Ajamu Baraka, The Black Alliance for Peace

by John K. Stoner -- January 26, 2018

     Ajamu Baraka is founder of “The Black Alliance for Peace.”  Did you know there is such a thing?  What do you think about the significance of such an alliance?  

Here is Baraka writing under a title that would surprise all Americans and seriously shock most of them: “ Why We Must Protect the World From the United States.”  But then I wonder, could you, or I, write a convincing refutation of what he says?  What would our evidence be for such an argument?  (Black Agenda Report)

Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stated the obvious: The United States was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. He also said the public allowing this violence would lead to a kind of national spiritual death that would continue to make the U.S. state a danger to the world.

That spiritual death has not quite happened completely. Yet accepting the “inevitability” of violence and the necessity for waging war is now more deeply ingrained in the collective consciousness of individuals in the United States than it was 50 years ago when King warned of the deep malady of U.S. society. For most of the 21st century, the United States has been at war. Culturally, mass shootings, the wars on drugs and terror, violence and war as entertainment, livestreamed videos of horrendous police-executed murders as well as of a head of state being sodomized with a knife have resulted in what Henry Giroux refers to as a “culture of cruelty.

But the very fact that the authorities need to lie to the people with fairy tales of the “responsibility to protect” in order to give moral coverage for the waging of war is an acknowledgement that they understand that there is enough humanity left with the public that it would reject U.S. warmongering if it was only seen as advancing narrow national interests.

It is this remaining moral core—and the objective interests of the clear majority of the people to be in opposition to war—that provides the foundation for reviving the modern anti-war movement. …(more)

And here, Baraka on the U.S. role in one current horrendous war, in Yemen: (Ajamu Baraka blog)

Ajamu Baraka, a Black voice for truth and peace in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr.