Oorlogshitser Voordewind, die vluchtelingen het liefst opvangt in de regio, is speciaal ambassadeur van ZOA, een christelijke organisatie die zich o.a. inzet voor vluchtelingen. ZOA staat voor Zuidoost-Azië en werd opgericht als reactie op linkse organisaties die Noord-Vietnam steunden tegen de ongebreidelde VS terreur tegen dat land, ofwel ZOA stond voor hulp aan het inhumane en uiterst corrupte bewind in Zuid-Vietnam en stond achter de vreselijke bombardementen van de VS op zowel Noord-Vietnam als Laos en Cambodja >> echt héééél christelijk!!
Door de westerse oorlogen o.l.v. de VS, het land dat ook al vanaf de oprichting van de NAVO het militaire opperbevel heeft over deze terreurorganisatie, zijn niet alleen deze eeuw al meer dan 5 miljoen mensen omgekomen, of beter gezegd: vermoord, maar zijn ook enorme vluchtelingenstromen opgang gekomen. Illegale oorlogen die van A tot Z werden gesteund door Voordewind…… Echter die vluchtelingen mogen van Voordewind niet naar Nederland, tenzij ze christelijk zijn natuurlijk…..
Zelfs de oorlog tegen Syrië steunde Voordewind, terwijl onder het bewind van Assad alle geloven naast elkaar konden leven, wat gelukkig weer zo is in de door de reguliere Syrische troepen bevrijde gebieden, desondanks kan Voordewind het maar niet laten om alle leugens van de VS geheime diensten te herhalen en erop te hameren dat Assad moet verdwijnen, wat tevens zou betekenen dat de christenen moeten vluchten uit dat land….. Benieuwd of Voordewind die christenen wel op zou willen vangen in Nederland en dat voor onbepaalde tijd….. (de vraag stellen is haar beantwoorden: niemand zo hypocriet als een fundi-christen!!)
Voordewind op een foto met een tot christendom bekeerde moslim die niet terug kan naar Somalië, foto bij bericht van het ChristenUnie partij vod: ‘Christelijke ex-moslim kan niet terug naar Somalië‘ (toch vreemd dat hij deze christenen wel wil opvangen in Nederland, benieuwd of hij dat ook wil als het om een homoseksueel persoon gaat, die bij deportatie moet vrezen voor diens leven……)
Wat zal Voordewind verdienen als ‘speciaal ambassadeur’ voor ZOA?? Dat zal niet misselijk zijn, want voor niets gaat de zon op, nietwaar Voordewind??!!!
(On the top right hand side of this page you can choose for a translation in the language of your choice, first choose ‘Engels’ [English] so you can recognise your own language [the Google tranlation is first in Dutch, a language most people don’t understand, while on the other hand most people recognize there language translated in English]).
20 jaar lang heeft de VS gelogen over de situatie in Afghanistan, aldus Glenn Greenwald, hoewel je wel blind moet zijn geweest om dat niet te hebben onderkend, althans als je geïnteresseerd was in wat er in dat land gebeurde…….
Keer op keer liet men weten dat men de situatie onder controle had en dat de Taliban geen macht meer was van ook maar enige betekenis…. Evenzo hard loog men dat de training van het Afghaanse leger en politie een zo geweldig succes was dat Afghanistan op eigen benen kon staan (onder de corrupte machthebbers en oorlogswinstmakers, in volgorde de presidenten: Hamid Karzai en Ashraf Ghani)…..
De berichtgeving over die successen werden voor een groot deel overgenomen door de reguliere westerse media in de VS en de andere NAVO-lidstaten die zich leenden voor deze illegale oorlog…….. Echter volgens Greenwald hebben een aantal journalisten de zittende regeringen het vuur aan de schenen gelegd, zoals ook een week of 6 geleden Joe Biden, die werd geconfronteerd met een uitspraak van een journalist dat de VS heeft gelogen over de kracht van het Afghaanse leger en politie, wat hij driedubbel ontkende (waarmee hij bedoelde dat het Afghaanse leger en politie wel opgewassen waren voor hun taken)…… Op 8 juli jl. zei Biden nog dat de Afghaanse regering en het leger zo sterk waren dat ze aanvallen van de Taliban met gemak konden afslaan……
Wat betreft Nederland* viel het me werkelijk mee dat de reguliere media in Nederland nogal wat kritiek hadden op het door Nederland opleiden van politieagenten in Kunduz, al is dat te danken aan het schandaal dat werd onthult na onderzoek toen bleek dat deze opleiding één grote maar peperdure mislukking was (ondanks dat is Nederland daarna nog doorgegaan met die opleiding [de opleiding tot de toekomstige religieuze politie van de Taliban….])…..
Greenwald gaat in zijn artikel uitgebreid in op hoe het volk in de VS werd opgelicht door de verschillende administraties, van George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump en Joe Biden (waar de laatste extra verantwoording draagt, daar hij als vicepresident fungeerde onder Obama….)….. Uitermate lullig te lezen dat zowel Greenwald als Edward Snowden bepaalde zaken geheim hebben gehouden, daar ze bang waren dat bepaalde zaken zouden kunnen leiden tot geweld van de Taliban….. (Je bent journalist of niet……)
Het meest schandalige van e.e.a. is wel dat men ‘niet heeft kunnen voorzien’ dat de Taliban na het opstappen van een groot deel van de westerse troepen, Afghanistan in zeer korte tijd onder controle zouden krijgen….. Het grote failliet van geheime diensten in binnen en buitenland. Voor Nederland moet de MIVD worden aangewezen als één van de hoofdverantwoordelijken die hadden moeten voorzien dat Nederland alles op alles moest zetten om personeel dat voor Nederland had gewerkt, al in vroeg stadium vervoerd hadden moeten worden naar Nederland….. Deze mensen worden door de Taliban gezien als collaborateurs en zijn daardoor ten dode opgeschreven…… De Duitse premier Merkel, waar Duitsland dezelfde grove fout maakte, durfde gisteren te zeggen dat Duitsland dit als andere landen niet had kunnen voorzien, een leugen van enorme proporties…… (bovendien jezelf vrijpleiten door te wijzen naar anderen, is zonder meer een bijzonder zwaktebod….)
