(234)S11E3/2: True Conspiracy of Racism - McNamara's Morons
Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. In this episode, we get to take a look at another true conspiracy, an event that we know actually happened. Having done quite a lot of reading in regard to racial issues over the past few years, this was a difficult episode for me to whittle down to a single conspiracy. If you'd ask anyone on the street which conspiracy would be the best one to discuss in regard to racism, chances are almost certain that if they knew any history at all, they'd refer you to the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. Everyone knows about that one.
Derek:But going with the Tuskegee experiment seemed a little bit blase for me. But not only did it feel too safe of a choice, it also seemed like a choice that was too dangerous. See, this season is all about undermining propaganda, and propaganda's job is to normalize ideas. As I've said multiple times already this season, propaganda makes atrocities possible or it makes them unbelievable. It makes the dehumanization of another group normal and certain so that one can dispose of them like refuse, or it makes the righteousness and incorruptibility of one's own group so certain that one would think our group incapable of so great and evil.
Derek:And I think had I gone with presenting the Tuskegee experiment for my conspiracy selection here, I would have just been feeding into the racist narrative which persists today. Just think about it. Would the average person on the street cite the Tuskegee study as the best example of a racial conspiracy because it is legitimately the best example? Or would they cite the study simply because it's the only racial conspiracy they know of? Now I'd wager that the average person, if they could even name the Tuskegee experiment, probably couldn't tell you about any other true conspiracies.
Derek:In that regard, the Tuskegee study has itself become a means of propagandizing the masses. When blacks or other minorities have a distrust of the state, we say, oh, come on. You don't trust the government or science because of something that largely happened before the civil rights era? Get over yourself. It was one conspiracy, and it happened so long ago.
Derek:Bringing the Tuskegee study to light and only or almost exclusively shining the light on that study is a way to minimize the distrust of the black community for those in authority. Propaganda can be a very wicked and devious jiu jitsu sort of thing in in this regard. By embracing the one great evil of the Tuskegee study, the propagandizers can make the black community look paranoid, stupid, and foolish. They can assert that such an evil is a fluke that isn't repeated, so we can really trust authority now. And they can deny any sort of systemic nature of racist mistreatment and atrocity because one lone event can't be considered systemic.
Derek:So in light of that thought process, I wanna present to you a different true conspiracy. It's a conspiracy that is larger in nature, impacting hundreds of thousands of more individuals than the Tuskegee study, and one which is just as recent as Tuskegee. Now maybe you're gonna disagree with my selection here and think it's not really the best example, but it's an example that I haven't heard many people really talk about, and something that I think is is pretty representative. And so I'm going with it. So today, I want to talk about McNamara's Morons.
Derek:Now McNamara's Morons isn't the kindest of titles when you discover that we're talking about people with intellectual disabilities here. Words like retard, idiot, and moron are extremely caustic when we hear them today. This change in values from the past, or at least a change in social pressure, which requires many to mask their true values, is probably why author Hamilton Gregory entitled his book McNamara's Folly rather than McNamara's Morons, as the subjects that he writes about were commonly known as the the more caustic version. But I don't really like that change because changing the language actually caves into propaganda and allows it to win, and that it whitewashes the reality of what was going on. To call something of folly is to say, hey.
Derek:You know what? Some mistakes were made. It's tragic, but, you know, we've all learned our lesson now. Let's leave the past in the past and move on. A folly is just a mistake, and errors aren't generally thought of as cruel justice issues.
Derek:So keeping the harsh language, I think, is vital to seeking clarity. And I do appreciate that although Gregory has softened the title of his book, he still does use plenty of moron language throughout the book and refuses to whitewash the language throughout when he quotes others. I think that's a a very important and great thing. Okay. So McNamara's morons, what is this true conspiracy all about?
