Dems,
Bush, Fear
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.' Words! Shake 'em Up! Quote King!
By Jay Janson
17 March, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Its the 15th of the month, the
monthly birthday of the giant spirit, whose words, the elite within
the un-American corporate governance of this country, still fear. They
are afraid we will start throwing King Jr.' words at them while they
dissimulate less than peaceful intentions, feign helplessness and stick
to a policy of war in other people's countries as a national priority,
as a continuing adventure and a 'patriotic' pastime. These pathetic
imagination-less corporate lackeys will have no rejoinder to OUR sound
bites of King Jr.' truthful words:
"For the sake of the
hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."--
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Riverside Church, New York City, April 4th,
1967
"The greatest purveyor
of violence in the world today [is] my own government.!"
Once a year, high positioned
members of both parties of the two party monopoly of political power
ingratiatingly smile and nod, even bow at Martin Luther King Jr's. grave,
eulogizing the memory of a wonderful Black civil rights leader, who
determinedly, relentlessly, but peacefully sought peaceful integration
(unlike, in the memory of these staid establishment notables, the more
demanding Black Panthers or the intimidating Malcolm X). There is also
begrudging praise for King that stops just short of putting a handkerchief
on his head, and reluctantly accepts that we have premiated his death
with a national holiday to make up for his assassination. Their thinking
goes - 'that should do it, - calm the outrage and bitterness for King's
murder'. Media entertainment features annual reruns of a few non-confrontational
sentences from the 1963 "I have a Dream" along with some non-violent
documentary footage of civil rights movement history espousing pride
that racism is no longer enforced by law, not shame that this institutionalized
racial violence was still occurring in modern day post Second World
War Amerika during
our own lifetime (the 'k' is for the KKK which was then still strong).
Corporate commercial media is careful not to mention King's condemnation
of brutal and inhuman U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam and seeks to emasculate
his image by avoiding any coverage or mention of his speeches during
the final years of his life, when he rose to prominence as a national
leader with support from all progressives, many constituents of both
major parties, and millions of the non-voting man in the street segment
of American society.
However, we will not let
the media black out and bury King's furious condemnation of U.S. government
murderous foreign policy. We shall shout, at least on 15th of every
month,
"The greatest purveyor
of violence in the world today [is] my own government.!"
"For the sake of the
hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."
We will quote the 1967 King
Jr. who by then understood well, the connection between war abroad and
the injustices of racism and poverty at home:
"So I was increasingly
compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as
such. Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it
became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating
the hopes of the poor at home."
What on earth can the Democratic
leadership in Congress answer back when we remind them unrelentingly
of this awesome pronouncement of Rev. King:
"The greatest purveyor
of violence in the world today [is] my own government.!"
"For the sake of the
hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
As the Democratic leadership
in Congress, ignoring the wishes of the great majority of the American
people, goes along with using our military for 'nation building', i.e.,
building nations subservient to U.S. interests (read U.S. corporate
interests), regardless of the increasing terror it causes, multiplying
recruits for suicide bombings, we clobber these weak-minded politicians
with an appropriate clear-minded King Jr. quote:
"There is nothing more
dangerous than to build a society, with a large segment of people in
that society, who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that
they have nothing to lose. People who have a stake in their society,
protect that society, but when they don't have it, they unconsciously
want to destroy it."
As our science-fiction-like
corporate media fields charm-attempting young women reporters and commentators
saccharinely making a show of heralding and hailing our young men and
women in military service as "protecting our freedoms" by
killing Iraqis in Iraq and Afghans in Afghanistan, "fighting them
there so we won't have to fight them here". We call and write and
tell them what a real protector, King Jr. taught forty years ago:
"Violence ... is impractical
because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It
is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win
his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence
is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love."
Up to now, we have allowed
our corporate entertainment/news industry to hail Rev. King Jr., civil
rights leader, and bury Rev. King Jr., peace activist and analyst of
the economic reasons for U.S. wars and predator foreign trade policies,
a Rev. King Jr. who called this nation to change. But now we have put
forward a plan to zero in on the war promotion of the five giant TV
networks. Conglomerate owned networks who sell us, as war watching audiences,
to the giant PR agencies advertising on public owned broadcasting frequencies,
frequencies only LEASED to the networks whose CEOs find it 'necessary'
to deceive us viewers, using the very frequencies that we the public
own. We will repeat King's most powerful words condemning war for profit,
until they reverberate throughout the nation - or until a media free
of corporate bias disseminates honestly King's legacy to us.
King, "A true revolution
of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty
and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas
and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money
in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with
no concern for the social betterment of the countries"
Those self-important politicians
and good looking TV anchors, who with puffed up chests claiming patriotism
in sending our trusting young men and women to bomb, invade and occupy
defenseless third world nations, have not the courage to challenge those
truthful words of Martin Luther King Jr. which we are determined to
repeat in order to expose their misrepresentations, now finally obvious
to everyone, and defeat the criminally insane purposes of pathetic lovers
of war for profit.
