(Article changed on December 25, 2013 at 21:41)
As I write, am listening at the same time to a large chorus gloriously singing Handel's Messiah on the radio - so energetic, dramatic, powerful,and yet so deeply pious - Handel was a genius. Over the years lived stateside, your author remembers performing the Messiah during many Easters and Christmases.
During the American war in Vietnam, yours truly played that Trumpet Shall Sound aria broadcasted internationally live from the largest church temple hall in the US at that time. And at the time of this live broadcast so many years ago, the body counts of communist brothers or freedom-fighter brothers killed by the French, Americans, other Europeans and armed forces of other nations of European decent, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, were mentioned daily on the news. These bodies, being carefully counted to prove that everything was going well, were bodies of those who, some years earlier, had fought the Japanese-Vichy French occupation as US allies. Commentators on news programs were assuring us that their bodies were piling up at a comforting rate - (better them then our white boys was the feeling often spoken outright).
Every time an American shoots or bombs to death a citizen of Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or Yemen, or Somalia, Bang! Boom! there goes Jesus, shot down again at the same time as the man, women or child lying bleeding or already bled to death, or turned into what some jokingly refer to as a "bug splat.'
The Evangelist Mathew in 25:40 has Jesus teaching his followers:
"Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.' [full passage found at article's end]
By Jesus' words of warning, to paraphrase, "you shoot him or her, and you shoot Me at the same time.'
Actually, Jesus teaching is bare boned simple, isn't it. But if an American or military person of US allied colonial power caught up seeking to help protect and maintain his nation's wealthy investors' predatory interests, can't recognize Jesus' brother in the face of the Muslim, or in earlier times in the face of a Korean, Laotian, Cambodian, Lebanese, Iraqi, Dominican, Panamanian, Grenadian, about to be dispatched, well"?
Or if a guy is so bloody stupid to believe that the incalculable number of Muslims targeted for him to kill must be thought of as part of the same conspiracy of Saudi Arabians who suicided themselves into the Twin Towers (whose country, by the way, has been the only Arab country to be inexplicably or understandable spared US vengeance), well"?
Or if the GI who pulls the trigger or presses the button on a brother or sister or child of Jesus, has forgotten what he was taught in church, mosque or synagog, namely, that all men are brothers? But wait, the clergy, in tune with militarized North America, has for decades avoided mentioning Jesus regarding killing. On the contrary, twisting scripture to justify wars, organized clergy sanctifies the killing.
Martin Luther King Jr.' own Baptist churches do not support his condemnation of US wars for unjust overseas predatory investments, and have been deadly silent regarding war promoting mainstream media's forty-four year blackout and taboo of any mention of his world shaking sermon "Beyond Vietnam - a Time to Break Silence" and "Why I am Against the War in Vietnam."
Read on line King's publicly suppressed sermons and then read the sermons given during the past year from the Riverside Church pulpit from which King called his country "the greatest purveyor (not cause) of violence in the world," in which, after dismissing his government, he went on in anguish to hold himself and all US citizens responsible for "atrocity wars and genocidal violence on three continents meant to maintain unjust predatory investments;" responsible for being perfectly capable of making them unacceptable and inoperable through non-participation, non-support, non-acquiescence and conscientious objection. Now read or listen on the Internet to the audio of the past year's Riverside Church Sunday Sermons, mostly on the Old Testament or Jewish Bible, and wonder who is most guilty for the continuing genocide, the soldiers, or their clergy. There is no quote from these devastatingly blistering condemnations of US atrocity wars on the King Monument in Washington DC. and Rev. Dr. King's closest friends, many of them ministers, made not a single word mention of King's broadening his search for justice to include the poor being slaughtered overseas during the last year he was allowed to live. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death, the war in Vietnam allowed to continue for another eight years by his nations betrayal of himself and the teaching of Jesus he reminded the world of.
Forsooth, add up the simultaneous double manslaughter of Jesus and the three million Vietnamese brothers of Jesus, two million Koreans brothers of Jesus, one and a half million Iraqi brothers, a half million Laotian brothers, half million Cambodians brothers, Yugoslav brothers, Afghani, Somali, Yemeni, Pakistani, Libyan brothers all slaughtered in their very own beloved small countries, in the streets of their towns, in the countryside, and often as not in their very own homes. And if one counts in Jesus' brothers brought to die for the aftereffects of US wars for predatory investment maintenance and the covert homicide that made it impossible for defenseless governments have control over and disposition of their nation's natural resources needed for sustenance and survival, the amount of brothers, their sisters and children that were made to starve to death, the matching toll of the number of times Jesus has been killed in matching death of his brothers as stated in Matthew 25:40, it runs into the tens of millions - with murderous economic policies and sanctions into the hundreds of millions during the last sixty-four years.
It is all so stupefying, inhuman, merciless, and yet all this genocide is written up by all the most knowledgeable progressive journalists and historians on the left, not as prosecutable crimes against humanity and crimes against peace, but as Realpolitik, abhorrent to be sure, but legal homicidal and normal "politics,' dirty politics if you will, as usual, something as unchallengeable as the less than predictable weather patterns, nothing worth a useless intention to stop what has no way of stopping, the mind boggling in intensity unfortunate suffering of our and Jesus' brothers, sisters and children less interesting for it being impossible to halt. It is as if the informed tasked by the Bible to alert the uninformed, do not recognize the laws in the scriptures of all religions regarding murder, manslaughter, or killing by any other legal term - laws created over millenniums. But humanity's laws of nature do not cease to exist for being calculatedly uninformed. The laws remain vibrant in the hearts of ordinary (read wonderful) men and women.
That overwhelming majority of US citizens, watching war- promoting CIA fed monopolized TV in America with learned indifference, will not be expected to know that the heavy weapons and cash the CIA and its branches in US allied nations are meant to be used to overthrow the Syrian government of elected President Assad supported by over 70% of its citizens. Most Americans will not know that this has been admitted in writing by NATO, which nevertheless backs Obama's and Kerry's often stated goal of seeing to Syria's government overthrow. One hundred and twenty thousand Syrians have died since CNN first repeated, ad infinitum, its lie, exactly the same lie as was manufactured for Libya two years ago, "the government is killing its own people!", while Syrian local TV showed film of provocateurs firing from roof tops into crowds.
Americans will not see these films, until they are shown at the eventual Nuremberg Principles Law trial of Americans for committing genocide in dozens of small nations. The trial will inevitably find that it was not the popular Syrian government that arranged for the mass murder of its own citizens but the international community of investors as led by Americans on Wall Street. [see "Syria: CIA, M16, French, Mossad, Saudi Involvement Unreported In Imperialist Media." By Jay Janson. 27 June, 2011. Countercurrents.org. What is unfolding in "] http://www.countercurrents.org/janson270611.htm
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