Venezuela: het VS volk wordt weer een oorlog in gelogen, zoals eerder in Irak, Libië en Syrië

Posted on March 11, 2019 by Telmo Claro

Lee Camp de schrijver van het hieronder opgenomen artikel, eerder gepubliceerd op Truthdig en door mij overgenomen van Information Clearing House, stelt in zijn openingszin dat het niet de eerste keer is dat de VS regering en de massamedia het volk van de VS een oorlog in sleept, dan wel een staatsgreep organiseert die onherroepelijk desastreuze gevolgen zal hebben….. Die uitspraak gaat wel op voor het eufemisme van het jaar, immers de VS geschiedenis vanaf 1945 staat er bol van!*

Met een terugkijk op zijn leve ten tijde van de tweede illegale oorlog van de VS tegen Irak in 2003 en hoe hij toen de zaken bekeek, waar hij het gevoel kreeg dat de argumenten voor die oorlog niet klopten, ontleedt Camp 4 illegale oorlogen van de VS die op valse gronden werden gevoerd.

Camp begint met de Spaans-Amerikaanse oorlog, waar de reden voor een VS aanval het zinken was van oorlogsschip USS Maine in de haven van Havanna. Daarna haalt hij de Vietnam oorlog aan en het conflict in de Golf van Tonkin, waar VS oorlogsschepen ‘schoten op weersverschijnselen die ze op de radar zagen……’ Oorlogsmisdadiger Robert McNamara wist op grond van deze in feite false flag operatie**, president Johnson te bewegen de strijd tegen Noord-Vietnam te intensiveren tot een ‘totale oorlog……’ Later gaf McNamara toe dat het Golf van Tonkin incident nooit plaatsvond…… Let wel: deze oorlog kostte miljoenen het leven, deze slachtoffers werden niet alleen in Vietnam vermoord (3,8 miljoen mensen), maar ook in buurlanden Laos en Cambodja……

Vervolgens komt de oorlog tegen Irak aan bod, een illegale oorlog waarvan iedereen kan weten dat deze op basis van leugens werd aangegaan door de VS, een oorlog die intussen aan meer dan 2 miljoen Irakezen het leven heeft gekost (Camp noemt overigens een aantal van 1 miljoen Irakese slachtoffers, nogal een verschil met schattingen die in Irak werden gemaakt door deskundigen, al blijft een aantal van 1 miljoen doden, een verschrikking waar je je amper iets bij voor kan stellen….)

Camp komt als eerste (hij begint vanaf het vierde voorbeeld) met het bombarderen van Syrië. Jammer dat hij niet wijst op het feit dat de VS al in 2006 heeft besloten dat Assad weg moest, niet in de laatste plaats daar hij pijpleidingen over de grond van Syrië weigerde, gaspijpleidingen van de Golfstaten richting Zuid-Europa…… (waarmee 2 vliegen in 1 klap worden geveld, immers met dat gas zou Rusland een afzet probleem krijgen in Europa…..). De VS heeft de opstand in Syrië georganiseerd en geregisseerd, waar deze terreurentiteit gewapende figuren van buiten Syrië als provocateurs heeft ingezet tijdens die ‘opstand…’ Helaas voor de VS, maar deze keer mislukte de opzet……

Camp noemt veel meer feiten en zaken die de reguliere (massa-) media niet brengen. Het verhaal eindigt tenslotte bij Venezuela, waarover Camp o.a. vertelt dat oorlogsmisdadiger Bolton zonder blikken of blozen stelde dat de VS uit is op de enorme olievoorraad van Venezuela (de op 1 na grootste voorraad ter wereld, volgens Camp de grootste maar dat klopt m.i. niet). Deze bekentenis van Bolton werd niet eens gebracht door de massamedia, nee zij houden vol dat de arme Venezolanen geholpen moeten worden, daar het hen aan alles ontbreekt, ‘zelfs aan tandpasta…’ (zie daarvoor ook de video van Lee Camp, die onder het artikel is weergegeven, waar hij ook op de ‘honger’ in Venezuela ingaat)

Niet genoemd door Camp, maar de VN en het Rode Kruis hebben de VS terecht gewezen met haar poging humanitaire hulp te politiseren, daar deze organisaties al lang humanitaire hulp verstrekken in Venezuela, er zijn zelfs 20 keer meer humanitaire hulpgoederen in Venezuela (waaronder medicijnen) dan de VS heeft klaarstaan….. Humanitaire hulpgoederen die zoals gezegd wel medicijnen bevatten, in tegenstelling tot de humanitaire hulp uit de VS, terwijl de westerse massamedia en het grootste deel van de westerse politici in navolging van hun collega’s in de VS, dat keer op keer wel stellen……. Nota bene USAID, de organisatie die de VS zendingen gereed maakt, heeft zelf toegegeven dat zich geen medicijnen tussen die VS hulpgoederen bevinden….. Alweer een feit dat de westerse reguliere media niet hebben gemeld……

Lees het volgende artikel en zegt het ajb voort, tijd dat de massamedia ook in ons land eindelijk de waarheid brengen over Venezuela…..