Hare CDA leeghoofdigheid en minister van Defensie Bijleveld durfde o.a. te stellen dat ingrijpen van de VS en andere NAVO-lidstaten hebben voorkomen dat er nog meer aanslagen werden beraamd vanuit Afghanistan…… Ook Bijleveld lijdt blijkbaar aan een fikse geheugenstoornis (als aartsleugenaar VVD premier Rutte), immers sinds 2001 zijn er een fiks aantal aanslagen uitgevoerd in EU lidstaten, uiteraard zijn die aanslagen te danken aan westers optreden in Afghanistan, het Midden-Oosten en Libië……. Voorlopig is Bijleveld niet alleen mede verantwoordelijk voor gepleegde oorlogsmisdaden in Afghanistan, maar ook voor de dood van 25 Nederlandse militairen (om nog maar te zwijgen over de 500.000 vermoorde Afghanen in deze illegale oorlog….)
Men wist al lang dat de VS zich terug zou trekken uit Afghanistan en men had van meet af aan een plan moeten opstellen om collaborateurs, die Nederlandse troepen hebben geholpen, te vervoeren naar Nederland….. Schande dan ook dat Rutte 3 ministers Bijleveld, Kaag en staatssecretaris Broekers-Knol onlangs lieten weten dat Nederland alleen tolken en familie zou overbrengen naar Nederland en dat andere collaborateurs het zelf maar uit moeten zoeken…… ‘Leuk weetje’ voor de volgende collaborateurs die toekomstige illegale militaire avonturen van Nederland bij moeten staan…..
Nog schunniger was de opmerking van een paar weken geleden, waarmee men liet weten dat ondanks de opmars van de Taliban, Nederland nog steeds Afghanen terug zou kunnen sturen, waarvoor VVD hufter Broekers-Knol als hoofdverantwoordelijke moet worden aangewezen (dit in samenwerking met de Nederlandse ambassade in Kabul, die middels ambtsberichten van Buitenlandse Zaken de situatie als veilig beoordeelde……**)….. Gelukkig heeft de Nederlandse regering na druk van o.a. de VN en NGO’s besloten de komende eerste 6 maanden geen uitgeprocedeerde asielzoekers uit te zullen zetten naar Afghanistan….. (trouwens al een schande dat asielverzoeken van Afghaanse vluchtelingen werden afgewezen en dat voor een land dat 20 jaar lang in oorlog was en waar de bevolking dus allesbehalve veilig was en is, of dat nu kwam door de terreur van de Taliban of die van westerse troepen…….)
Hoorde vanmiddag nog een plork op WDR 5, die stelde dat de VS niet de Taliban had gesteund in de strijd tegen de Sovjet-Unie, maar dat dit de moehadjin was, echter naast een flink stel warlords, werden de Taliban wel degelijk voorzien van training en (ook zware) wapens….. In feite heeft de VS de Taliban grootgemaakt en door de illegale oorlog die de VS in 2001 tegen Afghanistan begon, is de Taliban nu aanmerkelijk veel machtiger dan in voornoemd jaar….. En dan durft de VS andere landen te beschuldigen van het destabiliseren van gebieden zoals Iran dat het Midden-Oosten zou destabiliseren…… ha! ha! ha! ha! (vergeet daarbij niet dat de VS met haar illegale oorlogen tegen Afghanistan, Irak, Libië en Syrië meer dan 5 miljoen mensen heeft vermoord, met hulp van andere NAVO-lidstaten als Nederland….)
Using the same deceitful tactics they pioneered in Vietnam, U.S. political and military officials repeatedly misled the country about the prospects for success in Afghanistan.
The Taliban give an exclusive interview to Al Jazeera after taking control of the presidential palace in Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 15, 2021 (Al Jazeera/YouTube)
“The Taliban regime is coming to an end,” announced President George W. Bush at the National Museum of Women in the Arts on December 12, 2001 — almost twenty years ago today. Five months later, Bush vowed: “In the United States of America, the terrorists have chosen a foe unlike they have faced before. . . . We will stay until the mission is done.” Four years after that, in August of 2006, Bush announced: “Al Qaeda and the Taliban lost a coveted base in Afghanistan and they know they will never reclaim it when democracy succeeds. . . . The days of the Taliban are over. The future of Afghanistan belongs to the people of Afghanistan.”
For two decades, the message Americans heard from their political and military leaders about the country’s longest war was the same. America is winning. The Taliban is on the verge of permanent obliteration. The U.S. is fortifying the Afghan security forces, which are close to being able to stand on their own and defend the government and the country.
Just five weeks ago, on July 8, President Biden stood in the East Room of the White House and insisted that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was not inevitable because, while their willingness to do so might be in doubt, “the Afghangovernment and leadership . . . clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place.” Biden then vehemently denied the accuracy of a reporter’s assertion that “your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse.” Biden snapped: “That is not true. They did not — they didn’t — did not reach that conclusion.”
