America has once again successfully wiped away the anti-imperialist efforts of Dr. King, even during the height of an imperialist war. Every year, they don’t play the beautifully spoken audio tape of MLK’s "Beyond Vietnam" (Democracy Now played a clip today) or talk about it’s very real and very deep message even though through it’s understanding lies a path to winning the real war on "terror". After reading and hearing so much about MLK on this day, I feel obligated to shine more light on what I consider to be his best speech. Unlike his "I have a dream" speech, "Beyond Vietnam" may hold the key to liberating many billions of people across the globe. It is exactly because of its very candid assessment of America’s perverse role in the world, that you will not hear the MSM or our candidates discuss it.
The candidate that I’m favoring talks about poverty now, but will continue to fund this god damned war whether he wins the presidency or not. He acts like that embassy is going to stay and ignores the reality that those two things, poverty and empire, are fundamentally connected.
and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Are we so sure that Venezuela isn’t just trying to reduce their decades long struggle with poverty, to which some blame must rightly be pinned on US neo-liberalism and the disaster capitalism imposed. Is it possible that Iran is trying to achieve security through strength when surrounded by the strongest military machine?
In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.
I don’t think our candidates are allowed to ponder such thoughts anymore and it is that failure to which Dr. King would be most ashamed. For all of our talk about "change" we still see the world through American eyes.
It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
"A time comes when silence is betrayal". I think that this particular race is that time, but I don't think we'll see a serious discussion by our candidates of what King speaking about.