"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’. THIS IS THE LIBERATION WHICH WE ARE PROCLAIMING."
Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas (2002)
"If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a
long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them
not to talk too long. ... I'd like somebody to mention that day that
Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others." - Martin Luther King Jr., 'Drum Major' sermon February 4, 1968.
6:01pm CST at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April
4, 1968, at 6:01pm CST. He was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital, where he
died at 7:05pm. Reverend King was in Memphis to support sanitation workers on strike.
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had scaled the heights of American rhetoric the night before, on April 3, 1968, deconstructing the case for violence and reaffirming nonviolent resistance.
Dr. King gave this address at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee the
night before he was assassinated. He called for nonviolent protest and a
boycott of Memphis area businesses in support of the Memphis Sanitation
Workers strike. Conveying a sense of foreboding, he not only recounted a
near-death experience when he was stabbed near the heart, but also
spoke of the possibility of his own demise at the hands of those who
opposed him.
"And that's all this whole thing is about. We aren't engaged in any
negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are
saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people.
We are saying -- We are saying that we are God's children. And that we
are God's children, we don't have to live like we are forced to live."
Funeral services were held for Reverend King on April 9, 1968. Coretta Scott King requested that King eulogize himself: His last sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, a recording of his famous 'Drum Major' sermon, given on February 4, 1968, was played at the funeral. The King family held solemn services for Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia, attended by thousands including the then Vice President of the United States, Hubert Humphrey, Senator Robert Kennedy, and Richard Nixon.
Meanwhile in Memphis the local government met the demands
that had been made by Reverend King and the striking sanitation
workers.
The King family went on to found the King Center
and continued his nonviolent legacy to the present day. Other activists
from King's inner circle continued their civil rights work, while some,
like John Lewis, entered political life and continued working to realize Reverend King's beloved community in the U.S. Congress.
"Whoever
destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the
whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture
to have saved the whole world." - Mishnah (1135-1204)
Harold was a member of the Christian Liberation Movement and a youth leader. Harold understood that those who engaged in repression were also not free stating: "Those who removeand crushfreedomare the realslaves."
Harold Cepero nació el 29 de enero 1980. Hoy cumple 45 años. Asesinado por el régimen de Fidel y Raúl Castro, junto a Oswaldo Payá, el 22 de julio de 2012.
"Nos sigue la comunista" ( así llamaba él a la Gestapo cubana) le dijo a Ángel Carromero momentos antes del crimen. (1) pic.twitter.com/xGYVXNVoQ5
Today
would have been his 45th birthday, but due to the actions of the Castro regime's
secret police his life was ended 13 years ago at the age of 32.
Clare Short, a former Labor member of parliament addressing the topic of forgiveness and justice raises two important points that underline reconciliation within an ongoing injustice and repression:
"Is anger about
injustice one of the forces that drives historical progress and
important social reform? Is
there an important difference between the bitterness,hatred and quest
for vengeance that
can be so damaging to those who have been hurt or wronged, and the anger
that thirsts
after justice?" ... "I also agree that the quest for vengeance is also
wrong because it so often inflicts harm on people who share an identity
with the original perpetrator but have no guilt,and it means the evil of
the original harm is
recreated in the actions of the person who has been wronged. But all
this said, there is
such a thing as just anger and those who are subject to continuing
oppression can get
strength from that anger in order to join with others to liberate
themselves. And so I wish to
conclude by celebrating forgiveness and reconciliation but also by reminding us that
reconciliation can not be the answer when there is a continuing wrong or continuing
oppression."
In the Cuban context, Antonio "Tony" Ramón Díaz Sánchez, a former prisoner of conscience and secretary general of the Christian Liberation Movement, rejects hatred while at the same time forgiving past injustices
but refuses to forgive those that are ongoing or that will
be carried out in the future.
"Because what I do not forgiveis that theyear has started with thesamerepression thatended last year. What I cannot forgiveis that inmy country,those who govern, do notrecognize the need to changetodemocracyand allowthe people to decidein free andpluralistic elections. I can not and do not want to forgive that right now, at this instant, there are political prisoners inCubaandthatthe existing lawsguarantee their imprisonment or perhaps the firing squad for others. I do notforgivethat young people arelivingwithout life projects, whilea group in powerlive asbillionaires.Nor do Iforgivethe complicity of manyinterests thatseek capitalnowinCubawithout wanting to find outtodaywhat is happeningthere. I do notforgiveout ofhate. No, no but becauseforgiving a present and a future ofinjustice andtotalitarianismfor yourcountry, is notmercybutcomplicity with the evil of others."