Biden continued his assurances by insisting that “the likelihood there’s going to be one unified government in Afghanistan controlling the whole country is highly unlikely.” He went further: “the likelihood that there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.” And then, in an exchange that will likely assume historic importance in terms of its sheer falsity from a presidential podium, Biden issued this decree:
Q. Mr. President, some Vietnamese veterans see echoes of their experience in this withdrawal in Afghanistan. Do you see any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam, with some people feeling —
THE PRESIDENT: None whatsoever. Zero. What you had is — you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our embassy — six, if I’m not mistaken.
The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.
When asked about the Taliban being stronger than ever after twenty years of U.S. warfare there, Biden claimed: “Relative to the training and capacity of the [Afghan National Security Forces} and the training of the federal police, they’re not even close in terms of their capacity.” On July 21 — just three weeks ago — Gen. Mark Milley, Biden’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, conceded that “there’s a possibility of a complete Taliban takeover, or the possibility of any number of other scenario,” yet insisted: “the Afghan Security Forces have the capacity to sufficiently fight and defend their country.”
Similar assurances have been given by the U.S. Government and military leadership to the American people since the start of the war. “Are we losing this war?,” Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, asked rhetorically in a news briefing from Afghanistan in 2008, answering it this way: “Absolutely no way. Can the enemy win it? Absolutely no way.” On September 4, 2013, then-Lt. Gen. Milley — now Biden’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — complained that the media was not giving enough credit to the progress they had made in building up the Afghan national security forces: “This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day,” Gen. Milley insisted.
None of this was true. It was always a lie, designed first to justify the U.S’s endless occupation of that country and, then, once the U.S. was poised to withdraw, to concoct a pleasing fairy tale about why the prior twenty years were not, at best, an utter waste. That these claims were false cannot be reasonably disputed as the world watches the Taliban take over all of Afghanistan as if the vaunted “Afghan national security forces” were china dolls using paper weapons. But how do we know that these statements made over the course of two decades were actual lies rather than just wildly wrong claims delivered with sincerity?
To begin with, we have seen these tactics from U.S. officials — lying to the American public about wars to justify both their initiation and continuation — over and over. The Vietnam War, like the Iraq War, was begun with a complete fabrication disseminated by the intelligence community and endorsed by corporate media outlets: that the North Vietnamese had launched an unprovoked attack on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. In 2011, President Obama, who ultimately ignored a Congressional voteagainst authorization of his involvement in the war in Libya to topple Muammar Qaddafi, justified the NATO war by denying that regime change was the goal: “our military mission is narrowly focused on saving lives . . . broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake.” Even as Obama issued those false assurances, The New York Times reported that “the American military has been carrying out an expansive and increasingly potent air campaign to compel the Libyan Army to turn against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.”
Just as they did for the war in Afghanistan, U.S. political and military leaders lied for years to the American public about the prospects for winning. On June 13, 1971, The New York Timespublished reports about thousands of pages of top secret documents from military planners that came to be known as “The Pentagon Papers.” Provided by former RAND official Daniel Ellsberg, who said he could not in good conscience allow official lies about the Vietnam War to continue, the documents revealed that U.S. officials in secret were far more pessimistic about the prospects for defeating the North Vietnamese than their boastful public statements suggested. In 2021, The New York Times recalled some of the lies that were demonstrated by that archive on the 50th Anniversary of its publication:
Brandishing a captured Chinese machine gun, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara appeared at a televised news conference in the spring of 1965. The United States had just sent its first combat troops to South Vietnam, and the new push, he boasted, was further wearing down the beleaguered Vietcong.
“In the past four and one-half years, the Vietcong, the Communists, have lost 89,000 men,” he said. “You can see the heavy drain.”
That was a lie. From confidential reports, McNamara knew the situation was “bad and deteriorating” in the South. “The VC have the initiative,” the information said. “Defeatism is gaining among the rural population, somewhat in the cities, and even among the soldiers.”
Lies like McNamara’s were the rule, not the exception, throughout America’s involvement in Vietnam. The lies were repeated to the public, to Congress, in closed-door hearings, in speeches and to the press.
The lies were repeated to the public, to Congress, in closed-door hearings, in speeches and to the press. The real story might have remained unknown if, in 1967, McNamara had not commissioned a secret history based on classified documents — which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. By then, he knew that even with nearly 500,000 U.S. troops in theater, the war was at a stalemate.
The pattern of lying was virtually identical throughout several administrations when it came to Afghanistan. In 2019, The Washington Post — obviously with a nod to the Pentagon Papers — published a report about secret documents it dubbed “The Afghanistan Papers: A secret history of the war.” Under the headline “AT WAR WITH THE TRUTH,” The Post summarized its findings: “U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, an exclusive Post investigation found.” They explained:
Year after year, U.S. generals have said in public they are making steady progress on the central plank of their strategy: to train a robust Afghan army and national police force that can defend the country without foreign help.
In the Lessons Learned interviews, however, U.S. military trainers described the Afghan security forces as incompetent, unmotivated and rife with deserters. They also accused Afghan commanders of pocketing salaries — paid by U.S. taxpayers — for tens of thousands of “ghost soldiers.”
None expressed confidence that the Afghan army and police could ever fend off, much less defeat, the Taliban on their own. More than 60,000 members of Afghan security forces have been killed, a casualty rate that U.S. commanders have called unsustainable.
As the Post explained, “the documents contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.” Those documents dispel any doubt about whether these falsehoods were intentional:
Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.
John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.”
Last month, the independent journalist Michael Tracey, writing at Substack, interviewed a U.S. veteran of the war in Afghanistan. The former soldier, whose job was to work in training programs for the Afghan police and also participated in training briefings for the Afghan military, described in detail why the program to train Afghan security forces was such an obvious failure and even a farce. “I don’t think I could overstate that this was a system just basically designed for funneling money and wasting or losing equipment,” he said. In sum, “as far as the US military presence there — I just viewed it as a big money funneling operation”: an endless money pit for U.S. security contractors and Afghan warlords, all of whom knew that no real progress was being made, just sucking up as much U.S. taxpayer money as they could before the inevitable withdraw and takeover by the Taliban.