Derek:Well, we have to travel all the way back to 1955. Nineteen '50 '5 marks the year in which the Vietnam conflict began for The United States, a war which was drawn out for twenty years until 1975. However, the first ten years of the war, or I guess it was a conflict at that point, didn't, pose too much of a strain on The United States in terms of personnel commitments because it was a relatively low key conflict. The low key conflict changed in 1964 with the Gulf Of Tonkin incident. In the Gulf Of Tonkin, off the coast of Vietnam, a US ship claimed that it was attacked by North Vietnamese forces.
Derek:This seemingly overt aggression by the North Vietnamese caused Congress to move forward with giving president Johnson leeway to escalate the war in Vietnam. With the passage of the Gulf Of Tonkin Resolution, Johnson committed to sending many more troops and resources to fight in the Vietnam War. Now on a side note, the Gulf Of Tonkin Incident is a well known true conspiracy in and of itself, which became verified conspiracy with the work of insider Daniel Ellsberg, the the guy who released the Pentagon Papers in 1971, and who had first hand accounts of the cables that were coming in on the Gulf of Tonkin incident. So the government knew that the North Vietnamese were not really to blame for an attack, which was the pretense for The United States going to all out war against North Vietnam. Maybe the use of a conspiracy is a little strong, considering how we usually understand the word.
Derek:Maybe this this Gulf Of Tonkin incident was really more like a jumping of the gun and a strong ignoring of facts, which subsequently were covered up. The incident wasn't a conspiracy, but the cover up sure was. Now the event which led to tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese to lose their lives was untrue. Of course, the war may have ended up escalating on some other grounds later, but still, the war that we got was built on a lie. Many lies really, but, you know, the one that kicked it off was at least the Gulf Of Tonkin.
Derek:But let's get back to McNamara's story right now. In 1964, the Gulf Of Tonkin rev resolution meant that the conflict in Vietnam was ratcheted up, and that that meant that more bodies were needed to sacrifice to the god of war. And that's all well and good for we Americans who are used to appeasing this god, but the Vietnam conflict came right off the heels of two other wars, World War two and the Korean War. World War two took the lives of over 400,000 soldiers and ended in 1945. Only five years later, The US entered a three year conflict with North Korea, which ended the lives of another 40,000 soldiers.
Derek:The very next year after the Korean War ended, The US committed to the conflict in Vietnam. By 1964, the United States had had nearly twenty five straight years of conflict. They were facing a cold war, nuclear age, and they were dealing with civil rights turmoil at home. Needless to say, it wasn't the best time to recruit troops. By 1966, '2 years after the Gulf Of Tonkin Resolution began to surge troops into Vietnam, The US was facing a significant shortage of soldiers.
Derek:Whenever there's a problem, you know, governments are ready and willing to provide solutions to these problems. The solution to the military problem was presented by secretary of defense Robert McNamara in 1966 and became known as project 100,000. Project 100,000 is what we, in this episode, refer to as McNamara's morons or McNamara's folly. Though McNamara presented the idea for project 100,000, it is attributed by some to directly connect back to Patrick Moynihan. And I didn't find enough information to determine whether Moynihan had a direct hand in the idea for project 100,000, but he certainly was influential at least indirectly.
Derek:If you start reading anything about politics in the nineteen sixties and on, or if you read anything about race relations and racism coming through the civil rights era, you're gonna run into Moynihan's name quite a bit. Moynihan is one of those guys who seems kinda sleazy, at least to me. Car car salesman type sleazy stereotype sort of thing. I'm I'm sorry. I I always bring in car salesman.
Derek:And I'm I'm sorry. I know there's probably some car salesman out there who listens to this and is just like, I hate that. But we're we're going with stereotypes here. Anyway, he's not he's not your overt racist at the time, but rather one of those racists who couches their racism as benevolent. And regardless of whether Moynihan's influence in project 100,000 was direct or indirect, the influence was certainly there.
