Jemen: de vergeten genocide en haar kinderslachtoffers………

CounterPunch bracht afgelopen vrijdag een door Paul Street geschreven artikel over Jemen en het verschil in verontwaardiging en ondernomen acties tegen het scheiden van vluchtelingen en hun kinderen door de VS overheid…. Kinderen die families meenamen op hun vlucht voor een in een groot aantal gevallen geweld dat op de één of andere manier is verbonden met de grootste terreurentiteit op aarde >> de VS…. Dit afgezet tegen de ontbrekende aandacht voor het grote aantal kinderen dat al is omgekomen bij de door de VS en GB gesteunde genocide van de Saoedische coalitie op de sjiitische bevolking van Jemen……..

Ongelofelijk dat men wel terecht flink pissig wordt over het afnemen van kinderen van hun ouders door de overheid van de VS, die deze kinderen heeft ontvoerd; terwijl men wegkijkt van een genocide aan de andere kant van de aarde, waar NB de VS meehelpt aan en de regie voert over een genocide, die volgens Save the Children alleen in 2017 al naar schatting aan zo’n 50.000 kinderen het leven moet hebben gekost…….. (ofwel vermoord door de Saoedische coalitie, de VS en Groot-Brittannië, de laatste heeft als de VS ook een fikse steen bijgedragen aan de massamoord in Jemen….)

Overigens schunnig ook dat de EU en Nederland nog steeds goede banden onderhouden met de (terroristische) reli-fascistische dictatuur van Saoedi-Arabië, om als Nederlander je ogen voor uit je hoofd te schamen……

Lees het volgende artikel en geeft het ajb door! (er moet onmiddellijk een eind gemaakt worden aan de genocide die de VS, Saoedi-Arabië en anderen uitvoeren in Jemen en de daders moeten worden vervolgd door het Internationaal Strafhof!!)

JULY
20, 2018

No
Liberal Rallies Yet for the Children of Yemen

by PAUL
STREET

Photo
by Felton Davis | 
CC
BY 2.0

Hundreds
of thousands of people
 showed
up across the United States at more than 600 gatherings three
weeks ago. They came out to protest 
Donald
Trump
‘s “zero
tolerance

immigration policy in highly choreographed, Democratic
Party-affiliated “Families Belong Together” rallies and
marches. 
Liberal
celebrities
 marched
and spoke. Local, state, and federal Democratic Party politicians and
office-holders gave passionate speeches denouncing Trump’s
separation of Central American migrant children from their parents at
the southern U.S. border.

Marchers
carried signs expressing their concern for children and families.
Here are some of the 
messages
written
 on
the posters displayed at these gatherings:

We
care”

I
Raise my Voice Not so I can Shout but So that Those Without a Voice
Can be Heard”

Do
All Lives Still Matter?”

What
Would Mr. Rogers Say?”

Compassion”

(The
issue that sparked this remarkable outpouring has already been pushed
off the front pages and the cable news headlines by the resurgent
RussiaGate story, brought to new intensity by Trump’s “
spectacular
debacle

alongside
Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland. It is a victim of the
all-powerful “now we see you, now we don’t” U.S. news cycle –
this even as 
nearly
two-thirds
 of
the migrant children criminally separated have yet to be reunited
with their parents and as evidence emerges that the Trump
administration intended for the family separations 
to
be permanent
.)

Emaciated
Babies”: 50,000 Yemeni Children May Have Died in 2017

We
have yet to learn of any large and widespread U.S. demonstrations on
behalf of the children and families of Yemen, where the U.S. is
deeply complicit in the creation of a situation that “looks,” in
the words of the United Nations’ humanitarian chief, “like the
Apocalypse.” 
UNICEF
reported
 last
year that a child dies from preventable causes on the average of once
every 10 minutes in Yemen.

As
the Associated Press (AP) 
reported
last May
,
roughly 3 million Yemeni women and children are “acutely
malnourished; another 400,000 children are fighting for their lives.”
Further:

Nearly
a third of Yemen’s population — 8.4 million of its 29 million
people — rely completely on food aid or else they would starve.
That number grew by a quarter over the past year…Aid agencies warn
that parts of Yemen could soon start to see widespread death from
famine. More and more people are reliant on aid that is already
failing to reach people. …It is unknown how many have died, since
authorities are not able to track cases. Save the Children late last
year estimated that 50,000 children may have died in 2017 of extreme
hunger or disease (emphasis added), given that up to 30 percent of
children with untreated cases of severe acute malnutrition die.”

