Mutually Assured Terror: ‘America’s’ New Day of Distraction, Bloodshed, and Hypocrisy

Published in Issue 425 of The Black Commentator on May 5, 2011
Republished in uruknet.info (Middle East news) on May 6, 2011
By Larry Pinkney

“We have guided missiles and misguided men.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.

Unfortunately, when it comes to many ‘Americans,’ virtually any corporate-government/military distraction will suffice to keep this nation from owning up to its own self-induced policies of hypocrisy and endless bloodshed, and reversing them.

Today’s Orwellian and fascistic policies at home, combined with corporate/military machismo abroad, bring unrestrained, ahistorical, and blind cries of euphoria from those in this country who utterly fail to understand that sooner or later only the everyday people of this nation can save ‘America’ from itself. The corporate-stream media, following the direction of this corporate/military government, has only to feverishly beat the drums of war and far too many follow  in a politically drunken stupor as if they are uni-dimensional characters in some 21st century horror story.

So this nation and world has been told that Osama Bin Laden is now officially dead, but what of the U.S. policies of deceit and hypocrisy that brought him into being? What of the intensifying cycle of the U.S. Empire’s insatiable appetite for hegemony, deceit, and militarism? What of the cycle of mutually assured terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, north Africa, and elsewhere that has already given birth to other Osama Bin Ladens? What of the terror of political disenfranchisement and economic pain of everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people right here in this nation? There is no cause for celebration–only an urgency to fundamentally change this corporate/military government and its concomitant policies of despicable subterfuge, repression, and distraction at home and abroad.

Will Barack Obama, this swaggering, slippery tongued, first nominally black head of the U.S. corporate/military Empire hang his blood-drenched political trophies side by side with his Nobel “peace” prize, his predator drone missile murders, and his trillions of dollars in gifts to Wall Street barons and the corporate elite (at the expense of everyday people) of this nation? Like a colored combination of Ronald Reagan and John Wayne on steroids, Barack Obama and his corporate allies are utilizing every conceivable political trick in the proverbial hat in order to effectively pimp the pain of the people of this nation and planet. Moreover, it is no mere coincidence that Barack Obama has picked a military General to head the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), and the implications alone of this are horrifying, chilling, and undemocratic. But who is paying attention, as there are so many other simultaneous Obama distractions?!

Then of course, all in the cynical name of laying the matter to rest, the Obama White House recently officially released his birth certificate, as if a duly elected, sitting U.S. president of over two years, suddenly felt compelled to officially release a document which was already readily available to virtually anyone who seriously wanted to view it. Had Obama seriously desired to lay the matter to rest he could have easily had the White House release the document in the first week of his so-called “hope and change” presidency and gone on to make his campaign rhetoric a reality, neither of which he did. In any event it is now a moot point and utterly irrelevant as to whether Barack Obama was born and/or raised in Hawaii, Kansas, etc. This was another Obama tactic of distraction, all in the very name of supposedly laying the matter to rest once and for all. One does not put out a smoldering fire by pouring gasoline on it.  At this point and time, what is of the utmost importance is not where Obama was born or grew up but rather what he, his policies, and his corporate confederates are doing right now to emaciate those of us everyday people who are already born, not to mention the environmental pillage being carried out by Obama’s financial supporters in the multinational nuclear power and oil corporations, etc. against Mother Earth herself.

This nation’s vision of Obama’s “hope and change” has sadly, but not surprisingly, proven to be a new day of bloodshed, distraction, and hypocrisy–more of the same only worse.  It is imperative that everyday people make a conscious effort to avoid being sucked in by the political distractions that are sure to come on the part of the two-legged political foxes and wolves, i.e. the Democrats and Republicans.

The obscene new found “personhood” that has been judicially and politically bestowed upon the avaricious U.S. corporations at the expense of everyday real human beings, combined with the continued gutting of the U.S. Constitution and civil liberties in this nation, has ushered in a period of de facto 21st century fascism no matter what guise it might wear or how one chooses to define it. If this reality is ignored, it will be done so at our own peril. This present day corporate-government/military combination, if left to its own devices, ensures mutually assured terror at home and abroad on so very many levels. This must not be allowed to continue. Rather, let us struggle unceasingly for a mutually assured and collectively actualized vision for a different society and more just and humane world.

It is the everyday, ordinary Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people in this nation must organize locally and nationally across all color and gender lines, etc. We must take our places as part of Mother Earth’s entire human family; placing human need above corporate greed. We must speak truth to power and settle upon nothing less than real systemic change. We must remember that what we allow this corporate/military government to do to others internally or externally is precisely what it will ultimately do to we ourselves. To paraphrase the words of Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand”…and “if there is no struggle there is no progress.”

Be persistent, creative and innovative. The time is now. Onward 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, and more recently on the nationally syndicated Alex Jones Show. 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), 107 Cowgate (Ireland and Scotland), and Mayihlome News (Azania/South Africa). He is in the archives of Dr. Huey P. Newton (Stanford University, CA), cofounder of the Black Panther Party. 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.)