We Are Being Lied Into War Again

This is not the first time our government and our media have conspired to drag the American people into war with another country—or helped create a coup that will inevitably have disastrous results

By Lee Camp

March 08, 2019 “Information Clearing House” – I was 23 when we invaded Iraq, and I wasn’t sure it was based on lies, but something deep down in me—just behind the spleen—told me it was based on lies. Kinda like if your blind date shows up and you notice he has a 2004 flip phone. It seems vaguely worrisome, and no explanation he can haltingly supply will put you at ease. Plus, anyone else who acts like it’s normal also becomes suspect.

The invasion of Iraq just felt like it was a lie to me. And it turned out that I was right, that it was a lie, and that the entirety of the mainstream media and our government were either wrong or lying and, most of the time, both.

Now our government and our media are trying their damnedest to lie us into another war, this one with Venezuela. They tell us the Venezuelan people are desperate for necessities like toothpaste, while independent journalists show piles of affordable toothpaste in Caracas.

And even if they didn’t have toothpaste, that hardly seems like a good reason for America to be dropping our long-range bad decisions on the heads of innocent people. Turning a town into an impact crater for the sake of a battle to stop gingivitis seems a bit extreme.

The mainstream media and nearly the entirety of the U.S. government tell us Juan Guaido is the “interim president,” even though he was never elected to that position and the current president is still leading the Venezuelan government and military. So I guess this “interim” is the time between Guaido being a nobody and the time when he goes back to being nobody but now gets to tell women at parties, “You know, I used to be interim president.”

The mainstream media also inform us that the Venezuelan military set U.S. aid trucks on fire, when video shows opposition forces doing it. Furthermore, the idea of Venezuela taking “aid” from the country whose sanctions are crushing them would be like the Standing Rock Sioux accepting gift packages from the construction crews swiss-cheesing their land to lay down the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL). Unless the boxes are filled with industrial paper towels to help clean up oil spills, I fail to see how it would be beneficial. Sometimes you do indeed have to look a gift horse in the mouth (or should I say “gift dog”).

This is not the first time our government and our media have conspired to drag the American people into war with another country—or helped create a coup that will inevitably have disastrous results. So I thought this would be a prime moment to go through the top four greatest hits.

Number 4: The Spanish-American War

This is widely considered to be the birth of modern media propaganda, because it was the first war actually started by the media. Newspapers fabricated atrocities in the never-ending quest for more readers.

And as The New York Times noted, “[T]he sensationalistic reporting of the sinking of the American battleship Maine in Havana harbor on Feb. 15, 1898 … and all the other egregious reporting leading up to the Spanish-American War might have been considered merely cartoonish if it hadn’t led to a major international conflict.”

I think maybe The New York Times got that quote confused with its mission statement: “Cartoonishly dragging America into major international conflict since 1851!”

Number 3: The Vietnam War

Sure, most everyone knows the catastrophic Vietnam War was precipitated by the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which U.S. naval vessels were fired upon by villainous North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Following that skirmish, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara recommended that President Johnson retaliate, and the full-force Vietnam War had begun. But most Americans still don’t know that there was no Gulf of Tonkin incident—unless you count U.S. naval ships literally firing their weapons at weather events they saw on the radar. The 2003 documentary “The Fog of War” finally revealed the truth. Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara confessed that the Gulf of Tonkin attack did not actually happen.

That’s right. It never happened. Much like leprechauns or dragons or Simon Cowell’s talent, it was a figment of our national imagination.

The lies of our government, followed by the fawning, credulous reporting from our media, led to the death of 58,000 U.S. service members and as many as 3.8 million Vietnamese.
The United States government has one of the most powerful Departments of Fabrication and Falsification ever assembled. It’s a modern marvel on par with the Great Pyramid of Giza and Rafael Nadal’s down-the-line running forehand.

Number 2: The Iraq War

Of course, there’s the most obvious lie about Iraq, i.e., that Saddam Hussein had so many weapons of mass destruction that he would often use one to scrub hard-to-reach places while in the tub. But that wasn’t the only falsehood manifested to bring about our complete annihilation of the sovereign nation Saddam ruled over. There were others, such as the idea that Saddam was connected to al-Qaida and perhaps played a role in the 9/11 attacks. William Safire at The New York Times, in May 2002, wrote, “Mohamed Atta, destined to be the leading Sept. 11 suicide hijacker, was reported last fall by Czech intelligence to have met at least once with Saddam Hussein’s espionage chief in the Iraqi Embassy.”

Yes, Safire was able to polish a load of bullshit so thoroughly it would sparkle like a sapphire. And that column is still up on the Times’ website, without a correction or retraction. I would say the Times is only useful for covering the bottom of a birdcage, but I’d fear the paper would lie your pet cockatoo into an ill-advised invasion, killing millions.

