A Reminder King Called His Government: “The Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World”

What if someone of consequence and world attention, difficult for US monopolized and controlled media to ignore, reminded us that one year before receiving a bullet to his brain, King had made bold print headlines in newspapers worldwide reading, “KING CALLS US “GREATEST PURVEYOR OF VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD.¹

Would it not weaken US deep state media credibility as it tried to explain how this world-shaking event in the life of Martin Luther King has not been known by millions who celebrate his birthday as a national holiday for a great civil rights leader? — the only American, so honored.

That same morning in 1967, Wall Street-owned, CIA-controlled, TV and newspapers,² which had all defended, some even praising, the war in Vietnam, vilified King as a traitor to his country and an embarrassment to the African-American community for King’s condemning the American war in Vietnam as a series of inhuman murderous atrocities.¹

During the half-century since King’s murder in 1968, corporate media would block all reference to King’s 1967 “nightmare-ish” New York sermon condemning horrific wars meant to maintain US predatory overseas investments,³ and instead give high priority time to telecasting King’s four years earlier Washington sermon “I Have a Dream” over and over and over again. Thus now, in 2023, the minds of most Americans and even corporate media’s international audience, all attention is focused on King’s anti racism. King’s later world shaking condemnation of US wars for imperialist capitalism forgotten or unknown.

America’s many dozens of life-taking invasions and violent overthrows of Third World nations would be worthwhile remembering, especially today, while the overwhelming focus is on the Russian war in the Ukraine?

Why?

– The same great news and entertainment corporate conglomerates still hail the US-Vietnam War veterans as heroes, though during years of body counts, reports were very often around 15 Vietnamese bodies for each American body. – Seems insulting to citizens of Communist Vietnam, long a profitable US trading partner. In 1995, Vietnam released its official estimate of the number of people killed during the US Vietnam War: as many as 2,000,000 civilians on both sides — North and South.

– The same media now praises every veteran who invaded whichever small country as having served to protect Americans at home and to keep America free.

– The US government spends more money on weapons and preparations for war than the next highest spending eleven nations all together.

• Although it has been referred to in many articles over the years, it is worth mentioning again that retired NATO Secretary General Wesley Clark revealed a memo from the Office of the US Secretary of Defense he was told about just a few weeks after 9/11. It revealed plans to “attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and moving on to “Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.” Clark argued this strategy was fundamentally about control of the region’s vast oil and gas resources. The wave of destruction and the death and maiming of millions spread across the Middle East and northern Africa by US/NATO military and US created terrorists is phenomenal.⁴
• Americans betray Martin Luther King with their genocidal bombings and invasions in the 3rd World.
• A looming future US war with China is already being discussed openly.
• King’s assassination has been sold as racist, but investments in the Vietnam War were enormous and King was organizing a second March on Washington linking the war to poverty and racism in America. Although James Earl Ray was convicted in 1969 for the murder of King, little mention is made that three decades later a Memphis jury deemed the United States government “guilty of conspiring to assassinate Dr. King Jr.” On December 8, 1999, 12 jurists unanimously rendered their verdict after a four-week civil trial of listening to more than 70 witnesses’ testimonies. It was determined that “local, state and federal U.S government agencies, and the Mafia, were all involved.” How ironic that 54 years after King was shot in Memphis, the very same government which now honors Dr. King with a national holiday, has been found, in a court of law, responsible for his assassination.
• As to Russia’s replacing the US government as the worst ‘Purveyor of Violence,’ Putin’s massive misbegotten death-dealing crime against humanity in invading the Ukraine has given the criminally insane investors in war headquartered on Wall Street, who control the USA and and to some degree the great part of the world it has hegemony over, a perfect scenario for the war with Russia they have been so eagerly promoting and preparing for.

If someone reminded us that King called his Government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,“ there would certainly be differing reactions by various sectors of the public both in the United States and abroad, and US media would have difficulty explaining how such an American hero could have once castigated and condemned by his American government so severely. Followers of Dr. King might well come to have an incentive to learn more about their government’s wars, both past and present. For example:

Why “Ukraine’s European Lives Matter! Iraqi Vietnamese Asian MidEast African Latin Lives Didn’t!,” and still Don’t! Intense media coverage showing compassion for the thousands of Ukrainians killed is very humane. Little or no Western media attention for the many millions of lives taken by US/NATO in Asia, Africa, MidEast and Latin America is cruel and heartless. It is being noticed outside the US and Europe.

1. “Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence” sermon delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City.
2. “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A,” New York Times, December 26, 1977.
3. “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 these countries. 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 … our alliance with the landed gentry of South America, ‘This is not just.’”
4. ISIS IS US: The Shocking Truth: Behind the Army of Terror, Progressive Press, October 2016. A panel of cutting-edge researchers tell what ISIS really is.

Jay Janson, spent eight years as Assistant Conductor of the Vietnam Symphony Orchestra in Hanoi and also toured, including with Dan Tai-son, who practiced in a Hanoi bomb shelter. The orchestra was founded by Ho Chi Minh,and it plays most of its concerts in the Opera House, a diminutive copy of the Paris Opera. In 1945, our ally Ho, from a balcony overlooking the large square and flanked by an American Major and a British Colonel, declared Vietnam independent. Everyone in the orchestra lost family, “killed by the Americans” they would mention simply, with Buddhist un-accusing acceptance. Jay can be reached at: [email protected].