The Greatest Purveyor of Violence

‘The United States is the Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World Today’

It is still true today, as it was when one of the United States’ greatest orators proclaimed these words.  Martin Luther King Junior was abusively vilified, and his words viciously condemned, by nearly the entire American Establishment when he uttered them at Riverside Church in New York City, one year before his assassination. 

One of the greatest ironies of American history took place on Monday, as it has every year since 1983.  The historic irony is that there is a national MLK Jr. Day, even though there is considerable reason to believe King was defamed and then killed in a governmental conspiracy.  The very government that so vilified King and brought about his death now pays tribute to him with a monument on the Mall near the Lincoln Monument and a national holiday for a man who never held a public office and died at the young age of thirty-nine.

If our government truly wished to honor him, it should listen to him. In that same speech in 1967, MLK Jr. loudly called for America to atone profusely for its violence, to end immediately the War in Vietnam, and to pay reparations to the Vietnamese.  He called for restitution of the 1954 Geneva Agreement, which, had the American government not undermined it would have prevented that war thirteen years earlier.

Today, there are many who are similarly abusively vilified, and their words viciously condemned and censored for calling for the restitution of the 2015 Minsk Agreement, which, had the American government not undermined it would have prevented today’s dangerously escalating War in Ukraine eight years earlier.

When a nation continues to have a track record of endless violence and war, and continually wages or assists in war, currently in almost ninety countries, a shift in collective awareness is necessary for a shift away from being the world’s greatest purveyor of violence.