But the propaganda didn’t even stop there. There was also the anthrax attacks following 9/11. Anthrax was mailed to press outlets and the offices of politicians. To this day, many people still believe it had something to do with Iraq or al-Qaida because of award-winning national embarrassments like Brian Ross.

“Brian Ross at ABC News wrote ‘the anthrax in the tainted letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was laced with bentonite’ and ‘bentonite is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program.’ ” As Salon so clearly put it, “All of those factual claims … were completely false, demonstrably and unquestionably so. … Yet neither ABC nor Ross have ever retracted, corrected, clarified, or explained these fraudulent reports.”

And, as you would expect, following that blatantly false reporting, Brian Ross did not lose his job. In fact, he wasn’t put out to pasture from ABC News until last year, when he “reported that fired national security adviser Michael Flynn was ready to testify that Trump told him to contact the Russians during the campaign.”

That report—much like the rumors of Brian Ross’s journalistic integrity—turned out to be absolutely false.

(In my professional opinion, anyone who had anything to do with the selling, perpetrating or planning of the Iraq War should never again hold a position higher than assistant trainee to the guy who picks up the shit of a dog that does not belong to anyone of any particular importance. If that position does not exist, we as a nation should create it just for this moment. Yet, despite my objections, Robert Mueller (head of the FBI at the time of the invasion and a big supporter of it) is leading the biggest investigation in the country. John Bolton, who advocated for the Iraq invasion as far back as the 1990s, is now national security adviser. Bill Kristol, who pushed for the war and said it would last two months, is now a regular panelist on MSNBC. And the list goes on.)

Unlike Defense Secretary McNamara, who admitted the Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened, we don’t have a smoking gun showing that the Bush administration created these lies to get us into Iraq. … Oh, wait! Turns out the paper shredder at the Bush Oval Office was on strike for a higher minimum wage in 2002, and in fact, we do have a memo written by Bush’s defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, a year before U.S. forces unleashed a reign of terror on the Iraqi people. His memo about warwith Iraq stated, “How start? US discovers Saddam connection to Sept 11 or to anthrax attacks? Or maybe a dispute over WMD inspections?”

I’m not sure what’s more striking—that this memo exists, or that it sounds like the Bush boys planned a massive international battle the same way a broke 35-year-old maps out his bad novel that he’s sure is the ticket out of his mom’s basement.

“How start horrible bloody war? Maybe Saddam found to moonlight as porn star?”

Point is, multiple completely false stories laid the groundwork for an invasion of Iraq that left well over 1 million people dead.

Number 1: The Bombing of Syria

President Bashar Assad gassed his own people, thereby guaranteeing more American involvement—and he did it just days after Donald Trump had told the Pentagon to begin withdrawing troops from Syria. At least, that’s the story the corporate media repeated on-loop for at least a month, only pausing every 10 minutes to try desperately to get us all to buy more things with “baconator” in the name or to seek out a harder penis.

So we are expected to believe Assad did the one thing that would ensure more U.S. involvement just as he was about to win his war? It’s kinda like how, when I’m about to win a fistfight, I often poke myself repeatedly in the eye. You know—just to keep it exciting.

Famed journalists Seymour Hersh and Robert Fisk have done great work showing that the chemical attacks never happened, but there’s a new update. Just two weeks ago, a BBC producer came forward and said the Douma, Syria, chemical attack footage was staged.

His tweet said that after six months of investigations, he can prove that no fatalities occurred in the hospital. Yet our breathlessly inept mainstream American media, with little to no evidence, ran around saying, “There was a chemical attack! Those poor people! And they don’t have toothpaste, either! We must bomb them to help them!”

The overarching point here is that we’ve replaced our media with stenographers to the ruling elite long ago. The ruling class comes up with a lie to manufacture American consent for its all-American war crimes, and that lie is then sprayed like laminate all over average American citizens. This goes on until such time as any average citizens who question said lie is looked at like they have two heads, and one of them is covered in rat shit.

For the “journalists” who hose the lies across the country the best, awards and private jets and rooftop drinks with midlevel celebrities like Chuck Norris await them. Now we’re getting to the point where the actual rulers—the Trump administration, etc.—are not even hiding their corruption. John Bolton stated on Fox News that the ultimate goal is to steal Venezuela’s oil. But our media continue to tout the propaganda line. Even after Bolton said that, you won’t see Anderson Cooper or one of Fox News’ grand wizards saying, “Venezuela is undergoing a U.S.-backed coup because we’d like to steal their oil.” It’s truly dizzying that the corporate media preserve the propaganda even after the “leaders” have revealed their true sinister intentions.

On the inside of Wolf Blitzer’s eyelids, the phrase, “Must Defend the Matrix” blinks in red.

