For many, the words “I have a dream” are the only thing they associate with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. King’s legacy is mostly depicted in the context of civil rights, with history books lauding his noble achievements of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts being passed.

But Dr. King gave hundreds of unpopular and controversial speeches ranging from the dangers of the Vietnam War to mass commercialization. During his life, he was attacked and marginalized from the white and black community alike.

The US government coined Dr. King the most “dangerous Negro leader in the country”, routinely spied on him and even went as far as writing him a letter in 1964 urging him to commit suicide.

In fact, MLK Jr.’s surviving family filed a civil suit in Memphis, TN, in which the jury found elements of the US government complicit in his assassination.

Having been arrested thirty times, Dr. King routinely threw his body upon the gears of the machine to show that change doesn’t roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but through continuous struggle against institutionalized injustice.

Focusing on America as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, Dr. King spent the last year of his life fighting what he called the triple evils of the word: racism, militarism, and economic exploitation.

In fact, when MLK was assassinated he was planning the “Poor People’s Campaign” – a mass march and occupation of DC until the US government granted poor people an “Economic Bill of Rights”.

Listen to his profound speech “Beyond Vietnam”, given exactly one year before Dr. King’s assassination.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “Beyond Vietnam”

It’s a topic Tavis Smiley explores in amazing depth and clarity in his new book, Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s’ Final Year in which he talks about the unvarnished truth about Dr. King’s life, and last sermon entitled “Why America May Go to Hell”.

Breaking the Set speaks with Smiley about Dr. King and Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson, Arun Gandhi, about why structural and passive violence are the most inhibiting factors for peace.

Breaking the Set with Tavis Smiley and Arun Gandhi

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 Abby Martin | @Abby Martin 

Photo by flickr user Angela N.

For twenty years, Western elites have spun a tale of how Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame heroically ended the 1994 genocide in that country.

That narrative has persisted despite the fact that a great deal of evidence shows that Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) did much of the killing and has committed extraordinary levels of violence in neighboring Congo since invading that country not long after seizing power.

The recent BBC telecast of Rwanda: The Untold Story indicates that the truth about Kagame may finally be penetrating the mainstream. Rwanda: The Untold Story presents much information that contradicts the official narrative, specifically that the dramatic escalation in violence began not in April 1994 but in October 1990 when the RPF invaded from its outposts in Uganda; that RPF forces killed tens of thousands of people in the 42-month period from the invasion to April 1994; and that the RPF is responsible for the deaths of several hundred thousand more Rwandans during the three month period of bloodshed in 1994.  

In contrast, the spinners of the Kagame the Hero tale have put the entire responsibility on the Hutu-controlled government and armed Hutu mobs. The RPF’s 1990 invasion, meanwhile, has been completely written out of history in the official narrative, as has RPF responsibility for the shooting down of a plane carrying Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana. It was immediately after the murder of Habyarimana that what has been known since as the Rwandan Genocide began.

Another part of the official narrative that was exposed long ago by Edward Herman, Robin Philpot and others is that the US didn’t do enough to stop the killing. In fact, Kagame was an imperial operative as early as the 1980’s who trained at Fort Leavenworth and the US was closely allied with the RPF even before the 1990 invasion. Throughout the spring of 1994, the Clinton administration was proactive in blocking the UN from taking measures that might have prevented much of the killing. Former United Nations Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Gali, for one, has put the entire blame for what happened in Rwanda in the 1990’s on the United States.

In addition, while the Rwandan government and France, its primary ally, supported international action to stop the killing, Kagame was so determined to take complete control of the country that he eschewed a ceasefire and negotiations. The inescapable conclusion is that the mounting deaths on both sides were acceptable to Kagame and, by extension, the US, so long as the end result was complete victory and the ascension of the RPF to power.

From the outset, both Hutu and Tutsi survivors, UN officials and numerous investigators have presented an entirely different version of events. Those stories, which have been fortified by population studies and other means, reveal that both sides are each responsible for hundreds of thousands of killings. These dissident voices have been ignored and, in the case of several studies by human rights groups and the UN, suppressed – at least until the airing of Rwanda: The Untold Story.

Perpetrators and supporters of empire who have never seen a US war crime they didn’t like have attacked critics of the official narrative and obfuscated who really benefits from the ongoing warfare. It’s a neat trick practiced regularly: falsely accuse dissidents of denying atrocities and deny imperial atrocities, all the while obscuring the billions in US business profits made possible by Kagame’s invasions of the Congo.