The
AP told the heartbreaking story of Umm Mizrah and her children,
tragic drops in the bucket of what could become one of the biggest
humanitarian catastrophes of the last half-century:

The
young mother stepped onto the scale for the doctor. Even with all her
black robes on, she weighed only 84 pounds …The doctor’s office
is covered with dozens of pictures of emaciated babies who have come
through Al-Sadaqa Hospital in Aden …Mothers like Umm Mizrah…skip
meals, sleep to escape the gnawing in their stomachs. They hide bony
faces and emaciated bodies in voluminous black abaya robes and
veils…The doctor asked the mother to get back on the scale holding
her son, Mizrah. At 17 months, he was 5.8 kilograms (12.8 pounds) —
around half the normal weight for his age. He showed all the signs of
‘severe acute malnutrition,’ the most dire stage of hunger. His
legs and feet were swollen, he wasn’t getting enough protein. When
the doctor pressed a finger into the skin of his feet, the
indentation lingered.”

Things
have gotten worse in the last two and half months. 
According
to Lisa Grande
,
head of the UN humanitarian effort in Yemen, “8.5 million people
that we describe as being pre-famine… when they wake up in the
morning, they have no idea if they will eat that day…by the end of
this year, another 10 million Yemenis will be in that situation.”

Two
and a half weeks ago, special PBS correspondent 
Jane
Ferguson related
 the
plight of Maimona Shaghadar, who “suffers the agony of starvation
in silence. No longer able to walk or talk, at 11 years old, little
Maimona’s emaciated body weighs just 24 pounds…Every day,” a
nurse told Ferguson in a remote Yemen hospital, medical personnel
“see these sorts of cases.”

Cholera,
a prominent 19th-century disease, has become epidemic there, thanks
to the collapse of water sanitation. Cholera has already killed
thousands of Yemeni civilians, children especially, and a million
Yemenis are currently infected. Yemen is now home to 
what
Ferguson calls
 “the
worst cholera outbreak in modern history. Now every time the rains
comes, people fall ill.”

American
Made”


The
cause? In “mainstream” U.S. media, the Yemeni children and
families suffering this near “apocalypse” are victims of a
three-year-old war between Yemen’s Iran-backed Shiite Houthi rebels
who hold the country’s north, and a Saudi Arabian-led coalition,
armed and backed by the United States. But there is little evidence
of significant Iranian involvement in Yemen. The desperately poor
nation’s “civil war” is a remarkably one-sided affair in which
the world’s only Superpower (the United States) has been providing
critical support for what amounts to the crucifixion of millions of
innocent children and families. Combined with a vicious economic
blockade, the US-Saudi coalition’s relentless bombing campaign has
collapsed Yemen’s economy, leaving two-thirds of the population to
depend outside on food aid for survival. The air onslaughts have
devastated much of Yemen’s basic infrastructure so that more than
half the population lacks access to safe drinking water – the key
cause of the cholera epidemic. In a recent trip deep into Yemen’s
countryside, Ferguson found a Doctors Without Borders cholera
treatment center that had been crushed into rubble by a U.S.-Saudi
airstrike the day before – an obvious war crime. “It was just
about to open its doors to patients,” Ferguson reports.

Ferguson
spoke to Dr. Ali Al Motaa, a Yemeni college professor who did his
doctorate in the US. “The missiles that kill us,” Motaa said,
“American-made. The planes that kill us, American-made. The tanks,
Abrams, American-made. You are saying to me, where is America?
America is the whole thing.”

By
Ferguson’s account, from deep inside rebel-controlled territory:

The
aerial bombing campaign has not managed to dislodge the rebels, but
has hit weddings, hospitals and homes. The U.S. military supports the
Saudi coalition with logistics and intelligence. The United States it
also sells the Saudis and coalition partners many of the bombs they
drop on Yemen. In the mountains outside the capital, we gained
exclusive access to the site where the Houthis store unexploded
American-made bombs, like this 2000-pound Mark 84 bomb made in
Garland, Texas. It landed in the middle of the street in the capital,
we are told.”

That
was before he U.S.-Saudi forces, with the Trump administration’s
approval, decided to launch an 
offensive
against the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah
,
through which almost all the food and medicine coming into
Houthi-held Yemen passes. As 
Al
Jazeera reported
 three
days ago, the UN is warning that “the humanitarian crisis in Yemen
is worsening as tens of thousands of families are displaced by the
Saudi-UAE coalition offensive to retake the strategic port city….the
relentless air raids and lack of aid are making an already dire
humanitarian crisis even worse for the civilians who live in the
region….tens of thousands of families have been displaced from
Hodeidah as a result of the fierce fighting.

