By Final Call News
Revelations that the Nixon administration fostered the War On Drugs as a way to neutralize political enemies seen in Black America and the counter culture hippie movement during the 1960s and 1970s barely brought a reaction from Black leaders and Black organizations.
Writer Dan Baum repeated an admission he attributed to Nixon-aide John Ehrlichman, who served jail time for the Watergate burglary and cover-up, in an article published in the April edition of Harper’s Magazine: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did,” the former Nixon counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs said, according to Mr. Baum. He has repeating a quote he said he obtained during a 1992 interview for his book, “Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure” and a quote he had repeated over the years. Mr. Ehrlichman died in 1999.
Yet despite this direct admission of targeting the Black community, Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton and husband Bill’s apology for the 1990s Omnibus Crime Bill that jailed Black non-violent drug offenders and devastated Black America alongside the CIA crack cocaine connection exposed in 1996 and a history of direct assaults on Blacks under the cover of law, little reaction came from Black America.
There were no major streets demonstrations, no bevy of press conferences to condemn this practice, no demand for investigations and punishments for those guilty of such nefarious and wicked deeds. There was kind of a collective yawn and retort, “Tell me something new.”
The “news” wasn’t new to Black America, which has long suspected and believed that its own government has been its mortal and often unrepentant enemy.
Is this the price of Black existence in America–that even when high level wrongdoing is thrust before our eyes we simply shrug, roll our eyes, rant on talk radio but never organize against such illegal assaults? And if our existence is to be a perpetual second class, ever besieged, non-respected group of citizens, will we willingly accept this humiliating and vulnerable position?
Something is woefully wrong when Black apathy trumps outrage in the face of all-out diabolically fought genocidal war that aims to destroy us and our children. Something is wrong when those who have been constant and urgent in their warnings and divine insight into the nature and plots of the enemy are described as extremists or conspiracy theorists–as Nation of Islam patriarch Elijah Muhammad and his servant, Minister Louis Farrakhan have been misportrayed. Such lies about these two men would be disheartening except that the refusal to heed their divine words and warnings reflect prophecies of God-sent men to a hard hearted, stiff necked, rebellious and foolish people. A people easily led in the wrong direction and hard to lead in the right direction is the perfect description of Black America even as we face threats to our very existence.
What more evidence do we need to understand our former slavemasters and their children are disagreeable to live with in peace, that they are incapable of delivering justice and that we have no future with those who have deceived, degraded and destroyed us? Every evil imaginable has been done to us and with every stubborn refusal to separate from these wicked and murderous people, we only increase our own suffering. And that is a self-inflicted tragedy.