Western plunder of the region dates to the murderous rule of Belgian King Leopold II. No sooner did the Congolese independence movement succeed in 1960 than Congolese reactionaries and their Belgian and CIA helpers overthrew and eventually murdered Patrice Lumumba, the nation’s first elected Prime Minister. Eventually installed in Lumumba’s place was US puppet Mobutu Sese Soko, who for 30 years served US business interests as zealously as Kagame has. And much as a succession of US administrations hailed Mobutu as a great man, Clintons, Madeline Albright, George Bush II, Samantha Power and Susan Rice hail Kagame as “the man who ended the Rwandan Genocide.” Never mind the millions of Congolese who have been killed or died from starvation, disease and other causes traced directly to Kagame’s invasions.

The unraveling of the official Rwanda story has global implications, as the US has invoked “preventing another Rwanda” to justify invasions of the former Yugoslavia, Libya and large swaths of the Middle East. With a population increasingly alarmed by endless wars of aggression, the fact that the foundation for those acts is one big lie brings us closer to the day when we can end forever imperial ambitions and war.

Andy Piascik of Bridgeport writes for Z Magazine/Znet

Photo by flickr user DFID

Six years ago, Congress passed a bailout to the tune of 80 billions dollars funded by American taxpayers to rescue the bankrupt auto industry, mostly based in Detroit. But when the Motor City itself needed help and retirees were on the brink of losing everything, the money was nowhere to be found, apparently to avoid “meddling” in the bankruptcy process.

Fast forward to today, where the government admits it “only” lost 9.3 billion taxpayer dollars to the auto makers – an amount that could transform the lives of hundreds of thousands of Detroit residents.

And despite the rhetoric that Detroit is on the up and up, there’s still an insurmountable amount of suffering and neglect plaguing the city. Much of Detroit is in squalor, with skyrocketing rates of poverty, homelessness, and even cuts to vital resources like water where 40% of the population faces shut-offs.

At the end of the day, it’s a story of priorities. If this country continues to prioritize guns over water, bombs over shelter, and bloodshed over life, then it won’t just be Detroit that needs saving.

Breaking the Set recently traveled to Detroit to delve deeper into the roots of the bankruptcy as well as connect with activists working tirelessly to help bring city residents back on their feet.

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Detroit Part I: Extinguishing the Homeless & Shutting Off Human Rights

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 Detroit Part II: Bankruptcy Dictatorship & Foreclosed Futures

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Donate to the Detroit Water Brigade here. Find out more about The Tricycle Collective here.

Follow me @AbbyMartin and let me know what you think at #BTSDetroit

In the wake of the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, many mainstream media outlets featured guests who shifted the focus from police brutality to “black-on-black” violence.

FBI statistics show that intra-racial homicide is high for both blacks (90%) and whites (83%), so it’s puzzling when people bring up black-on-black homicide as if it’s a pathology endemic to black people. Nevermind that when a white suspect opens fire at a movie theater, elementary school or on a Congress woman, white-on-white homicide is hardly ever mentioned nor discussed.

There’s long history in the United States of racist law enforcement and mistreatment of African Americans. But this red-herring tells black people they should concern themselves with intra-racial violence as opposed to police violence, patently dismissing legitimate grievances African Americans have in regards to the over-policing of their communities.

Black communities are very concerned about high rates of gun violence and homicides, as well as the socioeconomic conditions that put black youth at risk for experiencing violent trauma. In many communities across the country, there are several neighborhood organizations working to reduce gang and gun violence. Cities such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, Oakland and Chicago have hospital-based or hospital-affiliated violence intervention programs that help reduce recidivism among those who have experienced violent trauma using biopsychosocial framework to mitigate associated risk.

Those who wish to deflect attention away from unarmed black men being murdered by police and point fingers at community neglect don’t seem to care that these programs and organizations exist. Just because the media doesn’t show protests against black-on-black violence doesn’t mean they are not occurring.

Unaccountable police killings are rampant across the country and color lines, but black men are gunned down by white police officers with impunity at a rate 21 times higher than their white counterparts. People are waking up to this disturbing trend and participating in mass at protests and die-ins nationwide to express their outrage towards police impunity.

While President Obama seems to think requesting hundreds of millions of dollars to outfit officers with body cameras will prevent these violent encounters, the murders of Eric Garner and Oscar Grant were both caught on camera. Daniel Pantaleo was not indicted for the death of Garner while BART police officer Johannes Mehserle spent only 11 months in prison for the murder of Grant.

America’s two-tiered justice system continues to exhibit that life does not matter, especially when it’s African American. It will only take a sustained, collective movement to end violent, racist, and militarized police practices across the country. The black community is working hard to address the serious issue of black-on-black violence. So next time you hear this sensationalist argument, shift the conversation to where it really matters: the system.

Ken Peeples is working in social behavioral and biomedical research in Philadelphia. His background is Political Science and African American Studies. @StatelessMan18

Photo by flickr user Barry Yanowitz