In light of all this, it is simply inconceivable that Biden’s false statements last month about the readiness of the Afghan military and police force were anything but intentional. That is particularly true given how heavily the U.S. had Afghanistan under every conceivable kind of electronic surveillance for more than a decade. A significant portion of the archive provided to me by Edward Snowden detailed the extensive surveillance the NSA had imposed on all of Afghanistan. In accordance with the guidelines he required, we never published most of those documents about U.S. surveillance in Afghanistan on the ground that it could endanger people without adding to the public interest, but some of the reporting gave a glimpse into just how comprehensively monitored the country was by U.S. security services.
In 2014, I reported along with Laura Poitras and another journalist that the NSA had developed the capacity, under the codenamed SOMALGET, that empowered them to be “secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation” in at least five countries. At any time, they could listen to the stored conversations of any calls conducted by cell phone throughout the entire country. Though we published the names of four countries in which the program had been implemented, we withheld, after extensive internal debate at The Intercept, the identity of the fifth — Afghanistan — because the NSA had convinced some editors that publishing it would enable the Taliban to know where the program was located and it could endanger the lives of the military and private-sector employees working on it (in general, at Snowden’s request, we withheld publication of documents about NSA activities in active war zones unless they revealed illegality or other deceit). But WikiLeaks subsequently revealed, accurately, that the one country whose identity we withheld where this program was implemented was Afghanistan.
There was virtually nothing that could happen in Afghanistan without the U.S. intelligence community’s knowledge. There is simply no way that they got everything so completely wrong while innocently and sincerely trying to tell Americans the truth about what was happening there.
In sum, U.S. political and military leaders have been lying to the American public for two decades about the prospects for success in Afghanistan generally, and the strength and capacity of the Afghan security forces in particular — up through five weeks ago when Biden angrily dismissed the notion that U.S. withdrawal would result in a quick and complete Taliban takeover. Numerous documents, largely ignored by the public, proved that U.S. officials knew what they were saying was false — just as happened so many times in prior wars — and even deliberately doctored information to enable their lies.
Any residual doubt about the falsity of those two decades of optimistic claims has been obliterated by the easy and lightning-fast blitzkrieg whereby the Taliban took back control of Afghanistan as if the vaunted Afghan military did not even exist, as if it were August, 2001 all over again. It is vital not just to take note of how easily and frequently U.S. leaders lie to the public about its wars once those lies are revealed at the end of those wars, but also to remember this vital lesson the next time U.S. leaders propose a new war using the same tactics of manipulation, lies, and deceit.
** De Nederlandse ambassades in ‘conflictgebieden’ spelen keer op keer een smerige rol door ambtsberichten te doen uitgaan dat men vluchtelingen uit die gebieden kan terugsturen daar de situatie veilig zou zijn, terwijl ieder kind kan begrijpen dat een land waar oorlog wordt gevoerd, allesbehalve veilig is voor vluchtelingen…….. Schande!!!
‘Afghanistan, betaalde ‘survivaltochten’ voor legers‘ (1 mei 2013) De VS betaalde Karzai en warlords voor het mogen uitvoeren van taken door particuliere bedrijven uit de VS in Afghanistan, ook Nederland zou zich hieraan hebben beschuldigd…..
CounterPunch kwam gisteren met een artikel over de demonisering van Ilhan Omar, lid van het VS Huis van Afgevaardigden. Ilhan Omar stelde dat alle misdaden tegen de menselijkheid gelijk moeten worden behandeld wat betreft verantwoordelijkheid en gerechtigheid. (het is daarvoor inderdaad de hoogste tijd, wat zeg ik: we zijn wat dat betreft al zwaar overtijd….*) Daarbij stelde ze dat we ondenkbare wreedheden hebben gezien die zijn gepleegd door de VS, Hamas, Israël, Afghanistan en de Taliban……
Dit schoot zowel een groot deel van de Democraten (de partij van Omar) als de Republikeinen in het verkeerde keelgat en er barstte een storm van verontwaardiging los over haar woorden. Heel smerig stelde men dat Omar de VS vergelijkt met Hamas….. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! Hamas mocht willen dat het zoveel terreur kon uitoefenen als de VS, dan was het snel afgelopen met de staat Israël!! Ofwel de verontwaardiging is niet alleen hypocriet, maar ook ongelofelijk dom, immers vanaf het moment dat de VS de atoombom onnodig losliet op respectievelijk Hiroshima en Nagasaki heeft deze terreurstaat meer dan 25 miljoen mensen vermoord: -in illegale oorlogen, -door het organiseren van opstanden in derde landen, -door het organiseren van staatsgrepen in landen die niet gehoorzaam aan de hand van de VS liepen, zoals Guatemala, Indonesië, Chili, Honduras, Oekraïne en ga nog maar even door, -het vermoorden van verdachten middels drones, waarbij meer dan 90% van de slachtoffers niet eens werd verdacht en -het opleggen van illegale sancties (illegaal: niet gesteund door de VN) aan ongehoorzame landen, die bijvoorbeeld in Venezuela aan 50.000 mensen het leven heeft gekost….. Vergeleken met het voorgaande is Hamas een padvindersclub……
‘Maar goed’, in de VS tilt men zwaar aan de uitlatingen van Omar, echter op volkomen valse gronden, immers Omar vergeleek met haar uitspraak de VS niet met Hamas, maar noemde landen en organisaties die zich schuldig maken aan misdaden tegen de menselijkheid (jammer trouwens dat Omar Saoedi-Arabië niet noemde, het land dat NB met hulp van de VS een genocide uitvoert op de sjiieten in Jemen….) Voorts moet je dan ook nog kijken naar waarom organisaties als de Taliban en Hamas geweld uitoefenen >> het is immers de taak van elke soevereine natie om zich te verzetten tegen bezetting van haar land tegen buitenlandse indringers en daar is wat betreft Afghanistan en Palestina wel degelijk sprake van….. Anders gezegd of beter gevraagd: was het verzet in Nederland tegen de nazi-Duitse bezetter tijdens WOII terreur of gelegitimeerd verzet?? Dit voorbeeld is des te belangrijker als het gaat om de zogenaamde Politionele Acties van Nederland in Indonesië (een ordinaire koloniale oorlog), uiteraard was Nederland voor de gewone Indonesiërs een bezetter en dan durft men nog steeds te spreken over door Indonesiërs gepleegde oorlogsmisdaden tegen Nederlandse militairen en burgers, terwijl deze mensen als Nederlanders tijdens WOII de bezetter hebben aangevallen……..
