Set a Positive Example

13 Comments

1. 

   Bazooka Joe on August 28, 2013 at 6:05 pm

   Something to think about.

   Not really. It’s not Vietnam.

   Nobody really gives a shit about the use of force anymore. There’s no societal compromise. There will be no repercussions to missile strikes in Syria. Obama gets a peace prize for evacuating Iraq, the actual Iraqis just get unending car bombs. Are we still at war in Afghanistan? Shrugs abound. It’s all very postmodern.

   I’ve noticed the fault lines in the reaction to the President’s speech today are near exactly the same as that graduation speech he gave down in Atlanta. He’s not one for mixing the message up, Barack Obama. Just steady as she goes. It is what it is.

   It freaks me out that “teachers paying for their students’ supplies” is an applause line, though. That’s fucking crazy. Nobody in government should ever be congratulating private citizens for having to compensate for the lack of financing they receive from government. That’s just fucked up.

   • 

     on August 28, 2013 at 9:30 pm

     Fifty years after the coup.

2. 

   Don Durito on August 28, 2013 at 6:06 pm

   Here’s an excerpt from Ahmed Shawki’s book Black Liberation and Socialism(pp. 200-204):

   King began to see the connections much more clearly between racism at home and racism abroad, in particular between the economic inequities at home and the war budget. King also started to rethink his understanding of violence. He was keenly aware that the growing urban unrest in the North was an expression of the frustration and impatience that existed among Blacks – and a corresponding sympathy and openness to more radical solutions. After the Watts riots, King declared, “It was a class revolt of the under-privileged against the privileged.” In 1967, he concluded, “after Selma and the voting rights bill we moved into an era which must be an era of revolution…. The whole structure of American life must be changed.”

   King now made clear that there was a great deal of difference between the violence of the U.S. state and the violence of those rioting in urban centers across the country, and he began to use a different vocabulary to describe his tactics, referring to “massive nonviolence,” “aggressive nonviolence,” and even “nonviolent sabotage.”

   Trying to overcome the collapse of the coalition he built to challenge Southern segregation, the apparent failure of the movement in the North, and the growing impatience among Black activists and Blacks more generally, King formulated a new strategy:

   Nonviolence must be adapted to urban conditions and urban moods. Non-violent protest must now mature to a new level, to correspond to heightened Black impatience and stiffened white resistance. This high level is mass civil disobedience. There must be more than a statement to the larger society, there must be a force that interrupts its functioning at some key point…. To dislocate the functioning of a city without destroying it can be more effective than a riot because it can be longer lasting, costly to the larger society, but not wantonly destructive. It is a device of social action that is more difficult for a government to quell by superior force…. It is militant and defiant, not destructive.

   King’s most powerful indictment of the war came on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before he was murdered. In a speech at New York City’s Riverside Church, aptly titled “A Time to Break Silence: Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam,” King declared:

   Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, 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.

   Perhaps the 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. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

   My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

   These kinds of views were not welcome by many of the liberals who had previously praised King in the struggle to end Jim Crow. As [Michael Eric] Dyson observes:

   King’s assault on America as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” elicited a predictably furious reaction from the White House. The news media was even harsher…. Richard Lentz notes that Time magazine had, early in King’s opposition to the war, characterized him as a “drawling bumpkin, so ignorant that he had not read a newspaper in years, who had wandered out of his native haunts and away from his natural calling.” Newsweek columnist Kenneth Crawford attacked King for his “demagoguery” and “reckless distortion of the facts.” The Washington Post said that King’s Riverside speech was a “grave injury” to the civil rights struggle and that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people.” The New York Times editorialized that King’s speech was a “fusing of two public problems that are distinct and separate” and that King had done a “disservice to both.”

   • 

     MNPundit on August 28, 2013 at 8:52 pm

     Yeah this, right here. If he wasn’t assassinated he would have been assassinated… by the establishment. Threaten the economic system (and for non-whites!) and America turns on you.