The propaganda line for Venezuela right now is, “We want to help the poor Venezuelans.” Well, if you want to help them, then keep America out of their face. Don’t force them to have anything to do with the country that came up with drive-through fried food served in a bucket and opioid nasal sprays. At no point does anyone look at the Donald Trump presidency and think, “Wow, that country really has things figured out. I hope they bring some of their great decision-making to our doorstep.”

Lee Camp is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor and activist. Camp is the host of the weekly comedy news TV show “Redacted Tonight With Lee Camp” on RT America.

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Hier nog een video met Lee Camp: ‘The TRUTH About Juan Guaidó in Venezuela’ (zien mensen!):

* Zie: ‘VS vermoordde meer dan 20 miljoen mensen sinds het einde van WOII……..‘ (tot het jaar 2000, intussen is het aantal moorden opgelopen tot meer dan 22,5 miljoen……) en: ‘VS buitenlandbeleid sinds WOII: een lange lijst van staatsgrepen en oorlogen……….‘ en ‘List of wars involving the United States‘ en: ‘CIA 70 jaar: 70 jaar moorden, martelen, coups plegen, nazi’s beschermen, media manipulatie enz. enz………‘

** Zie: ‘‘False flag terror’ bestaat wel degelijk: bekentenissen en feiten over heel smerige zaken……….‘ (zie ook de links in dat bericht voor meer false flag operaties)

Zie ook:
‘Venezuela: overleg in Noorwegen eindigde met telefoongesprek tussen Guaidó en Pence‘

‘Tirannie op de straten van Washington, een vergelijking met de start van nazi-Duitsland‘

‘Venezuela: VS ministerie van BuZa publiceert per ongeluk een lijst met sadistische terreurdaden tegen het Venezolaanse volk‘

‘Pence to offer ‘carrots’ to Venezuela military, warnings to judges‘

‘Venezolaanse ambassade in Washington belaagd, er mag zelfs geen voedsel worden gebracht….‘

‘Venezuela: VS zal desnoods militair geweld gebruiken om een vreedzame overgang van regime te bewerkstelligen…… ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!‘

‘Venezuela: ultieme couppoging van Guaidó mislukt‘

‘Trump vermoordde al 40.000 Venezolaanse burgers‘

‘Venezolaanse regering treft nieuwe regeling voor hulpgoederen van het Rode Kruis, ‘onafhankelijk NOS’ brengt alweer fake news‘

‘VS heeft beslag gelegd op 5 miljard dollar van Venezuela voor medicijnaankopen‘

‘Venezuela: onafhankelijke journalisten ontmaskeren leugens over dit land bij presentatie voor de VN‘

‘Venezuela: 15 doden door sabotage elektriciteitsnet‘

‘Venezuela: bijt de VS in haar eigen staart?’

‘Venezuela: humanitaire hulp stunt van de VS ingegeven om de kruistocht tegen Maduro een versnelling te geven‘

Pompeo: US Military Obligated to “Take Down” the Iranians in Venezuela

(de opgeblazen oorlogshitser en oorlogsmisdadiger Pompeo beweert dat Hezbollah werkzaam is in Venezuela en daar een leger heeft dat gezien zijn woorden amper onder doet voor de gezamenlijke NAVO troepen… ha! ha! ha! Ook voor deze belachelijke beschuldiging is totaal geen bewijs…)

‘Halliburton en Chevron hebben groot belang bij ‘regime change’ in Venezuela‘

‘Mike Pence (vicepresident VS) gaf Guaidó, de door de VS gewenste leider, groen licht voor de coup in Venezuela‘

‘VS coup tegen Maduro in volle gang……..‘

‘Antiwar Hero Medea Benjamin Disrupts Pompeo Speech on Venezuela‘

‘Venezuela’s Military Chief, Foreign Allies Back Maduro‘

‘Als de VS stopt met spelen van ‘politieagent’ en het vernielen van de wereld, zullen de slechte krachten winnen……‘

‘VS weer op oorlogspad in Latijns-Amerika: Venezuela het volgende slachtoffer…….‘

‘Venezuela: VS verandering van regime mislukt >> de Venezolanen wacht een VS invasie‘

Vast Majority of Democrats Remain Silent or Support Coup in Venezuela

‘Trump wilde naast de economische oorlogsvoering tegen Venezuela dat land daadwerkelijk militair aanvallen……‘

‘Venezolaanse regionale verkiezingen gehekeld door westen, terwijl internationale waarnemers deze als eerlijk beoordeelden……….‘

‘Venezuela: Target of Economic Warfare‘

‘Venezuela: de anti-propaganda van John Oliver (en het grootste deel westerse massamedia) feilloos doorgeprikt‘

‘Venezuela: ‘studentenprotest’ wordt uitgevoerd door ingehuurde troepen………‘

‘Abby Martin Busts Open Myths on Venezuela’s Food Crisis: ‘Shelves Fully Stocked’‘ (zie ook de video in dat artikel!)