The perils of speaking truth to power in Cuba were and still are understood by Tony Díaz Sánchez. Long years in prison and forced exile were the price he paid.
Harold also understood the dangers of advocating for freedom in Cuba under the Castro dictatorship. In 2012, shortly before his death he
explained the cost of resistance.
"Christians and non-Christians who
have the courage and the freedom to consider the peaceful political
option for their lives, know they are exposing themselves to slightly
less than absolute solitude, to work exclusion, to persecution, to
prison or death."
This courageous young man is remembered and the demand for justice continues. The petition
demanding an international investigation into the circumstances of
Harold and Oswaldo's killing on July 22, 2012 has crossed 16,500 signatures.
Defending memory by pursuing truth
and maintaining the call for justice is an ever present opportunity for
the other to repent and embrace justice and actual forgiveness. The
antithesis of this is "forgiving and forgetting" while injustices are
ongoing and new ones being compounded not only harms the victims but
also condemns the perpetrator to continue committing evil acts and is
described as a "false reconciliation."
In the spirit of defending truth and memory, this video of a 2002 interview with Harold Cepero provided by the Christian Liberation Movement on their Youtube channel is being shared.
“We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. U.S. leaders
should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban
leaders, they themselves will not be safe.”
President Kennedy with the First Lady in the backseat moments in Dallas.
Sixty-one years ago, on November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. At 12:30pm Central Standard Time, the Kennedys in their convertible limousine turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. As they were passing the Texas School Book Depository, President John F. Kennedy was shot twice and slumped over toward First Lady Jackie Kennedy. The governor of Texas was also hit. At 1:00pm, President Kennedy was pronounced dead.
On the 61st anniversary of this political assassination the spin doctors and agents of influence continue to cloud the circumstances leading up to the murder of America's 35th president. However, the question that needs to be asked looking back to that fateful day: who benefited most from his death? Cui bono?
Following the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961 the White House initiated Operation Mongoose. President Kennedy's brother and Attorney General of the United States, Robert Kennedy, headed up the sustained effort to topple the Castro regime and this included the assassination of Fidel Castro.
On December 29, 1962, President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy met with the Bay of Pigs veterans, and over 40,000 Cuban exiles at the Orange Bowl. On that day the returning soldiers gave President Kennedy the flag of Brigade 2506. " I want to express my great appreciation to the brigade for making the United States the custodian of this flag. I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana," stated President Kennedy to all assembled there.
Daniel Harker of the Associated Press interviewed Fidel Castro on September 7, 1963 at the Brazilian Embassy in Havana at a reception, and in it the communist dictator made an explicit threat. “We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.”
It is evident in a White House memorandum from ten days before President Kennedy was killed on November 12, 1963, that the Kennedy Administration was still committed to pursuing an aggressive strategy to topple the Castro regime:
Support of Autonomous Anti-Castro Groups. The question was asked from where would the autonomous groups operate. Mr. FitzGerald replied that they would operate from outside U.S. territory. He mentioned two bases of the Artime group, one in Costa Rica and the other in Nicaragua. Also it was hoped that the autonomous group under Manolo Ray would soon get itself established in a working base, possibly Costa Rica. Mr. FitzGerald said that much could be accomplished by these autonomous groups once they become operational. A question was asked as to what decisions remain to be made. Mr. FitzGerald replied that we were looking for a reaffirmation of the program as presented, including sabotage and harassment. When asked what was planned in sabotage for the immediate future, he said that destruction operations should be carried out against a large oil refinery and storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater demolition of docks and ships. The question was also raised as to whether an air strike would be effective on some of these principal targets. The consensus was that CIA should proceed with its planning for this type of activity looking toward January.
Less than eleven months after making his pledge at the Orange Bowl, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas by Lee Harvey Oswald.
On November 29, 1963 in a phone call with President Lyndon Baines Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI revealed Oswald’s links with the Castro regime.
"This angle in Mexico is giving us a great deal of trouble because the
story is they have this man Oswald getting $6500 from the Cuban Embassy
and then coming back to this country with it."
