"Soon we'll find out who is a real revolutionary."
- Bob Marley, Zimbabwe

Part 2 of a series excerpted from the Conscious Rasta Report entitled
HIGH CRIMES OF MURDER (©1998/$10.00)
Footnoted documentation can be found on page 76 of the report.
(Take me to Part 1, of "The CIA & Reggae)

In April of 1981, a few weeks prior to Marley's death, recently elected Prime Minister Edward Seaga announced that the stricken singer had been awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit, officially designating him as a national hero. Since Marley was still critically ill in Dr. Issel's Bavarian clinic in Rottach-Egen, Seaga arranged for Marley's eldest son, Ziggy, to accept the honor in Kingston. In the ghetto, the move was celebrated as a gesture of acquiescence to the desperate agenda of the sufferah-especially since it coincided with a Seaga-urged announcement early that year by Ronald Reagan of a US-backed Caribbean Basin Initiative... However, a confidential CIA airgram dispatched to the State Department from the American embassy in Kingston on April 28, 1981-about four months after Ronald Reagan's inauguration-revealed the cynical motive behind Seaga's oddly timed bestowal of the Order of Merit, to depict as disreputably unpatriotic Opposition leader Michael Manley's People's National Party. As the classified communiqué carefully explained:

"Jamaica's Governor General, Florizel Glasspole, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II on April 17, four weeks after Prime Minister Edward Seaga had announced the Government of Jamaica's decision to allow Jamaicans to accept foreign honors...(The Governor General received 150 congratulatory messages and cables on the first day after the announcement and many more on subsequent days.) Government members in the House of Representatives paid tribute to and congratulated the Governor General when the House met on April 22. At the same time that Jamaica House released the news of the Governor General's knighthood, it was announced that Jamaican reggae star Bob Marley, who is being treated for cancer in the Federal Republic of Germany, had been awarded the Order of Merit, Jamaica's third highest honor. In responding to the government's tribute to the Governor General, the Opposition moved to congratulate Marley at the same time and allowed itself to be maneuvered into a position of not paying tribute to the popular Governor General."

Thus, in one stroke, Seaga had both humiliated Manley's democratic socialists and defused the explosive legacy of the Third World's most renowned rabble-rouser. Once it might have been unseemly for Seaga's Reagan-steered regime to have celebrated a musician who actively endorsed black leftist struggles for freedom and self-determination in Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique and South Africa. But Marley's terminal illness and Seaga's election mandate of October 30, 1980, had allowed the canny new prime minister to cloak the courage of the reggae firebrand's convictions with a cultural garland that smacked of a gratuity.

We can thus conclude through such documentation that there had been quite an interest in the Rastafarian reggae movement and those who had risen to lead such a progressive struggle. And as indicated in the previous paragraphs, the issue of the British Crown issuing such titles to non-British subjects leaves room for suspicion and speculation. A similar title was bestowed on former U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman (Sir) Colin Powell, in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Could it be true, as some have suggested, that the British aristocracy is quietly reestablishing its global empire by co-opting the loyalties of government officials within the United States, Jamaica and other countries? I suggest that the answer to that question is an unambiguous "yes!"

THE ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF BOB MARLEY IN 1976 Marley biographer Timothy White gives us a further insight into the CIA's and U.S. State Department's obsessions with Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. The following excerpts are from the White interview published in High Times in February 1990:

I think the CIA and the State Department paid attention to Bob Marley for the same reason they took an interest in John Lennon-because he was such a huge figure in Caribbean culture. It's very important for people to realize two things: that the Third World is most of the world, and that, from a philosophical standpoint, no one is free until everyone is free. People in government realize that. There's so much of a focus on the Caribbean in the last 20 or 25 years as a strategic point in the Western Hemisphere, in terms of both military and cultural significance. So someone like Bob Marley, who was supporting freedom struggles around the world, in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and behind the Iron Curtain, was a very threatening figure for the conservative presence around the world...

Some people have said Bob Marley was Socialist, or that he was Marxist, but that's not true. He didn't approach politics from an ideological standpoint. He felt the people of South Africa had a right to be free because it's their country and their culture. Everybody has to share in it, in terms of the democracy of their numbers. He didn't feel they deserve to have self-determination because of some political standpoint, but because it was their country and the majority should rule. That's a very simple, non-ideological philosophy. His support of freedoms for those around the world had a real purity of purpose. It was very deeply felt.

The United States government disagreed with Bob Marley in terms of who he chose to support, and the way he saw the freedom struggles in South Africa or wherever. In modem times, certainly in the post-war era, the United States government has been very conservative in its perspective. It has supported a lot of sleazy dictatorships, for cynical reasons, figuring that if the government that's in power is friendly toward us, especially from a business standpoint, they're the lesser of two evils. Marley felt that was a lousy way of looking at the world.

We recognize that Timothy White is speaking to the politically immature readers of High Times, a magazine largely dedicated to the psychedelic experience, and thus is not expected to address certain hardball aspects of the international political struggle. The Conscious Rasta does not have such limitations.

In 1976, Jamaica, because of the intensity of political violence, was under martial law. Political warfare was taking place in the streets of the island's major cities. The populace was divided along class lines with the masses of the working class, poor and dispossessed supporting Prime Minister Michael Manley's People's National Party (PNP) and the elite backing the opposition Edward Seaga's Jamaican Labor Party (JLP). Both camps made use of armed street gangs recruited from the ghettos of Kingston and outlying areas. Additionally, offshore influences deepened the conflict; the leftist PNP in solidarity with regional socialists and the JLP backed by the wealthy Western powers.

In an attempt to quell the political violence, the PNP planned a peace concert to be entitled the "Smile Jamaica Concert," for which Bob Marley penned one of his more renowned compositions. For insight into the role this event likely played in triggering the attempted assassination of Marley in 1976, we again refer to the White interview:

The concert wasn't political, it was just intended to cool the country down, and make it stop thinking so intensely about politics and think more about itself and the fact that people in the outside world were coming to like and admire it. Marley got induced to do the concert, but since Manley's People's National Party was in power and it was their cultural ministry that prevailed upon Marley to give the concert, it was seen as a political act. And enemies of Bob Marley in the rival Jamaican Labor Party, as well as ghetto associates were involved in their own mischief. They all pointed to Bob Marley as the cause of their problems. There was a lot of jealousy. As a result, a number of people conspired to assassinate Marley in the days before the concert. The men who tried to assassinate Bob were never brought to trial; they were all murdered themselves. Vigilantes hung them in the ghetto long before the police could even find out who they were. It was pretty grisly.

...After Bob was shot and he survived, he went on to perform at the concert, which was December 5, 1976, in Jamaica. He was supposed to be under government protection, but many of those men vanished. He was supposed to take a plane out of Jamaica the following day under police protection. And those guards vanished. It was a very mysterious thing, the point being that he was left vulnerable again if someone else wanted to try to kill him. It was a very spooky, sinister set of circumstances. Pictures that were taken of Marley and people hanging around his house, where the assassination attempt took place, later vanished under very mysterious circumstances. Any kind of record of who those people might have been just vanished.

(Take me to Part 3 of "The CIA & Reggae")