Next | Contents | Prev

Brett McCabe: Welcome once again to The Fourth Reich In America, Political Repression in the Warfare State. We are next going to be having a panel discussion on Racism and Genocide. Our first speaker, on "Genocide and Spirituality and Survival," is Richard Williams. Richard Williams is a Native American activist, and also a Vietnam-era Veteran. He works as a Human Services Counselor with Swords to Plowshares, which is a Veterans support organization. He was trained in the traditional ways of the Native Americans by medicine people, and he serves as a spiritual advisor to Indian inmates in the California prison system, in San Quentin and other prisons. He is a representative and spokesperson for the International Indian Treaty Council, and is active with the Big Mountain Support Group. I now give you Richard Williams. [long, loud applause]

Richard Williams: Thank you. It’s an honor and privilege to be here, to speak at this forum.

The theme, racism and genocide in America, is an old theme to the American Indians, I’m sure most of you are aware. Since the first Europeans landed on this continent, we have been victims of racism and genocide. It has been estimated, probably conservatively, that there were 100 million Indians on this continent, when the Europeans first came here. And we know how many are left. Not very many: the result of racism and genocide.

A lot of that has been covered up. A lot if it is still going on, even more so today. We do not have a voice in Congress. We do not have a voice in the media. So many of you do not know what is still going on to us, as a people, as a nation, as a culture, as human beings on this planet.

As American Indians, we have always been a spiritual people. We are now, and we always will be in the future, because that is our way. We believe that we are just a part of the Creation. We believe that, long before this Earth was made, that every living thing was in the Spirit World. And when it came time to come down in life form, we got to choose which life form we would come down as. Some of the Spirits chose to come down as fire, as water, as rocks, as the air; some chose to come down as plants and animals. Those of us in this room chose to come down as human beings.

We were the last ones to be Created, to be allowed to come down here. And now we know why: because if we were one of the first ones, nothing else would have survived.

So, we believe, that all the plants and the animals, the fire, the water, the earth and the air, are all of our relatives. They are living beings; they have Spirits. They are our relatives; they are our family. We must protect them. They were here first; we are guests here, as human beings. This is their Creation too.

It is an honor for us, as human beings, to share in this Creation, that the Creator has made for us. And the Earth Mother has given us. But the Earth Mother gives us everything we need. She gives us food; She gives us clothing; She gives us shelter; She even gives us medicines when we are sick. So we are thankful for this. We know how important all of this is. We know how important clean air, clean water, clean food, is.

This is a way we lived, for thousands of years. Before the Europeans came. And it is documented, in the military history, ethnic history, the frontier history, how the American Indians were treated: how they were herded off into concentration camps, how they were experimented on, how they were brutalized, how they were murdered. How they were almost wiped out with "White man’s diseases," for which we had no immunities .

And we were blamed for these diseases. We were blamed for smallpox. We were blamed for different diseases that killed us; it was our fault. Similar to what is now going on to the rest of the world, as well as the Indian population, with AIDS.

This is not new to us; we know what oppression is. We still do. Many of our people are still suffering. Many of our people are still being relocated. As an Indian activist, I find out that all of the causes which I become involved in, are interconnected: what’s going on in with the Indians in South Dakota on their Reservations, what’s going on on Big Mountain, the Navaho Indian Reservation, what’s going on on White Earth, Minnesota

The corporations want the land. They want the energy. And it just so happens that what little land we have left, what little land that was taken from us, what’s left, from all the land that was given to us by treaties. Over half of all the mineral resources in this country is on Indian land. They want to get that. They do not want to pay a fair price. They want to take it. And they must forcibly remove us, or kill us, or starve us out, or to forcibly relocate us.

As an example of what’s going on is Big Mountain. The Federal Government, United States Congress, has authorized a bill to forcibly remove ten thousand Navaho Indians from the Big Mountain area. Which just so happens to be the area where there is two, two-and-a-half billion tons of coal, hundred of thousands of tons of uranium, oil, potash.

The traditional people do not want to leave. They want to stay. This was their land. They have been on this land for thousands of years. Their sacred shrines are there. They have a right, as a human being, as guaranteed by your constitution, which we were so graciously given citizenship in 1924, contrary to what our President said in Moscow.

We are not rich. By all standards of civilized societies: of health, education and financial, we are on the bottom rung. We have been kept there for a good reason. But as I said before, were are a spiritual people. We always have been. We still are. Many of us still practice our sacred ceremonies. Many of us still have our own, different languages.which do not translate well into English.

There is no word in our language for relocation. To relocate means to die. To be separated from your family. This is to die. To be separated from your place of birth, from where you were raised, from where your sacred shrines are is to die. Emotionally, mentally, spiritually and physically.

The oppressors, they know that. They use that against us. They have been trying to kill us for a very long time. But we are stronger than them. We have been surviving. For hundreds if not thousands of years, by following this way.

There have been documented cases where they have gone into these Reservations, and kidnapped train loads of children. Sent them off to boarding schools; not allowing them to speak their language or practice their ways. To beat the culture out of them. Not letting them come back until they were completely confused.

Some of us were involved in that relocation. A medicine man once told us, "An American Indian who is not on his own land, has been relocated." Either economically, socially, financially, or physically.

They make it very difficult for us. We have very few options. The military is one of the options that we have, to go into the military. Or we can go into a bar. We can go to jail. We can go to prisons. Those are the options that we have. We’re starved to death.

As said in the introduction, I council American Indian inmates inside the California Department of Corrections Prison system. Many of those in there, if not all of them, are victims of the system that oppresses them. They are victims of drugs and alcohol, which was given freely to them by government agents.

What has happened to us, from the early days on, is now happening to you. They don’t need us any more. All they need is our land. They don’t care what happens to us. They are now experimenting and working on you. We have been telling you this for many years. Nobody listens to us. I doubt if anybody does yet.

As a recognized spiritual leader, I know, from the teachings that I have had, from traditional spiritual leaders, that we’re all human beings. We were all Created the same way. We all have the basic needs, as met by the Earth Mother. We all have families. We all need food, clothing and shelter. We all need the four elements: the fire, the water, the earth and the air. Because these are our relatives. These are our relatives. We must treat them with care and respect.

We have ceremonies to honor these relatives. We have annual and semi-annual ceremonies, to welcome these relatives: the fire, the sun, the water, the wind, and the rocks. We honor all living things. When we open and close our ceremonies we say, "All our relations." That’s what we mean, our relations, our living relations. These four elements. We give thanks for them. For we know, that without them, we would not survive. No living thing on this earth can survive without clean water, or clean air.

We have been against nuclear power since it’s very beginning because we know. When they tested the bombs, before they dropped it on Japan, they tested it on Indian land. The first miners to go down, to dig ’em out of the earth, were Indian miners, who were forced to go down there. They did not tell them how hazardous it would be. And they never gave them any compensation for when they were dying, and their families were dying.

Our children were experimented on, for nuclear poisoning and birth defects. Rather than helping us to stop it, they used us a guinea pigs to find out how we would die.

We asked for your help then. Nobody heard us. Now you are suffering. It’s a tragic story. Now they have let loose this nuclear madness on the world. More people are dying, and have died, from nuclear poisoning, than any and all of the bombs that were dropped. The have us live in fear. Of the war. Of the bomb. When they poison our water, poison our air, even poison our genes, so that future generations will suffer.

That’s what concerns us, as American Indians. The future generations. For we, we as human beings, have a responsibility to protect the Earth, to protect all the elements, to protect our elders, to protect our own culture, whichever culture it is, not only for ourselves, but for our posterity, our future generations. We believe even to the seventh generation, we are responsible.

This must stop. This must stop, and will stop.

In our ceremonies, we use the four elements: the fire, the water, the earth and the air; to purify and cleanse ourselves. Through the physical, the emotional, the mental and the spiritual levels. For we know that’s how the Earth Mother purifies Herself. With the fire, the floods, the earthquakes, and electrical storms. We are constantly in tune with Her, for, if we do not stop our own pollution, and destruction of our own world, the world will stop it for us. Or else, we will poison all the future peoples of all the earth’s generations.

It’s important that we know this. I’m sure it’s been discussed here earlier, of what they’re doing to us, Individually and collectively. They say we have no power. They don’t know us. They don’t know how strong we are spiritually. They don’t know how strong we are collectively, as a spiritual being, as a group. They keep telling us that we need them. We don’t. They need us.

As far as surviving, there are many of us who are surviving, despite all of these things that are happening to us as people, as individuals, because we have chosen to walk the Red Road. To keep our bodies clean. To keep our minds clean, our emotions clean, and our spirits clean. We return to these ceremonies weekly. To purify ourselves. This is the season, when it gets warm weather, we have our sacred ceremonies. They’re happening all over the country now to bring the Indian Nations back together. So that we can walk in balance and harmony. With the earth. With the plants and the animals. And with each other as human beings.