Derek:And I just wanna read an excerpt from an article, on project 100,000, which I think summarizes how, you know, McNamara and Moynihan and all this stuff played out a little bit. Quote, in 1966, during a speech in New York City, Secretary Of Defense Robert McNamara announced that he would lower the mental and physical standards for admission into the armed services. McNamara based his decision on government reports, which had studied the rejectees. He promised that the new program, project 100,000, would uplift America's subterranean poor and cure them of the idleness, ignorance, and apathy which marked their lives, proclaiming that these young men have not had the opportunity to earn their fair share of the nation's abundance, but they can be given an opportunity to return to civilian life with skills and aptitudes. The secretary predicted that men recruited under project 100,000 would return to civilian world able to earn two or three times the amount that they would have earned had they not entered the military.
Derek:Although the original announcement of project 100,000 did not specifically mention the problems of black Americans, in a speech called social inequities, urban racial ills, presented to the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, the secretary of defense claimed that project 100 that 100,000 was created to assist black men in overcoming a heritage of poverty and deprivation. McNamara claimed that the DOD had the potential for contributing to the solution of the social problems wracking our nation. He described project 100,000 as a step towards restoring the self respect of these men, citing high black failure rates on the armed forces qualification test, as well as Moynihan's theory of the cycle of family poverty. An excerpt from the speech reads, what these men badly need is a sense of personal achievement, a sense of succeeding at some task, a sense of their own intrinsic potential. They have grown up in an atmosphere of drift and discouragement.
Derek:It is not simply the sometimes squalid ghettos of their external environment that has debilitated them, but an internal and more destructive ghetto of personal disillusionment and despair, a ghetto of the human spirit. End quote. So what was the government's solution to their plight, to their military weakness, and their lack of bodies to offer on the altar of freedom? Their solution was benevolence. American people weren't doing the government a favor by providing more sacrificial victims.
Derek:No. No. No. The government was doing the people a favor. And not just any people, mind you.
Derek:The government was stooping down to include the most downtrodden and the most outcast of them all. They were willing that none should perish, but that all should come to military service. They would be redeemed by the shedding of their blood and the remission of their ignorance. The government, through the military, would take the poor of the nation and enlighten them, train them, equip them with the skills, and redeem them as productive citizens worthy to live out in our great nation. While on paper, project 100,000 lowered the standards for all potential recruits, blacks, whites, Hispanics, Native Americans, or anything else, given the demographics of the nation and McNamara's explicit rationale for redeeming blacks in his social inequity speech, the minority community and especially blacks were going to be significantly impacted by this policy.
Derek:And this discrimination wasn't a new addition to the war, but something which was already going on. As the New York Times article linked in the show notes says, quote, African Americans also complained that they were disproportionately drafted, assigned to combat units, and killed in Vietnam. Statistics from the first three years of the war support these complaints. African Americans represented approximately 11% of the civilian population. Yet in 1967, they represented 16.3% of all draftees and 23% of all combat troops in Vietnam.
Derek:In 1965, African Americans accounted for nearly twenty five percent of all combat deaths in Vietnam. By 1967, this percentage had dropped considerably to twelve point seven percent. But the perception that blacks were more likely to be drafted and killed remained widespread, end quote. It was in that year, 1967, that doctor Martin Luther King Junior gave his famous speech, Beyond Vietnam, at Riverside Church. In that speech, doctor King blasted the war in Vietnam for the first time really overtly and in such a strong manner, as well as the domestic war on the poor.
Derek:Now, coincidentally, or not coincidentally, doctor King was assassinated exactly one year to the day from making that speech on 04/04/1968. Talking about race was dangerous, but bringing the military industrial complex and class into the discussion was a death warrant. King could rightly see who was being sacrificed on the altar. It was the poor, Both the poor brown bodies of the Vietnamese and the poor brown and black bodies of Americans. Those who are being sacrificed were those deemed disposable by society.
Derek:And now McNamara wanted to extend the disposable class by lowering IQ requirements and other standards, allowing, as Johnson and McNamara called them, second class citizens to be recruited and drafted. Now there are a few things that you need to understand about project 100,000 in order to really grasp the depths of the depravity involved here. If war is hell, then its purveyors are devils, and their recruits are tragic victims of all of the devil's hubris. But we have to ask why some victims were selected and not others. Why did the devils go after a population which centered around lower IQ individuals?
