Urgency of Now’s Revolutionary Choice: “Nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation”

Haunting words relevant 46 years on

Reposting from Jill Stein’s reposting of April 4, 1967, speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Further excerpting, minor editing by Carolyn Bennett

Continents: Asia (South Central, Middle East: Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, Palestine, etal) and  Africa (Somalia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Congo, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, etal) suffer U.S. foreign relations model in violence.

[Invading, plundering, corrupting, massacring, occupying, lawless]

Liberators?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only … revolutionary political force…. We have supported enemies of the peasants …. We have corrupted women and children and killed the men.

Now there is little left to build on -- save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. …

The [peasants] question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new violence?

…When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered.

W

e are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved.

 

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. … War is not the answer.…

Essential ethos: nonviolence

Herein lies the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence: when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. 

From his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition; and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of [those] who are called the opposition.…

Getting house in order: 

Internal “values” revolution

A

 true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.…

Tomb of
Dr. King Coretta Scott King

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.

With righteous indignation, it will 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 countries ─ and say: ‘This is not just.’

It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: ‘This is not just.’

The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

U.S. Activist

A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’

This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.…

World protests U.S. drones

World revolutionary times

Egyptians protest

All over the globe [people] are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression; out of the wombs of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. …

We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. …

 

O

Syrians protest
U.S. interference

ur only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores ….

 

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to [human]kind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.…

Urgency of now

We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. …We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today.… We must move past indecision to action.

Dr. Jill Stein
U.S. activist
2012  candidate
U.S. presidency

In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity.… Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’…

W

e still have a choice: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

Source

Posted to me ─ a posting of the text from the archives of the Black Radical Congress, encouraged to forward or repost ─ from Jill Stein (Dr.) (HQ@JillStein.org)

This speech was delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City. The speech was delivered one year to the day before his assassination, and it signaled a change in approach toward what King only weeks earlier had called the ‘triple evils of racism, extreme materialism and militarism.’

I have excerpted selected portions for contemporary direct relevance.

___________________________________

Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy
___________________________________

Africa USA-made — CRISIS CHAOS CONFLICT PLUNDER clouded by mass media

NGO-Government Co-op
Virtual reality is not REALITY
Editing by Carolyn Bennett

“A whole generation of Acholi people were born and grew into adulthood in government-created camps for internally displaced people,” Juliane Okot Bitek wrote in 2009. She is an Acholi woman who lives in Vancouver, Canada, who also spoke this week with Vancouver’s feminist radio program “The F Word.” Juliane Okot Bitek is president of the Acholi Community of British Columbia Society and a University of British Columbia doctoral student interested in post-conflict narratives of formerly abducted women in northern Uganda. She said that for years the Ugandan people had been dying at an alarming rate. World Health Organization (WHO) figures showed in 2009 that a thousand Ugandans died every week — a catastrophe “in plain view of the rest of the world.”

The Acholi people numbering more than one million at the turn of the 21st century are an ethno linguistic group of northern Uganda and southernmost Sudan. They speak a Western Nilotic language of the Eastern Sudanic branch of the Nilo-Saharan family and are culturally and historically related to the neighboring Lango. The Acholi are the descendants of a variety of Luo-speaking peoples who are believed to have migrated from adjacent areas of the southern Sudan into what is now the Acholi district of Uganda three or four centuries ago.

Under the Ugandan president Idi Amin (1971–79), the Acholi were severely persecuted, the men systematically executed for past association with the [British] colonial army and for their support of President Milton Obote (1962–71, 1980–85) [Britannica note].

The people in the northern part of Uganda have suffered at the hands of the LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) and the Ugandan government has failed to protect them, Juliane Okot Bitek said. The international community has largely ignored their suffering. International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo appeared on film wondering, callously, who might have “‘interest in Ugandans, in the Acholis?’” Answering his wondering, he said, “They have no oil [except now oil has been discovered], nothing to win, so how much effort do we have out there? Not a lot.’”

The current generation, Juliane Okot Bitek continued, “has grown up without the strong Acholi culture that for generations held the people together with their traditional values — 30,000 children had been unaccounted for over the years. What kind of people can come through this unscathed? Ours will take many generations to heal from the legacy of Joseph Kony, the LRA and the Uganda government that failed to protect its own people — and the rest of the world that watched in silence.”

NGO-GOVERNMENT CO-OP

Making money on misery and make believe

"Kony2012" 

No clever tactics, as those used by the Invisible Children organization — self abduction, fake homelessness or other antics — are going to change the conditions of life for the Acholi people. The tactics only manipulate and delude. “It hurts immensely,” she said, “to watch commercialism take over in a bid to garner the interests and involvement of young people in these campaigns. “The British Red Cross has joined in the fray by producing a game that allows players to become 16-year-old Joseph who ‘has one goal – to find out from the Red Cross if his mother is dead or alive.’

