Kathy Kelly
Over the past
three years, a collective of volunteer researchers, lawyers, and commentators
created The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, dedicated to holding
accountable four weapon manufacturing corporations based in the U.S. Their
tribunal amassed copious evidence to prove that Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX
(formerly Raytheon) and General Atomics (a company which manufactures
weaponized drones) are guilty of committing war crimes. On January 15, 2025, as
the world marks the birth of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, a press
conference announced the Tribunal’s verdicts and release the report of ten
international jurors who have weighed the evidence submitted to them.
President
Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence look on at the Martin Luther
King Jr. memorial on MLK day in Washington, D.C., on January 20, 2020. NICHOLAS KAMM /AFP via Getty Images
Of necessity,
the evidence was culled from examining a limited range of devastatingly
criminal U.S. “forever wars,” of brutal and needless wars of choice. The
Tribunal focused on specific U.S. war
crimes and crimes against humanity in the invasions, occupations and aerial
assaults which followed the “9/11” attacks in 2001.
What if we could
enlarge the Tribunal, bringing before it war crimes occurring right now, the
U.S.-assisted massacres we watch in real time on our phone and computer
screens?
Certainly, one
witness we would beg to appear for testimony would be Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya,
who was the director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital when such a place existed.
The Tribunal would wish to amplify his testimony on the harrowing weeks of
siege during which Israel subjected his hospital to artillery and aerial
bombardment. They would help to record his story of witnessing assassinations
targeting medical staff, field executions of people clutching white flags in an
attempt to surrender, the hospital’s forced evacuation with at-gunpoint
humiliation stripping of women and girls. The initial attacks disabled the
hospital’s operational capacities by targeting power generators and oxygen
production equipment, but now an iconic photo shows Dr. Abu Safiya walking
towards an Israeli tank through collapsed buildings and rubble. The Tribunal
would like to interview him, but he is being held without charge by Israel’s
military.
Our tribunal
would surely turn to three of the world’s most crucial international human
rights groups for testimony.
On December 5,
2024, Amnesty International concluded that Israel is committing genocide
against Palestinians in Gaza. Its research documents how, during its military
offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern
Israel on 7 October 2023, “Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on
Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity.”
On December 19,
2024 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF,
Doctors Without Borders) stated that “repeated Israeli military attacks on
Palestinian civilians over the last 14 months, the dismantling of the health
care system and other essential infrastructure, the suffocating siege, and the
systematic denial of humanitarian assistance are destroying the conditions of
life in Gaza.” The report says there are “clear signs of ethnic cleansing” by
Israel as it wages war in Gaza.
Also issued on
December 19, 2024 was a report from Human Rights Watch, entitled “Extermination
and Acts of Genocide,” stating that Israel has killed thousands of Palestinians
in Gaza by denying them clean water which it says legally amounts to acts of genocide
and extermination.
Corroborating
the testimony of health care workers and human rights advocates in Gaza would
be Pope Francis’s January 9, 2025, message to international diplomats. Pope
Francis denounced Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, calling the humanitarian
situation in the Palestinian enclave “very serious and shameful.” Pope Francis
referenced the deaths of children who froze to death because of Israel’s
destruction of infrastructure: “We cannot in any way accept the bombing of
civilians. We cannot accept that children are freezing to death because
hospitals have been destroyed or a country’s energy network has been hit.”
Recommendations
made by jurors in the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal call for major
weapon makers to pay reparations for suffering caused. They echo the words of
Pope Francis, whose message to the assemblage of diplomats made this appeal: “With the money spent on weapons and other
military expenditures, let us establish a global fund that can finally put an
end to hunger and favor development in the most impoverished countries, so that
their citizens will not resort to violent or illusory solutions, or have to
leave their countries in order to seek a more dignified life”.
Considering such
testimony from so many diverse sources, one might expect that U.S. lawmakers
would re-evaluate their murderous, unwavering support of Israel. Instead, on
January 9th, 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to sanction the
International Criminal Court in protest of its arrest warrants for Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister.