In spite of all that’s happened to us, we still believe that we will survive. We still believe that we can survive. We don’t know how it will happen, but we know it will. For we as a people are almost all wiped out, but we still believe. And all I can say to you.is that you not lose faith, either.

In closing, I’d like to say: One of my teachers was giving a talk on Indian spirituality, and when it was over, he was answering questions. And the first question was, a non-Indian, White man asked him, "Where do you go when you die?" And he’s an Indian medicine man, and he said, "I don’t know where you White people go, but we, as Indians, go to the happy hunting ground. We don’t believe in heaven and hell. That’s for you people. If you want to believe that, that’s fine. If you believe you want to go to heaven, you can go to heaven. If you don’t, you can go to hell." And he said, as far as Indians believing in heaven and hell, "Our heaven is here. Everything that we do in this life, is our heaven. And it is you people, who have made it a hell for us."

We will survive. We know this. Our elders and our traditions tell us this. Our young people are starting to turn away from drugs and alcohol, as I know, some of your children are. Because they realize that our elders are dying off at an alarming rate. Because of radiation poisoning. We cannot have this; we must get back to our original teachings. Get back to our original ways, to survive.

A lot of us can do with less than what we have. And you will soon find out that you will have to. So you must prepare yourself mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. For, when this happens physically, you may not have time.

Our prayers are not only for ourselves, and our future generations. But for all the brothers and sisters, of all cultures, of all the world. We don’t want what has happened to us, to happen to you. Or your children. Or you children’s children. We want to come together, in balance and harmony, sobriety, truth and justice, together. Each of us bring our own distinctive culture, our own creativeness, our own beautiful beings. Together, we can survive this. We can do this with compassion. We can do this with intelligence. We can do this with spirituality.

Thank you. [very long, very loud applause]

Brett McCabe: Our next speaker is Lori Bradford. Lori Bradford is an ex-psychiatric inmate. She’s a researcher and an activist in movements against psychiatry, and for lesbian, gay and women’s rights. Formally a collective member of Big Mama Rag, a feminist news journal, Lori lives in San Francisco, and works with Counterprobe: a group searching the hidden history behind AIDS. And Lori also works with Mental Patients Opposed to Psychiatry, and is co-author of The Misery Business, an unpublished manuscript about psychiatry. I give you Lori Bradford. [loud applause]

Lori Bradford: I’m not sure what to best do with this time. Since we were talking about AIDS earlier, I’m not sure if most of you all were here, if we want to get back to that, and kind of do this panel on, and go ahead and open for some questions. Or I could talk more in the area of chemical/biological warfare, and all of that military buildup and connection with genocide. Does anyone have a feel? Would you like to open this for questions? And, I’m sure, Richard would be more than glad to take questions too, at this point.

Audience Member: Does Mr. Williams believe that AIDS is another form of genocide towards the Indians? There’s been a lot of articles that AIDS is now prevalent on the Reservations, and things like that. Do you believe in that?

Richard Williams: You mean that it was genocidal to . . .

Audience Member: Yeah, deliberate, towards the Indians.

Richard Williams: Some of us do, yes, a lot of us do. Me as a person, it’s just if it is, or if it isn’t, it’s still a continual, oppressive, genocidal tactic. And we’ve seen them all. If it wouldn’t have been AIDS, it would have been something else.

Audience Member: This is a question for Lori Bradford. What do you feel is the connection with Aspartame, Nutrasweet, in connection with placating women in particular, and it’s harm to people in general?

Lori Bradford: I hate it. When it first came out, the stuff that I read about Nutrasweet was that it was a behavior modifier. That it especially shouldn’t be allowed for younger children while they were in the early stages of physical and mental development. That it was especially harmful to young children. And it’s like, where is Nutrasweet now, in terms of products? Well, it’s in everything that kids eat. And the advertising is that if you don’t give your kids food with Nutrasweet, like if you still give them Koolaid with real sugar, that you’re really a bad mother. And that you really have got to be switching over to Nutrasweet, Koolaid with Nutrasweet, or you’re giving your kid all this nasty sugar. But they don’t want to comment on what kind of nasty chemical that is. I think that it’s some kind of mood modifier that they’ve introduced into the food.

The other day, when I was driving around on my lunch hour, I heard a brief spot on the news, that in the future, we would look forward to all sorts of things being in our food, like putting something, like a stomach antacid into chocolate ice cream, because chocolate is hard on your stomach, like if you wanted a kind of a tranquilizer, you could buy specific food products that would have those kinds of drugs added in, concepts of putting stress reducers into food . . . I definitely think that Nutrasweet is a mood modifier that’s been introduced in food. And that since it was so initially cautioned in the use of children, and now all of a sudden that’s where it is, I think is suspicious.

Just because it’s not carcinogenic, (and I don’t know if I even think that’s the case) that’s not the only hazard in adding these kinds of chemicals to our food these days.

Audience Member: I heard on NPR Radio that it was found to cause birth defects, and sterility, and also losses of memory.

Lori Bradford: Yeah, I think it’s a really hazardous food additive. I’m not surprised, especially just from what I’ve read about it, altering minds. It also is really like an unstable chemical. I’ve read that it has a really unstable shelf life, and that if it’s too hot, and stored too long, that it’s chemical properties change, and that it tends to taste less sweet. There’s all sorts of problems with the kind of chemical match up that it is, and how it acts in the food, and when it’s that unstable chemically, what it’s doing in people’s bodies, and it already has a behavior modifying effect. That it would affect memory isn’t surprising.

Audience Member: I would like to hear your perspectives on the psychiatric profession, institutes, and so forth, on what’s going on in Lexington.

Lori Bradford: I think psychiatry is really here to adjust us to our oppression, and that it’s doing, essentially, a wonderful job of it. I mean everything is psycho-babble. We couch everything in terms of psychiatric language. We try to understand everything that’s happening as . . . I mean, nothing is political. And it’s certainly better than a new religion. And it introduces all sorts of ways of getting people on different kinds of drugs that are incredibly controlling. The State would rather have you on their drugs than on street drugs, really. Either that, or they’d like to have you on the street drugs that they sell. They certainly like to have control in all aspects.

Every time I hear one more report about the insidious nature of psychiatric institutions in the USSR, I start to get furious. Because, regardless if it’s in a prison, or a psychiatric institution in this country, there are horribly insidious tortures that are being done on political prisoners with psychiatric techniques, in this country right now.

There are control units at Lexington prison. And the entire prison at Marion, Illinois, is essentially a control unit. The entire prison is on a lockdown. Patients, or prisoners, spend 23 hours a day in a six by nine foot cell. That’s been going on since 1983. There hasn’t been a prison that’s been on lock-down like that in this country since l800s. But they’ve wanted a lockdown prison. They’ve wanted a facility where they could experiment on different kinds of control devices.

I think electroshock is coming back, it seems to me, in a big way in this country, now. Not only is it back in, in terms of being used for a quick and speedy cure for depression in this country, but it’s also being used as part of the war on drugs. Some of the quick cure drug clinics are using electroshock to make you forget about your desire for drugs. That worries me.

And it’s kind of like the concept of "friendly" fascism. The kind of concept of "friendly" psychiatry, you know. Really, anybody, at any time, can just find themselves on a psych ward, and end up on some psychiatric drug that has side effects that cause depression or cause psychotic breaks, and end up, in turn, for symptoms that are side effects from the drugs, and end up locked up, and end up on more drugs, and end up not getting out, and then you start to be institutionalized.

That’s really how this system is still working today. And certainly the biggest populations for psychiatric institutionalization are women and kids and Third World people. And that’s who’s being locked up.

Then you look at the Vietnam vet population, and their relation with military psychiatry. Like Steve mentioned this morning, that we’re going to call Vets who are upset about being exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam, we’re going to refer to them as "hysterical," or having "post-traumatic stress disorder."

We’re going to name all things like incest, or rape, we’re going to continue to couch them in psychiatric terms, so that we continue not to notice that they’re not just some aberrant individual syndrome, but rather the norm in society. And we’re supposed to believe that, thank God, with AIDS, at least we can return to the safety of the nuclear family, when for, I would say maybe most of us in this room, that the nuclear family was hardly a very safe place to be. That lots of us are incest survivors, and lots of us have been battered, and lots of us have only learned really abusive and horrible ways to interrelate to each other.

