June, 1954, Congress enacted legislation changing the holiday’s name to Veterans Day.
Both holidays would never be needed in a nation dedicated to peace, but one committed to perpetual war for an unattainable peace dishonors its youth in life and disingenuously honors those who died in imperial wars for conquest and plunder. Nations waging wars only guarantee more of them in an endless cycle of violence, militarism, brutality and shameless inhumanity to those made to suffer and die in combat theaters – so the privileged who get to stay home can profit from them.
People don’t want wars but can always be made to support and fight in them using the proven method of choice that always works – fear based on shameless lies and deception by governments with hidden motives unrevealed because who would go along with them if they did. Only by deceitfully scaring people enough to believe the nation’s security is threatened will they support foreign wars and fight in them thinking they have no other choice. When traumatized enough, those wanting peace can be convinced to go along with the most outlandish schemes planned that if ever explained would be condemned and never supported.
If people only knew the wisdom of iconic investigative journalist IF Stone, they’d know in times of war, or events leading to it, truth is the first casualty. He told young journalists that “All governments are run by liars and nothing they say (about anything) should be believed, and on another occasion shortened it saying, “All governments lie.”
Serial lying is the defining characteristic of the Bush administration, but all others earlier were duplicitous as well including the one led by the Republican former president just passed whose short two and a half year tenure only gave him less time to commit fewer crimes of war and against humanity. He managed to do his best with the time he had, yet we honor him instead of exposing his shameless acts deserving condemnation.
It’s almost like it’s preordained and in the country’s DNA that this nation is warrior state sending its expendable youth to fight and die in foreign wars but not for national security, honor or the rights of free people anywhere. It’s always for wealth and power that conquest and plunder afford the privileged who get to stay home safe and in comfort letting others do their dying and then shamelessly hold a day of remembrance honoring them for their sacrifice. This is the long tradition of this nation that since inception in 1776 has been at war with one or more adversaries every year without exception from that time to the present.
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