Nixon Policy Advisor Admits He Invented War On Drugs to Suppress 'Anti-War Left and Black People

Not that this is a surprise to me. This is the same party / line of thinking that brought us the Southern Strategy:

Namely, trading on people's racism and fear to distract from their economic difficulties and using "coded language" to vilify people they hate.

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Both examples above are exactly what I mean when I talk about systemic White Supremacy and injustice. Things that have been written off by "average people" as excuse making and conspiracies.

There's a particular quirk of human psychology that would rather see us blame victims than believe that the world can be such an inhumane, cold place.

That these things are coming out years after these men are dead is telling and typical whitewashing of crimes against humanity as footnotes of history, while we stumble along allowing history to repeat itself "to our surprise".

It's time we grew up.

That the same divisive tactics that colour codes classism of the most nefarious kind is still working...well...that's not lost on me either.

The war on drugs has cost trillions of dollars, turned places like Mexico & Jamaica into virtual narco-states and devastated millions of Black people in the United States and all over the world. The CIA was implicated in trafficking of cocaine into South Central LA by journalist Gary Webb.

Gary Webb was later found dead. Apparently he committed suicide...by shooting himself in the back of the head twice. His explorations ultimately lead to the Iran-Contra scandal.

There are currently more Black men in jail now in the United States than have ever been enslaved. Most of them on non-violent drug offences. Democrats / Liberals aren't free from this either. Clinton's drug laws saw the penalties for crack cocaine be much harsher than those for powdered cocaine. Guess who mostly traded street level crack.

That race is a sociological fact, not a biological one is lost on alot of people, but carries with it great implications of who we are and who we want to be as humans and as a society.

That we live in a profoundly racist society where people's "tough on crime" attitudes are directly correlated with anti-Black views is a fact. Explicit racism has been vilified while "implicit bias" runs amok with the same end result: shitty lives for people of colour...mainly Black people.

That something so superficial has been played on systemically and is still effective to this day is troublesome. The question now is: will history be set straight? Will justice be done? How will these wrongs be righted?

KB