{"id":1351,"date":"2022-04-07T16:26:00","date_gmt":"2022-04-07T16:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/?p=1351"},"modified":"2025-02-25T16:28:33","modified_gmt":"2025-02-25T16:28:33","slug":"when-the-profits-of-war-kill-the-prophets-of-peace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/2022\/04\/07\/when-the-profits-of-war-kill-the-prophets-of-peace\/","title":{"rendered":"When the profits of war kill the prophets of peace"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Yesterday, U.S. General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the House Armed Services Committee and outlined the need for a larger budget while warning, \u201cThis is a very extended conflict that Russia has initiated and I think that NATO, the United States, Ukraine and all of the allies and partners supporting Ukraine will be involved in this for quite some time.”<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You don\u2019t say, Gen. Milley? (Deep Sarcasm)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is<\/em> often said is that the business of America is war, and to be perfectly blunt, such applies to the majority of Western powers as well. Meaning, while the serfs have always waxed nostalgically about \u201cduty, honor, and country,\u201d the manorial lords have always championed the exorbitant profits that they and their political pawns derive from the blood, sweat, and tears of the comparatively poor who march off to “die for country.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To further their ends, the wealthy powers that be have always gazed upon war critics with contempt, thus, Dictator Vladimir Putin’s immediate cessation of dissent from Russian journalists and citizen critics, alike. But before getting all \u201cI\u2019m proud to be an American,\u201d do know that domestic war critics have fared poorly throughout U.S. history, too, with perhaps the worst example being the death of arguably the greatest American of the 20th Century, Dr. Martin Luther King, 54 years ago this week. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the Hobbservation Point<\/em> has a number of readers who were alive during King’s short life, for those who were small children (or yet to be born) before his death, do know that the King who is celebrated today was far from popular or beloved during his Earthly life!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To that last point, I’ve always found it curious that King, a man who was in the midst of demonic Klansmen and affiliated malcontents from the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, until President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act the following year, was never killed while calling on America to fulfill it constitutional obligations towards Black people!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No, it was only when King started speaking out against what was at the time a very popular Vietnam War\u2014and blasting the American government for placing more money into the war effort than in easing the suffering of the poor\u2014that he became a pariah who was slowly marching towards his date with death. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In August of 1964, barely a few weeks after signing the historic Civil Rights Act, LBJ used the Gulf of Tonkin incident<\/a> as a pretext to ramp up the American military efforts in South Vietnam. A year later, only weeks after LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act (with Dr. King standing nearby), King blasted the American bombings in North Vietnam that were slaughtering civilians by the thousands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To his surprise and dismay, King’s early war criticism drew the ire of Black and white allies alike, including Connecticut Senator Thomas Dodd (D), who said that the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize winner had \u201cabsolutely no competence to speak about complex matters of foreign policy.”<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Dodd surely insulted the intelligence of a man who held degrees from academically rigorous Morehouse College and Boston University, the rebukes were enough to make King fall back from discussing the war\u2014at least for a short time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

King’s war criticisms also upped FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s surveillance, which included a recording of King saying later in 1965 “The thing is, I am to stay in my place and I am a Negro leader and I should not stray from a position of moderation. I figure I was politically unwise (to question the war) but morally wise. I think I have a role to play which may be unpopular.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, King would play a role that often goes uncredited, which was to inspire millions of students, mostly white, to protest what they coined “Johnson’s God Damned War.<\/strong><\/em>” In 1967, after a year of silence, King raised his voice once more, stating that, “If America\u2019s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam.\u201d <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

King was far from done, adding, “The war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home\u2026We were taking the Black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem<\/strong><\/em>.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Matters grew exponentially worse for King following a February 25, 1967 speech in Beverly Hills, California which included his strongest condemnation of the Vietnam War to that point. King said: \u201c\u2026But honesty impels me to admit that (America\u2019s) power has often made us arrogant. We feel that our money can do anything. We arrogantly feel that we have everything to teach other nations and nothing to learn from them. We often arrogantly feel that we have some divine, messianic mission to police the whole world. We are arrogant in not allowing young nations to go through the same growing pains, turbulence and revolution that characterized our history. We are arrogant in our contention that we have some sacred mission to protect people from totalitarian rule, while we make little use of our power to end the evils of South Africa and Rhodesia, and while we are in fact supporting dictatorships with guns and money under the guise of fighting Communism.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following King\u2019s California address, LBJ’s administration virtually shut the pastor and the SCLC out from its inner circle; during the next 12 months, while the war production effort continued to bolster the American economy, the student protest movement, spurred in part by King, was in full swing!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On February 27, 1968, one year after King’s powerful address in Beverly Hills, Walter Cronkite, the venerable anchor of the CBS News, produced a special report where he concluded, to the chagrin of LBJ’s administration, that America was losing the Vietnam War. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On March 31, 1968, LBJ chose not to run for re-election\u2014four weeks after Cronkite’s report\u2026Dr. King was killed four days after LBJ bowed out of the \u201868 race\u2026American soldiers remained in Vietnam until 1973\u2026South Vietnam fell to the Communist North in April of 1975.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the above reasons, Hobbs the Historian is watching the events in Ukraine\u2014and corresponding events in Washington\u2014because with a nod to the old cliche, history, truly, tends to repeat itself!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Further, as we all watch the events in Eastern Europe, let us do so with a discernment sharpened by the not so distant past, with hopes that with raised voices, like Dr. King, that those of us who tend to collectively bear the worst burdens of war can remind the powers that be that we see through their lies and schemes when it comes to profiteering from wars of conquest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thank you and please subscribe to the Hobbservation Point\u2014have a great Hump Day!<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chuck Hobbs is a freelance journalist who won the 2010 Florida Bar Media Award and has been twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.<\/em> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, U.S. General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the House Armed Services Committee and outlined the need for a larger budget while warning, \u201cThis is a very extended conflict that Russia has initiated and I think that NATO, the United States, Ukraine and all of the allies and partners […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[716,625,581],"class_list":["post-1351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","tag-mark-milley","tag-nato","tag-ukraine","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1351"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1352,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351\/revisions\/1352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}