Obama will have a lot of pressure on him from the powerful military-industrial-complex to continue the present foreign policy of occupation war in Afghanistan, of continued military presence in Iraq, of continuing to treat the governments of Iran, Cuba and North Korea as enemies of the United States requiring sanctions and threats of U.S. armed action, and of professing the right of American forces to intervene wherever its interests are thought to need protecting.
If the American public could be made aware of national hero Martin Luther King, Jr.'s condemnation of decades of heartless and murderous foreign policy throughout the world, it will be easier for Barack Obama to achieve turning the nation around to that law respecting and peaceful attitude toward other nations he promised in his campaign speeches.
Reverend King Jr. birthday celebrations this year will have increased efforts to get his speech "Beyond Vietnam - a Time To Break Silence" read at community gatherings all across the country. This is the speech that many believe brought him his assassination exactly one year after he gave it. Bold headlines in newspapers around the world the next morning read: "King Calls U.S. the Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World Today." National media criticized King as unpatriotic and or worse - treasonous.
People's historian Howard Zinn urges us to break conglomerate owned commercial media's blackout of King's blistering denunciation of imperialist wars and CIA covert undermining of democratic governments to protect predatory capitalist unfair investment and trade practices in the Third World. We could break conglomerate media's blackout by using word of mouth.
Hear and watch King giving the speech or read it over on the Internet:
Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence. Delivered 4 April 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City
click here a giving a thorough history of what America did to its war time ally Vietnam, starting with Truman bringing back in the French colonial army, King detailed vile policies in other innocent countries and ended with:
"A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: 'This is not just.' It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say: 'This is not just.'"
If Obama knows enough Americans are familiar with King's dream for a peaceful, kind and benevolent American foreign policy, it will be easier for him to create one, in spite of opposition from the hawks and the war promoting corporate media.
