[Peace-discuss] Why Black MisLeadership Won’t Sign the Anti-War Petition

[C. G. Estabrook]

http://blackagendareport.com/?q=content/why-black-misleadership-won’t-sign-anti-war-petition

“We vow not to support President Barack Obama for renomination for another term 
in office, and to actively seek to impede his war policies unless and until he 
reverses them,“ says a petition signed by hundreds of social activists, only a 
handful of them Black. The baton of progressive political and moral leadership 
may be passing from Black America, dominated by a venal misleadership class that 
refuses to actively oppose President Obama’s wars.

A Petition is making the rounds, in which hundreds of signatories have vowed to 
oppose President Obama “as long as he supports war.” It’s the kind of message 
that Dr. Martin Luther King would have signed onto. We know this, because that’s 
precisely what Dr. King told President Lyndon Johnson, in April of 1967: that he 
would oppose his president and onetime ally as long as Johnson continued to wage 
war in Vietnam. Many believe that’s the reason Dr. King was assassinated exactly 
one year later.
There are very few Black names on the current anti-war petition, but not because 
Black notables fear assassination if they oppose Obama’s wars. It is because the 
narrow and selfish class that has come to dominate the political life of Black 
America thinks it can do better for itself by collaborating with the war makers 
than by opposing them. Believing themselves to be somehow wired into power 
through the Democratic Party and their corporate connections, these African 
American misleaders are the political heirs to those Blacks that derided Dr. 
King for taking his stand against Lyndon Johnson’s war. They are the same 
opportunists that berated Dr. King for sacrificing what had been a close, 
working political relationship with the most powerful man in the world, over the 
issue of war. Dr. King’s answer to them was that the war must be opposed, not 
only on moral grounds, but because it condemned the poor of the United States to 
remain in that condition, by draining the government and society of all 
available resources “like some demonic destructive suction tube.”

Dr. King was saying to the Black leadership class of his day: it may serve your 
personal interests to collaborate with President Johnson and pro-war Democrats 
and thus remain in good standing with power, but you are harming the interests 
of the poor, of Black people as a whole, and of all humanity. To be on the wrong 
side on the war, or to engage in endless dithering and delay in order to avoid 
confrontation with power on the issue of war, is to work against the fundamental 
interests of one’s own people. Dr. King was forced by urgent necessity to break 
with President Johnson because war was against the interests of the Black America.
Obama’s multiple and expanding wars are no less antithetical to the interests of 
African Americans, today. The “demonic destructive suction tube” that feeds a 
trillion dollars a year into Obama’s wars strips Black America of all hope of 
emerging from permanent Depression. As long as such fantastic sums are expended 
on war, there is no escape from an economic race to the bottom that will mangle 
Black society beyond recognition.
The Black misleadership class, fearful to protect their own, tenuous political 
and corporate connections, give lip service to peace but refuse to confront the 
President that makes war. In thrall of power in a Black face, and hoping some of 
the benefits will accrue to themselves, they allow the baton of progressivism to 
pass from the hands of Black America, or fall to the ground. History will look 
on them with revulsion.