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

[C. G. Estabrook]

Another result of substituting diversity for equality. See 
<http://jacobinmag.com/archive/issue1/wbm.html>.


On 1/26/11 5:50 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> 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.
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss