Robert Greenwald: No Room for the Pentagon's Wars in Dr. King's Dream

[unhappycamper]

No Room for the Pentagon's Wars in Dr. King's Dream
Robert Greenwald
Filmmaker, Brave New Films
Posted: January 16, 2011 10:48 AM

This Monday, January 17th, is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It's a day for us to celebrate one of the most important peacemaking heroes in our nation's history, and an appropriate moment to reflect on the power of nonviolent social activism motivated by love and a sense of justice. For the millions of us who oppose the Afghanistan War (and yes, there are many, many millions of us in the U.S.), Dr. King points the way to the end of the Afghanistan War and beyond, to the onset of the Beloved Community.

Just don't tell the Pentagon.

I was amazed and bewildered to find Pentagon officials and paid military propagandists scrabbling to claim Dr. King as a supporter for war-making. From the general counsel down to the writers at the American Forces Press Service, the military bureaucracy was humming with the assertion that if Dr. King were alive today, he'd "understand" the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and would consider the activities that take place while fighting those wars akin to the actions of the Good Samaritan from the Christian gospel story. It was one of the most shameful attempts to cover these brutal, futile wars in humanitarian wallpaper I've seen in years.

Of course, Pentagon General Counsel Jeh Johnson and the American Forces Press Service are wrong. As our new Rethink Afghanistan video shows, virtually every reason given by King in his "Time to Break the Silence" speech for opposing the Vietnam War would damn the Afghanistan War as well.

~snip~

King decried the awful willingness of his country to spend $500,000 per each killed enemy soldier in Vietnam while so many Americans struggled in poverty. Yet last year, a conservative figure for the amount we spent per killed enemy fighter in Afghanistan was roughly $20 million.

[Teaser]

1. then King's Dream will ever remain a dream

because humans love them some war. And we love it much more than we have ever loved freedom or equality.