Politico in 2014 reported, "White House aide Joseph Califano, who was part of the anti-Castro plotting, said he was convinced
that 'Robert Kennedy experienced this unbelievable grief after his
brother’s death because he believed it was linked to his—Bobby’s—efforts
to kill Castro.'”
Lee Harvey Oswald raises his fist after being captured in Dallas, TX
Leo Janos, one of President Lyndon B. Johnson's former speech writers, interviewed him for the July 1973 issue of The Atlantic in which LBJ "expressed his belief that the assassination in Dallas had been part of a conspiracy. 'I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger." Johnson said that when he had taken office he found that "we had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.' A year or so before Kennedy's death a CIA-backed assassination team had been picked up in Havana. Johnson speculated that Dallas had been a retaliation for this thwarted attempt, although he couldn't prove it."
Following the President's assassination within a year Operation Mongoose was scrapped and Fidel Castro would remain in power until 2006, then replaced by his brother Raul in a dynastic succession following a health crisis. General Raul Castro remains the maximum authority in Cuba. Fidel Castro died of old age after causing much suffering in Cuba and around the world in places such as Ethiopia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
We settled the question of why in three years of research on this documentary in Mexico, USA and Cuba. Oswald had been an agent for the Cuban intelligence services since November 1962. He was a political fanatic and allowed himself to be used by the Cuban intelligence services to kill John F. Kennedy. It was a Cuban reaction to the repeated attempts of the Kennedy brothers, above all the younger Kennedy, Robert, to get rid of Fidel Castro through political assassination -- a duel between the Kennedys and the Castros, which, like in a Greek tragedy, left one of the duelists dead.
"Los
líderes norteamericanos deben pensar que si están cooperando con los
planes terroristas para eliminar a líderes cubanos, ellos mismos no
estarán seguros" -Fidel Castro
"If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a
long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them
not to talk too long. ... I'd like somebody to mention that day that
Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others." - Martin Luther King Jr., 'Drum Major' sermon February 4, 1968.
6:01pm CST at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April
4, 1968, at 6:01pm CST. He was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital, where he
died at 7:05pm. Reverend King was in Memphis to support sanitation workers on strike.
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had scaled the heights of American rhetoric the night before, on April 3, 1968, deconstructing the case for violence and reaffirming nonviolent resistance.
Dr. King gave this address at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee the
night before he was assassinated. He called for nonviolent protest and a
boycott of Memphis area businesses in support of the Memphis Sanitation
Workers strike. Conveying a sense of foreboding, he not only recounted a
near-death experience when he was stabbed near the heart, but also
spoke of the possibility of his own demise at the hands of those who
opposed him.
"And that's all this whole thing is about. We aren't engaged in any
negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are
saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people.
We are saying -- We are saying that we are God's children. And that we
are God's children, we don't have to live like we are forced to live."
Funeral services were held for Reverend King on April 9, 1968. Coretta Scott King requested that King eulogize himself: His last sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, a recording of his famous 'Drum Major' sermon, given on February 4, 1968, was played at the funeral. The King family held solemn services for Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia, attended by thousands including the then Vice President of the United States, Hubert Humphrey, Senator Robert Kennedy, and Richard Nixon.
Meanwhile in Memphis the local government met the demands
that had been made by Reverend King and the striking sanitation
workers.
The King family went on to found the King Center
and continued his nonviolent legacy to the present day. Other activists
from King's inner circle continued their civil rights work, while some,
like John Lewis, entered political life and continued working to realize Reverend King's beloved community in the U.S. Congress.
“This political line is wholly neo-Soviet: human beings do not have independent existences, they are cogs in the machine whose function is to implement unquestioningly whatever political escapades those in power dream up. Cogs have no rights. Not even to dignity in death.”
― Anna Politkovskaya, Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy.
Anna Politkovskaya August 30, 1958 - October 7, 2006
Anna Politkovskaya was a journalist who spoke truth to power in Russia. She was a critic of Vladimir Putin. She was shot dead in her apartment on Vladimir Putin's birthday in 2006. Six individuals have been brought to justice, but the mastermind remains free 16 years after her assassination. She is not the only one killed for speaking truth about Putin. Below is a 2011 documentary about this courageous woman who paid the ultimate price for seeking the truth and reporting it.
Below Anna speaks in her own words.