‘Rex Tillerson waarschuwt Venezuela voor een coup en beschuldigt China van imperialisme…….. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!‘

‘Edwin Koopman (VPRO Bureau Buitenland) over Venezolaanse verkiezingen met anti-Maduro propaganda bij de ‘onafhankelijke NOS…..‘

‘EU neemt uiterst hypocriet sancties tegen de Venezolaanse regering Maduro………‘

‘Venezuela ontwricht, wat de reguliere media u niet vertellen……..‘

‘VS steunt rechtse coalitie (MUD) in Venezuela………‘

‘Venezuela’s US-Backed Opposition Turns Up The Violence Following Assembly Vote‘

‘10 Things You Need to Know About the Terrorist Attack in Venezuela‘

‘Venezuelans in the Streets to Support Constituent Assembly‘

‘What Mainstream Media Got Wrong About Venezuela’s Constituent Assembly Vote‘ (met mogelijkheid tot directe vertaling)

‘The Left and Venezuela‘ (met mogelijkheid tot directe vertaling)

‘Rondje Venezuela schoppen op Radio1………‘

‘Karabulut (SP) blij dat ze Maduro eindelijk ook kan schoppen………‘

‘Venezuela moet en zal ‘verlost’ worden van Maduro, met ‘oh wonder’ een dikke rol van de VS en de reguliere westerse media‘

‘Venezolaanse regering treedt terecht op tegen de uiterst gewelddadige oppositie!!‘

De langzame moord op de ideeën van Martin Luther King…………….. Ofwel: Dr. Martin Luther Kings lessen willens en wetens verzwegen….

Posted on January 23, 2018 by Telmo Claro

Het volgende uitstekende artikel van Paul Street handelt over de lessen van Martin Luther King (in de VS vaak aangeduid als MLK) waarover men in de VS en de rest van het westen liever niet spreekt, dit daar in zijn visie o.a. alleen echte gelijkheid kan ontstaan in een vorm van socialisme………

Het is op 4 april a.s. 50 jaar geleden dat de staat dr. Martin Luther King liet vermoorden….. Vandaar veel aandacht dit jaar voor deze vrijheid en gelijkheidsstrijder. In de VS is 15 januari, de geboortedag van MLK, een vrije dag: ‘Martin Luther King Day’. Een uiterst hypocriet gebeuren als je het Paul Street vraagt, daar men vooral niet spreekt over de ideeën die King had over de ideale maatschappij en de vorm van bestuur die alle burgers ten goede zou komen, niet alleen de witte midden en hoge inkomens. Een wereld waarin arbeiders niet langer uitgebuit worden door en voor de ondernemers en aandeelhouders (en welgestelden in het algemeen).

Zo is echt socialisme of communisme een oplossing voor veel van de huidige ellende in de wereld. Vergeet niet dat communisme tot nu toe nooit heeft bestaan in onze wereld. Wat betreft socialisme kan je het Chili van Allende, Cuba van Fidel Castro en Venezuela onder Chavez en Maduro aanwijzen als voorbeelden (ook al was en is dit nog niet zoals het zou moeten zijn, echter wel zo goed dat de arme bevolking een veel beter leven kreeg, inclusief gezondheidszorg, een fatsoenlijk dak boven het hoofd en alfabetisering. Vandaar ook dat de VS zo haar best doet daar een eind aan te maken, wat tot nu toe al een aantal keren is gelukt, neem de uiterst bloedige staatsgreep tegen de democratisch gekozen regering van president Salvador Allende op 11 september 1973 in Chili, waarbij Allende strijdend werd vermoord…….. (betaald door- en onder regie en mede verantwoording van de CIA…..)

Momenteel is de VS naast het voeren van illegale oorlogen bezig met een economische oorlog tegen Venezuela, helaas is een heel groot deel van de Venezolaanse bevolking op de hoogte van de smerige streken die de VS het land levert (stop op leveringen van medicijnen en levensmiddelen) dat ze aan de kant van Maduro blijven staan. (dit nog naast de door de CIA georganiseerde gewelddadige protesten in Venezuela….)

De kijk van MLK op de wereld was volgens de schrijver van het volgende artikel, Paul Street, de reden waarom de overheid in de VS King alleen wil herdenken als strijder voor gelijke rechten t.b.v. gekleurde burgers……. Men leidt willens en wetens de aandacht af van de visie die King had op de VS en de wereld in het groot. Street spreekt dan ook (terecht) van een voortdurende morele en intellectuele moord op Martin Luther Kung………. (‘vreemd genoeg’ is er ook in de EU amper of geen aandacht voor de linkse kant van King….)

Zijn visie op de wereld, gecombineerd met zijn charisma is dan ook de reden waarom Martin Luther King ‘een bedreiging was’ voor de overheid en ‘wel vermoord moest worden…..’

