After Ali announced that he would not comply with the U.S. government's draft notice, which almost certainly would have meant that he would have been sent to Vietnam to kill Vietcong, Ali stated, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong."

Oh boy, his refusal to comply with the draft was bad enough, but to announce that he had no quarrel with a group that the U.S. national-security establishment had decreed was an official enemy of the United States only added fuel to the fire. Most important, the fact that this was a black man saying this to his white masters sealed Ali's fate. Not surprisingly, they went after him with a vengeance, trying not only to destroy his reputation and career but also to have him jailed for the next several years of his life.

But Ali had a good point. The Vietcong had never attacked him, the United States, or the American people. Why should he go thousands of miles away to kill them?

The answer is: Because the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA had designated the Vietcong to be official enemies of the United States. Therefore, since they are the ones with the power to do that, American citizens were expected to make the Vietcong their own enemy.

Why were the Vietcong labeled official enemies of the American people? The idea was that the Vietcong were communists. The communists, U.S. officials said, were coming to get us. They were going to conquer the world, just like the Nazis were supposedly going to do. We needed to stop them over there before they got over here. The fact that they were Reds was what made them official enemies of the United States.

This mindset was, of course, the same with respect to Russia, the Soviet Union, Red China, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba, East Germany, and all other nations that were headed by communist regimes. Americans were inculcated with the mindset that every one of them — including both the regimes and the people living in those countries — was an official enemy of the United States.