Geen evolutie en ecolutie zonder revolutie!

Albert Einstein:

Twee dingen zijn oneindig: het universum en de menselijke domheid. Maar van het universum ben ik niet zeker.
Posts tonen met het label L.B. Johnson. Alle posts tonen
Posts tonen met het label L.B. Johnson. Alle posts tonen

donderdag 9 augustus 2018

Seymour Hersh (gelauwerd journalist) met onthullingen o.a. over de VS plannen met het Midden-Oosten en de vergiftiging van de Skripals

Seymour Hersh, de gelauwerde journalist die wereldwijd bekend werd door zijn verslag over het My Lai-bloedbad tijdens de Vietnam oorlog en de manier waarop de VS destijds deze enorme oorlogsmisdaad, zelfs een misdaad tegen de menselijkheid, in de doofpot probeerde te stoppen.....

Hersh ligt onder vuur vanwege de vragen en kritiek die hij heeft over het officiële verhaal aangaande de gevangenneming en moord op Osama bin Laden. Het bewuste artikel van Hersh over deze zaak vind je als vierde link in het begin van het artikel dat Tyler Durden schreef over Hersh (de link vind je onder de volgende woorden 'Osama bin Laden death narrative' >> lezen mensen!!)

Hersh schreef een biografie waarin hij tien onthullingen doet, o.a. -het plan van de VS om hegemonie van de VS in het Midden-Oosten te vestigen, -de eerste plannen voor een VS invasie van Syrië, -de zogenaamde manipulatie van de VS presidentsverkiezingen door de Russen (waar de NSA zelfs toegeeft niets te weten >> lees het artikel bij onthulling nummer vier) en -de 'vergiftiging van de Skripals'.

Ondanks dat veel zaken al bekend waren is dit artikel en de biografie die Hersh schreef, 'Reporter: A Memoire' (klik op de eerste rode link met die titel in het Anti-Media artikel* hieronder voor de gegevens over dat boek) uiterst verhelderend (en wat mij betreft zijn een paar feiten zelfs schokkend), bovendien hoe meer bevestigingen voor de enorme terreur die de VS her en der uitoefende en uitoefent, hoe beter! 

10 Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh’s New Autobiography

August 8, 2018 at 10:11 pm
Written by Tyler Durden

(ZHE) — Among the more interesting revelations to surface as legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh continues a book tour and gives interviews discussing his newly published autobiography, Reporter: A Memoir, is that he never set out to write it at all, but was actually deeply engaged in writing a massive exposé of Dick Cheney — a project he decided couldn’t ultimately be published in the current climate of aggressive persecution of whistleblowers which became especially intense during the Obama years.

Hersh has pointed out he worries his sources risk exposure while taking on the Cheney book, which ultimately resulted in the famed reporter opting to write an in-depth account of his storied career instead — itself full of previously hidden details connected with major historical events and state secrets.

In a recent wide-ranging interview with the UK Independent, Hersh is finally asked to discuss in-depth some of the controversial investigative stories he’s written on SyriaRussia-US intelligence sharing, and the Osama bin Laden death narrativewhich have gotten the Pulitzer Prize winner and five-time Polk Award recipient essentially blacklisted from his regular publication, The New Yorker magazine, for which he broke stories of monumental importance for decades.

Though few would disagree that Hersh has single-handedly broken more stories of genuine world-historical significance than any reporter alive (or dead, perhaps)” — as The Nation put it — the man who exposed shocking cover-ups like the My Lai Massacre, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and the truth behind the downing of Korean Air Flight 007, has lately been shunned and even attacked by the American mainstream media especially over his controversial coverage of Syria and the bin Laden raid in 2011.

But merely a few of the many hit pieces written on this front include The Washington Post’s Sy Hersh, journalism giant: Why some who worshiped him no longer do,” and elsewhere “Whatever happened to Seymour Hersh?” or “Sy Hersh’s Chemical Misfire” in Foreign Policy — the latter which was written, it should be noted, by a UK blogger who conducts chemical weapons “investigations” via YouTube and Google Maps (and this is not an exaggeration).

The Post story begins by acknowledging, But Sy Hersh now has a problem: He thinks 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue lied about the death of Osama bin Laden, and it seems nearly everyone is mad at him for saying so” — before proceeding to take a sledgehammer to Hersh’s findings while painting him as some kind of conspiracy theorist (Hersh published the bin Laden story for the London Review of Books after his usual New Yorker rejected it).

Seymour Hersh broke the story of CIA’s illegal domestic operations with a front page story in the New York Times on December 22, 1974.
However, the mainstream pundits piling on against his reporting of late ignore the clearly establish historical pattern when it comes to Hersh: nearly all of the biggest stories of his career were initially met with incredulity and severe push back from both government officials and even his fellow journalists, and yet he’s managed to emerge proven right and ultimately vindicated time and again.