Counterpunch JANUARY 19, 2018

Dr. King’s Long Assassination

by PAUL STREET

Photo by Ron Cogswell | CC BY 2.0

As the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s violent death (on April 4, 1968) grows closer, you can expect to hear more and more in U.S. corporate media about the real and alleged details of his immediate physical assassination (or perhaps execution). You will not be told about King’s subsequent and ongoing moral, intellectual, and ideological assassination.

I am referring to the conventional, neo-McCarthyite, and whitewashed narrative of King that is purveyed across the nation every year, especially during and around the national holiday that bears his name. This domesticated, bourgeois airbrushing portrays King as a mild liberal reformist who wanted little more than a few basic civil rights adjustments in a supposedly good and decent American System – a loyal supplicant who was grateful to the nation’s leaders for finally making noble alterations. This year was no exception.

The official commemorations never say anything about the Dr. King who studied Marx sympathetically at a young age and who said in his last years that “if we are to achieve real equality, the United States will have to adopt a modified form of socialism.” They delete the King who wrote that “the real issue to be faced” beyond “superficial” matters was the need for a radical social revolution.

It deletes the King who went on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in late 1967 to reflect on how little the Black freedom struggle had attained beyond some fractional changes in the South. He deplored “the arresting of the limited forward progress” Blacks and their allies had attained “by [a] white resistance [that] revealed the latent racism that was [still] deeply rooted in U.S. society.”

“As elation and expectations died,” King explained on the CBC, “Negroes became more sharply aware that the goal of freedom was still distant and our immediate plight was substantially still an agony of deprivation. In the past decade, little has been done for Northern ghettoes. Al the legislation was to remedy Southern conditions – and even these were only partially improved.”

Worse than merely limited, King felt, the gains won by Black Americans during what he considered just the “first phase” of their freedom struggle (1955-1965) were dangerous in that they “brought whites a sense of completion” – a preposterous impression that the so-called “Negro problem” had been solved and that there was therefore no more basis or justification for further black activism. “When Negroes assertively moved on to ascend to the second rung of the ladder,” King noted, “a firm resistance from the white community developed…In some quarters it was a courteous rejection, in others it was a singing white backlash. In all quarters unmistakably, it was outright resistance.”

Explaining to his CBC listeners the remarkable wave of race riots that washed across U.S. cities in the summers of 1966 and 1967, King made no apologies for Black violence. He blamed “the white power structure…still seeking to keep the walls of segregation and inequality intact” for the disturbances. He found the leading cause of the riots in the reactionary posture of “the white society, unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural change,” which” produc[ed] chaos” by telling Blacks (whose expectations for substantive change had been aroused) “that they must expect to remain permanently unequal and permanently poor.”

King also blamed the riots in part on Washington’s imperialist and mass-murderous war on Vietnam. Along with the misery it inflicted on Indochina, King said, the United States’ savage military aggression against Southeast Asia stole resources from Lyndon Johnson’s briefly declared and barely fought “War on Poverty.” It sent poor Blacks to the front killing lines to a disproportionate degree. It advanced the notion that violence was a reasonable response and even a solution to social and political problems.

Black Americans and others sensed what King called “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 school. 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,” King said on the CBC, adding that he “could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.”

Racial hypocrisy aside, King said that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense [here he might better have said “military empire”] than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.”

Did the rioters disrespect the law, as their liberal and conservative critics alike charged? Yes, King said, but added that the rioters’ transgressions were “derivative crimes…born of the greater crimes of the…policy-makers of the white society,” who “created discrimination…created slums [and] perpetuate unemployment, ignorance, and poverty… [T]he white man,” King elaborated, “does not abide by law in the ghetto. Day in and day out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provision of public services. The slums are a handiwork of a vicious system of the white society.”

Did the rioters engage in violence? Yes, King said, but noted that their aggression was “to a startling degree…focused against property rather than against people.” He observed that “property represents the white power structure, which [the rioters] were [quite understandably] attacking and trying to destroy.” Against those who held property “sacred,” King argued that “Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround with rights and respect, it has no personal being.”

What to do? King advanced radical changes that went against the grain of the nation’s corporate state, reflecting his agreement with New Left militants that “only by structural change can current evils be eliminated, because the roots are in the system rather in man or faulty operations.” King advocated an emergency national program providing either decent-paying jobs for all or a guaranteed national income “at levels that sustain life in decent circumstances.” He also called for the “demolition of slums and rebuilding by the population that lives in them.”

His proposals, he said, aimed for more than racial justice alone. Seeking to abolish poverty for all, including poor whites, he felt that “the Negro revolt” was properly challenging each of what he called “the interrelated triple evils” of racism, economic injustice/poverty (capitalism) and war (militarism and imperialism). The Black struggle had thankfully “evolve[ed] into more than a quest for [racial] desegregation and equality,” King said. It had become “a challenge to a system that has created miracles of production and technology” but had failed to “create justice.”

