Obama's cowardly Martin Luther King dedication

[jakeXT]

Obama's cowardly Martin Luther King dedication
The president's incomplete dedication to King demonstrates how far removed he is from the man he was honoring

On a breezy, sun-drenched Sunday, President Obama stepped to the podium at the Martin Luther King Jr National Memorial to induct the great civil rights leader and peace activist into America's pantheon of heroes. The president's dedication rightly praised the "moral imagination" of Dr King, whose March on Washington demanded jobs and dignity for all Americans.

Unfortunately the president only glorified two-thirds of the man, now stone, staring out across the Tidal Basin. While racial and economic opportunity were certainly two sides of Dr King's pyramid of social justice, President Obama made only passing references to the third: peace. That choice was as deliberate as it was cowardly, because a full accounting of who Dr King was and what he stood for would demonstrate how very far removed President Obama is from the man he was celebrating.

To celebrate King's "I Have a Dream" speech is easy, as the president well knows: "That is what our school children remember best when they think of Dr King." But wrestling with the radical pacifist message of King's "A Time to Break Silence" would have meant confronting the truth that the man the president was memorializing, if alive, would be marching against him today.

Addressing New York City's Riverside Church in the spring of 1967, King delivered possibly his most subversive speech of his radical career. A staunch opponent of the war in Vietnam, King called the American government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" and excoriated the nation's addiction to militarism. It's not a message of the preacher's taught frequently in schools or quoted in preppy pundit columns, and it's certainly not a quotation etched on the memorial's inscription wall.

...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/20/obama-king-dedication



Reminds me of this



WASHINGTON, Jan. 13, 2011 – If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, would he understand why the United States is at war?

Jeh C. Johnson, the Defense Department’s general counsel, posed that question at today’s Pentagon commemoration of King’s legacy.

In the final year of his life, King became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, Johnson told a packed auditorium. However, he added, today’s wars are not out of line with the iconic Nobel Peace Prize winner’s teachings.

“I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation’s military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack,” he said.

http://www.salon.com/2011/01/13/obama_official_mlk_supports_our_wars/

[Lucinda]

1. Dr King would understand all too well why we are in perpetual wars

I have yet to see anything in his many many speeches about violence to lead me to believe that he would agree with Mr Johnson.

"...A third great evil confronting our world is that of war. Recent events have vividly reminded us that nations are not reducing but rather increasing their arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. The best brains in the highly developed nations of the world are devoted to military technology. The proliferation of nuclear weapons has not been halted, in spite of the Limited Test Ban Treaty16. On the contrary, the detonation of an atomic device by the first nonwhite, non- Western, and so-called underdeveloped power, namely the Chinese People's Republic17, opens new vistas of exposure of vast multitudes, the whole of humanity, to insidious terrorization by the ever-present threat of annihilation. The fact that most of the time human beings put the truth about the nature and risks of the nuclear war out of their minds because it is too painful and therefore not "acceptable", does not alter the nature and risks of such war. The device of "rejection" may temporarily cover up anxiety, but it does not bestow peace of mind and emotional security.

So man's proneness to engage in war is still a fact. But wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete. There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminated even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good. If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war. In a day when vehicles hurtle through outer space and guided ballistic missiles carve highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can claim victory in war. A so-called limited war will leave little more than a calamitous legacy of human suffering, political turmoil, and spiritual disillusionment. A world war - God forbid! - will leave only smoldering ashes as a mute testimony of a human race whose folly led inexorably to ultimate death. So if modern man continues to flirt unhesitatingly with war, he will transform his earthly habitat into an inferno such as even the mind of Dante could not imagine.

Therefore, I venture to suggest to all of you and all who hear and may eventually read these words, that the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence become immediately a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every field of human conflict, by no means excluding the relations between nations. It is, after all, nation-states which make war, which have produced the weapons which threaten the survival of mankind, and which are both genocidal and suicidal in character..."

–Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Lecture Dec. 11, 1964, Oslo"

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1964/king-lecture.html

[TreasonousBastard]

2. Oy! We now go to the Brits for Obama hit pieces. Does the name Bayard Rustin...

ring a bell? He's the gay Quaker who was a draft resistor long before he met King and was one of King's closest advisors and mentors on nonviolence until he disagreed with King's Viet Nam stance. It's not that he was in any way favor of killing Vietnamese, but he thought that it was not the time to dilute the focus of their movement from civil rights to anti-war.

In retrospect, he may have been right-- King's popularity dropped when he went after the war, adding jingoist hatred to race hatred, and may even have been partly responsible for his assassination.

Calling Obama a coward for ignoring a questionable part of the movement? How many more cheap shots can we find?

[xchrom]

3. right -- the anti-war movement was a dilution of civil rights

:eyes: you need to give alice her looking glass back.

[yurbud]

4. that Johnson piece is some ballsy Orwellian shit.

[jakeXT]

5. Obamas Nobel Peace Prize Speech wasn't bad either

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago - "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones." As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life's work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak -nothing passive - nothing naïve - in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism - it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

...

So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another - that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy. The soldier's courage and sacrifice is full of glory, expressing devotion to country, to cause and to comrades in arms. But war itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such.

So part of our challenge is reconciling these two seemingly irreconcilable truths - that war is sometimes necessary, and war is at some level an expression of human feelings. Concretely, we must direct our effort to the task that President Kennedy called for long ago. "Let us focus," he said, "on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/10/obama-nobel-peace-prize-a_n_386837.html

[KoKo]

9. Yurbud, You got that correct! n/t

[bhikkhu]

6. The weekend is prime-time here for hit pieces, it seems

I watched the speech - it was very fitting and well done. In many ways it has been a good week for the president, perhaps heightening the sense of desperation among critics.

[KoKo]

10. Jake XT agrees with you...you didn't read the second piece he posted

below on his OP You might want to go back

[chervilant]

7. Gosh...

You haven't gotten Teh Hallowed List...yet. But, the unreccers are working hard to get your OP relegated to the dust bin.

(There's a reason 'school children remember best' King's "I have a dream" speech. That's the highly sanitized and patriotic version of King our perverted system of public education elects to teach our children. Reminds me how hard teh sycophants are working to shore up their hero's feet of clay.)

[chervilant]

8. BTW, K & R n/t

[struggle4progress]

11. Matthew Harwood sails under false colors, I think. He's been "Homeland Security Editor" for

Security Management magazine, where he writes articles like

DHS Tries to SECURE Innovation
By Matthew Harwood
http://www.securitymanagement.com/article/dhs-tries-secure-innovation-009098

This, in my mind, places him firmly among the intellectual workers supporting the military-industrial complex: his pieces at Security Management seem, at first glance to be "balanced" expositions of "what both sides think," but from an objective point of view one should consider the readership of Security Management and what the readers gain from Matthews' summaries -- and I should guess that his pieces are intended to help security companies and lobbyists frame the political debate

The hit bit here, on Obama, is a nasty little thing -- Did Obama mention King's dedication to peace? Well, then, he must be a coward for doing that! -- the entire object of the article being wedge-driving. It's consistent with what Matthews does for Security Management magazine, but less subtle