And psychiatry only furthers that. Psychiatry has you really believe that, like, if you’re suicidal, that you can only be suicidal out on the street so long. And after that it’s really a problem for the professionals. And all they ever do if you’re locked up for suicide in a mental hospital is that they watch you lots. I mean like 24 hours a day. Well, there are other ways to have that kind of contact. And there are other ways to stay out of institutions. And there are other ways that people can begin to not to be so frightened of other people.

And there are other realities of psychiatric experimentation. There are realities about the effects of psychiatric drugs. That the reasons that mental patients have that stereotypic look: that kind of sagging faces, or musculature problems, or muscle movements are direct effects of the drugs, and not effects of schizophrenia. Not the result of depression. But the result of the drugs that they’ve been given for their depression that cause depression at the same time that they’ve been given a drug to cure their depression.

Suicide now in this country: A lot of the lethal suicides that are done with drugs are done with psychiatric drugs. They’re very lethal, and they hand them out to depressives like candy. It’s an interesting dynamic.

And I think with kids, psychiatry has entered schools. A kid gets shot in school, and then you bring the shrink in, so that we can all have stress counseling that day. But we never backtrack long enough to start to begin to really deal with why kids are shooting other kids in school. Or about the use and the handling of weapons in this country, and our access to handguns. Or being willing to consider any of that stuff. It’s all tied in together.

Did this answer your question? [laughter]

Audience Member: Do you know, what’s the current status of all that real estate theft going on in Massachusetts? I’m thinking specifically of the largely Indian area near Martha’s Vineyard. Is real estate still being stolen from them?

Richard Williams: I’m not familiar with that situation at all.

Audience Member: I have a friend who’s quite interested in Indian affairs, and he makes some points such as: that the Indians on some of the Reservations, the land cannot support the sheep, that they use as their main source of livelihood. That’s one of the things that he talks about. He also talks about this idea that Indians are given homes, or a certain amount of money, and they can go, when they leave the Reservation, that they can go into these homes and live in the White community, and that that is a form of aid for Indians. And that most of the Indians who wish to stay on the Reservations are really just the elders. That’s his kind of thesis, and he considers himself somewhat of an expert, because he talked to some people who were on the government’s side of doling out stuff to him, and he became quite convinced of all of these points. I wonder if you’d care to comment on any of those things? [laughter]

Richard Williams: As far as the . . . you said the land could not support the sheep . . . For hundreds of years, there was enough water on that land. But since they’ve started putting uranium mines on that land, they have drained the water tables, and now there is hardly enough water. But there still is enough water for the amount of sheep that those Indians need to live by. The reasons why they’re taking the sheep, is that the Federal Government said that in the Relocation Act of l974, that they could take 90% of their livestock. And sell it, kill it, or use it for whatever they will. But take it away from the Indians, to starve them out. That’s why they did that. And then, to justify this, they used the conditions of what happened during the drought of l933. And they used it on the Reservation when there was no drought. That was their justification.

Now, as far as the Indians being given new homes in White sections, so they could live like White people do. That is a form of relocation and genocide. It’s international fact, that whenever you relocate any amount of people, 25% of them will die. 50% will suffer from mental illness, and 25% will commit suicide. So, whatever you do to them, it is catastrophic. And the homes that you’re talking about, some of them are built with radiation material. Some of them are, if not all of them, are built and given to the Indians, and then they can’t pay taxes on it. They are thrown out, and another Indian family is given this house, and they are thrown out. This one house is sold, sometimes, six and seven times.

And once they leave this reservation, they cannot come back. They are considered strangers in their own land.

And what was the third one? Mostly the elders are really the ones who want to stay on their land? Well, that’s normal. They have lived there all their lives. They have their sacred shrines and their sacred ceremonies there. It’s very difficult for them to move and start over again.

For the young people, they make it very difficult for them to want to stay. Because, there are no jobs. There is no good education. There is nothing for them to do, except follow the traditional ways of the American Indians. And some of them, some of the young ones, are coming back, and following the traditional way, not wanting to leave, to support the elders.

But like I said before, our elders are dying off at an alarming rate. It’s scary. Pretty soon, in the next five or ten years, we will have no elders on the reservation at all. Because those ones who are staying are being poisoned, by the uranium tailings, that are being left there out in the open.

You see, the Federal Government and the military, on Reservation land; they don’t have to abide by the EPA standards.

Pat Cary: Speaking of natural force, that God invented. I personally don’t think we have any right to blast the atom apart. The atom which creates the material world in which we live. We have no right to be busting them apart and putting them into bombs, to blow up everybody on earth. There is a great possibility, I’ve often thought that, the Indians, possibly, could go into solar power, since they understand the sun, and they know the power of the sun, they could set up some form of solar power, which is twice as powerful as the atom, and there are no wastes that hang around for five hundred thousand years, and stockpile somewhere, to poison the whole world with radiation. The Indians understand the sun. They really do. They have lived with it, worshipped it. And the Indian people, as I understand it, have never violated the earth. They have utilized anything they ever killed, they ate it or wore it, or used it in a very respectful way, and they have never violated anything. And we are creating an abomination in blasting the atom apart, to put them into bombs. Because we are going to pay a terrible price for that. I was wondering what you thought of that.

Richard Williams: I agree with you. As far as nuclear power, the nuclear weapons industry, it’s ironic, that the Federal Government is choosing to dig up land, to get to this natural resources, and to do this, they have to dig up Sacred shrines. Now this, like you say, it’s blasphemy, and it’s and abomination to us too. That the areas that we worship at, are being dug up, to be used to kill our brothers and sisters on different lands. That is what really pains us.

Audience Member: Dr. Jack Evanton in Monterey, not long ago (he’s a geophysicist), said that when they blow off hundreds and hundreds of atomic bombs, a mile down in the earth, under the Nevada desert, they have literally poisoned the state of Nevada. And he said when the bombs explode under there (some of them are 16 times bigger than the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs) they form a gigantic glass ball. The heat is so strong that it melts the rock. But he says, "It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s just a big glass ball." But there are hundreds of them. A mile down in the desert, underneath the desert level. And I brought up the subject of the possibility, that if there was an earthquake, and some of the congealed, melted rock, which is a glass ball, broke into little pieces, and got into the water table of the state of Nevada, and came into the state of California, which is only one state away, came up into the grass, and into the cows, and into the milk and we ate it and drank it, we’d all have radiation poisoning.

Richard Williams: It already has.

Audience Member: Actually, what she’s talking about in nuclear tests is not the main hazard. They have a big, big, big problem, with what they call venting.

Richard Williams: The radon gas?

Audience Member: Yes. Where the bubbles actually burst through to the surface, and release radioactive gas into the atmosphere.

Lori Bradford: And you really have to know that it is coming up in the grass. All sorts of things are coming up in the grass.

Audience Member: Question for Richard Williams. Do you think that AIDS is a problem with the Indians, and, if so, how is it propagated?

Richard Williams: How is it propagated? How is it spread? It certainly is a problem with American Indians. per capita, more people are dying than any other culture. It’s propagated the way AIDS is propagated anywhere else, I’m sure.

Audience Member: Two question for Mr. Williams. How many Native Americans are there in the United States now, and how is Canada dealing with their Indians?

Richard Williams: Depending which source you believe, there are recognized about two million American Indians, in the United States. But there are certainly a lot more.

And, how is Canada dealing with their Indians. Basically, the same racist and genocidal way that we are, except you don’t hear about it as much. What has protected the Indians in Canada, is the long distances between the Indian Reservations and the populous areas.

Audience Member: Read The Siberians, by Farley Mowat, and you’ll get an idea of the difference in the way the Soviet Union has treated it’s indigenous Northern population, as opposed to North America. Besides the effects of uranium on the Native American miners, and on the nearby communities, could you discuss other sterilization of Native Americans in the US?

Richard Williams: Oh, yes, that’s been going on for a very long time. Forced sterilization, or even . . . they don’t even tell the women that they’re being sterilized. And what they’re doing now, in some of your mental health programs, near the reservations in South Dakota and Minnesota, is that, when Indian men are treated for alcoholism, they ask them if they see visions. And, traditionally, that is part of their culture. They go on vision quests, and they have ceremonies where they see visions. And they say, naturally, "Yes." So they give them this drug. Because they think they’re having hallucinations. And this drug makes them sterile.

Audience Member: What drug is it?

Richard Williams: I have it written down at home. I didn’t think I’d be answering this question. But, I can make it available.

Lori Bradford: Sterilization in different communities, like, in Puerto Rico and in the Native American communities here, there’s been sterilization to such a degree that there is zero growth, in some situations, in some communities, where sterilization programs have been that big, sterilization both of males, and females. Eugenics is not dead, and at best it went minimally underground. And it really didn’t even have to go that far underground, because they still do what they want, medically, to people. And they still control the population of peoples that they think ought to be controlled.