The
U.S. is involved in direct as well as indirect assault on Yemen.
Yemen was home to the 
first
known U.S. drone attack
 outside
Afghanistan in 2002. Hundreds of U.S. drone and other airstrikes have
targeted Yemen 
since
2009
.

Trump
drew his first military blood in Yemen. U.S. Navy special forces
carried out a raid—planned by the Obama administration and handed
off to the incoming Trump team—that killed 25 civilians, including
10 children in the mountainous Yakla region of Yemen’s Al Bayda
province. One of the children killed was an 
8-year-old
girl
,
Nawar al-Awlaki, daughter of the Islamist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki,
who was killed on Barack Obama’s orders in a September 2011 U.S.
drone strike in Yemen. Nawar’s older brother, 16-year-old
Abdulrahman, was killed in a second Obama-commanded drone strike soon
afterward.

Trump’s
continuation of the U.S. slaughter of al-Awlaki’s children was
consistent with his campaign claim that he would kill the relatives
of terrorist suspects—a war crime. “The other thing with the
terrorists is you have to take out their families; when you get these
terrorists, you have to take out their families,” Trump 
pronounced
on Fox News
 in
December 2015.

A
PBS NewsHour report earlier this month describes the Yemen tragedy as
a “man-made” catastrophe. A more historically specific
characterization would be “Empire-made” or “Washington-made.”
As Bill Van Auken 
accurately
reported
 on
the World Socialist Web Site five weeks ago:

This
total war against an entire population…would be impossible without
the uninterrupted support—military and political—of US
imperialism since its outset…The US, together with its main NATO
allies the UK and France, has supplied the planes, warships, bombs,
missiles and shells used to devastate Yemen and slaughter its people.
In his eight years in office, President Barack Obama presided over
some $115 billion in arms sales to the monarchical dictatorship in
Riyadh. The Trump administration, which has sought to forge an
anti-Iran axis with Saudi Arabia, the other reactionary Gulf oil
sheikhdoms and Israel, has touted arms deals with Riyadh that
potentially would amount to $110 billion.”

The
Pentagon has given direct and indispensable aid to the Saudi-led
onslaught, providing midair refueling for the planes that bomb Yemeni
civilians, staffing a joint command center in Riyadh with US
intelligence and logistics officers and reinforcing the Saudi-UAE
blockade of the country with American warships. Recently, US Green
Berets have been deployed with Saudi ground forces to assist in their
anti-Yemen operations. Under the banner of the ‘war on terror,’
the Pentagon is waging its own air war in Yemen, conducting at least
130 air and drone strikes in 2017, quadruple the number in 2016…The
Trump administration gave the go-ahead for the current siege of
Hodeidah Pentagon officials have reported that US officers are
helping to select targets in the port city.”

Historical
Continuities

The
Trump administration’s funding and equipping of the savage war on
Yemen shares three key characteristics with the “zero tolerance”
immigration policy that Trump was recently forced to (partially and
haltingly) rescind. First, it unconscionably uses innocent children
and families as hostages and pawns in the advance of White House
policy goals.

Second,
it is richly consistent with U.S. policy stretching far back in
history (
see
this
 on
the long U.S. record of family separation 
and
this
on
the long U.S. history of directly and indirectly attacking and
killing children and other civilians in foreign nations).

Third,
it is consistent with Barack Obama’s record. The Obama
administration 
backed the
Saudi-led Arab assault on Yemen. It also (as few marching against
Trump’s border policy seem to know or care) responded to Central
American migration and asylum-seeking with a policy of aggressive
deterrence and detention – 
a
policy that included the caging of children
.

Why
No Mass Marches for Yemeni Children?

Clearly
the murder of tens of thousands of (Yemeni) children is a bigger
crime than the undoubted transgression of traumatically if (hopefully
temporarily) separating 2300 Central American children form their
migrant parents. Why don’t hundreds of thousands of U.S.-Americans
march on behalf of Yemeni children and families killed, maimed,
starved, sickened, and otherwise placed at grave risk by Washington
and its Arab allies?