Derek:First, they did this because they knew the demographics of this group. Many of the individuals who tested as having a lower IQ did so because they didn't speak English, or English wasn't their first language, or because they were illiterate, or hadn't finished school. Of course, there were also plenty of others who legitimately had lower natural IQs. But the point is that this demographic tended to draw from a lower class and statistically, a higher percentage of minorities. And there's a second thing that you need to grasp here.
Derek:You have to understand that a primary motivator for politicians has been and still is to avoid pissing off the middle class. That's something that we're gonna talk more about in our next section on corporate propaganda, but it's it's really vital to understand. It's a a common thread you're gonna see constantly. The middle class is important because they are a large group of majority voters, white. This group has power not only in votes, but also in understanding how to access the system.
Derek:They have the means to access the system. They can contact senators, hire lawyers, and make a ruckus. Politicians don't like a ruckus, particularly in a population which could potentially vote against them. Gregory, in his book, McNamara's Folly, talks about all the ways that the middle class was able to avoid the draft by spending money on college or and I I couldn't believe this, but, getting braces. Yeah.
Derek:Braces could give you a medical deferral. You just shell out, like, $15,000 in today's dollars or something, and and that's something that, you know, only the the middle class or higher is gonna be able to do, you know, to buy your ticket out of the draft. There are all kinds of ways to get out of the draft if you wanted to and if you had access to the system, if you had the appropriate resources. Project 100,000 candidates did not tend to have access to the system because of their lack of financial and political resources. As Gregory points out in his book, that's why when you looked at plots of war death in particular cities like, you know, say Dallas, you'd inevitably find that those killed came from Spanish speaking sections of the city or poor black sections, while the wealthy sections remained largely unscathed.
Derek:Politicians need to avoid angering the middle class because not only does the middle class have more power, but they are a buffer between the poor and the wealthy. As long as the middle class is content, the plight of the poor can carry on, and the wealthy politicians won't be touched. It's basically the same thing that happened with the poor whites and the blacks in the South after slavery. While the blacks and the poor whites should have shared more in common interest against the plantation owners who exploited them both, It was easier and more convenient for the poor whites to join with the plantation owners and have a little bit of power by having the blacks placed below them. The poor white plight might have remained without fighting the plantation owners, but at least they had someone below them.
Derek:Thus, the most vitriolic defenders of white purity and racist ideology, were often those with the most who had the most in common with the blacks. It's a very similar situation here where the middle class who was avoiding the war only did so by the skin of their teeth, which was especially true of those who took the braces route. Just like in the civil war, Vietnam braces, people who deferred in that manner, could essentially pay a few thousand dollars to have a poor man stand in for him. But he had to pay. All the while, the children of politicians and businessmen or Hollywood Actors were exempt.
Derek:That's right. I'm talking to you, George Hamilton. But so long as the middle class had the slight privilege that remained intact, they were happy just like everyone else was to sacrifice second class citizens, the black and brown bodies, or those with intellectual disabilities, sacrifice them to the god of war, or in James Cone's imagery on the lynching tree. Now let's draw some conclusions here and add a few closing details to round things out. The United States government and their military industrial complex began a war in Vietnam on grounds that were either fabricated at worst or hastily pursued and then covered up at best.
Derek:During that war, they were sacrificing a statistically significant number of black Americans to the cause. When they started running out of bodies rather than tap into the large middle class, which was largely white, they extended recruiting allowances and draft allowances for persons with intellectual disabilities, a group which was statistically more likely to be poor and minority. Those in government who did this claimed that it was to help blacks learn skills and fight the inferiority of their cultural upbringing, which lacked discipline and structure. Though most recruits never were trained with the skills that were promised to them. These men died at a rate that was something like three times higher than the average infantryman.
