In direct and absolute contradiction to Rev. King's teaching, President
Obama on Memorial Day 1012, speaking before the playing of stirring
military marches at the Vietnam Memorial Wall, with mercilessly disrespectful, soul-twisting bold-faced lies told us that US soldiers
fallen in Vietnam [in a war King called an atrocity and described as
genocide] "had kept America free."
Does the President believe he can
get away with this, just because every other president since Truman has
gotten away with praising invasions and attacks on small nations
engineered by David Rockefeller's close confidants the Dulles brothers,
Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Bzrezinski? - and because Martin Luther
King is no longer around, his condemnations blacked-out from the memory
of all but the very elderly?
In his 1967 sermon Beyond Vietnam - a Time to Break Silence at
Riverside Church in New York, King cried out "Look across the seas and
see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in
Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no
concern for the social betterment of the country. This is a role our
nation has taken, " refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures
that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. This is
not just."
And King bitterly condemned US Wars and covert violence in Vietnam and
elsewhere around the world, "all meant to maintain these unjust
predatory investments." Little wonder that within the year, King was
lying in a pool of his own blood from a gunshot wound to the head.
Earlier, at Arlington National Cemetery Obama, spoke highly of pilots,
surely not meaning to insult our the memory of King and our intelligence
as well, but we recall Nuremberg Chief Prosecutor Gen. Telford Tailor
having told CBS that he would have be proud to prosecute the US airmen
shot down while bombing Hanoi.
Obama, in his pathetically confused afternoon speech, filled with platitudes and
nonsensical reference to glory [King said American fighting in defenseless poor
little countries in dishonor?] and to our holding sacred memorabilia from the childhood
of those who died in Vietnam, also noted surprisingly as he praised "draftees who did their duty. You came home and were sometimes
denigrated when you should have been celebrated. It was a national
shame, a disgrace that should have never happened." **
And "to make sure it won't happen again," Obama had veterans in the
audience stand and promise to welcome home veterans from Iraq,
Afghanistan or wherever.
Martin Luther King had explained US soldiers were dying while committing
horrific crimes against our Vietnamese allies who had fought with
America against their Japanese and brutal fascist Vichy French occupiers
and were forced after the WW II to continue to lose lives defeating a French Colonial
Empire army brought back and financially supported by the US for eight
years.
(President Franklin Roosevelt, had he not died or not been poisoned,
would have never have ordered such a war, for he had promised freedom
for all the colonies of European empires and the US.)
A day before the holiday weekend, the National Office of the Veterans
For Peace sent message to all Americans that was in agreement with Martin Luther
King's exposing of the disinformation and lies of corporate media
praising US wars as good.
The message on the VFP web site, titled Memorial Day: Pick Your Perversion , ends with the following paragraph in bold print:
"On this Memorial Day, Veterans
For Peace asks you to mourn not only for Americans killed in battle, but
also for those killed by Americans in battle. We ask you to be willing
to accept the fact that these war deaths did not have to happen--that
they are actually in vain. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people have
died in American wars of aggression. That is a tragedy and is a truth
that must be accepted and for which we must take responsibility."
Yours truly, a member of Veterans For Peace , as coordinator of the King
Condemned US Wars and "unjust predatory overseas investments"
International Awareness Campaign and as peoples historian-manager of
the web site of the separate Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign ,
promises everyone that some day there will be a Memorial Day of true,
sincere morning for loved ones of all nationalities whose lives were
taken in US wars in third world nations.
It will be a calm day of of loving reflection and contemplation free from moronic military parading and listening to absurd lies from war provoking, arranging and ordering criminals, who long before will have been prosecuted, convicted of crimes against humanity, and prevented from doing further illegal violence to us or themselves in the future.
In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. made bold headlines in newspapers everywhere: KING CALLS US GREATEST PURVEYOR OF VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD TODAY . When enough Americans know that King taught that we, the American people (he included himself), are responsible for, and capable of, making these mass homicidal US wars for wealthy investor schemes unacceptable and inoperable.
And these present and past pitifully
cowardly and heartbreaking illegal and undeclared wars on the vulnerable
of humanity for their resources will no longer be portrayed by a
war-promoting media as something holy and worth dying for to an unwary captive audience.
For anchors, publishers and
commentators, now doing so, will have been indicted as accessories before
the fact of crimes against peace, and the use of the public owned air waves and frequencies will
have been returned to their owner.
Footnotes
*
"I will never forget how stunned I was when Gen. Telford Taylor, a chief
U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two, told me
that he strongly supported the idea of trying the U.S. pilots captured
in North Vietnam as war criminals -- and that he would be proud to lead
in their prosecution." Robert Richter, an Emmy-winning documentary
filmmaker, and political
director for CBS News from 1965 to 1968 in Bomber Pilot
McCain: War Heroism or War Crimes? Institute for Public
Accuracy, October 15, 2008
**
[many soldiers returning from
Vietnam were spit upon by protesters for having participated in the
killing of mostly Vietnamese rice farmers in their own countryside villages.]
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