“Putin, having accidentally received enormous power into his hands,
administered it to catastrophic consequences for Russia. And I do not
like him, because he does not like people. He can’t stand us. He
despises us. He believes that we are a means to him only, a means to
achieve his own personal power goals. Therefore, he can do anything he
wishes to us, plays with us as he pleases, destroys us, if he wishes.
For him, we are nothing. And he, having accidentally scrambled to the
top, is now a king and a god, whom everybody should worship and fear.”
“We live in an era where normal values have been displaced. The good is called bad, the bad – good”
"People sometimes pay with their lives for saying aloud what they think."
"If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a
long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them
not to talk too long. ... I'd like somebody to mention that day that
Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others." - Martin Luther King Jr., 'Drum Major' sermon February 4, 1968.
Before and after 6:01pm CST at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April
4, 1968, at 6:01pm CST. He was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital, where he
died at 7:05pm. Reverend King was in Memphis to support sanitation workers who were on strike.
The night before on April 3, 1968 Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. scaled the heights of American rhetoric dismantling the case for violence and reaffirming nonviolent resistance.
Dr. King gave this address at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee the
night before he was assassinated. He called for nonviolent protest and a
boycott of Memphis area businesses in support of the Memphis Sanitation
Workers strike. Conveying a sense of foreboding, he not only recounted a
near-death experience when he was stabbed near the heart, but also
spoke of the possibility of his own demise at the hands of those who
opposed him.
Today, on the 52nd anniversary of the day he was assassinated, we remember #MLK’s love & legacy.
We are inspired by his courage & consistency to purpose.
We believe that his teachings & examples of compassionate action are relevant & applicable.
"And that's all this whole thing is about. We aren't engaged in any
negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are
saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people.
We are saying -- We are saying that we are God's children. And that we
are God's children, we don't have to live like we are forced to live."
Funeral services were held for Reverend King on April 9, 1968. Coretta Scott King requested that King eulogize himself: His last sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, a recording of his famous 'Drum Major' sermon, given on February 4, 1968, was played at the funeral. The King family held solemn services for Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia, attended by thousands including the then Vice President of the United States, Hubert Humphrey, Senator Robert Kennedy, and Richard Nixon.
Meanwhile in Memphis the local government met the demands
that had been made by Reverend King and the striking sanitation
workers.
The King family went on to found the King Center
and continued his nonviolent legacy to the present day. Other activists
from King's inner circle continued their civil rights work, while some,
like John Lewis, entered political life and continued working to realize Reverend King's beloved community in the U.S. Congress.
"We are ruthless and ask no quarter from you. When our turn comes we shall not disguise our terrorism." - Karl Marx, Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, vol. vi pp 503-5 (The final issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 18 May 1849) "Terrorism and deception are weapons not of the strong but of the weak." - Mohandas K. Gandhi
Body of Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi lies in state at Birla House in New Delhi.
Seventy one years ago Mohandas Gandhi was shot three times in the chest and killed by a Hindu nationalist at 5:17pm. The Soviet press published an article written by S.M. Vakar in 1948
following Gandhi's assassination on January 30, 1948 titled "The Class Nature of the Gandhi Doctrine" subtitled "Gandhi as a Reactionary Utopian" in the Soviet philosophy journal Voprosy filosofii (Questions of Philosophy). The Marxist Leninist argument was outlined as follows:
Although
Gandhi regarded the union and independence of the Indian peoples as
his goal, his reactionary-Utopian social theory and the reformist
methods of struggle connected with it caused his activity to fail in
facilitating overthrow of the colonial yoke [...] The social essence of
the Gandhi doctrine and its fundamentally reactionary role in the
history of India's national liberation
movement has hardly been treated in Marxist literature. Yet this
doctrine still retards the development of class awareness among the
Indian masses.
What was this social essence of Gandhian
thought that so troubled the Marxist Leninists in the Soviet Union?
First, the reformist methods of struggle referred to in the above quote
was nonviolent resistance and secondly his social theory rejected class
struggle as another manifestation of destructive violence. On September 11, 1906 a new word came into existence that would give a better understanding of Gandhi's social theory and method of struggle which he described as:
'Satyagraha.'
Truth (Satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and
therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian
movement 'Satyagraha,' that is to say, the Force which is born of
Truth and Love or non-violence, and gave up the use of the phrase
'passive resistance,' in connection with it, so much so that even in
English writing we often avoided it and used instead the word
'Satyagraha' itself or some other equivalent English phrase.
