September 17, 1985, marks the day that the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan had a vision-like experience in Tepoztlán, Mexico. He has consistently recalled this experience and its importance. This was not some dream that he had; this was a fulfillment of prophecy and Divine insight into the plans of the United States Government. Minister Farrakhan shared his experience again in his message to Donald Trump on November 16, 2017, at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C.:
“When I got inside the big Wheel, there was a scroll with cursive writing on it. I was trying to read it, [then] Elijah Muhammad speaks—and the scroll rolls up. He said: ‘President Reagan in early September met with his Joint Chiefs of Staff to plan a war. I want you to hold a press conference in Washington, D.C., and make known their plans. And tell them that you got it from me, Elijah Muhammad, on The Wheel.’ Then he said: ‘You’ve got one more thing to do. And when you have done it, you may come again to The Wheel, and I will let you see me face-to-face.’ And he dismissed me.”
After this experience, President Reagan bombed Libya on April 16, 1986. This attack on the Muslim world would later gravely impact the Middle East, as future U.S. presidents continued the pattern of conflicts with a Muslim country. However, this was not the only “war” that was being plotted. The Minister realized that the other war that would take place would be a domestic war against Black people, and Black youth in particular. Many of us know about the infamous “War on Drugs.” Although it was President Nixon to first coin the term “war on drugs,” it was President Reagan who was responsible for turning that term into an actual war with severe consequences.
It must be understood that you do not rage war on “ideas” or on “substances” without impacting the people that you believe withhold those ideas. If one was to believe, for example, that terrorism is birthed in the culture of Islam within the Middle East, then in their fight against terrorism, they would find themselves waging war against Muslims and Middle Eastern people. The United States’ “War on Terror” after the tragedy of 9/11 caused millions of Middle Eastern and Muslim people to lose their lives. A war on drugs is not an attack on the substance themselves, but on the people who are assumed and characterized to use them the most to criminalize them and their families.
In modern political discourse, it has been confirmed that the damaging effects of the WOD are evidence that this is not an attack on cocaine, but an attack on the Black community and those living in the inner cities of America. Particularly, it was Black men who were largely impacted by this. Author Michelle Alexander explains in a 2013 FRONTLINE interview that the WOD could not have been about drugs, because drug rates were actually at a decline before the war was declared. She states:
At the time President Reagan declared his war on drugs in 1982, drug crime was on the decline. It was not on the rise, and less than 3 percent of the American population identified drugs as the nation’s most pressing concern. So why would he declare an all-out war on drugs at a time when drug crime is actually declining, not on the rise, and the American public isn’t much concerned about it? Well, from the outset, the war on drugs had much less to do with … concern about drug abuse and drug addiction and much more to do with politics, including racial politics.
What is also interesting is that in circumstances of war around the world, there are common effects that are present within that destroyed community. If this was a literal war against Black people, then we should be able to see the similarities and patterns of “war” generally.
In war, one of the things that come up is a large military presence. A military force will be within a war zone, or within an area to inflict control over the people who are living there. We see evidence in the Black community and the system of policing. In the WOD era, this would show up in the enforcement of police presence in the Black community.
In 1971, Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “Public Enemy No. 1 and created a new agency, the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention, which received enhanced funding for drug treatment and enforcement. This would be the first and the last time during the War on Drugs that more funding went toward treatment than punishment. By 1985, nearly four-fifths of funds lawmakers allocated to the drug problem went to law enforcement.
In this present-day conversation about defunding the police, it is important to notice how easily a health crisis became a criminalizing problem that required a military occupancy, rather than easier access to rehabilitation and healthcare. Drug treatment was not the priority, but instead, Black communities were targeted and penalized for that which they were not responsible for creating.
Wars are also usually fought by introducing methods of propaganda within the media. During World War I, propaganda was heavily used by both sides to shape the minds of the people. According to Ian Cooke, the Lead Curator for International and Political Studies at the British Library, “Governments during the First World War devoted massive resources and huge amounts of effort to producing material designed to shape opinion and action internationally. The efforts of states to justify their actions, and to build international support, resulted in some of the most powerful propaganda ever produced.” The American media and Hollywood went to work demonizing Black men, in particular, to create an image in the people’s minds that would justify the need for this war to continue. In a 2003 interview, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan spoke about the propaganda in this drug epidemic.
During that time period, there was the arrival on the scene of crack cocaine; an increase in gang activity starting on the West Coast moving eastward with the Bloods and the Crips; and movies that portrayed our youth throughout the world, like “Colors” and “Menace to Society” that put Black men in particular, in a very ugly light.
The plan worked. The American media created the image of particularly young black, male “super predators” that were menaces to society and responsible for the chaos in the country. Black men, especially young Black men, were now synonymous with the word “Criminal.” Perry L. Moriearty and William Carson, in their article, Cognitive Warfare and Young Black Males in America, explain this propaganda that targeted young Black men:
..the “super-predator” war amplified the American public’s predisposition to associate adolescents of color, and in particular young black males, with violence and moral depravity, it also led the public to dissociate young black males from the one trait that should not have been up for debate: their youth. The result was a veritable feedback loop whose cognitive output, the mental imprint of “morally impoverished” “superpredators” continually fed its input. Thus, even as crime rates among black youth have dropped steadily since the mid-1990s, these self-reinforcing associations and dissociations have prompted lawmakers and their constituents to continue to support laws and policies that they know disproportionately punish and incapacitate young black males.
Lastly, war has various impacts on people, including psychological, economic, and communal effects. In her journal, Impact of War on Children and Imperative to End War, Joanna Santa Barbara lists these effects, such as a loss of a moral structure. She writes, “The experience of indifference from the surrounding world, or, worse still, malevolence may cause children to suffer loss of meaning in their construction of themselves in their world. They may have to change their moral structure and lie, steal, and sell sex to survive.”
We could say that due to circumstances of the war that has been taking place on Black youth, the moral structure was removed for the need of survival. This is not to blame them, because you cannot look at the effect of a thing without first acknowledging the cause. The pouring of drugs into the Black community and the criminalization of Black people have caused tremendous hardship and downfall. This was a war with lasting effects that remain true to this day. To correct this moral structure, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan called for 1 million Black men in 1995 to join him for a day of atonement and to accept responsibility as Black men in the community. This historic Million Man March was a day of peace and righteousness for them to carry back to their communities and families to do better and be better.
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan had more than a vision in 1985. There is no doubt that he was given divine insight from the Honorable Elijah Muhammad into a war that would target our people and last for generations. How else did he know that President Reagan would plan a war that would eventually be one of many catastrophic events in America? How else did he know about the plan against Libya a year before it was bombed by the U.S.? One must come to realize the value of the man that is in our midst who has forewarned us of what was planned. We would be wise to listen to him.