“If humanism is locked outside the [capitalist] system,” King said on CBC five months before his assassination (or execution), “Negroes will have revealed its inner core of despotism and a far greater struggle for liberation will unfold. The United States is substantially challenged to demonstrate that it can abolish not only the evils of racism but the scourge of poverty and the horrors of war….”

There should be no doubt that King meant capitalism when he referred to “the system” and its “inner core of despotism.” This is clear from the best scholarship on King, including David Garrow’s epic, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Council (HarperCollins, 1986)

No careful listener to King’s CBC talks could have missed the radicalism of his vision and tactics. “The dispossessed of this nation – the poor, both White and Negro – live in a cruelly unjust society,” King said. “They must organize a revolution against that injustice,” he added.

Such a revolution would require “more than a statement to the larger society,” more than “street marches” King proclaimed. “There must,” he added, “be a force that interrupts [that society’s] functioning at some key point.” That force would use “mass civil disobedience” to “transmute the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force” by “dislocate[ing] the functioning of a society.”

“The storm is rising against the privileged minority of the earth,” King added for good measure. “The storm will not abate until [there is a] just distribution of the fruits of the earth…” The “massive, active, nonviolent resistance to the evils of the modern system” that King advocated was “international in scope,” reflecting the fact that “the poor countries are poor primarily because [rich Western nations] have exploited them through political or economic colonialism. Americans in particular must help their nation repent of her modern economic imperialism.”

King was a democratic socialist mass-disobedience-advocating and anti-imperialist world revolution advocate. The guardians of national memory don’t want you to know about that when they purvey the official, doctrinally imposed memory of King as an at most liberal and milquetoast reformer. (In a similar vein, our ideological overlords don’t want us to know that Albert Einstein [Time magazine’s “Person of the 20th Century”] wrote a brilliant essay making the case for socialism in the first issue of venerable U.S.-Marxist magazine Monthly Review – or that Helen Keller was a fan of the Russian Revolution.)

The threat posed to the official bourgeois memory by King’s CBC lectures – and by much more that King said and wrote in the last three years of his life – is not just that they show an officially iconic gradualist reformer to have been a democratic socialist opponent of the profits system and its empire. It is also about how clearly King analyzed the incomplete and unfinished nature of the nation’s progress against racial and class injustice, around which all forward developments pretty much ceased in the 1970s, thanks to a white backlash that was already well underway in the early and mid-1960s (before the rise of the Black Panthers, who liberal historians like to blame for the nation’s rightward racial drift under Nixon and Reagan) and to a top-down corporate war on working-class Americans that started under Jimmy Carter and then went ballistic under Ronald Reagan.

The “spiritual doom” imposed by U.S. militarism has lived on, with Washington having directly and indirectly killed untold millions of Central Americans, South Americans, Africans, Muslims, Arabs, and Asians in many different ways over the years since Vietnam. Accounting for roughly 40 percent of the world’s military expenditure, the U.S. maintains Cold War-level “defense” (empire) budgets to sustain an historically unmatched global empire (with at least 800 military bases spread across more than 80 foreign countries and “troops or other military personnel in about 160 foreign countries and territories”) even as a near-record 45 million U.S.-Americans remain stuck under the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level. A very disproportionate number of the nation’s poor are Black and Latino/a.

It is obvious that the racist and white-supremacist real estate baron Donald J. Trump spoke disingenuously in tongue when he mouthed nice words about Dr. King last Monday. But what about his predecessor, Barack Obama, the nation’s first technically Black president? It was cruelly ironic that Obama kept a bust of King in the Oval Office to watch over his regular betrayal of the martyred peace and justice leader’s ideals. Consistent with Dr. Adolph Reed Jr.’s early (1996) dead-on description of the future President as “a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable credentials and vacuous to repressive neoliberal politics,” Obama consistently backed top corporate and financial interests (whose representatives filled and dominated his administrations, campaigns, and campaign coffers) over and against those who would undertake serious programs to end poverty, redistribute wealth (the savage re-concentration of which since Dr. King’s time has produced a New Gilded Age in the U.S.), grant free and universal health care, constrain capital, and save livable ecology as it approached a number of critical tipping points on the accelerating path to irreversible catastrophe. Thus is that one of Obama’s supporters (Ezra Klein) was moved in late 2012 to complain that a president “whose platform consists of Romney’s health care bill, Newt Gingrich’s environmental policies, John McCain’s deficit-financed payroll tax cuts, George W. Bush’s bailouts of filing banks and corporations, and a mixture of the Bush and Clinton tax rate” was still being denounced as a “leftist.”

Obama opposed calls for any special programs or serious federal attention to the nation’s savage racial inequalities, so vast now that the median of white households was 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households near the end of his presidency. He did this while the fact of his ascendency to the White House deeply reinforced white America’s sense that racism was over as a barrier to black advancement and generated its own significant white backlash that only worsened the situation of less privileged black Americans.