The
Marxist-Leninists embraced revolutionary violence and a movement led by
a small vanguard of intellectuals and professional revolutionaries that
would carry out the changes necessary by whatever means necessary and
rejected nonviolence as naive. They followed the doctrine of Lenin as
presented in his 1902 revolutionary tract What is to be done.
Over a century has passed since both sets of ideas have been set out and applied around the world. An analysis done by Maria J. Stephen and Erica Chenoweth
systematically explores the strategic effectiveness of both violent and
nonviolent campaigns using data on 323 campaigns carried out between
1900 and 2006.[1] There findings demonstrate that major non-violent
campaigns were successful 53% of the time versus only 26% for major
violent campaigns and terrorist campaigns had a dismal 7% success rate.
Today,
India with all its flaws is the world's largest democracy with a
growing economy that presents new competitive challenges to the
developed world and Marxist-Leninism has amassed a body count of 100
million dead and counting. It would appear that Gandhi's criticisms of
the communists were prescient:
"The
socialists and communists say, they can do nothing to bring about
economic equality today. They will just carry on propaganda in its favor
and to that end they believe in generating and accentuating hatred.
They say, when they get control over the State, they will enforce
equality. Under my plan the State will be there to carry out the will of
the people, not to dictate to them or force them to do its will." - Mohandas Gandhi
"It
is my firm conviction that if the State suppressed capitalism by
violence, it will be caught in the coils of violence itself, and will
fail to develop non-violence at any time. The State represents violence
in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as
the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to
which it owes its very existence." - Mohandas Gandhi
It is Satyagraha that is relevant today
in 2019 and offers an alternative to the conflagrations suffered in the
20th century and the wars that plague the world now. Gandhi's
Satyagraha is a call to principled non-violence but even pragmatists and
realists looking over the historical record cannot fail to be
influenced by the fact that non-violent civic resistance works and in
the aggregate offers a better chance of a better life for more people.
Below is a German documentary about the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi.
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting" - Milan Kundera
"People sometimes pay with their lives for saying aloud what they think."
- Anna Politkovskaya August 30, 1958 - October 7, 2006
Anna Politkovskaya was a journalist who spoke truth to power in Russia. She was a critic of Vladimir Putin. She was shot dead in her apartment on Putin's birthday in 2006. Six individuals have been brought to justice, but the mastermind remains free 12 years after her assassination. Below is a 2011 documentary about this courageous woman who paid the ultimate price for seeking the truth and reporting it.
"We are ruthless and ask no quarter from you. When our turn comes we shall not disguise our terrorism." - Karl Marx, Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, vol. vi pp 503-5 (The final issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 18 May 1849)
"Terrorism and deception are weapons not of the strong but of the weak." - Mohandas K. Gandhi
Body of Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi lies in state at Birla House in New Delhi.
Tonight at Florida International University at a presentation hosted by the Cuban Research Institute "The Catholic Church in Cuba: Current Status and Challenges for the Future" with Cuban Catholic priest, Father José Conrado Rodríguez speaking of the need for Cubans to engage in a national embrace of peace, the legacy of Mohandas Gandhi was brought up during the question and answer period. Father Conrado responded that Gandhi was an inspiration to him, that he kept a book by Gandhi next to his Bible, and that Gandhi had rejected and resisted evil with nonviolence. Furthermore that today, seventy years after his assassination, it was important to remember this nonviolent icon.
Tonight asked Father Conrado about Mohandas Gandhi 70 years after his assassination on January 30, 1948. Father Conrado said he kept a book by Gandhi next to his Bible. pic.twitter.com/H1VkLbR8ij
Father Conrado has followed the path of Gandhi speaking truth to power and challenging the dictatorship in Cuba to cease its evil ways. As a Christian he follows the teachings of Jesus Christ, rejects violence, and has a positive view of Gandhi's legacy. Not everyone shares this positive vision of the Indian nonviolence icon.
Although
Gandhi regarded the union and independence of the Indian peoples as
his goal, his reactionary-Utopian social theory and the reformist
methods of struggle connected with it caused his activity to fail in
facilitating overthrow of the colonial yoke [...] The social essence of
the Gandhi doctrine and its fundamentally reactionary role in the
history of India's national liberation
movement has hardly been treated in Marxist literature. Yet this
doctrine still retards the development of class awareness among the
Indian masses.