Part of MK/ULTRA, the CIA-sponsored stuff, was experimentation on prison populations, with different kinds of hormones. For the purpose of inducing sterility, or inducing impotence, and that kind of thing. So there’s certainly been long standing history: different kinds of hormones have been used, different kinds of drugs have been used, that result in that.

Once DES was banned here, it was marketed in Central Africa as a sterilization method. There’s all sorts of things . . .

Audience Member: I believe everything you’re saying. But there appears to be a world, like a Third World immigration wave, people that are not White. Why does our government bring so many people in, from other countries? What is the ultimate purpose? Why are they doing that if they’re anti-people that aren’t White, and they bring Third World people?

Lori Bradford: Well, you have to look at the economic function that they serve here. What kind of jobs they do here. And what kind of market, even if all we . . . I mean, even when we go there, why do we go there? The answer is the same as why they’re here. It’s economics, and it’s cheap labor, and it’s production. Really if they could make everyone work as cheap as that, they’d love it. And if they could make everyone drugged and work mindlessly 24 hours a day, they’d love it.

Everything has to do with production and economics. It’s financially lucrative to allow certain populations here to perform certain kinds of tasks. Capitalism requires certain unemployed, a certain class division, a certain number of people who are not working. That’s expected. It’s not like, that we have unemployment is a surprise. It’s not a surprise. It’s part of the plan. It’s part of the organization. And that we have some unemployed here, and that we allow, say, Vietnamese people in, and they’re taking our jobs away from us, is also part of the plan of Fascism instead, that pits different groups of people against each other; and it’s a racist tactic, it’s nothing more than that. I mean, they use it to their best advantage. And that’s why they do it. We’d love to keep everyone out, on the other hand, unless we can figure out a way to profit off it. And I think we have figured out a way. I think it serves a definite function in this country.

Brett McCabe: I think two of the main things of Reagan’s agenda are union busting and really screwing up the judiciary with all his little plants in key places. Like, how many judges has he appointed in a lifetime? It’s very frightening. And I’m a legal secretary, and you read some of the things like the Recorder, and what people accept as kind of mainline judiciary philosophy days nowadays, is kind of like, will make your hair rise. The first two things Hitler did was get rid of the unions, and subvert the judiciary.

Lori Bradford: And I also think in terms of that kind of immigration into the United States, it really just forms such a racist function. It allows them to pit us against each other, it allow for a certain amount of work to be done, it allows for hatred to be built up, it allows for everybody to feel better about passing something as disgusting as an "English-only" bill in this state, so that we’re going to push English as a first language down everyone’s throat, which is not necessary. But it’s necessary to them. I’ll backtrack and say it’s necessary for the plan that’s happening. It’s all part of the plan that’s happening.

Audience Member: In relation to the question of AIDS virus and AIDS phobia and ignorance and people’s illiteracy. A novel came out, I think years before AIDS was even discovered. It’s funny that sometimes, novels, fiction or science fiction get . . . information seems to get through somehow, but it’s written in this non-threatening form. But a book by the author of the Dune books, Frank Herbert, wrote a novel called the White Plague in which the scenario is based on a brilliant genetic scientist whose family, wife and two children, were blown apart in a car bomb, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. And because of his utter rage at humanity, went back to Washington State, locked himself in a cellar for a number of years, and created a virus that would only infect and kill women. So that basically he could . . . because he hated humanity for what happened . . . terrorism, politics, whatever, and only women died from this virus. It’s interesting this book came out right around the same time AIDS was being discovered, somewhere in the 70s.

Lori Bradford: I certainly think one of the reasons for genetic engineering is finding a way to eliminate women.

Brett McCabe: Could I say something about that? I worked for a scientist, I don’t want to mention any names, but I worked in a lab where they did the initial genetic engineering that started Genentec and all that, in the late 70s, early 80s. And it was around l983 that I first . . . a little bell went off in my head when I started hearing about AIDS, that it didn’t make any sense. And, since I’ve become involved in the research, I . . . I left that laboratory in l982, something like that, and I called the scientist, that I know has been up to his neck in scientific research, he’s very well respected, and I know he’s still working, that he’s working now in the field of AIDS. And I called him, and I think my reputation had proceeded me. Because he didn’t really want to talk to me about AIDS, and what was happening. And I started mentioning things like, the actual molecular structure of the thing doesn’t make any sense. I’ve read where it might be part of a Visna virus. And as I spoke he realized I knew something. Not very much, but I knew enough that when he came out and said, "Well, it came from the Green Monkey in Africa," that I could say, you know’ "That’s not true," and I know it’s not true. And he laughed, and he said, "Well, you can be sure that there will be new ones out soon." And I don’t think he was kidding. And sure enough, in the next couple of months, I was listening to the radio, and all of a sudden, cats have AIDS. And I think, you know, was he joking, or are they, as we go along, developing new strains of this virus, to dump on us? It sounds terribly hypothetical, but . . .

Lori Bradford: It’s interesting. I don’t know where we think all these new diseases come from. If it’s just a natural mutation and all of a sudden we have a new flu every year? You know, like they’re not marketing flus out of biological weapons centers regularly?

Brett McCabe: Something else on that score. My mother died of cancer. And every woman that’s her age in that area is dead of cancer. And this is in the last 10 years. I grew up on the East coast, in Rhode Island. And there’s a whole belt, along the whole southern tip of Cape Cod, where the cancer rates are horrible. And just recently I just read an article in the Nation about the Shorem nuclear power plant, which is down wind from where I grew up. You know, when my mother died of cancer, when all these people died of cancer, and everyone came to me and said, "Well, you know, cancer has been around for a long time, except nobody really knew what it was." I don’t believe that. Do you believe that?

I read quite a bit. I read, like, novels from the l8th and 17th century, and there were things like consumption, and there was cancer mentioned, but I don’t think it makes any sense, I don’t know about other people. I mean, we’re all expected to swallow this large pill, and not say anything.

Lori Bradford: As early as l932 some doctors were down in Puerto Rico implanting cancer cells into Puerto Ricans as an experiment in tracing the progress of cancer. To not think that disease isn’t a weapon in all sorts of ways, against all sorts of peoples is disastrous.

Audience Member: I read the New York Times of June 30 of ’88 on the Lyme’s [sic] thing, and then Friday night, July 15 on 20/20, ABC, they did a report on Lyme’s [sic]. And apparently, Lyme’s [sic] really attacks about every major disease. Well, the delivery vehicle is a tick, and they tend to think that the base blood problem comes out of a mouse. What I’m saying is, there’s a blood disease similar to AIDS, that’s being transferred by ticks, they tend to bringing it from mice, and they kind of bum rapped it according to the guy on 20/20 last night and I just . . .

Brett McCabe: [interrupting] Does it make sense to you? Does it make sense to you, that after all the history of human beings we’ve had Gay people around for how many thousands of years, and we’ve had monkeys around for how many thousands of years, and we’ve had epidemiologists around for like around a hundred years at least that know what they’re talking about. Dr. Wilbur Jordan has given a wonderful talk on AIDS. And all of a sudden, in the last 10 years, we have this cornucopia of these weird diseases coming up that don’t make any scientific sense, they don’t make any epidemiological sense, and we’re expected to sit back and believe that our scientific community, our medical community, still has some kind of credence? Why aren’t these people speaking up? I’m not a doctor, I’m not a scientist, but I can see something stinks. Can you see something stinks? Do you think something stinks? I do. [loud applause]

Audience Member: [resuming] . . .what do you call your heart, your liver, all the major functions of the body . . . major systems . . . it seems to . . . it attacks the brain . . . major organs . . .

Brett McCabe: [interrupting] I’m sure it’s a horror show. I’m sure if I keep shooting my mouth off I’ll come down with it. [laughter]

Audience Member: You mentioned at Shorem . . . that they didn’t open that one, fortunately . . .

Brett McCabe: [interrupting] No, they did shut it down, but they did do testing, and God knows what they let off into the atmosphere. I’m sorry, I’m hogging the mike.

Audience Member: [likewise resuming] Anyway, I think the nuclear effect in New England is from the Pilgrim nuke in Massachusetts and couple in Connecticut, where there are obvious higher cancer and cumulative birth defect rates by orders in Connecticut.

Audience Member: I just thought I’d ask one question as far as genocide. What about sterilization of mental patients? You might want to comment on that one.

Lori Bradford: What about it? Yeah, like, well, it was done, and it’s still being done.