* * *
Here are ten bombshell revelations and fascinating new details to lately come out of both Sy Hersh’s new book, Reporter, as well as interviews he’s given since publication…

1) On a leaked Bush-era intelligence memo outlining the neocon plan to remake the Middle East

(Note: though previously alluded to only anecdotally by General Wesley Clark in his memoir and in a 2007 speech, the below passage from Seymour Hersh is to our knowledge the first time this highly classified memo has been quoted. Hersh’s account appears to corroborate now retired Gen. Clark’s assertion that days after 9/11 a classified memo outlining plans to foster regime change in “7 countries in 5 years” was being circulated among intelligence officials.)

From Reporter: A Memoir pg. 306 — A few months after the invasion of Iraq, during an interview overseas with a general who was director of a foreign intelligence service, I was provided with a copy of a Republican neocon plan for American dominance in the Middle East. The general was an American ally, but one who was very rattled by the Bush/Cheney aggression. I was told that the document leaked to me initially had been obtained by someone in the local CIA station. There was reason to be rattled: The document declared that the war to reshape the Middle East had to begin “with the assault on Iraq. The fundamental reason for this… is that the war will start making the U.S. the hegemon of the Middle East. The correlative reason is to make the region feel in its bones, as it were, the seriousness of American intent and determination.” Victory in Iraq would lead to an ultimatum to Damascus, the “defanging” of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, and other anti-Israeli groups. America’s enemies must understand that “they are fighting for their life: Pax Americana is on its way, which implies their annihilation.” I and the foreign general agreed that America’s neocons were a menace to civilization.


* * *

2) On early regime change plans in Syria

From Reporter: A Memoir pages 306-307 — Donald Rumsfeld was also infected with neocon fantasy. Turkey had refused to permit America’s Fourth Division to join the attack of Iraq from its territory, and the division, with its twenty-five thousand men and women, did not arrive in force inside Iraq until mid-April, when the initial fighting was essentially over. I learned then that Rumsfeld had asked the American military command in Stuttgart, Germany, which had responsibility for monitoring Europe, including Syria and Lebanon, to begin drawing up an operational plan for an invasion of Syria. A young general assigned to the task refused to do so, thereby winning applause from my friends on the inside and risking his career.The plan was seen by those I knew as especially bizarre because Bashar Assad, the ruler of secular Syria, had responded to 9/11 by sharing with the CIA hundreds of his country’s most sensitive intelligence files on the Muslim Brotherhood in Hamburg, where much of the planning for 9/11 was carried out… Rumsfeld eventually came to his senses and back down, I was told…

3) On the Neocon deep state which seized power after 9/11

From Reporter: A Memoir pages 305-306 I began to comprehend that eight or nine neoconservatives who were political outsiders in the Clinton years had essentially overthrown the government of the United States — with ease. It was stunning to realize how fragile our Constitution was. The intellectual leaders of that group — Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle — had not hidden their ideology and their belief in the power of the executive but depicted themselves in public with a great calmness and a self-assurance that masked their radicalism. I had spent many hours after 9/11 in conversations with Perle that, luckily for me, helped me understand what was coming. (Perle and I had been chatting about policy since the early 1980s, but he broke off relations in 1993 over an article I did for The New Yorker linking him, a fervent supporter of Israel, to a series of meetings with Saudi businessmen in an attempt to land a multibillion-dollar contract from Saudi Arabia. Perle responded by publicly threatening to sue me and characterizing me as a newspaper terrorist. He did not sue. 

Meanwhile, Cheney had emerged as a leader of the neocon pack. From 9/11 on he did all he could to undermine congressional oversight. I learned a great deal from the inside about his primacy in the White House, but once again I was limited in what I would write for fear of betraying my sources…

I came to understand that Cheney’s goal was to run his most important military and intelligence operations with as little congressional knowledge, and interference, as possible. I was fascinating and important to learn what I did about Cheney’s constant accumulation of power and authority as vice president, but it was impossible to even begin to verify the information without running the risk that Cheney would learn of my questioning and have a good idea from whom I was getting the information.

4) On Russian meddling in the US election

From the recent Independent interview based on his autobiography — Hersh has vociferously strong opinions on the subject and smells a rat. He states that there is a great deal of animosity towards Russia. All of that stuff about Russia hacking the election appears to be preposterous.” He has been researching the subject but is not ready to go public… yet.

Hersh quips that the last time he heard the US defense establishment have high confidence, it was regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He points out that the NSA only has moderate confidence in Russian hacking. It is a point that has been made before; there has been no national intelligence estimate in which all 17 US intelligence agencies would have to sign off. “When the intel community wants to say something they say it… High confidence effectively means that they don’t know.”

5) On the Novichok poisoning 

From the recent Independent interview — Hersh is also on the record as stating that the official version of the Skripal poisoning does not stand up to scrutiny. He tells me: The story of novichok poisoning has not held up very well. He [Skripal] was most likely talking to British intelligence services about Russian organised crime.” The unfortunate turn of events with the contamination of other victims is suggestive, according to Hersh, of organised crime elements rather than state-sponsored actions –though this files in the face of the UK government’s position.

Hersh modestly points out that these are just his opinions. Opinions or not, he is scathing on Obama – “a trimmer … articulate [but] … far from a radical … a middleman”. During his Goldsmiths talk, he remarks that liberal critics underestimate Trump at their peril.

