santaclausifying martin luther king jr.

[xchrom]

http://www.nationofchange.org/santa-clausifying-martin-luther-king-jr-1359816095

Every year, right around the time between Martin Luther King Day and the beginning of Black History Month, the effort to distort Dr. King's life and legacy seems to intensify. Some years, we see conservatives preposterously assert that if Dr. King were alive today, he would join today's neo-confederate Republican Party. Other years, it is deception via omission — we see replays of Dr. King's 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech, but do not see any of his speeches about war and poverty.

Princeton professor Cornel West accurately labels all this the "Santa Clausification" of Dr. King, and if you have ever heard or read a snippet of King's 1967 Riverside Church speech, you will understand how apt the label is. You will also understand why this year's most grotesque attempt to Santa Claus-ify Dr. King's life is at once abhorrent and yet somewhat encouraging.

As The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald first reported, the United States Air Force's Global Strike Command last week posted an online essay saying that Dr. King would cheer on soldiers "ensuring the most powerful weapons in the U.S. arsenal remain the credible bedrock of our national defense." Further, claimed the Air Force, "maintaining our commitment to our Global Strike team ... is a fitting tribute to Dr. King."

At the same time, the U.S. Marines commemorated Martin Luther King Day by tweeting out a famous King line — "a man who won't die for something is not fit to live" — in a not-so-subtle attempt to depict him as a war supporter. That was a follow-up to a 2011 article posted on the Defense Department's website with the headline: "King Might Understand Today's Wars, Pentagon Lawyer Says."

[Earth_First]

1. "santaclausifying"

Beyond that, I've got nothing to offer this thread...

[joelz]

2. The jarheads left

out a few things

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look easily 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. 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 the veins of peoples 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.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0115-13.htm