Audience Member: What do you think about the appearance in the paper lately of what are being given as, I guess, landmark public opinion cases, like, I saw one in the paper the other day, there was a retarded lady, and they were going to take her child away from her. Saying that she wasn’t a fit mother.

Lori Bradford: Yeah, I think it’s interesting how they decided who’s fit, and what’s fit. Richard was just saying that that’s how they take Indian babies away from Indians. It’s true. When we hide everything by the facade of the "safe, normal" nuclear family, which is just killing kids right and left. What do we think? And the society, and how much oppression there is and how that works itself out in the family. You know, how all those power trips, and how all our powerlessness comes out between adults and kids, at home is kind of frightening. And that it’s all hidden. And that psychiatry is one of the things that helped hide it. Going back to Freud when he denied all the reality of incest, and said that all these kids, all these women were hysterics, and that their fathers couldn’t have been raping all these girls. And we seem to know now a little bit better, but we still continue to defend that front to the death, and deny parenthood to all sorts of other people, in all sorts of communities. I think it’s frightening, what’s happening with children right now.

We really want to do stop, and have John do a little bit of information about the Jonestown massacre, and connect that in with this genocide stuff [applause] and we will be taking questions again, so if you all want to just. . . I was going to say sit on it, but maybe that’s rude . . . if you’ll just wait a minute.

John Judge: I’m real sorry that Dr. Nathan Hare wasn’t able to be here with us. He was to have been another panelist. And I do recommend that people try to get in touch with his work. He was recommended to me as a speaker when I first started trying to form this panel from Washington, and work on the panelists, by Samuel Yette. I don’t know if you know that name, but he wrote a very interesting book back in the ’70s called The Choice: The Question of Black Survival in America. Dr. Hare’s specialty is reproductive control and racism, especially in terms of the Black community, the Black family, but also in general, and internationally. And the main issues we’ve touched on through the questions here, and what’s been said so far, I think he has very specific knowledge. Among his recent works are Bringing the Black Boy to Manhood, and Endangering the Black Family. He and his wife are working on a new book, he told me, called The Crisis in Black Sexual Politics. So those are some works of Nathan Hare I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to hear him.

Racism, like any other ism, is first a set of beliefs. Racism asserts that a group, within the human community, can be distinguished, and isolated out, on the basis of skin color, and deemed inferior. And because of this assumption of, and ability to assert, inferiority, then other assertions follow. The right to exploit labor. The right to deny privileges. The right to deny full social participation. The right to disenfranchise from social opportunities, or even survival. The right to exploit and control sexuality and birth. And the right to do violence and murder.

This is not so much a question of personal beliefs, at this point in this society, as it is an ingrained social system. The privilege of White skin is established in all areas of life. Ann Braden in a recent article defined racism as "a society run by Whites, for Whites, in the American context." This is prejudice plus power. Racism is the dominant culture, and this privilege is the equivalent of violence.

I am a racist. I am raised in a racist culture. I think that most White people refuse to deal with their racism, feeling that it’s enough for them to claim that they are not personally racist. But this position takes no responsibility for changing the culture or the institutions that perpetuate the racism, institutionalize it. It does nothing to end privilege. Participating day in and day out in our lives, in that privilege is racist, unless we act to end it.

I am also anti-racist. No easy task. To become anti-racist we must be aware of our own racism and contradictions. Hard work. And subtle. But we also must act to change that system of racist privilege. That starts in the home, in our personal life, in our neighborhood, but it has to go further. It has to include; our families, the organizations that we are part of, the work places where we are, the churches that we belong to, the politics and priorities that we have.

And I think we have to take responsibility to challenge that racism with other Whites. That’s not the responsibility of the victims alone, to end their oppression. This is not a Black problem, or a Native American problem, or an Asian problem. I think that those being oppressed are in the best position to define their oppression, but that doesn’t make them experts in some sense that they are the only ones who can, or need, to talk about racism. Whites need to talk about racism now, and stop playing dumb, and stop playing helpless. One poll I remember, of people living in Baltimore, revealed that 100% of the Whites there claimed that they were not racist but all their neighbors were. [laughter] That’s the kind of denial that serves to perpetuate privilege.

The effects of that racism are deadly. Institutionalized racism becomes more apparent every day. The gains that were made by the Civil Rights movements in the 50s and 60s are being eroded. There’s a constant pressure of racism in every aspect of the society that’s leading, in it’s result, if not it’s intent, to genocide. If you consider the separate, supposed, problems I’m about to talk about, as a whole, I think you can see that: tremendous cuts in social services; the primary effect of the militarization and the wars that we’ve talked about; drugs, and deaths related to drugs and drug murders; military service itself, sort of paid suicidal duty; war death and maiming from that; also unemployment, and suicide itself; unsafe jobs; non-union shops; constantly low pay; poor health care; pregnancy problems and a high infant mortality rate; crime and prisons; prison life and prison death, the violence in those societies turned inward as an encouragement by the system; ongoing attacks by the police; KKK attacks and the growth of KKK and the right wing in this period, open racism; the rapes, the lynchings that continue right to this day; the murders, the cases going on in New York and in Atlanta; the disproportionate amount of Blacks that are affected by AIDS and other diseases, and the same for other People of Color; who gets health care or support; who has survival privilege; the population control policies, and where the information and the things are focused; like the zero growth movement that talks about not having to bother organizing Whites because they have a lower per capita birth rate, they have less babies, so to really make the population problem (as it’s called) end, you have to go after other people’s birth rates; the youth who, under the age of 18, in Black and other non-White communities, have probably the largest percent of unemployment and suicide rates; the destruction of the family itself, and the cohesiveness of any community structure from all these effects; the targeting of Black leadership and other leadership in the communities and political organization, and the threats to that leadership; and then the secret plans that exist for round-up of these populations into camps, and the concurrent genocide.

I think it’s important to note that the two people who devised the massive round-up plans for Central American refugees here, in case of a US intervention into Central America, were Oliver North in the Pentagon, and a Mr. Louis Guiffreda from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Guiffreda himself had earlier drafted a plan for Black Americans at the Army War College, in 1970. And his assistant in the FEMA Mobilization Planning Office has currently gotten a job as the Director of the Selective Service System. All draft and intervention planning at this point, is based on massive mobilization scenarios, worked out, in part, by Oliver North himself, like this "Rex 84" round-up plan, to take hundreds of thousands of Central American refugees into concentration centers here in the United States.

But this is really older plans that go back in our history. We didn’t have to wait for Nazi Germany to find out what a concentration camp was. We didn’t have to wait for them to find out what genocide was. We had functioned by it. The technology changed, but not the purpose. And I think there have been some critical things that have happened, that point the way to how this particular horror is carrying itself out.

One of those is the COINTELPRO and CHAOS programs from the 60s, that targeted Black leadership, and wanted to get rid of what they called "Black messiahs." Or any chance for people of color to have leadership in their own communities that could go some place. And these weren’t just idle plans. They were plans that were talked about and worked out at a very detailed level. The recent murders there in Atlanta, the children. And all the ridiculousness of taking this guy Wayne Williams, and even the parents knew that the murders continued after he was arrested. And hints about whether they were doing experimentation on the bodies. And information that KKK families had been involved in at least some of them. But way too many murders to be explained by one person. And an ongoing number of them.

And, I think another thing we haven’t looked at closely enough, is the situation in Cameroon, where all this gas supposedly came up off of a lake. It was waiting, somehow, in a bubble at the bottom of the lake, you know, against the laws of physics, for it’s chance to come up. With poison gas. First they said volcanic gas. Then they admitted no volcano. Now the world scientific community meets by the hundreds, and they can’t figure out what happened there. Supposedly this gas came up off of a lake naturally. People in the area heard explosions. And the gas came up and just kills everybody, literally, for a ten mile area, or radius around the area. It’s just tremendous. Everybody’s dead. It’s not gas, like raises with the wind, or pockets some place else, or goes here, you know like gas will. And it’s a gas that’s not lethal by itself, carbon dioxide, unless you’re in a situation where you can’t get any oxygen. And yet they say that this gas came out and murdered all these people.

But I was suspicious from the beginning of it because it looked like yet another mass death situation involving People of Color. I looked into it a little further and the investigators were the same old crew that I always see: the Center for Disease Control went, with the US Army Pathology Division. They’re over there in these planes; some doctors from Israel went, and they got on the plane with Peres before the incident was known to the government in Cameroon. If you take a look at the timing, they got on to go over there to look into an incident that, at least by all official accounts, the government didn’t know anything of. They leave Thursday night, and Friday morning they get the report.

And, although they were coming there (Peres and the others from Israel) to reestablish diplomatic relations that had been broken off for two years, the situation in secret was that the Cameroon military was being trained by the Israeli troops.