Hypocrisie? Zo oud als de mensheid, al maken de ‘moderne machthebbers’ er veel meer werk van!!
Het volgende artikel werd geschreven door Paul Street, hij gaat dieper in op de smerige hypocritische storm die Ilhan Omar over zich heen heeft gekregen:
United States political culture is an Orwellian nightmare. Two plus two equals five in the propaganda spectacle that passes for “democratic” news and debate here.
Take the latest bipartisan establishment disciplining of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), the U.S. House’s most courageous and eloquent member, for saying this: “We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity. We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.”
Omar dared, in the words of The New York Times, “to compare Israel and the United States to Hamas and the Taliban.”
But did she? Look at these two sentences: “There’s nothing quite as exciting for baseball fans as a no-hitter. We have this season seen no-hitters thrown by pitchers with the Chicago White Sox, the San Diego Padres, the Detroit Tigers, the New York Yankees, the Baltimore Orioles, and the Cincinnati Reds.”
Does this statement compare the White Sox with the Red Sox, the Padres, the Tigers, the Yankees, the Orioles, and the Reds? No, it makes an assertion about baseball no-hitters and then includes six teams in a list of Major League Baseball franchises with a pitcher who threw a no-hitter this year. For all anyone knows from these 41 words, each one of these teams is wildly different from the others.
Thoughtcrime 1: Serious Comparison
But, okay, let’s compare. Since Omar’s critics charge comparison, let’s take comparison seriously. One reason not to make “false equivalencies” between the Taliban (or Hamas) and the United States is that the former has never been remotely in the latter’s ballpark when it comes to committing crimes against humanity. Between direct U.S. slaughter and the U.S. sponsorship, funding, and equipping of mass slaughter by its client regimes, prominently including the racist apartheid state of Israel (recipient of $146 billion in U.S. military and economic funding in FY 2020, helping make Israel what the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace calls “the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. assistance since World War II”), Washington has murdered tens of millions of world citizens since August of 1945, when it criminally and unnecessarily atom-bombed two major Japanese cities. For an introduction to this criminal record, which is hiding in plain sight for those willing to look, Google up the following: “No Gun Ri,” “My Lai,” “many My Lais,” “Operation Tiger Force,” “Abu Ghraib,” “Nissour Square,” “Fallujah,” “Guantanamo,” “extraordinary rendition,” the “Highway of Death,” and “Bola Boluk.” Better yet, read my February 2018 Truthdig essay “The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of U.S. Hegemony” for a soul-numbing account of this unmatched record of mass-murderous terror inflicted both directly (as in Korea during the early 1950s, in Southeast Asia between 1962 and 1975, in Iraq in 1991 and 2003-2011/2017) and indirectly (as in Indonesia, Latin America, Palestine, Yemen and in countless nations and regions around the world).
Here are some selections from that essay…
It is difficult, sometimes, to wrap one’s mind around the extent of the savagery Uncle Sam has unleashed on the world during the last and the present century. In the early 1950s, for example, the Harry Truman administration responded to an early challenge to U.S. power in Northern Korea with a practically genocidal three-year bombing campaign that was described in soul-numbing terms by the Washington Post years ago:
“The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America’s own leaders. ‘Over a period of three years or so, we killed off—what—20 percent of the population,’ Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later Secretary of State, said the United States bombed ‘everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.’ After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops … The U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of explosives on North Korea, including 32,557 tons of napalm, an incendiary liquid that can clear forested areas and cause devastating burns to human skin.”
This ferocious bombardment, which killed 2 million or more civilians, began five years after Truman arch-criminally and unnecessarily ordered the atom-bombing of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to warn the Soviet Union to stay out of Japan and Western Europe.
The savagery of U.S. foreign policy in the post-WWII era did not always require direct U.S. military intervention. Take Indonesia and Chile, for two examples from the “Golden Age” height of the “American Century.” In Indonesia, the U.S.-backed dictator Suharto killed millions of his subjects, targeting communist sympathizers, ethnic Chinese, and alleged leftists. A senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s later described Suharto’s 1965-66 U.S.-assisted coup as “the model operation” for the U.S.-backed coup that eliminated the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, seven years later. “The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders,” the officer wrote, “[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965.” As John Pilger noted 13 years ago, “the U.S. embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a ‘zap list’ of Indonesian Communist party members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured. … The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had called ‘the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in south-east Asia.’” According to the prolific and brilliant New Left historian Gabriel Kolko, “No single American action in the period after 1945,” wrote the historian Gabriel Kolko, “was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia.”
