What Was the Civil War About?

At the 150th Anniversary of the U.S. Civil War there still seems to be some dispute as to what the war was about. This is quite curious.

Let's end the debate right now with a look at what the second highest ranking member of the Confederate States claimed at the outset.

Below is a quote from Vice President Alexander Stephens [with historical commentary]:

"Stephens gave what is known as his Cornerstone Speech on March 21, 1861 at Savannah, Georgia. In this speech, Stephens fundamentally lays out what the conflict between the North and the South is all about. One sentence (that gives the speech its name) of this extemporaneous speech stands out as the definition of the Confederate cause and what its government stood for:

'The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution...Our new

government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the

great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his

natural and normal condition.'

– Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Hamilton Stephens.

With these words from his Cornerstone Speech, Alexander Stephens is stating in a nutshell the reason for secession … slavery. In our modern world of today, these words by Stephens are shocking and ugly. His words are so contrary to our times, that it may be necessary to read them twice, to see if what you thought he said, is really what he said..."

Why is there a debate?

Diodorus on Ethiopia and the Origins of Kemet

There is a popular myth still existing in the minds of many that Ancient Egyptians and their culture were introduced into Africa through Asia. But this is a modern myth, born of the racism of the last few centuries. It was largely disseminated by a highly regarded Egyptologist, Flinders Petrie.

Petrie was responsible for mentoring and training a whole generation of Egyptologists, including Howard Carter (known for discovering Tutahkhamen's tomb.) Petrie contended that the culture of Ancient Egypt was derived from an invading Caucasian "Dynastic Race" which had conquered Egypt in late prehistory and introduced the Pharaonic culture (Trigger, 1994). Petrie also happened to be a dedicated follower of the pseudo-science of Eugenics. Petrie claimed that his "Dynastic Race", in which he never ceased to believe, was a "fine" Caucasian race which entered Egypt from the south in late pre-dynastic times, conquered the "inferior" and "exhausted" "mulatto" race which then inhabited Egypt, and slowly introduced the finer Dynastic civilization as they interbred with the inferior indigenous people (Silberman, 1999).

As astutely pointed out by John Henrik Clarke, it's difficult to believe that Caucasians could have brought civilization to ancient Egypt when at that time they had no comparable civilization from which to bring it!

Nevertheless, thanks to Diodorus Siculus we can get a glimpse of how the ancients themselves understood their own origin.

Diodorus Siculus was a Sicilian Greek historian who lived from 90 to 21 BC. He wrote, a world history in 40 books, ending it near the time of his death with Caesar’s Gallic Wars, entitled Bibliotheca Historica ("Historical Library"). Below is an account from Book III.

On the Ethiopians who dwell beyond Libya and their antiquities (Book III)

(Ancient Greek historians such as Herodotus and Diodorus used the word Aethiopia(Αιθιοπία) to refer to the peoples living immediately to the south of ancient Egypt, specifically the area now known as the ancient Kingdom of Kush, now a part of modern Nubia, as well as all of Sub-Saharan Africa in general.)

"Now the Ethiopians, as historians relate, were the first of all men and the proofs of this statement, they say, are manifest. For that they did not come into their land as immigrants from abroad but were natives of it and so justly bear the name of "autochthones" (sprung from the soil) is, they maintain, conceded by practically all men..."

"And they say that they were the first to be taught to honour the gods and to hold sacrifices and processions and festivals and the other rites by which men honour the deity; and that in consequence their piety has been published abroad among all men, and it is generally held that the sacrifices practised among the Ethiopians are those which are the most pleasing to heaven."

"As witness to this they call upon the poet who is perhaps the oldest and certainly the most venerated among the Greeks (Homer) ; for in the Iliad he represents both Zeus and the rest of the gods with him as

absent on a visit to Ethiopia to share in the sacrifices and the banquet which were given annually by the Ethiopians for all the gods together:

For Zeus had yesterday to Ocean's bounds

Set forth to feast with Ethiop's faultless men,

And he was followed there by all the gods.

"They say also that the Egyptians are colonists sent out by the Ethiopians, Osiris having been the leader of the colony. For, speaking generally, what is now Egypt, they maintain, was not land but sea when in the beginning the universe was being formed; afterwards, however, as the Nile during the times of its inundation carried down the mud from Ethiopia, land was gradually built up from the deposit. Also the statement that all the land of the Egyptians is alluvial silt deposited by the river receives the clearest proof, in their opinion, from what takes place at the outlets of the Nile; for as each year new mud is continually gathered together at the mouths of the river, the sea is observed being thrust back by the deposited silt and the land receiving the increase.

And the larger part of the customs of the Egyptians are, they hold, Ethiopian, the colonists still preserving their ancient manners. For instance, the belief that their kings are gods, the very special attention which they pay to their burials, and many other matters of a similar nature are Ethiopian practices, while the shapes of their statues and the forms of their letters are Ethiopian; for of the two kinds of writing which the Egyptians have, that which is known

as "popular" (demotic) is learned by everyone, while that which is called "sacred" is understood only by the priests of the Egyptians, who learn it from their fathers as one of the things which are not divulged, but among the Ethiopians everyone uses these forms of letters. Furthermore, the orders of the priests, they maintain, have much the same position among both peoples; for all are clean who are engaged in the service of the gods, keeping themselves shaven, like the Ethiopian priests, and having the same dress and form of staff, which is shaped like a plough and is carried by their kings..."

The Truth Regarding King's Murder

Maybe that title is unneccesary because, well... who needs the truth when we have the "official story"?