He ends the Goldsmiths talk with an anecdote about having lunch with his sources in the wake of 9/11. He vents his anger at the agencies for not sharing information. One of his CIA sources fires back: Sy you still don’t get it after all these years – the FBI catches bank robbers, the CIA robs banks.” It is a delicious, if cryptic aphorism.

* * *

6) On the Bush-era ‘Redirection’ policy of arming Sunni radicals to counter Shia Iran, which in a 2007 New Yorker article Hersh accurately predicted would set off war in Syria

From the Independent interview[Hersh] tells me it is amazing how many times that story has been reprinted”. I ask about his argument that US policy was designed to neutralize the Shia sphere extending from Iran to Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon and hence redraw the Sykes-Picot boundaries for the 21st century.

He goes on to say that Bush and Cheney “had it in for Iran”, although he denies the idea that Iran was heavily involved in Iraq: “They were providing intel, collecting intel … The US did many cross-border hunts to kill ops [with] much more aggression than Iran”…

He believes that the Trump administration has no memory of this approach. I’m sure though that the military-industrial complex has a longer memory…

I press him on the RAND and Stratfor reports including one authored by Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz in which they envisage deliberate ethno-sectarian partitioning of Iraq. Hersh ruefully states that: The day after 9/11 we should have gone to Russia. We did the one thing that George Kennan warned us never to do – to expand NATO too far.”

Keep in mind this 2007 article by Sy Hersh - "The Redirection" - predicted the US & Saudis using extremists to start a regional war vs & : https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/03/05/the-redirection 

Well worth reading again to see just how prophetic it was.

* * *
7) On the official 9/11 narrative

From the Independent interviewWe end up ruminating about 9/11, perhaps because it is another narrative ripe for deconstruction by skeptics. Polling shows that a significant proportion of the American public believes there is more to the truth. These doubts have been reinforced by the declassification of the suppressed 28 pages of the 9/11 commission report last year undermining the version that a group of terrorists acting independently managed to pull off the attacks. The implication is that they may well have been state-sponsored with the Saudis potentially involved. 

Hersh tells me: I don’t necessarily buy the story that Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11. We really don’t have an ending to the story. I’ve known people in the [intelligence] community. We don’t know anything empirical about who did what”. He continues: The guy was living in a cave. He really didn’t know much English. He was pretty bright and he had a lot of hatred for the US. We respond by attacking the Taliban. Eighteen years later… How’s it going guys?”

8) On the media and the morality of the powerful

From a recent The Intercept interview and book review  If Hersh were a superhero, this would be his origin story. Two hundred and seventy-four pages after the Chicago anecdote, he describes his coverage of a massive slaughter of Iraqi troops and civilians by the U.S. in 1991 after a ceasefire had ended the Persian Gulf War. America’s indifference to this massacre was, Hersh writes, “a reminder of the Vietnam War’s MGR, for Mere Gook Rule: If it’s a murdered or raped gook, there is no crime.” It was also, he adds, a reminder of something else: “I had learned a domestic version of that rule decades earlier” in Chicago.

Reporter” demonstrates that Hersh has derived three simple lessons from that rule:
    1.The powerful prey mercilessly upon the powerless, up to and including mass murder.
    2.The powerful lie constantly about their predations.
    3.The natural instinct of the media is to let the powerful get away with it.
* * *

9) On the time President Lyndon B. Johnson expressed his displeasure to a reporter over a Vietnam piece by defecating on the ground in front of him

From Reporter: A Memoir pages 201-202 — Tom [Wicker] got into the car and the two of them sped off down a dusty dirt road. No words were spoken. After a moment or two, Johnson once again slammed on the brakes, wheeling to a halt near a stand of trees.

Leaving the motor running, he climbed out, walked a few dozen feet toward the trees, stopped, pulled down his pants, and defecated, in full view. The President wiped himself with leaves and grass, pulled up his pants, climbed into the car, turned in around, and sped back to the press gathering. Once there, again the brakes were slammed on, and Tom was motioned out. All of this was done without a word being spoken.

…”I knew then,” Tom told me, “that the son of a bitch was never going to end the war.”

10) On Sy’s “most troublesome article” for which his own family received death threats

From Reporter: A Memoir pages 263-264 The most troublesome article I did, as someone not on the staff of the newspaper, came in June 1986 and dealt with American signals intelligence showing that General Manuel Antonio Noriega, the dictator who ran Panama, had authorized the assassination of a popular political opponent. At the time, Noriega was actively involved in supplying the Reagan administration with what was said to be intelligence on the spread of communism in Central America. Noriega also permitted American military and intelligence units to operate with impunity, in secret, from bases in Panama, and the Americans, in return, looked the other way while the general dealt openly in drugs and armsThe story was published just as Noriega was giving a speech at Harvard University and created embarrassment for him, and for Harvard, along with a very disturbing telephone threat at home, directed not at me but at my family. 
* * *

By Tyler Durden / Republished with permission / Zero Hedge / Report a typo
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* Het originele artikel werd op Zero Hedge gepubliceerd.

dinsdag 23 januari 2018

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


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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More articles by:PAUL STREET

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

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