Published in Intrepid Report on July 26, 2012.
Republished in Islamic News Daily on August 1, 2012
By Larry Pinkney
“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
How bitterly ironic that this nation found itself turning to Barack Obama—the war mongering predator drone missile, ‘kill list’ U.S. president—for comfort and condolences, in the wake of the horrible killings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.
Our hearts must go out to all the victims and their families of that terrible tragedy in Aurora.
Likewise, our hearts must also go out to the thousands of victims and their families of the grandparents, parents, sisters, and sons in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya (north Africa), Somalia, Yemen, and the Philippines where Barack Obama’s predator drone missiles have blown to pieces the bodies of so very many once living human beings. Their horrible pain and suffering receives minimal or no media coverage in the United States, despite the fact that this insanity is being committed by Barack Obama, in the name of the people of this nation.
The numerous innocent non-combatant persons (including infants and young children) who are killed by Obama’s predator drone missiles are called simply, ‘collateral damage.’ They are not ‘collateral’ damage—they are human beings being continually terrorized and murdered under the auspices of Barack Obama; and with the death of each and every innocent victim, the potential for blind hatred against everyday ordinary people of the United States (and concomitant actions thereto) increases exponentially. This is great for the elite of the U.S. multinational corporations who make enormous profit from manufacturing missiles, bullets, rifles, tanks, fighter aircraft, and war ships, etc., but this is utterly horrible for the struggling everyday ordinary Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people of this nation and world who are invariably the victims of this insanity of internal violence and perpetual war.
This nation needs and deserves genuine peace both internally and externally, but before it can have genuine peace, it must first have a genuine democracy, not this corporate plutocracy masquerading as a so-called ‘democracy’ currently being led by the double-talking, war mongering, corporate brand Obama. Yet another irony of this is was the undeserved awarding of the Nobel ‘Peace’ Prize to Barack Obama, despite the fact that on his third day in office as U.S. president, he began launching and intensifying deadly predator drone missile strikes against persons in other sovereign nations. Now, over three years later, he has increased these bloody and deadly missile strikes, and now has his own personal ‘kill list’ which list includes, U.S. citizens and non-U.S. citizens alike. He has shredded important civil liberty safeguards for U.S. citizens contained in the U.S. Constitution, by signing into law the now infamous NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act of 2012). He signed the NDAA into law on New Year’s Eve (December 31, 2011) when most of the nation was unaware and not paying attention.
The horrible tragedy of the killings at that movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, as reported by the Associated Press headlines, states that Barack Obama said in relevant part, concerning that tragedy, “Now, even as we learn how this happened and who’s responsible, we may never understand what leads anybody to terrorize their fellow human beings like this. Such violence, such evil is senseless. It’s beyond reason.” Indeed, Obama’s own statement could be accurately applied to himself—the predator drone missile, ‘kill list’ president—who hypocritically talks peace while cold bloodedly waging war.
The inmates of this euphemistic U.S. insane asylum, including Barack Obama, have taken over the running of this nation. Or, more to the point, in the poignant words of a previous Nobel Peace Prize laureate—the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.” Barack Obama is among, and very much a willing and integral part of, these “misguided men.” Obama is a man of subterfuge, hypocrisy, and war. His ‘hope and change’ rhetoric was, and continues to be, a cynical ruse against the everyday people of this nation and of this precious planet of Mother Earth.
This nation’s corporate/military/Hollywood-induced predilection for violence is increasingly turning on and being used against ordinary everyday people throughout this land. Meanwhile, the violence of corporate-government subterfuge, joblessness, homelessness, domination by the corporate elite, judicial injustice, a burgeoning U.S. prison-gulag system, and perpetual war abound. More than ever, racism is rampant—but not just racism based upon color—but an insidious economic apartheid against people of all colors in this nation and around the world.
Barack Obama and his corporate Democrat and Republican accomplices should all be awarded a Nobel Prize—a Nobel Subterfuge Prize for pimping the pain of everyday ordinary people everywhere. And once this prize has been awarded, Obama and his corporate-political cohorts, along with this entire corrupt political system and its killing fields, should be relegated once and for all to the dustbin of history.
It is up to we the people—everyday ordinary people—to collectively organize, agitate, and educate ourselves and one another in order to creatively build a new and different political system based upon human needs, not corporate/military elitist greed.
Onward, then, my sisters and brothers. Onward!
Larry Pinkney is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil/political rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In connection with his political organizing activities, Pinkney was interviewed in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS News Hour, formerly known as The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. Pinkney is a former university instructor of political science and international relations, and his writings have been published in various places, including The Boston Globe, San Francisco BayView newspaper, Black Commentator, Intrepid Report, Global Research (Canada), LINKE ZEITUNG (Germany), 107Cowgate (Ireland and Scotland), and Mayihlome News (Azania/South Africa). For more about Larry Pinkney see the book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, by William Mandel [Introduction by Howard Zinn]. (Click here to read excerpts from the book.)
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