“Reducing the horrific experiences of hundreds of thousands of young Ugandans down to a game is unconscionable.

“To ask thousands of young people to pretend that they can ‘abduct themselves’ into creating a new reality for the children in northern Uganda is more than appalling – it is manipulative and undermines the horror of the last two decades of Ugandan suffering.… One wonders if such theatrics are reserved for African settings.

“Would anyone in the United States dare to create similar gimmicks to highlight the suffering of the victims of Hurricane Katrina in the U.S. city of New Orleans?”

Boys will be boys (?)

Founded in 2005 by three “‘normal’ guys” (Jason Russell, Bobby Bailey and Laren Poole) in California who loved surfing, playing sports, goofing around, and making movies, Invisible Children “has raised plenty of money through their unusual tactics. Using technology preferred by the young, “they inspired thousands of young people to sleep on the streets as they did on a  2006 ‘Global Night Commute’ that reportedly attracted well over 80,000 people all over the United States” according to the group’s website press releases.

On a lark in Africa, the “boys” decided to spice up theirs and other young lives. They found the situation in Acholi intolerable and in need their brand of “help,” so they made a film. The half-hour film made by U.S. organization Invisible Children Inc is “Kony 2012” sold and marketed live (in virtual reality) and online in aid of the group’s bottom line and sporting a brand new movement, ‘Stop Kony’, purportedly to profile and push for the arrest of indicted Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony. [Not William Jefferson Clinton, George H. W. or George W. Bush,  Barack Obama or Madeleine Albright or Hillary Rodham Clinton.]

Reality check

Dr. Vincent Magombe, a Ugandan journalist and broadcaster based in the United Kingdom, writes that while there may be some good in what the boys are doing, there are many damaging omissions and “misrepresentations in the film” — and in “the filmmakers’ blanket support of U.S. military deployments in the region, which many Ugandans view with suspicion and distaste.”

Misrepresentations the Ugandan journalist points to are these:

The war in Northern Uganda ended over six years ago and not since then has Kony been active in Northern Uganda. People in the northern part of Uganda now suffer abject poverty, lack of medicine, illiteracy, incurable diseases (e.g., the nodding disease has killed hundreds of children and infected thousands) — problems directly resulting from current leaders’ corruption and poor governance. 


The film fails to mention that Uganda government troops also killed, raped, and maimed civilians in the region (e.g., on several occasions government soldiers pretended to be Kony rebels and caused deaths for some crazy PR aims).

The film fails to show LRA/ Kony menace in regional countries or a similar type combined military operation (Americans and Uganda government, December 2008: a  CIA-led military operation involved a special American-established and armed force, the Ugandan Special Forces commanded by Yoweri Museveni’s son, Muhozi Kainerugaba) that ended two years of inactivity by Kony’s LRA, wrecked hopes for regional peace. Most of the consequent attacks in DRC, Southern Sudan, and now Central African Republic are more to do with a much-weakened LRA trying to escape the wrath of the Ugandan army (now the Americans) and survive another day.

CRISIS CHAOS CONFLICT PLUNDER clouded by mass media has consequences. Vincent Magombe continued.

Politically, financially and militarily strengthened by the Americans— Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni, heading a corrupt regime whose ministers steal millions that could be used to solve the living nightmare of children in the northern part of Uganda, is emboldened in violating the freedoms and human rights of the whole country.

Many Ugandans — especially those campaigning for democracy and political stability — see the military operation against 300 LRA ex-combatants as a diversionary strategy to divert attention from the ongoing national struggle for change. 


Since the new representation of the troubles only points at one culprit, Joseph Kony and his ‘barbaric gang’, Museveni and his regime — who have committed enormous crimes in the northern part Uganda — are being offered an exit route from accountability.

Without democracy and reconciliation in Uganda — as was true of South Africa’s minority White South African regime who had committed more egregious crimes than LRA and Kony and were effectively absolved of the crimes against Black Africans — there will be no peace.  We may start to see many more Kony-type rebel groups mushrooming to fight the Kampala regime.

Though many outsiders think and have the view that Ugandan people are naive and incapable of seeing the wider implications of the deployment of American troops in East and Central Africa, the opposite is true.

Many Ugandans know the U.S. military has encouraged Museveni and his regime to continue militaristic tendencies in the region. 