Two years and three months after the U.S-sponsored 1973 Chilean coup, Suharto received a green light from the Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford White House to invade the small island nation of East Timor. With Washington’s approval and backing, Indonesia carried out genocidal massacres and mass rapes and killed at least 100,000 of the island’s residents.
“To Henry Kissinger,” the human rights attorney Stanley L. Cohen noted five years ago, “the world, particularly Indochina, was very much a small chess game. Civilians were mere pawns ripe for sacrifice through hi-tech weaponry, including biological and chemical warfare, to enforce his worldview at any cost. Millions lost their lives to his cerebral game board” (emphasis added).
Among the countless episodes of mass-murderous U.S. savagery in the oil-rich Middle East over the last generation, few can match the barbarous and sadistic cruelty of the “Highway of Death,” where the “global policeman’s” forces massacred tens of thousands of surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait on Feb. 26 and 27, 1991. Journalist Joyce Chediac testified that:
“U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and thenpounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. ‘It was like shooting fish in a barrel,’ said one U.S. pilot. On the sixty miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun … for 60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No survivors are known or likely. … ‘Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,’ said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer. … U.S. pilots took whatever bombs happened to be close to the flight deck, from cluster bombs to 500-pound bombs. … U.S. forces continued to drop bombs on the convoys until all humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created an aerial traffic jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions. … The victims were not offering resistance. … [I]t was simply a one-sided massacre of tens of thousands of people who had no ability to fight back or defend.”
The victims’ crime was having been conscripted into an army controlled by a formerly U.S.-backed dictator perceived as a threat to U.S. control of Middle Eastern oil. President George H.W. Bush welcomed the so-called Persian Gulf War as an opportunity to demonstrate America’s unrivaled power and new freedom of action in the post-Cold War world, where the Soviet Union could no longer deter Washington. Bush heralded the “war” (really a one-sided imperial assault) as marking the end of the “Vietnam Syndrome,” the reigning political culture’s curious term for U.S. citizens’ reluctance to commit U.S. troops to murderous imperial mayhem. As Noam Chomsky observed in 1992, reflecting on U.S. efforts to maximize suffering in Vietnam by blocking economic and humanitarian assistance to the nation it had devastated: “No degree of cruelty is too great for Washington sadists.”
I could go on and on and on some more with terrible tales of unimaginable horror and mass death inflicted abroad by the U.S.-American war machine during my lifetime in Southeast Asia (the U.S. killed 3 to 5 million in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos between 1962 and 1975), Iraq (the “world’s leading democracy” killed at least 1 million Iraqis in the last eight years of this century’s opening decade) and elsewhere.
Since Afghanistan’s Taliban is part of the Omar drama, it seems germane to mention a forgotten 2009 crime against Afghan humanity that then U.S. president Barack Obama tried to blame on the Taliban.
Within less than half a year of his inauguration, Obama’s depressingly long list of atrocities in the Muslim world would include the bombing of the Afghan village of Bola Boluk. Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives in Bola Boluk were children. “In a phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to outraged members of the Afghan Parliament,” the New York Times reported, “the governor of Farah Province … said that as many as 130 civilians had been killed.” According to one Afghan legislator and eyewitness, “the villagers bought two tractor-trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the casualties that had occurred. Everyone at the governor’s cried, watching that shocking scene.”
The Obama administration refused to issue an apology or to acknowledge the “global policeman’s” responsibility. It initially blamed the carnage on – get this – “Taliban grenades.” (See Carlotta Gall and Taimoor Shah, “Civilian Deaths Imperil Support for Afghan War,” New York Times, May 6, 2009.)
(By telling and sickening contrast, Obama had just offered a full apology and fired a White House official because that official had scared New Yorkers with an ill-advised Air Force One photo-shoot flyover of Manhattan that reminded people of 9/11. The disparity was extraordinary: Frightening New Yorkers led to a full presidential apology and the discharge of a White House staffer. Killing more than 100 Afghan civilians did not require any apology but was falsely blamed on the Taliban.)
Reflecting on such atrocities the following December, an Afghan villager was moved to comment as follows: “Peace prize? He’s a killer. … Obama has only brought war to our country.” The man spoke from the village of Armal, where a crowd of 100 gathered around the bodies of 12 people, one family from a single home. The 12 were killed, witnesses reported, by U.S. Special Forces during a late-night raid.
(Obama was only warming up his “killer” powers. He would join with France and other NATO powers in the imperial decimation of Libya, helping kill more than 25,000 civilians and unleashing mass carnage in North Africa. The U.S.-led assault on Libya was a disaster for black Africans and sparked the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.)
The Taliban, which owes much of its origin to U.S. Cold War sponsorship of Islamo-terrorist forces on the former Soviet Union’s southern border, is a despicable terrorist outfit, God knows. There have long been fully credible reports of its vicious atrocities, including mass murder, torture, rape, and assassination. Still, it can’t hold a candle to Superpower (or even to Uncle Sam’s leading client state Israel[1]) when it comes to crippling and killing human beings.
Seat of world history’s most extensive empire, the U.S. has 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.” The U.S. accounts for more than 40 percent of the planet’s military spending and has more than 5,500 strategic nuclear weapons, enough to blow the world up 5 to 50 times over. Last year it increased its “defense” (military empire) spending, which was already three times higher than China’s, and nine times higher than Russia’s.
Comparing the Taliban and Hamas to such a massive military Empire is indeed truly absurd. Their crimes pale before those of world history’s most lethal Superpower. There’s no comparison.
