Global Research

Every spring, as the calendar ticks off the two month span between April 4^th (the assassination anniversary date of anti-war, anti-racist, anti-poverty activist Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr) and June 5^th (the assassination anniversary date of anti-war  and pro-racial equality presidential candidate Senator Robert F. Kennedy), many progressive, anti-war, anti-racism, non-violent activists around the world such as myself have spent a lot of time thinking about how different America and the world might have been if the political, military and economic powers that were behind the Vietnam War and in charge of those two assassinations had decided instead to allow the will of the people – rather than the use of cowardly firearms – to decide America’s future.

1968, the Year When Everything Happened

1968 is sometimes referred to as the “year when everything happened”. 

1. The Vietnam War intensified in the Battle of Khe Sanh (starting on January 21), the Tet Offensive (January 31), the Battle for Hue City (January 31) and the My Lai Massacre (March 16); 
2. The anti-Vietnam War protests intensified in the US, resulting in Reactionary Police Brutality; 
3. The Abdication of Lyndon Johnson (March 30); 
4. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr (April 4) with over 100 American cities burning in response; 
5. The Columbia University student occupations of campus buildings (April 23); 
6. The Broadway Play Hair (April 29) started the Age of Aquarius; 
7. The Catonsville 9  draft card burnings (May 17); 
8. Bobby Kennedy’s Assassination (June 5);
9. The Chicago Democratic Convention (August 28) with rampant police brutality;
10. Richard Nixon’s divisive Southern Strategy campaign; 
11. The segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace’s presidential run for president, winning 13% of the national vote; 
12. The Mexico Olympics and the famous Black Power Salute (October 16); 
13. Black athletes kneeling during the national anthem at 1968 NFL games to protest police brutality and racial discrimination; 
14. “National Burn Your Draft Card Day” (November 14); and 
15. etc, etc.

1968 is also the year that hastened the destruction of true representative democracy in America and the beginning of a quasi-police state/Deep State establishment in its place. The unwelcome truths about Bobby Kennedy’s shooting on June 5, 1968 (by an assassin or assassins other than Sirhan Sirhan (see the irrefutable evidence further below) and his death on June 6, 1968 has been annually over-shadowed by the commemoration of the World War II anniversary of D-day, June 6, 1944. And every year teachable moments are lost.

Bobby Kennedy’s political assassination had occurred just 3 months before the infamous police state repression and beatings of non-violent protestors at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago that brutalized so many young student anti-Vietnam war protestors. The police brutality ordered by Chicago mayor Richard Daley revealed that police power politics was alive and well in both political parties. It doomed the chances of Democrat Hubert Humphrey to keep the war-mongers Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger out of the White House. 

Shortly after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, singer-song-writer Richard Holler was inspired to write the classic song, “Abraham, Martin and John”. See the lyrics further below.

Holler was inspired to write the song after the assassination of newly anti-war, Presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy. Holler saw the similarities between the assassinations of liberal/progressive political figures such as President Abraham Lincoln (1865), President John F. Kennedy (1963), Martin Luther King, Jr and Bobby Kennedy (both in 1968). 

Holler could just as well have written verses for other American justice-seeking activists such as Malcolm X, John Lennon and Democratic Senator from Minnesota Paul Wellstone, each of whom were progressive agitators, thinkers and doers who saw injustice and violence and then felt compelled to act upon their deeply-felt need to end the violence of racism, sexism, economic oppression/exploitation, police state repression, male supremacy and militarism. 

Each one was assassinated before they could achieve what they had so courageously tried to accomplish. Each died before their time at the hands of a well-disguised group of conspirators who would meet the definition of enemies of the state that the targeted individuals were trying to preserve. 

Here is a more complete list of dates of the assassinations and the relatively youthful ages of the victims:

• Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on 4/15/1865 at age 56;
• John F. Kennedy was assassinated on 11/22/1963 at age 46 by conspiratorial deep state assailants and NOT by the patsy Lee Harvey Oswald; The latest and best book on the subject is titled “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters” by James Douglass. James Fetzer’s book on the assassination of JFK is “Murder in Dealey Plaza”  which totally debunks the single shooter theory (and therefore proves that there was indeed a conspiracy to kill JFK) – click here for a review.
• Martin Luther King was assassinated on 4/4/1968 at age 39 by deep state assailants and NOT by the patsy James Earl Ray; (for unassailable proof that Ray was a patsy, see this and also read “An Act of State” by attorney William Pepper, who is currently researching the Sirhan Sirhan case)
• Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on 6/5/1968 at age 43 by deep state assailants and NOT by the patsy Sirhan Sirhan; (For a review of the most recent book on the subject, “The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: Crime, Conspiracy and Cover-Up – A New Investigation”, see this.
• Malcolm X was assassinated on 2/21/1965 at age 39;
• John Lennon was assassinated on 12/8/1980 at age 40;
• Paul Wellstone was assassinated on 10/25/2002 at age 58. (for details google “Wellstone: They Killed Him” or see this)
• It should also be noted that the ancient progressive, non-violent, anti-sexist, anti-militarist, anti-poverty, peace and justice advocate Jesus of Nazareth was assassinated by his reactionary/conservative political and religious enemies at age 33.

Here are the lyrics to “Abraham, Martin and John”:

By Richard Holler

Has anybody here seen my old friend Abraham?
Can you tell me where he’s gone?
He freed a lot of people
But it seems the good die young
But I just looked around and he’s gone

Has anybody here seen my old friend John?
Can you tell me where he’s gone?
He freed a lot of people
But it seems the good die young
But I just looked around and he’s gone

Has anybody here seen my old friend Martin?
Can you tell me where he’s gone?
He freed a lot of people
But it seems the good die young
But I just looked around and he’s gone

Didn’t you love the things that they stood for?
Didn’t they try to find some good for you and me?
And we’ll be free
Someday soon, it’s gonna be
One day

Has anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he’s gone?
I thought I saw him walkin’
Up over the hill
With Abraham, Martin and John.

Here is a recent article about Bobby Kennedy’s assassination by Edward Curtin. It was published on Global Research last week.

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Dr Kohls is a retired physician from Duluth, MN, USA. He writes a weekly column for the Duluth Reader, the area’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, Big Pharma’s psychiatric drugging and over-vaccination regimens, and other movements that threaten the environment, prosperity, democracy, civility and the health and longevity of the planet and the populace. Many of his columns are archived at

http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls;

http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=2; or at

https://www.transcend.org/tms/search/?q=gary+kohls+articles