Call on Congress to not fund war in Afghanistan

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Beyond Afghanistan.

Excerpt:

Applying the Lessons of 'Beyond Vietnam'...
Guest essay by Ernest A. Canning

"Somehow this madness must cease."
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Beyond Vietnam" April 4, 1967.

On Jan. 18, 2010 our nation will observe Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, commemorating the extraordinary life of an intellectual and moral giant. The corporate media will fill the airwaves with excerpts of his uplifting August 28, 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech in which Dr. King called upon us to judge one another by the content of our character and not by the color of our skin. And, during that same holiday, the corporate media can be counted upon to ignore his April 4, 1967 "Beyond Vietnam" speech just as they have every year since the first Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 1986.

Why? Because the egalitarian principles enunciated in "I Have a Dream" challenged only the now (largely) defunct Jim Crow regime.

While de facto, race-based economic inequality stubbornly remains as a vestige of slavery and Jim Crow, the elimination of de jure segregation posed no threat to the stark economic inequality created by an increasingly brutal form of U.S. capitalism and imperialism. It was the brutal reality of corporate Empire which led Dr. King, in "Beyond Vietnam," to describe his own government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" --- a point which exposes the hypocrisy in that same government's celebration of the life of a man singularly devoted to non-violence.

If you have not read "Beyond Vietnam" in its entirety, you should. If you have, you should read it again, for Dr. King's message is as applicable today as it was then.

Particularly, as we deconstruct the empty words used by our Harvard-educated President to justify an escalation of what Robert Scheer aptly describes as a "War of Absurdity," and as we look "Beyond Afghanistan"...

We have met the enemy, and he is us.

"When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
Clarity on the U.S. roles in both the Vietnam and Afghanistan debacles requires self-reflection.

King understood this, explaining in "Beyond Vietnam" that "the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit," a malady, which if not confronted, would find concerned citizens organizing and marching against wars in dozens of conflicts for generations to come. As he observed:

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
He added:

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"....The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just."

The Truth about Empire and the Military-Industrial Complex

It is ironic that President Obama's Dec. 1 Afghan escalation speech would be delivered in a hall named after the President (Eisenhower) who, in his 1961 Farewell Address warned us of the need to guard against a "military-industrial complex" whose "influence --- economic, political, even spiritual --- is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government."

President Eisenhower's perception of the military-industrial complex's "grave implications" to the "very structure of our society" echoed the warnings provided in President George Washington's 1796 Farewell Address about the dangers to liberty posed by "overgrown military establishments" and by sociologist C. Wright Mills' seminal work, The Power Elite (1956), which ominously foretold, "American militarism, in fully developed form, would mean the triumph in all areas of life of the military metaphysics, and hence the subordination to it of all other ways of life."

During his Dec. 1 speech, President Obama said:

Unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination.... We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation's resources....

The President's words are at odds with a reality of a brutal corporate Empire, which, as confirmed by John Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man has been erected over the past 60 years through fraudulent manipulation, corruption, covert subversion, assassinations, torture and military conquest --- an Empire which is maintained by a global military presence.