Thoughtcrime 2: The U.S. is Not a Democracy
Now for a second U.S.-American thoughtcrime. As I suspect Rep. Omar knows very well (her political survival requires pretending not to), the United States is not a “democratic country.” It’s a capitalist plutocracy, a de facto bourgeois class dictatorship wherein majority progressive public policy opinion is close to irrelevant in comparison (there’s that word again) to the vastly superior power of concentrated wealth. If you are interested in how and why this is so, order and read my 2014 book They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy – a detailed analysis of how the U.S. ruling class rules (I argue that the commonly cited problem of plutocratic campaign finance is just one tip of a giant, democracy-freezing capitalist-imperialist iceberg) and why it matters. In the meantime, stop and think about all the programs and measures most U.S.-Americans support – Single Payer national health coverage as a human right, serious voter rights protections, serious progressive taxation, the restoration of union organizing rights, real gun control, a serious response to the climate catastrophe (which is merely the biggest issue of our or any time), and more (the list goes on) – that have zero chance of being implemented because of the corporate, financial, and imperial/military-industrial kill switch that is firmly attached to the U.S. system of supposedly democratic governance and mass consent-manufacture. U.S.-Americans don’t even directly elect the nation’s powerful chief executive (try explaining the preposterous undemocratic Electoral College system to someone from another country). The extremely powerful upper chamber of the U.S. Congress (the Senate) so vastly and absurdly overrepresents the nation’s most rural, white, and reactionary regions that it is now mathematically possible to put together a Trump-Republifascist Senate majority on the basis of states representing 17.6% of the nation’s population. (If liberal and diverse California had the same population-to-U.S. Senator ratio as super-white and right-wing Wyoming, it would have 136 U.S. Senators.) The Senate joins with the indirectly elected president to appoint absurdly powerful Supreme Court justices for life and now regularly cancels popular bills that manage to get past the badly gerrymandered lower chamber.
With all due respect, it is transparently false and even absurd to call the U.S. a “democratic country.” It would take an actual American revolution for it to become any such thing.
Note
1. “Beginning with its mass expulsion, rape and murder [of Arabs] at the onset of the [1948] Nakba (the Catastrophe),” Stanley L. Cohen wrote five years ago, “Israel has devoted itself to 68 [now 73] years of non-stop genocide coming up for air only periodically to retool or to change the nature of its weaponry of choice. What started out with the expulsion, at gunpoint, of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homeland set in motion a refugee stampede that has grown to more than seven million displaced and stateless people, providing the world more than a disturbing glimpse of what was to come decades later in Syria.” The weapons are largely provided and paid for by the United States. The is the nuclear-armed judeo-fascist settler and apartheid state opposed by Hamas, whose crimes pale before those of its enemy and that enemy’s sponsor, the United States.
* Neem ook het Internationaal Strafhof, belachelijk te zien dat daar vooral mensen worden bericht die niet lekker liggen in de politiek van de VS en andere westerse landen, terwijl de vreselijke oorlogsmisdaden van de VS en haar NAVO-lidstaten onbestraft blijven, ze worden zelfs amper onderzocht…….. We mogen al blij zijn dat dit hof een aantal van de vreselijke misdaden van Israël tegen het verdrukte Palestijnse volk onderzoekt, al vraag ik me af of dit ooit tot een zaak zal leiden……..
Voor meer berichten over Ilhan Omar, Indonesië, Afghanistan, de Taliban, Israël, Hamas, Irak, Libië, Chili, Hiroshima en/of Jemen, klik op het betreffende label direct onder dit bericht.
Ondanks Martin Luther King Day op 21 januari in de VS, een officiële vrije dag, is er verder maar weinig veranderd in de VS, sinds de moord op MLK (waar maar één dader voor aangewezen kan worden: de FBI). Wat betreft de discriminatie van de gekleurde bevolking geldt hetzelfde: er is over het geheel gezien weinig veranderd, ondanks de acties van Martin Luther King en de officiële MLK dag, plus 2 termijnen Obama, de eerste gekleurde president van de VS…… De VS regering en zelfs de FBI eert MLK wel schijnheilig, maar zou hem haten als hij nog leefde (zie ook het neerschieten van gekleurden door de VS politie, waarbij de meerderheid van de slachtoffers niet eens bewapend was en is, immers dit gaat bijna dagelijks door in de VS…).
King was niet alleen een mensenrechtenactivist, maar ook een groot leider in het verzet tegen de VS oorlog in Vietnam, daarmee verdubbelde hij de inzet van de VS overheid en de FBI hem tot zwijgen te brengen……..
De FBI begon overigens al met het onderzoeken en dwarsbomen van King in 1955, je kan dan ook niet anders concluderen dan dat King werd gezien als een staatsvijand in de ogen van FBI en de opvolgende regeringen destijds….. Vooral de corrupte psychopaat Hoover, hoofd van de FBI had het niet op met King en dat heeft hij meermaals laten weten…. In de ogen van Hoover was King een communist…..
De schrijver van het hieronder opgenomen artikel Matt Agorist, stelt volkomen terecht dat King ook heden ten dage als een gevaarlijke en invloedrijke staatsvijand zou zijn behandeld, dat zijn Facebook pagina al lang verwijderd zou zijn geweest (plus zijn Twitteraccount, Ap.) en hij te maken zou hebben met censuur en zeker zou zijn gedemoniseerd door de reguliere massamedia in de VS….