And, what Mae Brussell suggests is that they tested a neutron bomb. One of the reasons Vannunu was put in prison, for speaking out about the nuclear capability in Israel, was that he mentioned the neutron capability. And he’s been hushed up. He’s in jail, no one can get to him, there’s no public recourse. Because he spoke out about what was happening there.

Not to say they developed it on their own. Probably given it by US for that testing. But in any case it was those Israeli-trained troops that then went up into the area and got there first, and did what? They did a mass burial of all the bodies, with no autopsies. Also reminiscent of earlier situations. No one is allowed back in that area to this day by the government.

There were people living up there. It’s right on the border of Chad. It would not surprise me if a major development corporation goes in there fairly soon, and that there’s something there. But they felt they couldn’t manipulate that indigenous population to labor to get out of there, and so they just wiped them out. So they think either you control them or you move them . . . relocate them like what Richard is talking about . . . or you kill them. That’s the scenario when they’re ready to go for broke. And so it’s an expendable population. They were outside the government control, they were living some distance off from communications. A lot of them lived communally. They had a little different society than what was down in the cities and the concentrated populations. I think they were just a group that they felt they couldn’t control and so a good target population to do this. Whether it was a chemical or biological weapon, or in fact, a neutron bomb, is hard to say without the evidence. But it wasn’t what the government says it is.

The same situation with all those deaths in Bhopol. With the "accidental" spill of the gas there. I mean, how much is accident, and how much is to try to see both what will kill people and secondly what will our response be? Will our continued response to mass murders of People of Color around the world be silence? Be indifference? Be not taking the time to try to even find out what happened? Or will it instead be, a response that we would have, had that been a population that we belonged to? It’s the difference between Jackson State and Kent State. I mean, it’s whether or not we’re a human community, and whether or not all of our lives matter. This system doesn’t want us to think so. This decision with Goetz, for instance, is I think, an almost open season ruling. The guy on the New York subway that was supposedly approached by these kids, and got scared, and pulls out a gun and instead of just threatening them, starts to shoot them down. And is applauded openly by the racists and the right wing. Or the violence at Howard Beach. Or against this young woman now, up in New York.

These round-up lists that they have date back into the 50s. The McCarren Act, during the McCarthy period, allowed formally, for Federal institutions, prisons and other Japanese relocation camps from WWII. It’s interesting also, I mentioned to Richard yesterday, that they guy who directed one of the worst concentration camps for the Japanese, was rewarded by being given the job as the Director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, afterwards. See, because the pattern follows. And it’s not just one group. These are techniques that you can figure out how they work.

But I’ve talked to GI’s who’ve seen the round-up plans down to the neighborhood level. The isolation of people in certain parts of the community without access to the interstate highways. How certain things like gas, electricity or water can be cut off. And that’s thought through on a military level. And people are forced economically and otherwise into these areas that are easy to control, easy to surround. Once we go into a martial law situation, the interstate highways become military controlled roads, with no civilian access. They will be guarded.

At the time of Kent State, I talked to Guardsmen who were setting up the water and the gas and the food, for these prison centers. And were ready to round-up, had people instead of being scared by Kent State, and backing off, had students gone into the street (we were in the middle of a nationwide strike on the campuses against Cambodian involvement) had they reacted the other way and gotten angry, the Government was ready to round them up. With the National Guard. And they had eighteen camps open. They have thirty six camps, constantly maintained now that we know about. Those things exist.

It’s not impossible for them, by manipulating weather, by manipulating heat from outer space, to create droughts or famine in certain areas. And quite often those areas, after the people move out or die, are then developed. And miraculously recover. The water table comes back up. You know, and then they’re a profit to the system. To the corporations and to the system that wanted to move them out.

I think another recent example that we should have had more reaction to, was the Move situation in Philadelphia. And now yet another "explosive device" has been used in Maryland. In October, in a Black community there. You remember "explosive device"? That’s a police name for a police bomb. You know, a bomb dropped on a house, and a whole neighborhood burned down. People repeatedly asked the firemen to turn on the hoses, and they refused. And the only excuse given, "Oh," they said, "The people in the Move house would shoot at them, if they went out there and ran the hoses." I mean, these weren’t things that you just have to stand there and hold the hose 15 feet from the house. It’s all the way across the street. But they wanted the area to burn down.

And I looked into the background of the police that did it, and they were the same police that attacked the other Move house and razed it to the ground in l978. The old Rizzo cop team. They just waited until they got Green, the Mayor, out of town for a little bit, and then they went in. They went for broke.

And it was a military operation. I talked to people who knew that they were testing the helicopter and dropping the bomb on a little house down at the Army bases in New Jersey. Till they got it perfected, so they could drop it right in. Also, the Move attack represents, clearly, the militarization of police. You remember when they shot Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, one of the ways we found out what happened was that people went in the house and they put these ballistic rods through the rooms, and they figured out that 400 police bullets went in and 2 bullets went out. OK? Well, after the Move shootout, within 48 hours, a special police demolition team . . . have you ever heard of one of them? Do you have one out here in San Francisco? A police demolition team razed the house to the ground. So that there was no evidence to work with. Now that’s Fascism. I mean, attack is one thing. But the Fascism is where all the evidence is destroyed.

At Jackson State, after they calmed down and stopped shooting for a few minutes, the next thing they did was to start to remove all the wall panels where there were bullet holes. All over the buildings. And the outside walls. So that they couldn’t find any evidence. And everybody was picking up shells. The only way they finally got any evidence in, was that a State Trooper got mad, and didn’t want the State Troopers to be blamed for all of it, so he gave them some shells, he gave the investigators some shells from the local police. So that they wouldn’t get blamed. Otherwise they had all been picked up and the incident had been denied. So what, you got 6 people shot?

And, because we don’t look, and because we’re silent, I think that they they feel they can go on with this. These experiments we talked about, the syphilis experiments? They also tested lactose gas, because they know that a number of Black people have trouble digesting dairy products. And so they wanted to find out: what are they reacting to? can we gasify it? and can we concentrate it enough to make it lethal? And then, in their dream world, they’re going to kill only Blacks. But they don’t understand, that they can’t get these things to kill just one group of people; and that the groups of people just aren’t that different. They’d like to believe that they’re that different. They’d like to believe that there’s some sort of pure White genetic strain in the United States. But, the reality is, that the people just aren’t that different.

They studied blood types, from the 50s on, extensive studies, of blood types. They tried to determine, ethnic differences, genetic differences in blood. So I think it’s very interesting that AIDS, somehow, is a blood disease. Because this is exactly the area they looked at for racially and ethnically-oriented chemical/biological warfare.

Now they want to do some kind of early detection of sickle cell babies and abort them, once they find them. Well, sickle cell isn’t always fatal. The abortion will be.

So it’s not by choice except by choice of the state which babies they want born and which ones not. Which was eventually the point they came to between the wars. They had mass sterilization in Nazi Germany, but it started here in Indiana in l926. And it spread to over 30 states. So it was automatic that people with certain mental illnesses, and so-called retardation, which is often just the racist effects of the IQ test, and the tracking in the schools, that gets you into this retarded category. But those people aren’t going to be allowed to have babies, because they have to "protect the gene pool."

We talked a little bit before about Grenada. Grenada’s a pretty telling example (Nicaragua’s yet another one, El Salvador too) of the fact that they don’t want indigenous communities to have control over their own lives, over their own resources, over their own politics.

That’s all they mean when they talk about "Democracy" and "Communism." Those words don’t mean anything to this system. "Democracy" means we can control them, "Communism" means we can’t. [laughter] That’s what they mean. When the people come up to you and they say, "We want democracy and blah blah blah," they mean, "We want to be able to go in with the corporations, exploit the labor, steal the resources. Anybody against that, then that’s what Communism is." That’s all we’re talking about. They have you believing it’s some kind of great difference in systems.

Well, it is a great difference when people control their own lives; when people take back the power to make decisions about what happens to them. It’s a revolutionary difference. They want us to believe that those societies where people try to do that are "Communist," and they do their damnedest to isolate them economically and break their back, and they then say, "See, it doesn’t work," to you. But the reality is, that even if what’s being adopted on the face of it is these societies "calling" themselves "Communist," it doesn’t matter. It’s not the rhetoric that matters, it’s the control level that matters. Who is in charge? That’s what you have to look at.

But in the Grenada thing, their going after this New Jewel movement, in the independent Black community there, and trying to crush it because they don’t want it to be an example in Caribbean region. Then they set up this phoney Organization of Eastern Caribbean States under a Kissinger protege, who had headed up NATO and the Allied Intelligence in Europe, and he worked in there, and he comes in, and then we claim that we were invited by six Caribbean countries to go in and invade another Caribbean country. I mean it would be like if six of you wanted to go out back right now and beat the shit out of somebody. And you invited me along, and when the police came, I said, "I was just invited by the other six." [laughter] "You got no charge against me." What does it mean to be invited by countries to invade other countries? Some kind of neutral position?.