King: "The Americans
are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious
that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities
of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring
deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never
again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image
of violence and militarism."
We will not accept political
pronouncements and media commentators solicitous heaping of praise for
the valor and sacrifice of our young soldiers, men and women who will
never hear anything that is said of them, nor of how they were betrayed
into dying for yet another
mistaken American war.
King, "As we counsel
young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's
role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious
objection.
The invasion of Iraq a 'mistake'?
Then it was a 'mistake' arranged, and at the time justified, in the
press and on network screens free from control of government which is
itself not 'free' of inescapable and ubiquitous pressure from great
national and huge multi-national corporations, mindlessly and insanely
scheming for further profit hegemony over planetary resources in gross
violation of the rights and patrimony of the great majority of the inhabitants
of the earth.
King, "A time comes
when silence is betrayal."
Don't let establishment media
keep selling war unchallenged. Don't accept conglomerate commercial
insincere and effusive praise for our dead and dying soldiers which
the entertainment/news media anchors are paid to repeat, calling every
single dead soldier a hero. How many of us would rather just be remembered
as a regular guy, rather than be jerked around posthumously with profuse
and oily words by commercial personalities trying to squirm out of the
responsibility of having immorally cooked up the war that took our life
along with hundreds of thousands of others. Never mind those phony phrases
of concern like "in harm's way"! What about sending our young
men into 'death's way', we viewers know anchors are just reading the
moving line of words on the prompter above the cameraman's head. And
commercial TV has turned its viewers into having heartless disregard
for foreign lives taken by U.S. military action - you will never hear
that phrase "in harm's way' ever used concerning 'foreign' but
indigenous civilians during U.S., (or euphemistically "U.S. coalition"),
bombing attacks.
King, "So far we may
have killed a million of them, mostly children. ... This way of settling
differences is not just." This business of burning human beings
with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows,
... of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically
handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with
wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to
spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift
is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful
nation in the world ..."
Just as King studied history
to be able recognize the lies being propagated about Ho Chi Minh and
the U.S. role in backing a French war of recolonialization, so must
we study the history of our recent manipulation by selection and misrepresentation
of the news and facts. Carter armed and funded the fundamentalists attack
on a Socialist, women liberating, Kabul government in order to sucker
the Soviets into the trap of entering Afghanistan six months later.
Following U.S. administrations funded thousands of extremist Wahabi
sect schools and aided Osama bin Laden and the Taliban for oil pipeline
reasons. The blow-back upon us of 9/11 has provided the excuse for the
present wars that are really for 'securing' and controlling militarily,
the oil regions of the Middle East.
Want to help our Iraqi brothers
and sisters to keep their oil and their lives, and fight against corporate
media selling us open-ended occupations? Quote the words of a national
living icon - Kings credibility is stronger than anyone alive today,
and his purity of purpose and his sacrificed life make it impossible
for the war hawks so to go up against his evaluations and pronouncements.
King, "We in the churches
and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to
disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to
raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse
ways ... Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest
that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest." Our
nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling
power.
This article, "Dems,
Bush, Fear Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.' Words! Shake 'em Up! Quote King!
" is the third in a series which will continue appearing on the
15th day of every month until King Jr.'s nightmare exposing is no longer
needed and King Jr.'s Dream has become reality. January 15, and February
15 appear below:
King's Anguish versus Our
Apathy Then and Now / Quote Rev. King Day, the 15th of EACH Month
http://www.opednews.com/articles/
opedne_jay_jans_070213_king_s_anguish_versu.htm
Passages from King's "Beyond
Vietnam", if widely known, would be enough to make network entertainment/news
current promotion of both Vietnam and Iraq military ventures as glorious
look ridiculous at best or dastardly otherwise. King spoke firstly to
the foreign lives so wantonly taken in the destruction of their homelands.
That the 15th of each month be "Quote MLKjr Day" for peace
and justice activists.
Monday, January 15, 2007
King's Anguish When He Condemned U.S. War Crimes and Foreign Policy
Worthy of Emulation
http://www.opednews.com/articles/
opedne_jay_jans_070114_king_s_anguish_when_.htm
A call for activists to make
frequent use of the words of Martin Luther King Jr in his 1967 speech
"Beyond Vietnam", condemning the U.S. war in Vietnam and its
violent foreign policy toward countries in the third world. Being that
the entire speech is relevant to our deathly predicament today, and
King's stature being such that his outcry and accusations if often quoted
could have a belated effect on foreign policy.
SUGGESTED ACTION
Ask why the media black-out
of King's condemnation of U.S.wars and violent foreign policy.