Derek:And while the government was sacrificing black bodies abroad, it was also sacrificing black bodies at home, including the body of the most famous black man at the time, doctor King, a man who chose to speak out against racial and economic injustice perpetuated by the empire of the United States. Even though this episode wasn't exclusively about race, as there were many white recruits captured under project 100,000, I think that you can clearly see how the effects are racially top heavy, and how McNamara was definitely focused on racial component here. The initiative disproportionately impacted more minorities than it did white middle class individuals. And I think that's important to understand for my group, white middle class Christians. This is what systemic racism looks like.
Derek:When you can make a seemingly benign policy or, you know, fair policy on paper and simply expand the recruiting requirements, But that policy clearly impacts a group that's, you know, disproportionate to other groups, and it benefits another group disproportionately. That's injustice and racism baked into the system. But when you're like many in my group who buy into the myth of American benevolence and greatness, then you can't see through the legertamine of McNamara speech. You don't see that the government has needs and wants to exploit others. You believe that the government is actually offering the poor a great opportunity to better themselves.
Derek:You don't see racism and paternalism. You hear love and generosity. We can't forget that project 100,000 came within about a decade of God being placed in our pledge and on our currency. And it came at a time when we were fighting godless communism, a group in which civil rights leaders were often accused of cavorting with. In many minds, McNamara wasn't exploiting anyone.
Derek:He wasn't really a war pig looking to sacrifice others to the machine. He was offering socially and financially disadvantaged youths the opportunity of a lifetime. This is a true conspiracy. It really happened. And I might add, it's the type of thing that's still happening today.
Derek:You can hear a McNamara esque speech every day if you turn on the news and just listen to the politicians talking. There's some mythical American quality propped up or some group that needs our pandering too or some enemy that needs our killing. And as long as I can afford to give my kids braces and avoid the fight, I'll be happy to let someone else die in war or on the streets for the myth of America. As George Carlin said, that's why they call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it. Whether it's that the middle class is asleep or rather that they're doped up and sedated by opioids because our lives as a buffer against justice is a vacuous one, we're the ones who the propaganda is aimed at and the ones who are buying into it.
Derek:Don't pinch us and wake us up. Don't administer the Narcan. Just let us drift off into the depths of the empire until the smoke begins to rise, and we awaken by screams, Babylon the great is fallen. If you're not too much of a Bible fan, maybe you can handle a Black Sabbath approach instead. In their song, War Pigs, released in 1970, right smack dab in the middle of project 100,000, they sang, Politicians hide themselves away.
Derek:They only started the war. Why should they go out and fight? They leave that role to the poor. Day of judgment, God is calling. On their knees, the war pigs crawling, Begging mercy for their sins.
Derek:Satan laughing spreads his wings. Oh, Lord. Yeah. I highly, highly, highly recommend the book McNamara's Folly to you. It's such an easy read and an enjoyable read.
Derek:Chapters are short, and there's there are a lot of interesting stories woven throughout. The author also goes into a lot more detail about deferments, what kinds of people are being admitted under, project 100,000 exceptions, how that impacted people's lives, you know, the the people in project 100,000, how it impacted their family's lives, how it impacted combat units. Because you're probably thinking, well, if there are people who have sub 70 IQs that are going into units, like, isn't that dangerous for the units? Yes, it is. And, he has stories about how that worked out.
Derek:Some some good and some bad, which I I appreciate that he's, you know, he's he has a very well rounded book here in giving lots of different perspectives. The author even goes into to, you you know, how there are similar practices going on in regard to recruiters fabricating tests to help people get recruited today, or in lying to, recruits, potential recruits about, you know, their chances of getting certain jobs or seeing combat. There's there's so much more to this book, and and something that's worth reading. It's heartbreaking, but it's vital to learn about. I hope you enjoyed another conspiracy that is true.
Derek:And, there's so many, so many, so many more that, I I could have gone into. But at the, at the end of this section, I will have a resource episode, which gives you lots of books that you can, that have some true conspiracies in them. And I'll also reference some other, conspiracies that I think are, true conspiracies that I think are worth following up on and reading about. That's all for now. So peace, And because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.
Derek:This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to nonviolence and kingdom living.
