Since the 1980s, Africans in America have known of the United States government’s criminal, genocidal conspiracy to destroy the minority Black national community through its infamous domestic War on Drugs policy against Black people, which has been correctly identified by its victims as a war on Black people in America. However, despite overwhelming evidence accumulated over nearly half a century, pointing to the United States government’s racial targeting of Black people with a War on Drugs policy, corporate-owned mainstream media outlets have yet to inform the public or acknowledge to the world the conspiracy to destroy the minority Black national community in America. This best kept secret may soon change. In the cover story for Harper’s Magazine, April 2016 issue, journalist Dan Baum wrote about how in 1994 he interviewed John Ehrlichman, a former aide to President Richard Nixon, who served as Nixon’s chief domestic advisor when the President announced the so-called War on Drugs in 1971.
According to Baum, Ehrlichman provided some shockingly honest insight into the motives behind the War on Drugs. “You want to know what this was really all about?” said Ehrlichman. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies, the anti-war 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 Blacks, 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.”
This quote acknowledges several disturbing things about the United States government; that the minority Black national community are viewed as a domestic enemy; that there exists a criminal conspiracy to destroy Black people by means of a phony domestic drug war policy; that corporate media were in cahoots with the United States government to make Black people the public face of criminal activity; that genocide against Blacks in America occurred, and that the government’s motive was to prevent the minority Black national community from gaining political power in the United States government after the Civil Rights-era achievements of the 1960s.
This crime of criminal conspiracy, racial targeting, criminal civil rights violations, and genocidal human rights violations against Black people through a phony drug war has tremendously devastated the minority Black national community in America with a drug addiction and selling epidemic, destruction of the Black family, mass incarceration, militarized police occupation of Black communities, criminalization of Black people, horizontal Black violence, police killings of Black people, political disenfranchisement, and much more.
This crime against Black people has been carried out by both Republican and Democratic parties of the United States government over the last 45 years. It is ongoing and show no signs of ending. For this crime and many other crimes committed by the United States government against Black people during our 500-year sojourn in America, we charge genocide. From the belly of the beast at Prison Radio. I am Shakaboona. Thank you for listening.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