Ugandans know the Ugandan regime and its military are powerful allies of the United States in Somalia and indeed in the Great Lakes region and that now the U.S. seeks to establish its so-called AFRICOM (African Command) Headquarters in Uganda and continue building a powerful military alliance involving U.S. soldiers and the militaries of the East and Central African nations (Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Southern Sudan, DRC, and Central African Republic).

 

This is not aimed merely to capture Kony but to safeguard and secure the strategic interests of a now declining American Super Power. …

The strategic vision of the American political and military thinkers is to shift and try to consolidate U.S. influence in West Africa and now East and Central Africa where it is much easier to deal with existing regimes and where local people have no real capacity to force the Americans away, as is true of the Middle East.  

Major oil discoveries have been made in Uganda and Southern Sudan and the region is bustling with inexhaustible reserves of other mineral resources. 

The world we live in is complex; in reality, not reducible to clever tactics, clouded causes and sentimental simplicity. Vincent Magombe concludes.

Research will reveal that Invisible Children was among the two or three non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who vigorously lobbied in the United States for U.S. military deployment in Uganda and Central Africa. (The other NGOs included Resolve! and The Enough Project).  

Though IC’s awareness raising about one ‘evil man’, Joseph Kony, may be appreciated, Magombe says, Invisible Children must be “held responsible for intended or unintended consequences that may in the long run bring much more damage to Uganda than Joseph Kony and his LRA ever would.”

Sources and notes

“Commercializing Children's Suffering Is Macabre,” By Juliane Okot Bitek, April 24, 2009,

http://thetyee.ca/Views/2005/11/11/UgandanPowerlessness/ http://www.friendsforpeaceinafrica.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=132&Itemid=77

For Invisible Children information on the upcoming ‘abduction’:

http://ncm.newcitymovement.com/2009/04/abduct-yourself-april-25th-rescue-child-soldiers.html

http://www.invisiblechildren.com/theMovement/

Juliane Okot Bitek is an Acholi woman living in Vancouver, Canada. She writes as she lives, thinking about a place to call home much of the time.

See also blackstarnews.com

“Grounding focus in the midst of the Kony 2012 social media storm” (By The F Word, Length: 22:32 minutes March 13, 2012)— “The Kony 2012 film is officially the fastest spreading viral video of all time. On March 5, 2012, the video release launched a campaign by Invisible Children Inc. to promote the charity’s ‘Stop Kony’ movement to make indicted Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony internationally known in order to arrest him in 2012. The campaign has been wildly popular with youth on social media.

“Since the launch, the campaign has come under much due criticism such as simplifying a complex issue, ignoring the voices of Northern Ugandans (including many female leaders), and promotion of a consumer-based and ultimately ineffective brand of charity, among many other issues.”

Ellie Gordon-Moershel spoke with Acholi Juliane Okot Bitek who has been close to the conflict in Northern Uganda since 1986. Juliane Okot Bitek is “president of the Acholi Community of British Columbia Society and a Ph.D. student at UBC interested in the post-conflict narratives of formerly abducted women in northern Uganda. She is passionate about the ways we can present and represent our own stories in the media, in our communities and in the general society.” More information about The F Word at www.feminisms.org

http://rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/f-word/2012/03/grounding-focus-midst-kony-2012-social-media-storm

“Joseph Kony viral video campaign clouded in controversy” (Allison Cross, March 7-8, 2012), http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/03/07/kony-2012-video-controversy/

“The Truth About KONY2012” (By Dr. Vincent Magombe), March 13, 2012, http://www.blackstarnews.com/?c=135&a=5605

Dr. Magombe is a Ugandan journalist based in the UK

MAPS

Graphic Maps (and/or) Worldatlas.com (U.S. and Italy)

http://www.worldatlas.com/contact/contact.htm

http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/af.htm

Maps, graphics, flags, photos and original descriptions copyrighted by and created by Graphic Maps...  

______________________________________

Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy

“Stop criminal bombing of Libya!” — ANSWER

Excerpting, editing by Carolyn Bennett

Emergency demonstrations — This is not a war for democracy 

Stop the criminal bombing of Libya!

The United States needs a real anti-imperialist movement—a movement that resists lies and demonization schemes that corporate media churn out to justify military aggression. ANSWER Coalition is mobilizing a movement in the streets that extends a hand of solidarity to the people of Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine who have both suffered and resisted the terrorism of the greatest war machine in human history.

The same global powers that used the force of arms to colonize Africa, suction out its natural resources and enslave millions of its people now rain bombs and missiles on Africa’s largest producer of oil.

