THE OBSCENITY IN OBAMA'S NOBEL ACCEPTANCE SPEECH
There is no quote that is more fitting to describe Obama's Nobel speech than the following: What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy"-George Orwell In his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, the following is what Barack Obama cherry picked from Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s Nobel Prize acceptance speech: "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones."
The following is the full context of what Reverend King actually said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: "I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers." Martin Luther King's descriptions of the effects of violence are borne out in every respect. There is no question about the fact that the United States is engaged in the slaughter of innocents-- in its shock and awe massive bombardment with depleted uranium coated bombs, in its torture of prisoners, in its creation of torture sites around the world, in its killing of more than a million Iraqi and Afghan civilians, in its destruction of the infrastructure of these nations and in its support of Zionist led Israel's murderous assault on the Gaza sector of Palestine. The fact that the brutality of United States' actions "creates bitterness in the survivors" in Iraq and Afghanistan and in Palestine makes King's assessment an accurate description of the reality compared to Obama's pontifications. On the other hand, Barack Obama, after quoting King without its context, digs deep into the well of rationalizations and then justifies and compares this current use of violence against Iraq and Afghanistan by the United States by comparing it with the violence the United States used to defeat the nazi led government of Germany more than 60 years ago. Obama was forgetting, of course, that the United States used a racially segregated army created out of some four hundred brutal years of concerted racism in the United States to defeat an anachronistic decade old fascism of nazi-led Germany---an effort, by the way, that has served to smother into obscurity the enormous death dealing racism, slavery and colonialism in 400 years of United States history. In contrast, this is what Reverend King said in opposition to the United States invasion of Vietnam some forty years ago: “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent. . . . As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for “the brotherhood of man.” This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances . . . [for] we are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.” For Obama to make reference to Reverend King in the midst of his rationalization for the United States' current slaughter of innocents can only be regarded as an obscenity --- a tunnel-visioned examination of violence wearing the rose colored glasses of the sycophant. | 