There is No Such Thing As A “Just” War—Period

Published in the December 2009 issue of Born Black Magazine (Canada)
By Larry Pinkney

War is not peace and there is no such thing as a “just” war.

A short while ago Barack Obama accepted the so-called Nobel “Peace” prize by attempting to justify and rationalize the corporate / military ‘American’ empire’s bloody wars and subterfuge in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Honduras, Haiti, and elsewhere.

The “monster” that Frantz Fanon aptly described as having become the “United States of America” has in the 21st century, found in the person of U.S. president Barack Obama an insidious purveyor of war and misery against the peoples of the world externally and even inside the United States itself, where civil liberties and constitutional rights have been shredded into nothing more than meaningless pieces of paper. Indeed, this is the “piece” that Barack Obama represents. It is a piece of continued hypocrisy, racism, empire, and endless wars.

While the Palestinian people struggle against U.S. imperialism and Israeli Zionism for the right of return to their homes and land, Black and poor people inside of ‘America’ struggle for the right of return to their Katrina ravished homes in New Orleans, U.S.A. Indigenous native peoples struggle for an end to the thievery of their lands and culture, and few seem to see or heed the handwriting on the wall of looming disaster ecologically and economically.

The invocation of the name of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by Barack Obama in his acceptance speech of the Nobel “Peace” Prize is utterly despicable and lacks any measure of credibility or reality. Nothing could be further from the truth. Obama is the representative of continued corporate / military domination, economic disenfranchisement, hypocrisy, and war—nothing else.

For hundreds of years now it is war that has been declared and carried out against the poor and disenfranchised peoples of the United States and the world; and Barack Obama is the continuation of this. War is not peace and there is no such thing as a “just” war.

There is however, a need for intensified and ongoing struggles against these wars against the people. Ours is a struggle for social, political, and economic justice by, as Malcolm X often said, “any means necessary.”

The time has arrived to separate the proverbial “wheat from the chaff.” In other words, in the words of Malcom X, it is time for the definitive “clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing.” And as he further stated, this clash would not be based on the color of the skin…”

In this instance we the people are the “wheat” and the oppressors of humankind, including Barack Obama and his ilk are the “chaff.” Whether we like it or not we must quickly prepare for, and act upon, this reality, for it is this and this alone that will ensure the triumph of oppressed peoples.

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.)