Alex Constantine - January 7, 2025
By Alex Constantine
Travel to Africa, India, the Philippines, anywhere, and the blazing calligraphy hangs over roads and in shop windows: "Drink Coca-Cola." The soft drink has a way of worming its way into our lives at every turn. Even after numerous boycotts, Coca-Cola lives on like a an aspidistra or the Count of St. Germain.
Coke is so ubiquitous that it frequently turns up in assassination chronicles.
Remember: Where was Lee Harvey Oswald when John F. Kennedy was shot? Pulling a Coke from a vending machine at the Dallas School Book Depository. Coca-Cola was his alibi. (Richard Nixon attended a Pepsi-Cola bottlers convention in Dallas that day -- a public place where he was close to the operation but diverting suspicion away from himself.)
Five years later, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Some on the far-right have speculated that Lyndon B. Johnson was involved. How does he account for his whereabouts at the time?
Johnson also had an alibi.
He was notified that King had been shot on April 4, 1968, while meeting in the White House with Robert Woodruff, the CEO of Coca-Cola, and former Georgia Governor Carl Sanders. (Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Recordings – Johnson Conversation #5966 with Robert Woodruff on Oct 25, 1964.)
But there's more. The year after Kennedy was shot, according to reporter Heather Grey in a history of the beverage, Dr. King spoke to an integrated audience words destined to become one of his most memorable quotes: “If people of good will of the white South fail to act now, history will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the vitriolic words and then the violent actions of the bad people but the appalling silence of and indifference of the good people.”
King knew Atlanta and the general indifference of city residents to Coca-Cola's appalling discriminatory business practices. He often spoke about the discrepancy of pay scales at the plant based on race. His last speech gave us a mountaintop and his dream. It's generally forgotten that he also gave us his scorn for Coca-Cola.
Grey writes that King "encouraged those in Memphis to boycott Coca-Cola because of its discriminatory employment practices (as in, less salary for blacks, fewer advancements compared to whites, etc.). Other corporations were also mentioned as violators of 'just' employment practices. The next day after this speech, King was assassinated." (See https://constantinereport.com/killer-coke-egregious-history-coca-cola-company/)
But the association of Coca-Cola and murder didn't begin in the 1960s. Coca-Cola was a popular beverage in Nazi Germany. Between 1933 and 1939, Coke sales in Germany swelled from 100,000 to over 4 million cases per year. Hitler loved the concoction so much that he increased sales by linking the soda to every aspect of Nazi life and his dictatorship. It remained the king of soft drinks under Hitler until an Allied blockade intercepted shipments of the syrup to the country. But the Germans still had Fanta, developed in German labs by the Coca-Cola Company specifically for them.
As in Nazi Germany, the drink has also insinuated itself into every corner of American life and death. There are the neon signs, billboards, cute collectibles, t-shirts, television advertising, bus benches, sports stadiums, everywhere one turns a diabetic eye. Coke has become a feature of the world around us so common that it often goes unnoticed and sinks quietly into the collective mind.
True to form, Coca-Cola was among the first companies to use aspartame, a known carcinogen composed of genetically-modified bacterial waste, as a sweetener in its product line. They don't call it "Killer Coke" for nothing.
Despite its bloody history, even leftists drink the swill (transparency notice: I don't). This is ironic because the company represents everything the left despises.
William F. Buckley must have realized this when he wrote Mongoose R.I.P., a political thriller based on the infamous CIA attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro. In Buckley's book, Castro is on the mortal brink ... but slips out for a bottle of Coke at the very moment the attempt in his life is made. Fiction? Buckley claimed that the book was correct in all details -- as a New York Times review observed, "convinces us that his research (or the work of his research assistant) has been exacting, and that we are close to seeing the inside of a real operation." (see, NYT, January 24, 1988) if so, a decadent capitalist multinational saved the communist leader's life.
I could go on, but my premise is clear. Coca-Cola is more than a syrup or a Wall Street symbol. It is a tonic of providence in a glass bottle, tempting us like Eve's apple, speaking to us on any path we take, saving or snatching our lives away, ultimately leading us to the graveyard where we wave goodbye to the commercials and billboards that bless our passage to the afterlife.