Obama made it crystal clear in ways that no white president could that what Dr. King in 1963 called America’s unpaid “promissory note” and “bad check” to Black America would remain un-cashed. This was all too sadly consistent with Obama’s preposterous 2007 campaign claim (at a commemoration of the King-led 1965 Selma Voting Rights March) to believe that Blacks had already come “90 percent” of the way to equality in the U.S.

Completing the “triple evils” hat trick, Obama – the self-appointed chief-executioner atop the Special Forces Global War on (of) Terror Kill List – embraced and expanded upon the vast criminal and worldwide spying and killing operation he inherited from Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and George W. Bush. He tamped down Bush’s failed ground wars only to ramp up and inflate the role of unaccountable special force and drone attacks in the spirit of his dashing and reckless imperial role model John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Obama’s drone program, Noam Chomsky noted in early 2015, was “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times.” It “target[ed] people suspected of perhaps intending to harm us some day, and any unfortunates who happen to be nearby,” Chomsky wrote.

In waging his deadly and disastrous, nation-wrecking and regionally destabilizing air war on Libya, Obama (unlike Bush prior to the invasion of Iraq) did not even bother with the pretense of seeking Congressional approval. “It should be a scandal,” Stansfield Smith wrote on CounterPunch one year ago, “that left-liberals paint Trump as a special threat, a war mongerer – [but] not Obama who is the first president to be at war every day of his eight years, who is waging seven wars at present, who dropped three bombs an hour, 24 hours a day, in 2016.” As Alan Nairn told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman in early 2010, Obama kept the nation’s giant imperial machinery “set on kill.”

Meanwhile, Obama far surpassed the Cheney-Bush regime when it came to repressing antiwar dissenters, not to mention those who opposed the rule of the 1 percent – smashed by a coordinated federal campaign in the fall of 2011. “As all kinds of journalists have continuously pointed out,” Glenn Greenwald noted in early 2014, “the Obama administration is more aggressive and more vindictive when it comes to punishing whistleblowers than any administration in American history, including the Nixon administration.”

Furthermore, and to make matters far worse, Obama helped keep the planet set on burn. As Stansfield Smith noted two days before the horrid Trump’s inauguration:

Obama, who says he recognizes the threat to humanity posed by climate change, still invested at least $34 billion to promote fossil fuel projects in other countries. That is three times as much as George W Bush spent in his two terms, almost twice that of Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush and Bill Clinton put together…Obama financed 70 foreign fossil fuel projects. When completed they will release 164 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year – about the same output as the 95 currently operating coal-fired power plants in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Oklahoma. He financed two natural gas plants on an island in the Great Barrier Reef, as well as two of the largest coalmines on the planet… Moreover, under Obama, the U.S. has reversed the steady drop in U.S. oil production which had continued unchecked since 1971. The U.S. was pumping just 5.1 million barrels per day when Obama took office. By April 2016 it was up to 8.9 million barrels per day. A 74% increase.

As Obama proudly said in 2012, in the film This Changes Everything:

‘Over the last three years I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75% of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough oil and gas pipelines to encircle the earth and then some. So, we are drilling all over the place, right now.’

“Drill, baby, drill!”

Perhaps the dismal neoliberal Obama presidency – a key midwife to the Trump atrocity – was at least an object lesson on how real progressive and democratic change is about something bigger than a change in the party or color of the people in nominal power. That is certainly something King (who would be 88 today) would have understood very well had he been able to witness the endless mendacity of the nation’s first half-white president first-hand.

“The black revolution,” King wrote in a posthumously published 1969 essay titled “A Testament of Hope” (embracing a very different, authentically progressive sort of hope than that purveyed by Brand Obama in 2008) “is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws – racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction society of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”

Those words ring as true as ever today, with heightened urgency as it becomes undeniable that the profits system is driving humanity over an environmental cliff. They are words we never hear during official King Day commemorations.

King, it is worth recalling, was recruited by antiwar progressives to run for the U.S. presidency in 1967. He politely declined, claiming that he’d have little chance of winning and that he preferred to serve as a force of moral conscience for all the nation’s political parties.

The deeper truth, clear from his late-life writing and speeches, is that he had no interest in climbing into the power elite: his passion was directed toward a “revolution” of “the dispossessed” and a mass grassroots movement for the redistribution of wealth and power – a “radical reconstruction of society itself” – from the bottom up. Dr. King was interested in what the late radical U.S. historian Howard Zinn considered the more urgent politics of “who’s sitting in the streets,” very different from what Zinn saw as the comparatively superficial politics of “who’s sitting in the White House.”

King’s officially deleted radical record and Zinn’s clever and sage dichotomy are worth bearing in mind in coming months and years as we watch the nation’s “left” liberals try to call forth and herald a new Obama (Oprah perhaps?) in 2020. That is certainly one of the last things we need.

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