The ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement operates in blatant disbelief of Martin Luther King’s moral and entirely logical warning; ‘will be no progress on social justice issues at home while we go on killing the poor overseas at a such an enormous expenditure of social and financial resources that makes such progress at home impossible.’ Another example of American exceptionalism is Occupy Wall St. diverting attention from US wars.
The education intending slogan Black Lives Matter! is presently heard throughout the United States via television. What an embarrassing indication of the depth of stupid white racism remaining in largely Anglo-Saxon led US society one hundred and sixty years after America freed its millions of slaves.
There is something equally if not more embarrassing and stupid in the American exceptionalism shown by leaders of the civil rights movement as they selectively and thus immoral call for justice and protection from death and brutality for African-Americans, while tens thousands of African-American GIs directly participate in or back up the taking of lives of men, women and children of darker than white complexion in Africa and the Middle East.
This writer believes that this particular effort of using the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ that pathetically calls for what should not have to be called for will go nowhere, for it is in open defiance and blatant disbelief of Martin Luther King’s moral and entirely logical warning that ‘there will be no progress on social justice issues at home while we go on denying the very right to live of the poor overseas at a such an enormous expenditure of social and financial resources that make such progress at home impossible.’ “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.” [from King’s sermon Beyond Vietnam]
King held all Americans, including himself, responsible for ‘atrocity wars and covert violence on three continents meant to maintain unjust predatory investments.’
“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.” [see Beyond Vietnam -a Time to Break Silence and also Why I Am Against the War in Vietnam http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm]
We live in a world still economically plundered by the same nations, which for nearly two centuries proudly and arrogantly referred to themselves as ‘The Colonial Powers.’ They were amazingly racist, amazing, considering that the dominant empires of Northern Europe were ‘Johnny come latelys’ to reading and writing, science and the arts, which the high civilizations they savagely conquered had developed centuries before their underdeveloped conquerors. The instructive slogan for Americans, ‘Black Lives Matter,’ might be appropriate in a materialist and commercialized US society suffering from poverty of thought, but only if this slogan demonstratively included reference to the thousandfold more ‘Black’ lives being illegally and criminally taken by the military of the US and its allies.
Another example of the American exceptionalism that seems to be rampant among most American dissidents is Occupy Wall Street diverting attention from America’s criminal wars overseas. Occupy Wall Street claims to represent 99% of Americans demanding a better cut from the 1% of Americans, who have been perennially investing in profitable but criminally illegal mass murderous use of USA’s devastatingly powerful Armed Forces.
A God-awfully high percentage of that 99% of Americans, which Occupy Wall Street claims to represent do not support what has been seventy years of these illegal and prosecutable invasions, bombings and occupation wars in the many dozens of small defenseless nations (nations earlier occupied and plundered by the Colonial Powers), yet those activists running Occupy Wall Street, in order keep the 99% as Occupy Wall St. supporters, have made every effort to avoid making an issue of the genocidal US foreign policy that former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark calls the greatest crime since World War Two. [see Ramsey Clark’s The Fire This Time – US War Crimes in the Gulf]
Your author has personally on a dozen occasions during OWS meetings tried to get US atrocity wars and covert violence placed on the list of issues. His last attempt was at a OWS ‘Occupy Faith’ meeting of ministers, priests, rabbis, Buddhists, an imam and a yogi in a church on NYU’s Washington Square. As he pleaded for a third time, invoking the words of Martin Luther King, with no one agreeing except a minister from South Africa, the moderator, visibly frustrated, insisted the subject was closed and cut off proposals for added OWS issues. Readers can google the Occupy Wall Street website to check its present list of issues.
Below are linked two newspaper articles a year apart noting the seven issues that the more than twenty got narrowed down to (none on the US wars overseas).
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/17/occupy-wall-street-issues-spotlight_n_1891768.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/17/occupy-wall-street-issues_n_3937483.html
In her book, Capitalism – a Ghost Story, revolutionary writer Arundhati Roy of India well describes how the great super wealthy foundations, set up by the corporate world that completely dominates the economy and society of her country and others, have infiltrated peace and justice organizations everywhere, and how in the United States of America itself, the civil rights movement along with other social justice movements have become war supporting movements.
Jay Janson is an archival research people’s historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents in 67 countries; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India, Sweden and the US; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents, Kerala, India; Minority Perspective, UK; Einartysken, Sweden: Saker Vineyard, Germany; Dissident Voice; Ta Kung Pao; Uruknet; Voice of Detroit; Mathaba; Ethiopian Review; Palestine Chronicle; India Times; MalaysiaSun; China Daily; South China Morning Post; Come Home America; CubaNews; TurkishNews; HistoryNews Network; Vermont Citizen News have published his articles; 300 of which are available at: http://www.opednews.com/author/author1723.html ; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign: and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign featuring a country by country history of US crimes and laws pertaining.