Differences
of geographical proximity and familiarity are part of the
explanation. Equally if not more significant: the dominant U.S
media’s systematic under-reporting of U.S, imperial aggression in
the Middle East; that media’s portrayal of is the Yemen war as a
regional Sunni-Shia and Saudi-Iranian conflict in which the U.S. is
only peripherally involved; the Yemeni victims’ status as Muslim
Others who are linked in the dominant U.S. media and politics culture
with the officially U.S,- and Israel-demonized state of Iran (a
nation that all too unmentionably looks like a model of democracy,
social justice, and women’s rights in comparison to its regional
arch-enemy and Washington’s “good friend” the absolutist and
arch-reactionary state of Saudi Arabia). For these and other reasons,
the Democratic Party establishment sees no political advantage in
confronting Trump on U.S. Yemen policy, a policy in which both
reigning U.S. political parties are deeply complicit.

Help
Paul Street keep writing here.

More
articles by:
PAUL
STREET

Paul
Street’s
 latest
book is 
They
Rule: The 1% v. Democracy
 (Paradigm,
2014)

==========================

Zie ook:

Saoedi-Arabië woedend over VN rapport waarin de waarheid wordt verteld over S-A en de oorlog in Jemen

Trump wijst elke bezuiniging af op de hulp van de VS voor de genocide die Saoedi-Arabië uitvoert in Jemen

Saoedische terreurcoalitie raakt alweer een bus met kinderen, dit keer tijdens een bombardement van een vluchtelingenkamp……..

Genocide Jemen: ‘eindelijk ontdekt’ door reguliere media VS, nu nog Nederland en de EU

Saoedische aanval op schoolbus in Jemen: 43 kinderen vermoord……

Aanval op schoolbus Jemen, door Saoedi-Arabië opzettelijk als doel gekozen, geen reden voor VS veroordeling……

Bom waarmee schoolbus in Jemen werd getroffen is van VS makelij

Democratisch congreslid eist antwoorden over de rol van de VS bij de massamoorden in Jemen, zoals de aanval op een schoolbus

8 miljoen Jemenieten, inclusief een groot aantal kinderen, dreigen te sterven van de honger……..

Jemen, de gemartelde, vermoorde of ‘verdwenen’ Jemenieten, onder verantwoording van de Saoedische coalitie……

Door VS geregisseerd bombardement op ziekenhuis Hodeida >> 50 doden……

Saoedi-Arabië geeft toe in Jemen gruwelijke oorlogsmisdaden te hebben begaan…. ‘ (en daarmee is ten overvloede nog eens duidelijk gemaakt dat ook de VS meewerkt aan oorlogsmisdaden en die genocide in Jemen…..)

Agressie vanwege een vermeende gifgasaanval op Douma, terwijl de tienduizenden kinderen die in Jemen worden vermoord middels een genocide blijkbaar niet meetellen……

Saoedische coalitie valt in Jemen de laatste haven voor humanitaire goederen aan…… Weer ziekenhuis met hulp van VS gebombardeerd………‘            

VS rol in Jemen gaat verder dan eerder gemeld, ofwel nog meer VS hulp bij Saoedische genocide op sjiieten…..

Congres VS geeft akkoord voor verdere steun aan de Saoedische genocide in Jemen……

VS versterkt militaire terreur t.b.v. genocide >> deelname aan aanval op Jemenitische havenstad Hodeida…….

VS en Groot-Brittannië weigeren een onmiddellijk staakt het vuren op haven t.b.v. door genocide geterroriseerd Jemen…..

VS vecht in Jemen, Pentagon loog weer eens >> Congres eindelijk ‘wakker’

Saoedi-Arabië vermoordde minstens 20 bruiloftsgangers in Jemen

Saoedi-Arabië dreigt Iran aan te vallen voor vanuit Jemen afgevuurde ‘raketten’ op Saoedische ‘doelen……….’

VS doet planning van de Saoedische genocide in Jemen…..

VS rol in Jemen gaat verder dan eerder gemeld, ofwel nog meer VS hulp bij Saoedische genocide op sjiieten…..

Jemen: meer VS steun voor genocide op sjiieten met grote levering ‘slimme munitie’ aan Saoedi-Arabië……

Jemen: BBC propaganda voor genocide door Saoedische coalitie……..

Mike Pompeo (ex-CIA, VS min. van BuZa en ‘christen’) liegt openlijk over genocide in Jemen‘ (zie ook de links in dat bericht)

Saoedi-Arabië heeft op verzoek van de VS intensief haar islam ideologie (en die van ISIS) verspreid…..

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

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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Paul Street keep writing 
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PAUL
STREET

Paul
Street’s
 latest
book is 
They
Rule: The 1% v. Democracy
 (Paradigm,
2014)

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        en: ‘Willem Post over de zegeningen van het zero tolerance beleid in de VS en ach, het is misschien ietsje doorgeschoten…….