This little country, they’re no threat to anybody. They’re putting in an airport so they can deliver their spice, and we’re supposed to believe, like, the minute there’s an airport anywhere within an thousand miles south of us, the Soviet Union has already taken us over. So it’s only purpose could have been to land big Soviet military planes, and what? Launch the invasion of the United States from Grenada? I mean, how many Soviets could fit there? [laughter] Maybe enough to take over Newark. The joke on the East coast was, "Why didn’t Reagan invade Rhode Island?" It’s too big! [loud laughter and applause]

But on the field, they tried to use their best Black troops, the 101st and 82nd Airborne. The traditional front line troops. But these are predominantly Black units.

Audience Member: Why?

John Judge: Why are they predominantly Black? There’s a series of reasons for that. There’s a predominance, first, of Blacks who go into the military in the first place, under economic impressment in the poverty draft. There’s a large number of People of Color, Hispanics and Blacks, disproportionate to their general representation in the population. Secondly, there’s a concentration of those people just by the tests that they do in the military are racist. They have these skills tests, called ASVAB and they route all the Black and Third World people into the dead end jobs and a lot of them into infantry. But also, I think there’s a cultural matter that, within the Black community, with the few outlets that there are for somebody to sort of make something of themselves, or come to manhood, prove themselves, the military has, since the integration in WWII, been a way, for certain Blacks, to get a certain amount of prestige for themselves, to prove themselves, you know, as people, as men or women, to show that they could do something. It’s a chance sometimes for somebody to advance, not many but a certain percentage do well, or at least become NCO’s in the military, and can make a career out of it. And it used to be, it’s much worse now, but it used to be a way to get housing afterwards, like the GI Bills, get education thought a lot of that’s been stripped, away now. So there were those reasons, and the idea of sort of, the proving the manhood, I think is a piece of it, of like, being the toughest of the troops. And being the ones who can go out there. But, they knew, since Vietnam, that it was also those troops, Black and Third World troops, who were the ones that led the struggle in the field, to stop the war. Because they were the quickest to get the point, that they were going out killing people on behalf of a country, that wasn’t treating them much better than the people they were attacking. And they could see that those people were living in about the same relation, with some economic differences, you know, but about the same relation they were living back home. So why go fight this war against those People of Color, on behalf of a society that wasn’t going do deal with them when they came back, anyway, and never had.

The very first march against Vietnam came out of Harlem. Down into New York, and the signs were: No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger. [Applause] That was the organizing point. And that slogan, you remember, "Hell no, we won’t go," that was SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. That was their organizing slogan. All the first Vietnam stuff came out of the Black community, and they know that. And they were afraid of it because it was effective in the field. And the Blacks could organize much quicker than Whites. Whites have to build a coffee house, and have a newspaper for ten months. Over night, the Blacks could see what’s coming down, and this happened, and bam! you’ve got an organized thing. Because they’re a little more used to getting messed with so they have a little more natural response to understanding the oppression.

And then there were very bad racial situations everywhere that the Blacks were, and still, in the military, and Klan organizing and all that stuff. In any case, they were afraid, since Vietnam, and they still are, of how these troops were going to perform. And they were very wary of Grenada, because here they were sending Black troops into an English-speaking Black country, that they would refuse. And they did, they refused. We helped Corporal Al Griffin, who said "I’m not going to shoot Blacks in Grenada, I’m not going to shoot Moslems in Lebanon." He wouldn’t go either place, and he was a model Marine, he’d been in the White House. And they court marshaled him. We helped to try to get him legal defense. And we talked to a lot of AWOL’s coming back. And many of those units refused to fight there.

One of the things that happened out of that, is that part of the 101st, which was, again, a largely Black unit, was moved out of the situation in Lebanon. Eventually some of the ones that went to Grenada then went overseas there (they were sending the units both ways) and they flew out of there in this plane. Aero Air, was the company. It was a commercial carrier, and the plane was no good. It was bottoming out every time it tried to take off, and it did that twice, and then it crashed in Newfoundland. And you had this, about 180, if my memory’s right on the figure, predominantly Black, 140? [in response to a correction offered by a member of the audience] anyway, it was a lot of people died in this crash, I don’t remember the exact number, but it was quite a few, and predominantly Black troops.

At the same time, I was reading Army Times, and right after Grenada, all of the planning for the Rapid Deployment Force, (which was this idea of, taking a force, like quick as they could, somewhere in the world.) they dropped the 82nd and 101st from all the future planning for the RDF. And they went to the White division concept, and they made up these new ten thousand person divisions. In the interim they were going to use the 191st out of Dyess Air Force Base, which is a 90% White unit. And then, when I looked at the pictures of the new guys coming out of Campbell to fill up the 101st, they were almost all White, in the training units. So they wanted to change the race composition after Grenada

The situation that I found when I looked into Jonestown, is the last thing that I just want to touch on, and one of the worst. Jones grew up in Southern Indiana, in a Klan family. His father was KKK. He grew up in a racist environment. He was not an anti-racist. He was a phoney bible-thumper preacher, fake healer, from the time he was fairly young. And he was friends, back there in Indiana, for a long time, family friends and otherwise, with an older kid, who eventually moved into a position in the police department in Indianapolis when Jones went up and did his tent healing shows in Indianapolis. And in the Sheriff’s office this guy was there, his friend. And usually, you do those tent healings, and you start ripping people off, and you can get chased out of town by the law, pretty quick. But he had police cover. I think from his friend. And his friend’s name was Dan Mitrione.

Now Dan Mitrione went on to the International Police Academy, and then he was moved to Brazil to work with USAID funding, to do torture training, taking the old Nazi torture methods from WWII, and training the secret police in Central America. And one of the first places he did that was down in Brazil. And he was out of Minas Gerais, and it was during those years that a Green Beret, part of the Operation Phoenix program, and the killing in Vietnam, the genocide there, named Charles Beekman, came into Jones’ temple, and his wife, back there in Indiana, and Jones suddenly had this idea that he ought to go to Brazil. And he took his family, and Beekman, and went down to Brazil, and he lived in a house down there, and the neighbors said that the cars that would come and drive him around and deliver his groceries, were from the US embassy. While he lived in Brazil. And he told the neighbors that he was working for Naval Intelligence, while he was down there. And his son, in one interview I found, said that he spent a lot of time going out to Minas Gerais and visiting with Mitrione at the CIA headquarters out there.

Then he suddenly had a hundred thousand dollars and he came back to the United States. He told his followers that he had slept with the Ambassador’s wife, and she had paid him that much for the sex. [laughter] So, I mean, you can make what you want of that story. But he came back, and he moved out to Ukiah, California, and he set up this Happy Havens Rest Home, and he didn’t have a license, he didn’t have a medical degree. But suddenly he got 150 children as wards of the court. He got elderly out of the homes. He got psychiatric inmates out of the institutions. He got people coming in there out of all different institutional settings. They were handed over into his care.

I have pictures of the place: it has barbed wire, it had an electric fence, it has armed guards in black boots and black uniforms guarding the perimeters. These people were taken in there, to so-called Happy Havens Rest Home, and they began the pressure and experimentation there.

It was during that period that the top lieutenants moved in: the Layton family, and the Blakeys eventually were to come, and Terry Buford. Now, these people were not people off the street, who just wandered in, messed up, looking for some kind of a religious ecstasy.

Larry Layton is from an aristocratic family. His father, who was a professor, out in Pennsylvania, in the 50s, although he claimed to be a Quaker, he was appointed Head of all chemical and biological warfare research, for l956 up into the mid-60s, at Dugway Proving Grounds, in Utah. Which was also one of the places that all this radiation was blowing across, and Larry Layton’s mother died of cancer, I believe from that radiation, years later, down in Jonestown. His mother, was from Germany. Her initial claim when she came and met him, was that she was a Methodist. She always told the children she was a Methodist, and then they became Quakers. But after Jonestown, she told the children a completely different story, and said that she had been a Jewish girl who had run from the Nazis, but that she didn’t want to bring that up to the children. In hiding her Jewishness and hiding her escape from the Nazis. And that her parents had been on a train on the way to a death camp, but they had gotten ill on the train, so the train stopped and they were taken off, and saved by other people. [laughter]

Now these are the stories that she was telling in the New York Times. I mean, huh!?!

