[News] Jeremiah Wright Delivers the Knockout Punch
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Mon Apr 28 11:42:39 EDT 2008
http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney04282008.html
April 28, 2008
But Will It Topple Obama?
Jeremiah Wright Delivers the Knockout Punch
By MIKE WHITNEY
Reverend Jeremiah Wright appeared on PBS Bill
Moyers Journal on Friday night and delivered a
knockout punch to the bully-boys in the corporate
media. Wright showed that he is neither a fanatic
nor an America hater; just an extremely
well-read and principled man with an unshakable
commitment to justice. Wright has also paid his
dues; he's an ex-Marine who served as a medic in
Vietnam when most of his critics were either
hiding behind their student deferments or
languishing in the "Champagne Unit" of the Texas National Guard.
Rev. Jeremiah Wright:
"And the United States of America government,
when it came to treating her citizens of Indian
descent fairly, she failed. She put them on
reservations. When it came to treating her
citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed.
She put them in internment prison camps. When it
came to treating citizens of African descent
fairly, America failed. She put them in chains.
The government put them on slave quarters, put
them on auction blocks, put them in cotton
fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in
substandard housing, put them in scientific
experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs,
put them outside the equal protection of the law,
kept them out of their racist bastions of higher
education and locked them into position of
hopelessness and helplessness. The government
gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons,
passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to
sing God bless America? No, no, no. Not God bless America; God damn America!
No one disputes Wright's summary of US history.
His comments have simply been lifted, just to
beat up on Barak Obama; everyone knows that. Just
like everyone knows that the corporate media
destroy political enemies, which means anyone who
poses a challenge to America's unelected
corporate oligarchy. That's why it is so
frustrating to hear people say, "The media is not doing its job."
That's just plain wrong; the media IS doing its
job. It's cheerleading the country to war, it is
diverting attention from the main political and
economic issues of the day, and it is destroying
the systems political enemies, actual or potential.
What the media is try to do by singling out
Wright is pretty straightforward. They're trying
to create the impression that blacks conceal a
deep sense of grievance which expresses itself in
rage. This generates feelings of fear among
whites which, of course, is all part of the
strategy. The message is simple; "blacks are
angry, blacks are dangerous" and, oh by the way, Obama is black.
The attack on Wright is that it was set up in a
way to make it look like the Reverend a man
whose entire career has been devoted to social
justice is a racist. That took a bit of
maneuvering. In fact, the media, and their
friends at the right-wing think tanks, had to dig
through 15 years of Wright's sermons to find just
the right snippets they needed to destroy Obama. Now that's determination!
Race has become one of the dominant issues on the
campaign-trail. Obama is no longer just a man
running for office; now he's a black man. That's
how swift-boating works. Like they say in the
Godfather; It's not personal; it's just
business. The business of personal destruction.
Fortunately, Bill Moyers decided to give
Wright a chance to acquit himself before the
public. Wright took the opportunity and made the most of it.
Rev. Wright: God is the giver of life. Let me
tell you what that means. That means we have no
right to take a life whether as a gang-banger
living the thug life, or as a President lying
about leading a nation into war. We have no right
to take a life! Whether through the immorality of
a slave trade, or the immorality of refusing
HIV/AIDS money to countries or agencies who do
not tow your political line! We have no right to take a life!
Wright showed that the doctrine he preaches,
Black Liberation Theology, is neither
discriminatory nor racist as the media has
suggested. Rather, it integrates the teachings of
Jesus Christ with the real-time struggle for
social justice and equality. Compassion is not
possible if one does not have a grasp of one's
own culture and identity. That's why Wright tries
to reconnect his congregation to their roots, so
they can be proud of who they are and have more productive lives.
Rev. Wright:
"You know, you come into the average church on a
Sunday morning and you think you've stepped from
the real world into a fantasy world. And what do
I mean by that? Pick up the church bulletin. You
leave a world, Vietnam, or today you leave a
world, Iraq, over 4,000 dead, American boys and
girls, 100,000, 200,000 depending on which count,
Iraqi dead. Afghanistan, Darfur, rapes in the
Congo, Katrina, Lower Ninth Ward, that's the
world you leave. And you come in; you pick up
your church bulletin. It says, there is a ladies
tea on second Sunday. How come the faith preached
in our churches does not relate to the world in
which our church members leave at the benediction?
This is the essence of Black Liberation Theology;
how to make sense of the world we live in so the
word of Christ can be applied in practice. Wright
thinks that faith should be a transforming
experience that changes behavior and shapes
lives, not just a few hours of prayer every week at Sunday services.
Does that make it a race-based theology? (as Moyers asks)
Rev. Wright: No, it is not. It is embracing
Christianity without giving up Africanity.
...We're not givin' up who we are as black people
to become somebody else...No mas. Nada mas. We're
gonna be ourselves. We're gonna be our culture.
We're gonna be our history. And we're gonna
embrace it and not say one is superior to the
other. Because we are different. And different
does not mean deficient. We talk about God of
diversity? God has diverse culture and we're
proud of who we are and that's not a race-based theology.
Wright has also been skewered in the media for
suggesting there may be a connection between
American foreign policy and the attacks of 9-11.
The media considers any analysis that doesn't
square with Bush's crackpot "they hate our
freedoms theory to be either anti-American or
outright heresy. In his most famous sermon,
Wright elaborates on the "blowback" theme as well
as the so-called war on terror:
"We took this country by terror away from the
Sioux, the Apache, the Arawak, the Comanche, the
Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism! We took Africans
from their country to build our way of ease and
kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism!
We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians,
babies, non-military personnel. We bombed the
black civilian community of Panama with stealth
bombers and killed unarmed teenagers and
toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard-working
fathers. We bombed Gadafi's home and killed his
child. "Blessed are they who bash your children's
head against a rock!" We bombed Iraq. We killed
unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We
bombed a plant in Sudan to payback for the attack
on our embassy. Killed hundreds of hard-working
people; mothers and fathers who left home to go
that day, not knowing that they would never get
back home. We bombed Hiroshima! We bombed
Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the
thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we
never batted an eye! Kids playing in the
playground, mothers picking up children after
school, civilians - not soldiers - people just
trying to make it day by day. We have supported
state terrorism against the Palestinians and
Black South Africans, and now we are indignant?
Because the stuff we have done overseas has now
been brought back into our own front yards!
America's chickens are coming home to roost!
Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred
and terrorism begets terrorism."
America has blood on its hands. America, as
Martin Luther King said, "is the greatest
perpetrator of violence in the world today." So what else is new?
The media use every soapbox in the country to
preach uber-nationalism and vilify America's
critics as unpatriotic. That's why the wrath of
the media has descended on Obama like a Texas
hailstorm; they're afraid he doesn't understand
who really runs things in America.
Wright means nothing to the media or to the men
behind the curtain. If he didn't provide an
avenue for denigrating Obama, he'd be treated
with the same indifference as the thousands of
other blacks who were herded at gunpoint into the
Superdome during Hurricane Katrina. Better buckle
up. Obama has entered the crosshairs of America's
criminal oligarchy and things are bound to get nasty.
Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org
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