“As they did in the 19th century, the colonialists—who have now morphed into modern-day imperialists—bribed or coerced indigenous elites to function as their partners and clients. Today, the so-called Arab League provided some early cover to mask the imperialist character of the operation. …

“The cheerleaders for this ‘democracy movement’ have gone from right-wing Republican to liberal Democrat.  They are even joined by some in the U.S. anti-war movement, including some self-described ‘socialists,’ desiring to show their ‘democratic’ credentials and wanting to accommodate to liberal mainstream public opinion.”

U.S. planes today drop terror bombs in the center of Tripoli. U.S. CIA-operated drone aircrafts carry out missile attacks on Pakistani villages. Pentagon forces bomb the Afghan people. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops still occupy Iraq after a war that took the lives of one million Iraqis.

The dominant force practicing terrorism in the world today is the U.S. government, the Pentagon and the CIA.

How can they get away with launching another war at the same moment that public officials and politicians tell Americans the country is so broke that they must slash vital public services and fire massive numbers of public workers?

Launching cruise missiles, dropping bombs, flying fighter jets, and maneuvering battleships and aircraft carriers, the U.S., in the first few days of war on Libya, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars.

Irony of ironies: Exploiters and enslavers of Africa, the same powers, now explain their latest act of mass violence as motivated by a tender concern for democracy and freedom for Libyans.

Don’t believe them and don't let them get away with it.

Wednesday, March 23 through Saturday, March 26 “Stop the bombing of Libya” Demonstrations will take place in the United States and abroad

USA 

Washington, D.C., Saturday, March 26, Noon, White House (Pennsylvania Avenue)

Los Angeles, California, Thursday, March 24, 5 p.m., Westwood Federal Building, 11000 Wilshire Blvd.

San Francisco, California, Wednesday, March 23, 5 p.m., New Federal Building, 7th and Mission Streets

New Haven, Connecticut, Saturday, March 26, 11 a.m., 141 Church Street

Naples, Florida, Friday, March 25, 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., corner of 41st and Pine Ridge Road

Chicago, Illinois, Thursday, March 24, 5 p.m., Federal Plaza (corner of Dearborn and Adams)

Baltimore, Maryland, Thursday, March 24, 5 p.m., McKeldin Square (SE corner of Light Street and E. Pratt Street by the flagpole nearby the Inner Harbor)

Boston, Massachusetts, Saturday, March 26, 1 p.m., Park Street Station (Park and Tremont Streets) MBTA: Red or Green lines to Park St., Orange line to Downtown Crossing

Minneapolis, Minnesota, Friday, March 25, 4:30 p.m., Mayday Plaza - 3rd Street and Cedar Avenue South (301 Cedar Ave. South), West Bank

Albuquerque, New Mexico, Saturday, March 26, 2 p.m., UNM Bookstore

New York City, New York, Wednesday, March 23, 5 p.m., Times Square (in front of the recruiting center)

Greenville, South Carolina, Wednesday, March 23, 5 p.m., Federal Building, Washington and Church Streets

Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, Saturday, March 26, 10 a.m., Route 278 and Beach City Road

Austin, Texas, Wednesday, March 23, 6 p.m., 6th and Lamar

Seattle, Washington, Saturday, March 26, 2 p.m., Westlake Park (4th and Pine) 

INTERNATIONAL

El Salvador, Wednesday, March 23, 10 a.m., Sponsored by Comunidades de Fe y Vida= COFEVI de El Salvador, Coordinadora Nacional Monseñor Romero, Movimiento Popular y Social de El Salvador

Rev. Ricardo Cornejo - 503-7614-5031

Vancouver, Canada, Tuesday, March 22, 5 p.m., U.S. Consulate, 1075 W. Pender Street

Source

This is not a war for democracy—Stop the criminal bombing of Libya!

ANSWER [Act Now to Stop War and End Racism] demonstrations — Emergency demonstrations across the country (Brian Becker,

National Coordinator, ANSWER Coalition), March 21, 2011, http://www.answercoalition.org/national/news/bombing-libya-to-save-libya-emergency-demos.html#libya-demos

Further analysis and information on U.S. strategy toward Libya articles: After Libya declares ceasefire, U.S. government lays bare its imperialist ambitions; U.S. progressives must tell truth about Libya and impact of foreign intervention, http://www.answercoalition.org/national/index.html

_______________________________________

Bennett's books available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; The Book Den, Ltd.: BookDenLtd@frontiernet.net [Danville, NY]; Talking Leaves Books-Elmwood: talking.leaves.elmwood@gmail.com [Buffalo, NY]; Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza: http://www.bhny.com/ [Albany, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY]; LONGS’ Cards and Books: http://longscardsandbooks.com/ [Penn Yan, NY]
_______________________________________