Lees het artikel van Agorist en geeft het door, veel te veel mensen in Nederland hebben de foute idee dat het allemaal wel goed zit in de VS wat betreft de behandeling van gekleurden….. Bovendien zijn er hele volksstammen die geloven dat de sociale media alleen maar kul en poezenfilmpjes laten zien, terwijl juist daar het echte nieuws is te vinden en waar de betekenis van dat nieuws wordt gebracht. Intussen lopen de reguliere massamedia braaf aan de leiband van hun rijke meesters, grote bedrijven en regeringen, waarbij men geen schroom heeft fake news en desinformatie te brengen, om zo het volk achter de machthebbers en rustig te houden…… Zelfs de illegale oorlogen van de VS (en haar terreurorganisatie NAVO) tegen Afghanistan, Irak, Libië en Syrië worden door de media verdedigd als was het motief medemenselijkheid, waar het in werkelijkheid gaat om massamoorden en het veilig stellen van westerse belangen, zoals de olieproductie, waarbij alleen deze eeuw al meer dan 2,5 miljoen mensen om het leven werden gebracht……. Het volgende artikel komt van The Free Thought Porject en werd zoals gezegd geschreven door Matt Agorist (mijn excuus, bij plaatsing vergeten The Free Thought Project te noemen):
If Dr. King Was Alive Today, His Facebook Page Would Be Deleted, And He’d Be Censored
Martin Luther King Jr.’s pro-peace and antiwar stance would have made him an enemy to today’s establishment and he would have been censored.
When most people think of the great man, born Michael King on January 15, 1929, they see an advocate for peace, who is celebrated by the US government — honored every year in January, on the third Monday.
However, what the government tells us and what this great man did are two separate stories and had Dr. King been alive today, he would have been an enemy to the establishment who would have made every move they could to silence him.
Dr. King’s position as the leader of the Civil Rights Movement began after his election as spokesman for the Montgomery Improvement Association in December of 1955. What also started in that December of 1955 was the FBI’s investigation into him.
Like all those who stand against government-sanctioned violence, Dr. King was an enemy of the state. The fact that he’s celebrated today by the same state that persecuted him is quite Orwellian.
According to a report out of Stanford University titled, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle, the FBI had it out for Dr. King as soon as he began making waves.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began monitoring Martin Luther King, Jr., in December 1955, during his involvement with the Montgomery bus boycott, and engaged in covert operations against him throughout the 1960s. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was personally hostile toward King, believing that the civil rights leader was influenced by Communists. This animosity increased after April 1964, when King called the FBI ‘‘completely ineffectual in resolving the continued mayhem and brutality inflicted upon the Negro in the deep South’’ (King, 23 April 1964). Under the FBI’s domestic counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) King was subjected to various kinds of FBI surveillance that produced alleged evidence of extramarital affairs, though no evidence of Communist influence.
With a state that owes its very existence to the monopoly it holds on the use of violence, anyone who is pro-peace is a potential threat. This was the case in the 20th century just as it is the case in the 21st century. The fact that Americans take off of work one day in January, does not negate the reality that this struggle continues.
In fact, the government is still very engaged in fighting the antiwar and pro-peace narrative King so eloquently espoused. And they have no qualms talking about this in the open.
After deleting the pages of hundreds of antiwar and pro-peace media and activist outlets in October, last week, Facebook made another giant move to silence. This time, they had no problem noting that they went after pages whose specific missions were “anti-corruption” or “protest” movements.
“Some of the Pages frequently posted about topics like anti-NATO sentiment, protest movements, and anti-corruption,” Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher wrote in the blog post. “We are constantly working to detect and stop this type of activity because we don’t want our services to be used to manipulate people.”
Make no mistake, because Dr. King broke through the divisive paradigm and bridged the gap between different cultures so well, he would undoubtedly been a target of these tech giant censors who aim to keep you divided. The Atlantic Council would have likely had a special committee devoted to solely silencing his “dangerous” talks of peace.
Like Dr. King, however, many activists of today are unafraid of speaking truth to power, even when faced with police action and censorship.
Like the activists of today, Dr. King’s activism was often met with brutal backlash from police. Just like the protesters of today, who peacefully march in solidarity to end police violence and war, the protesters of the 50s and 60s were met with violence from the police.
Attacks against non-violent protesters are nothing new. In the 60s, as the marches increased, so did the attacks against non-violent demonstrators.
“There may be some tear gas ahead. But I say to you today, that I’d rather die on the highways of Alabama, than make a butchery of my conscience,” said Dr. King in his famous speech just prior to the Selma-Montgomery march in which protesters were met with such violence from police that the day would be forever remembered as “Bloody Sunday.”
The first march took place on March 7, 1965, and it gained the nickname “Bloody Sunday” after its 600 marchers were attacked at the Edmund Pettus Bridge after leaving Selma; state troopers and county posse attacked the unarmed marchers with billy clubs and tear gas.
Does this type of police reaction to protests sound familiar?
Dr. King was no stranger to police and being arrested, in fact, during his 12-year run as the leader of the civil rights movement, he was arrested 30 times.
Today, there is a good chance Dr. King would be referred to as a ‘thug’ by a large portion of society — and police — for his activism.
Dr. King, like many of the protesters of today, stood against state violence and war. Those who wage the wars and initiate the violence, delegating a single day in January to honor a man who stood against their very tactics, is defamatory to this struggle for peace, to say the least.
So, while you are out there today, enjoying the day off, remember that this struggle is far from over. There are countless individuals continuing to try to live in the way Dr. King advocated for and who face constant bombardment from the establishment for doing so.
As long as innocence is lost to those who claim to protect it, the conflict remains. As long as people of all races are harassed, kidnapped, locked in cages or killed over victimless crimes, our strife will persist.
Not until the corruptions ceases, not until all the troops are brought home, not until a person can do with their own body as they see fit, not until the brute force changes to compassion, will the perpetual struggle of Dr. King and all those before and after him, be complete.
“Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Agorist is also the Editor at Large at the Free Thought Project. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter, Steemit, and now on Facebook. =========================== Hier nog een korte video waarin het geweld tegen gekleurden wordt weergegeven:
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…..’
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….”
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.