Her father, Hugo Phillips, was a stockbroker for Interessen Gemeinschaft Farben, IG Farben, the huge Nazi dye and drug cartel, that brought Hitler to power.

Terry Buford’s father was the head of Naval Intelligence at the fleet in Philadelphia, for many, many years.

Blakey, married into the family. Debbie Layton married George Blakey when the family sent her to be educated at an upper class school in England. His parents are major investors and stockholders in Solvay Drugs which is the largest pharmaceutical subsidiary of Interessen Gemeinschaft Farben, IG Farben.

So they came from Nazi money. They came from aristocratic wealth. They weren’t from nowhere.

Timothy Stone and his wife Grace: He was from the Justice Department. He was well placed here in San Francisco. And while Jones was in Ukiah, his best friend was Walter Headley, the head of the John Birch Society there. And he was using people in his encampment to write letters in favor of Nixon going into office, and had been right wing all along.

Suddenly, when it was time to bring him into San Francisco, he changed the tune, and came in here as a liberal. In a political vacuum, and used the techniques that he had studied under Father Divine, a Black charismatic religious leader in Philadelphia (the techniques that I just mean in terms of the recruiting and the preaching) in order to bring people into the church here and make it seem as though it were progressive or liberal. To compromise the liberal community here, who would support him.

But still, the vast majority of people coming to him were not, again, converts, but people who he got because Mayor Moscone put him in charge of the Housing Authority and appointed many of his people into jobs in the Welfare rolls. And it was off of those rolls, of the indigenous Black community, that they made up the bulk of the People’s Temple.

When he began to be exposed here, he took those people and put them in buses, he stuffed the children into the luggage racks, underneath. He drove all the way to Florida, he got on Pan Am planes, and there’s a whole other history of who Pan Am is (but it’s the same money and the same people that are involved in these other assassinations and things) and the Pan Am plane landed in Guyana. And I talked to the air traffic controller there, who was present at the time, and he told me every Black that came off the plane was bound and gagged. He told me that people who lived as close as 5 miles away, and I’ve gotten this from other sources, in the bush, did not know that there was a single Black living at Matthew’s Ridge in Guyana. All they had ever seen were the Whites. Because the Whites were the only ones allowed in and out of the camp, allowed to have money; allowed to carry a gun; allowed to go into the city.

In the city they were paying off Black and Indian women to sell their babies. Which they were taking back to the camp. And all of these people were being experimented on by Dr. Lawrence Schacht, the camp doctor, and a crew of about 40 nurses. For a population of about 1200 people, 40 nurses. And he was infamous for participating in the torture, for doing suturing without anesthetic. I believe that he is none other than the grandson of Hjalmar Schacht, the Reichminister of Economics, who moved to Houston Texas where Larry Schacht’s family is from, at the end of the war. And it was Hjalmar Schacht who invented the slogan, over the gate at Auschwitz: Arbeit Macht Frei, "Work will make you free." That’s the family that I think Schacht is from, and carrying on the tradition.

The people there knew that this was a slave labor camp, a concentration camp. They were drugged day in and day out. There were enough drugs found on site, after the massacre, to drug the entire population of Georgetown, Guyana, a city of over l00000 people, for more than a year. Being used on a population of 1200 people. In one foot locker alone, there were ll,000 doses of Thorazine. The other drugs that were named on the site were the exact drugs that I have been following all through my research of CIA MK/ULTRA and MK/DELTA and MK/NAOMI. They were the mind control drugs.

They had the drugs, they worked them 16-18 hours a day, they fed them poorly, they disoriented them, they kept them up all night yelling at them with lectures, lack of sleep, classic conditioning techniques.

They also abused them physically: they had sensory deprivation cells, live burials, wells for the children, electric prods to torture them with, public rape, sexual humiliation in public, and any combination of techniques they could think of.

They kept extensive notes. All those notes disappeared. I believe Schacht disappeared. His name wasn’t in the first list of the dead; it only showed up later in the second list.

There were, by all accounts, 1100-1200 people there. Original press report: 400 dead, 700 flee into the woods. Evaluation of the number of people there: 800 adults with passports, 300 children. These add to 1100. How many dead in the final count? 915 How many official survivors returned to the United States? 16. Where are the rest? Who were they?

They were the trained guards. The sadistic torturers. The programmed killers. The ones who came to Port Kaituma and were described as acting mechanically, moving without emotion in their face, picking certain people to kill, not bothering with others; zombies was the word used to describe them. Programmed killers. Mind controlled killers.

Phillip Blakey was putting them on boats and shipping them to Angola, for use by Joseph Savimibi in the CIA-controlled UNITA forces, as mercenaries. Afterwards, they moved to the Honduran camps of the Contras, and for mercenary work in Central America.

The main leadership (Blakey, Stephen Jones, the son of Jim Jones, the people that were at the top, the White lieutenants), went to Trinidad briefly, stopped off in Panama and drained a Swiss bank account under the name Associacion Religioso do San Pedro, the Religious Association of Saint Peter, which I believe was one of the Vatican money front companies for Roberto Calvi, in the Panama shell companies. In a bank account there, under that name, took 5,000,000 dollars out of it, and went where? Where did they set up shop?

Grenada. Who did they work with? Dr. Peter Borne and Sir Jeffrey Borne, the two MK/ULTRA experts from the Vietnam period. Who tested methadone in Vietnam. Who worked at the Yerkes Primate Research Center on monkeys. Who know the drugs and the techniques. Dr. Peter Borne was responsible for setting up the the methadone programs in the Black communities all over the United States. He finally got chased out of the Carter White House, briefly, because of a drug scandal.

They were the ones that set up the medical school. They were the ones that set up the hospitals there. And the mental hospital, which was the only building bombed in Grenada. And I have the Air Force magazine reports bragging about the accuracy. It wasn’t a mistake. It was the only building bombed. They even talked about pumping 40,000,000 dollars back in there to build a new one.

And what happened to the bodies? Mass burial. Within 48 hours. No autopsies. That was the continuation of Jonestown, up in that area.

When Dr. Mootoo came on site and found the bodies, he found 408, the vast majority, 80-90%, with a fresh needle mark on the back of their arms, without a single sign of cyanide pathology, with no hint of suicide, in neat rows, face down, calm and dead. The remainder he found were either strangled or shot.

Over the next 5-6 days, the count went up, until it reached 915. In order to explain it ending up with 915, the Army said the Guyanese couldn’t count. They said there were bodies on top of bodies. They said that families fell in piles together. Their final explanation, all those failing, was that they had forgotten to go to the back of the pavilion for 6 days, and they found 500 bodies there.

The reason the body count went up, is that 700 did flee into the woods, but they were surrounded. They were surrounded by British Black Watch troops, the equivalent of our Green Berets, on maneuvers at Matthew’s Ridge those days. They were surrounded by about 200 American Green Berets, who were not doing the body clean up, but creating the bodies. And they were surrounded by Guyanese troops, about 350 strong, that had been trained under the auspices of Dan Mitrione.

They were murdered. They were dragged back to the camp. You can see the drag marks. You can see the shot marks on the bodies. And then they were left to rot. They were stripped of all medical tags (you can see them in the early photos because they were under experimentation) under the orders of who? Robert Pastor; taking his orders from Alexander Haig; taking his orders from Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Carter administration.

Stripped the bodies of all identification. Even the little tags that Dr. Mootoo put on, with the help of Odell Rhodes were taken off, and then let them rot for 6 days in the sun. They claimed you can’t bring more than 43 bodies back in these huge C-5 Starlifters. They dragged them off to the other end of the country to a military mortuary.

They got an open letter, from the American College of Medical Examiners to the US Army, criticizing them because they could have done fluid autopsy on the site. Dr. Mootoo asked for help. The US Pathology Institute people, and the CDC people arrived without any autopsy equipment, or chemicals. To the mass "suicide site" of Jonestown.

They didn’t want an autopsy done. They didn’t want us to know what drugs were in the bodies. They didn’t want us to identify who they were and who they weren’t. They wanted them dead and finished with. They murdered all of them. They came on television and told us the racist lie that Black parents squirted poison in their kids’ mouths. And instead of rising up and saying, "What the hell happened there?" for the most part, we were silent.

But we can turn these things around, if we will look at them. If we’ll just use simple arithmetic, would tell you, that if you start with 408 bodies, and end up with 915, the 408 have a lot of covering to do, don’t they? Especially if a third of them are children.

These things are obvious if you will look. If you will just have the idea in your mind, that this government is killing people. It’s doing genocide right now. It’s doing it with your tax money. And in your name. And if you don’t understand how the Germans could have let that happen, go home and think about it. [stunned silence followed by loud applause]

Next | Contents | Prev