The official story is that James Earl Ray a racist, ex-con killed King and that he acted alone. Now, essentially, the mainstream maintains that if you

question their 'official story', you are a conspiracy theorist -or worse, you are against the government. This is the same logic we have recently heard from George Bush, "either you're with us or you are with the terrorists." Wow, what a bind to be in. So most of us simply ignore what happened and all the evidence that exists outside of the inexplicably narrow official story. But that evidence has been mounting - considerably. Or maybe we aren't aware of the evidence because the mainstream media has done a superb job of keeping it below our radar.

It is hardly known that according to a Memphis jury's verdict on December 8, 1999, in the wrongful death lawsuit of the King family versus Lloyd Jowers "and other unknown co-conspirators," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government. Almost 32 years after King's murder at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, a court extended the circle of responsibility for the assassination beyond the late scapegoat James Earl Ray to the United States government.

How long shall they kill our prophets while

we stand aside and look? -

Bob Marley

So what if based on the outcome of this trial we

have questions? Let's say we have no grand conspiracy concocted but just questions regarding some things the official story doesn't even attempt to explain or consider such as:

1. Why did Loyd Jowers the owner of Jim's Grill in Memphis come forward and state that he had been asked to help in the murder of King and was told there would be a decoy (Ray) in the plot?

(Jowers said the man who asked him to help in the murder was a Mafia-connected produce dealer named Frank Liberto. Liberto, now deceased, had a courier deliver $100,000 for Jowers to hold at his restaurant, Jim's Grill, the back door of which opened onto the dense bushes across from the Lorraine Motel. Jowers said he was visited the day before the murder by a man named Raul, who brought a rifle in a box.)

2. Why did store owner John McFerren say when he arrived around 5:15 pm, April 4, 1968, for a produce pick-up at Frank Liberto's warehouse in Memphis he overheard Liberto on the phone inside saying, "Shoot the son-of-a-bitch on the balcony." ?

3. Why did an FBI agent admit the agency called King to urge him to stay at the Lorraine, a black owned motel instead of the white owned (more secure) Holiday Inn where he had stayed before?

4. If the FBI didn't make that call, who did? Why?

5. Who made him change his room from a secluded ground floor room to the second floor balcony space?

6. Why were two U.S. Army officers from Army's 111th Military Intelligence Group stationed on the roof of Memphis Fire Station 2 on April 4, 1968 ? (Carthel Weeden, captain of Fire Station 2 in 1968, testified that he was on duty the morning of April 4 when two U.S. Army officers approached him. The officers said they wanted a lookout for the Lorraine Motel. )

7.Why were the only two black firefighters temporarily transferred from that location on Apr. 3?

8. Why was Ed Redditt, a black Memphis Police Department detective, removed from his Fire Station 2 surveillance post two hours before King's murder?

9. Why was there testimony of two rifles, one that was found in a bundle behind the rooming house and one witnesses say Loyd Jowers retrieved from the actual shooter, still smoking, which he broke down and disposed of?

10. Why didn't the FBI ever do a ballistics test matching the slugs taken from King's body with the rifle attributed to Ray? (Judge Joe Brown, who had presided over two years of hearings on the rifle, testified that "67% of the bullets from my tests did not match the Ray rifle." He added that the unfired bullets found wrapped with it in a blanket were metallurgically different from the bullet taken from King's body, and therefore were from a different lot of ammunition. And because the rifle's scope had not been sited, Brown said, "this weapon literally could not have hit the broad side of a barn." Holding up the 30.06 Remington 760 Gamemaster rifle, Judge Brown told the jury, "It is my opinion that this is not the murder weapon.")

12. Why did Loyd Jowers testify that immediately after the killing, MPD Lieutenant Earl Clark (the MPD's best marksman), now deceased, came out of the brushy area and give him a smoking rifle at the rear door of his restaurant, Jim’s Grill?

13. Why did Several witnesses at the 1999 trial testify that they saw two men running away from the brushy area, one burning tires as he drove away in a green 1965 Chevrolet past a police car that took no notice, another getting into a police car and being driven away? (The official story has always been that nobody shot from the bushes but that James Earl Ray fired from a bathroom window of the rooming house.)

14. Why did Olivia Catling who lived a block away from the Lorraine on Mulberry Street after hearing the shot claim that "the shot came from that clump of bushes," indicating the heavily overgrown brushy area facing the Lorraine and adjacent to Fire Station 2?

15. Why did Earl Caldwell a New York Times reporter staying at the Lorraine Motel on the evening of April 4, in a videotaped testimony, after hearing the shot, say he saw a man crouched in the heavy part of the bushes across the street? The man was looking over at the Lorraine's balcony.

16. Why did the Memphis Police and the FBI ignore Earl Caldwell's and any testimony that contradicted the belief that Ray fired from a bathroom window of the rooming house across from the Lorraine? (Caldwell:"I will always remember the puff of white smoke and the cut brush and having never been given a satisfactory explanation. "When I tried to tell the police at the scene as best I saw they told me to be quiet and to get out of the way. I was never interviewed or asked what I saw by any law enforcement authority in all of the time since 1968.")

Of course there are tons more questions. Over 70 witnesses at the 1999 Civil trial gave testimony.

But the myth of James Earl Ray, the lone gunman remains. Part of this is the belief that he

confessed.

Every story, and I mean every story, about Ray over the years by the media has begun with the same phrase:

"James Earl Ray, the confessed killer of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. . . . "

But Ray actually pled guilty (after 3 days of coercion by his attorney.)

Pleading guilty and a voluntary confession are two completely different concepts - of course with a confession comes more details about what, how and why events happened. Ray never provided any of these (days later he even re-canted his guilty plea).

See, William Pepper "An Act of State".

Let's see how much of this is discussed today.