What was this social essence of Gandhian
thought that so troubled the Marxist Leninists in the Soviet Union?
First, the reformist methods of struggle referred to in the above quote
was nonviolent resistance and secondly his social theory rejected class
struggle as another manifestation of destructive violence. On September 11, 1906 a new word came into existence that would give a better understanding of Gandhi's social theory and method of struggle which he described as:
'Satyagraha.'
Truth (Satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and
therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian
movement 'Satyagraha,' that is to say, the Force which is born of
Truth and Love or non-violence, and gave up the use of the phrase
'passive resistance,' in connection with it, so much so that even in
English writing we often avoided it and used instead the word
'Satyagraha' itself or some other equivalent English phrase.
The
Marxist-Leninists embraced revolutionary violence and a movement led by
a small vanguard of intellectuals and professional revolutionaries that
would carry out the changes necessary by whatever means necessary and
rejected nonviolence as naive. They followed the doctrine of Lenin as
presented in his 1902 revolutionary tract What is to be done.
Over a century has passed since both sets of ideas have been set out and applied around the world. An analysis done by Maria J. Stephen and Erica Chenoweth
systematically explores the strategic effectiveness of both violent and
nonviolent campaigns using data on 323 campaigns carried out between
1900 and 2006.[1] There findings demonstrate that major non-violent
campaigns were successful 53% of the time versus only 26% for major
violent campaigns and terrorist campaigns had a dismal 7% success rate.
Today,
India with all its flaws is the world's largest democracy with a
growing economy that presents new competitive challenges to the
developed world and Marxist-Leninism has amassed a body count of 100
million dead and counting. It would appear that Gandhi's criticisms of
the communists were prescient:
"The
socialists and communists say, they can do nothing to bring about
economic equality today. They will just carry on propaganda in its favor
and to that end they believe in generating and accentuating hatred.
They say, when they get control over the State, they will enforce
equality. Under my plan the State will be there to carry out the will of
the people, not to dictate to them or force them to do its will." - Mohandas Gandhi
"It
is my firm conviction that if the State suppressed capitalism by
violence, it will be caught in the coils of violence itself, and will
fail to develop non-violence at any time. The State represents violence
in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as
the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to
which it owes its very existence." - Mohandas Gandhi
It is Satyagraha that is relevant today
in 2018 and offers an alternative to the conflagrations suffered in the
20th century and the wars that plague the world now. Gandhi's
Satyagraha is a call to principled non-violence but even pragmatists and
realists looking over the historical record cannot fail to be
influenced by the fact that non-violent civic resistance works and in
the aggregate offers a better chance of a better life for more people.
“We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. U.S. leaders
should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban
leaders, they themselves will not be safe.” - Fidel Castro, September 6, 1963*
President Kennedy with the First Lady in the backseat moments in Dallas.
Fifty four years ago today on November 22, 1963 around 12:30pm the Kennedys in their convertible limousine turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.
As they were passing the Texas School Book Depository, President John
F. Kennedy was shot twice and slumped over toward Mrs. Kennedy. The
governor of Texas was also hit. At 1:00pm President Kennedy was pronounced dead. Seven days later on November 29, 1963 President Lyndon Johnson and FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover discussed the FBI investigation into the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy on the White House
telephone. The conversation was recorded and is now part of the public
record. Hoover described to Johnson the capture
of Lee Harvey Oswald after the shooting. Hoover also discussed Oswald's
pro-Castro and anti-American associations.
Three
days after the shooting in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963, Lyndon B
Johnson was informed that Oswald had visited the Cuban and former
Soviet Union embassies in Mexico City on 28 September 1963 to arrange
visas.
The Daily Mail reported that the memo had "remained a secret until [September 15, 2015], when the CIA released 19,000 confidential documents from the 1960s." Three years later President Donald Trump announced the release of all the remaining files related to the John F. Kennedy assassination in what amounted to a dump of an additional 2,800 files.