     • 

       on August 28, 2013 at 9:31 pm

       He was assassinated by the establishment.

3. 

   lamh31 on August 28, 2013 at 7:16 pm

   Rumsfeld Says Obama Hasn’t Justified Syria Attack

   Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “who ushered the U.S. into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, said the Obama administration has not clearly justified an attack on Syria,” The Hill reports.

   Said Rumsfeld: “One thing that is very interesting, it seems to me, is that there really hasn’t been any indication from the administration as to what our national interest is with respect to this particular situation.”

   • 

     TarheelDem on August 28, 2013 at 7:28 pm

     Rumsfeld is a conniving jerk. He never in his career stated clearly what our national interest was in the wars he supported.

     But there has been one statement of national interest.  It is in the United States national interest, according to government spokespersons, that chemical weapons not become regularized in fighting wars and that the nonproliferation regime with regard to chemical weapons not be broken.  Even by a country that is not a signatory of that regime.

     Rumsfeld (and others) might disagree with that statement of national interest, but it has been made.

     • 

       yastreblyansky on August 28, 2013 at 8:05 pm

       PBO just repeated it, very carefully, on PBS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GxyBKKYPT4c

       I prefer living with this to anything Rumsfeld could agree with.

       Of course I’m also snark-wondering if applying treaties to non-signatories means Israeli nukes…

     • 

       MNPundit on August 28, 2013 at 8:54 pm

       Yeah, that’s all pro-intervention has got.

       But tell me, how is firing 100 cruise missiles going to send that message?

4. 

   rikyrah on August 28, 2013 at 8:29 pm

   Seriously?
   This is the speech you chose to highlight?
   Sigh

5. 

   Oscar In Dallas on August 29, 2013 at 9:37 am

   Um, apparently the pooch is about to get royally screwed – Saudis vs. Russians.

6. 

   Arthur Gilroy on August 29, 2013 at 11:27 am

               Right here!!!

   

   On April 4, 1967 MLK Jr. delivered his most famous anti-Vietnam War speech at Riverside Church in NYC. In it he connected the ongoing failure of the U.S. to truly integrate minorities into its economic mainstream…a failure which most obviously continues to this day despite the many and various  “token minority” members in place from McDonalds managers right up to the White House…to the economic imperialist PermaWar which is also about most obviously about to continue in Syria.

   Precisely one year later…April 4th, 1968…martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, a crime which to this day has not been clearly and deciseively solved.

   Coincidence?

   Maybe, but in matters of this import I do not believe in coincidences. Too many of them inexorably lead one to such disbelief. Bet on it.

   And the PermaGov coup continues. Bet on that as well. Next stop? Syria, of course.

   Does anyone here actually believe that a viable anti-PermaWar presidential candidate will be allowed to emerge in 2016 by the Government Media Complex?

   Please.

   Wake the fuck up.

   Station WTFU once again signing off.

   AG

7. 

   on August 29, 2013 at 12:31 pm

   A helpful, welcome post about Dr King’s view of the VN War and how it undermined the GS while unleashing the political forces of reaction domestically.

   Too bad that in all the hundreds of hours the cable networks have devoted to Dr King and the MOW commemoration — repeating ad nozz the same video snippets and mainstream talking points about the speech –I didn’t hear a word about how MLK turned forcefully against LBJ’s War a few yrs after the March, causing, among other effects, a major rift between King and the Johnson WH.

   And, no, except for Pacifica and Amy Goodman, on the occasion of MLK’s birthday holiday there’s also rarely a mention of the antiwar King.

   Instead, as an example I caught last night on Msnbc, an interview w Prof Charles Ogletree, who went on and on gushingly about how he thought Lyndon was such a great president (while also clearly downplaying the crucial positive CR role of JFK).  Neither CO nor the gentle softballing host (Rachel or the guy with the hornrim glasses) bothered to interject that Dr King himself, certainly by the last year of his life, would not have agreed with that rosy presidential assessment.