APRIL 16, 2019
Will someone please explain to
me why Martin Luther King, Jr. is considered a hero for violating laws sustaining
the system of racial discrimination, while Julian Assange is considered a
villain for violating laws sustaining the system of imperial war?
Democratic Party bigwigs are
celebrating the arrest of the Wikileaks founder in London and the request of Donald
Trump’s Justice Department for his extradition to the U.S. According to
Senators Chuck Schumer, Mark Warner, and Joe Manchin – and, of course,
ex-Senator Hilary Clinton – Assange deserves to be punished severely for
plotting with Chelsea Manning to obtain and release classified military
information, and for allegedly helping the Russians to influence the election
of 2016. These are War Democrats, of course, who never met a defense
corporation or armed intervention that they didn’t like. One is not surprised
to hear them howling for revenge against the “traitor” who revealed American
war crimes to the world.
Democrats calling themselves
progressives are more inclined to defend Assange – sort of – on the ground that
his imminent prosecution represents an attack on journalistic freedom that may
make it difficult for the media to publish classified documents like those
contained in the Pentagon Papers. More legalistic progressives aren’t so
sure about this, since they consider publishing classified info OK so
long as it has been “sanitized” to avoid exposing intelligence agents,
but obtaining the info by hacking into a government computer not ok:
i.e., a crime.
What neither camp wants to
talk about, however, is whether it’s ok to break securities laws in order to
expose the American Empire’s war plans, errors, and misdeeds.
Thus, my earlier question: why
is lawbreaker Martin Luther King, Jr. a hero and lawbreaker Julian Assange a
villain? Intelligent people whom I’ve asked about this give the most
convoluted and irrelevant answers! “Dr. King never threatened American
security the way Assange did.” “Dr. King submitted to arrest, but Assange
fled to the security of an embassy.” “King loved his enemies, but Assange
hates America.”
The assumption disguised by
these rather scholastic distinctions is that Martin attacked an obviously evil
system – American institutional racism – while Julian only attacked . . . the
American Empire. So if you don’t want to admit that the empire is evil
(or even that it exists), you talk about national security or journalistic
freedom or something. Anything but imperialist warmaking.
Dr. King himself did not make
that mistake. What he finally came to understand was that racism, the
oppression of the poor, and empire-building are co-dependent, interrelated
diseases that can only be cured by strenuous efforts to heal all three
conditions simultaneously. He called this a “revolution of values.”
On April 4, 1967, at the Riverside Church in New York, he delivered an address
called “Beyond Vietnam” that contained these lines:
A true revolution of values
will lay hands on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling
differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of
filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous
drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home
from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically
deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. Anation that
continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on
programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. [sustained applause]
I think there is not the
slightest question that, were he alive, Dr. King would applaud the sort of
civil disobedience that exposes the empire’s secrets to the world and makes
people aware of the crimes and errors committed in places like the Guantanamo
and Abu Ghraib prisons, the battlefields of Iraq, and the drone-infested
provinces of Afghanistan.
Julian Assange is no saint,
and neither was Martin Luther King. They were very different
personalities, to be sure. But both put their “lives, fortunes, and
sacred honor” on the line in order to expose the inhumanity, violence, and lies
of the powerful elites that rule the globe. On the scale of human values,
both ranked Truth and Justice well ahead of Obedience to Authority.
Listen, Schumer and the rest
of you! If you honor Martin, you must also honor Julian. And if you
don’t understand why this is true, what is the difference between you and
Trump? If the U.S. government succeeds in extraditing Assange, let’s get
ready to celebrate his arrival with a protest recalling the 1963 March on
Washington. It’s what King would have done.
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