CIA documents, released in October of 2017, speculate that Oswald's motive for killing Kennedy was that he was "enraged after reading a detailed
article in his hometown newspaper in New Orleans in September suggesting
that his hero Castro had been targeted for assassination by the Kennedy
administration." Oswald sought vengeance on Castro's behalf. This was an embarrassment for the CIA and the White House that had repeatedly tried to assassinate Castro, and that President Kennedy's murder was blowback. Another declassified CIA document, released in October 17, 2017 cites Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs and later U.S.
Ambassador to Mexico, Thomas C. Mann who said "he had a 'feeling in his guts'
that Castro paid Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate the 35th president on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas."
Oswald visited Cuban, Soviet embassies in Mexico on 9/28/63
Further linkage between Lee Harvey Oswald and the Castro regime is also found among the newly declassified files in a "transcript of a 1967 cablegram [that] recounted
how a man named Angel Ronaldo Luis Salazar was interrogated at the
Cuban embassy in Mexico City the year before by Ramiro Jesus Abreu
Quintana, “an identified Cuban intelligence officer,” about Kennedy’s
assassination. During the interrogation, Salazar claimed he remarked
that Oswald must have been a good shot. According to him, Abreu replied 'Oh, he was quite good….I knew him.'"
Lee Harvey Oswald's membership card in a pro-Castro group
Furthermore who benefited the most from President Kennedy's death? Ten days prior to his assassination on November 12, 1963, in a White House memorandum, the continued commitment of the Kennedy Administration to pursue an aggressive policy to overthrow the Castro regime is clear:
(f) Support of Autonomous Anti-Castro Groups. The question was asked from
where would the autonomous groups operate. Mr. FitzGerald replied that they would operate from outside U.S.
territory. He mentioned two bases of the Artime group, one in Costa Rica and
the other in Nicaragua. Also it was hoped that the autonomous group under
Manolo Ray would soon get itself established in a working base, possibly
Costa Rica. Mr. FitzGerald said that
much could be accomplished by these autonomous groups once they become
operational.A question was asked as to what decisions remain to be made. Mr. FitzGerald replied that we were looking for
a reaffirmation of the program as presented, including sabotage and
harassment. When asked what was planned in sabotage for the immediate
future, he said that destruction operations should be carried out against a
large oil refinery and storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar
refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater demolition
of docks and ships. The question was also raised as to whether an air strike
would be effective on some of these principal targets. The consensus was
that CIA should proceed with its planning
for this type of activity looking toward January.
Following the assassination of President Kennedy within a year these
operations were mothballed and Fidel Castro would remain in power for
the next five decades. Is there anyone else who benefited more from the events of November 22, 1963? German documentary filmmaker Wilfried Huismann described the
circumstances surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the subsequent cover up by the Johnson White House with the tacit approval of Robert Kennedy in his 2006 documentary Rendezvous with Death. At the time of the film's release he gave an interview in Deutsche Welle on January 5, 2006 titled "Castro ordered Kennedy's Assassination." Below is an excerpt from the article:
DW-WORLD: We know that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy. But who ordered his assassination and why?
Wilfried Huismann:
We settled the question of why in three years of research on this
documentary in Mexico, USA and Cuba. Oswald had been an agent for the
Cuban intelligence services since November 1962. He was a political
fanatic and allowed himself to be used by the Cuban intelligence
services to kill John F. Kennedy. It was a Cuban reaction to the
repeated attempts of the Kennedy brothers, above all the younger
Kennedy, Robert, to get rid of Fidel Castro through political
assassination -- a duel between the Kennedys and the Castros, which,
like in a Greek tragedy, left one of the duelists dead.
General
Alexander Haig, for example, thinks Kennedy's successor, President
Lyndon B. Johnson, "was convinced Castro killed Kennedy, and he took it
to his grave." Haig served as a military adviser to Johnson and later
as President Reagan's Secretary of State. He tells Huismann in the film
about memos from 1963 that suggested Johnson's fear of letting the
Castro-assassination story get out to the American public. Johnson's
attitude, said Haig, was that "we cannot allow the American people to
believe that Castro ... had killed Kennedy," because "there would be a
right-wing uprising in America which would keep the Democratic Party
out of power for two generations."
The Kennedy brothers plotted Fidel Castro's assassination, but the Communist dictator got them first. This is what has been covered up by the U.S. government for 54 years. "Los líderes norteamericanos deben pensar que si están cooperando con los planes terroristas para eliminar a líderes cubanos, ellos mismos no
estarán seguros" -Fidel Castro
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