King and Obama 2

                                                                GANDHI

Gandhi and King are admired  by more than just their  own nations. Their speeches are quoted, endlessly, all around the world .    Their messages of Non Violence, though,  are totally ignored. 

 Violence wins. It is still the way of the world.  Obama 2 even as he uses Martin Luther King's Bible  for his swearing ceremony  will change nothing.  The Power and the Profits of endless War are just too much  to sacrifice. And the sacrifice of millions of people is apparently a price that has never  mattered. Will never matter. 

Great Greenwald read. Again.  

In that speech, King called the US government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today", as well as the leading exponent of "the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long" (is there any surprise this has been whitewashed from his legacy?). He emphasized that his condemnations extended far beyond the conflict in Southeast Asia: "the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit." 

He insisted that no significant social problem - wealth inequality, gun violence, racial strife - could be resolved while the US remains "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift" - a recipe, he said, for certain "spiritual death". For that reason, he argued, "it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war." That's because:

"If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over."

Working against US imperialism was, he said, "the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions." For King, opposing US violence in the world was not optional but obligatory: "We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy . . . ." 

The way in which "America's soul is totally poisoned" is evident in virtually every debate over US policies of militarism. Over the weekend, several pro-war national security "experts" argued: "I'd pay closer attention to critics of drone strikes if they explained their recommended alternative." This is a commonly heard defense of Obama's drone assaults: I supportdrones - despite how they constantly kill innocent adults and children - because the alternative, "boots on the ground", is worse.

Those who argue this are literally incapable even of conceiving of an alternative in which the US stops killing anyone and everyone it wants in the world. They operate on the assumption that US violence is and should be inevitable, and the only cognizable debate is which weapon the US should use to carry out this killing (drones or "boots on the ground"?). Even though they have no idea who the US government is killing, they assume, with literally no evidence or basis, that those being killed are "terrorists" who want to attack the US and that therefore they - and anyone close to them - must be killed first. As Jonathan Schwarz noted on Sunday, they have literally embraced the same mindset as the Terrorists they claim to loathe: we must use violence and killing, even if it means we kill innocents, because we simply cannot conceive of any alternative.

One of the best decisions the US ever made was to commemorate King's birthday as a national holiday. He's as close to a prophet as American history offers. But the distance between the veneration expressed for him and the principles he espoused seems to grow every year. When it comes to King's views on US militarism, nothing more potently illustrates that distance than the use of King's holiday to re-inaugurate the 44th president.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/21/king-obama-drones-militarism-sanctions-iran