Who are the
criminals? U.S. news coverage of five former or current presidents gathered for
the funeral of President Jimmy Carter never hinted that hideous wars of choice
along with massive increases in weapon sales had marked the administration of
each of the five. There was no mention of President Biden’s order to send eight
billion dollars of weapons to Gaza. This gathering of U.S. presidents is
referred to as “The World’s Most Exclusive Club.” Exclusive indeed. What other club of so few
has caused so much suffering to so many?
On April 4,
1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famously insightful, prophetic speech
about another illegal U.S. war of choice – “Beyond Viet Nam: A Time to Break
the Silence” – in which Dr. King said:
“Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has
taken: the role of those who make peaceful resolution impossible by refusing to
give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of
overseas investments.”
Dr. King’s
verdict, in this speech, on the momentous first anniversary of which he was
taken from us, was that “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. A nation that
continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on
programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
The four
defendants before our Tribunal certainly did their part to pressure these five
other criminals toward their varied crimes, but we all have a choice to hold
ourselves accountable in the face of Dr. King’s warning that we are approaching
spiritual death. One step toward reconciling with wisdom, justice and love
would be to demand the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya from an Israeli prison
so that we could humbly learn from him about war crimes and reparations.
January
19, 2025
Nicholas
Powers
This
Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Donald Trump will be sworn into office. Working in
concert, Trump, the Republican-led House and Senate, and the right-wing Supreme
Court threaten to dismantle King’s legacy. If they do, the most vulnerable
people in the United States, Black folks in particular, will be attacked. The
blueprint for this assault is Project 2025.
The
symbolism of Trump being inaugurated on MLK Jr. Day is chilling. Is King’s
legacy dead? How can we be observing MLK Day by handing power to a politician
who ran a blatantly racist campaign to beat the first Black woman to have run
as a major party’s presidential nominee? Has the goal of transforming the
United States from a white ethno-state into a multiracial democracy been
vanquished? If so, does that leave us plunging headlong into a permanent
Republican oligarchy?
King’s
life and martyrdom have been split in two. The dominant one is the “I Have a
Dream” King. He appears on Apple ads. He is the apostle for nonviolent direct
action to end racial segregation.
The
lesser known King, the one repressed from official celebration, is the 1968
radical, who was an anti-poverty and antiwar democratic socialist.
We
need that legacy of King to build a working class, progressive supermajority
that can fight the cruel agenda of Project 2025.
Dismantling
the Trap
On
Inauguration Day, Trump will place his hand on the Bible and be sworn into
office. The ceremony will take place on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol as
jubilant Republicans plan to cut, cut, cut the federal budget. They want to cut
poor people from social services, the sick from health care and undocumented
workers from the country with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids.
They come armed with a plan: Project 2025, a 900-plus page tome of conservative
policy crafted by the Heritage Foundation. When you look at it closely, you see
more than budget cuts, it is a plan to institutionalize conservatism. It is
state-sponsored, widespread suffering.
In
contrast to Trump’s swearing in to office, just two miles away at the Lincoln
Memorial, King gave the “I Have a Dream” speech in the 1963 March on
Washington. Nearby is the Reflecting Pool, where after King’s murder in 1968,
the Poor People’s Campaign built Resurrection City, a protest camp to make
visible the multiracial poor. In downtown D.C. sits a massive statue of King
called The Stone of Hope, engraved with his speeches. D.C. is filled with the
King’s history; the man’s life was dedicated to expanding the circle of
citizenship.
Trump’s
inauguration on MLK Jr. Day highlights the clash of two opposing visions. MAGA
wants to rebuild walls of racism, patriarchy and classism — even ending
birthright citizenship. The left has fought to enlarge the circle of
citizenship and include people of color, women, workers and LGBTQ folks. But
the right has the White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court.
“I
like one big beautiful bill,” Trump recently bragged at a news conference. His
reconciliation bill, scheduled for April, can pass the Senate with a simple
majority. It is the first step to Project 2025. And it’s a whopper. First up is
the renewal of Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act: basically tax cuts for the rich
to the tune of $4 trillion. Think about it. The government will have $4
trillion less to fund services. Next are additional funds for ICE to brutally
deport undocumented workers. What is obscene is that Republicans plan to plug
the hole left by those tax cuts with $5 trillion in budget cuts.
And
the cuts are sure to keep coming. Trump’s blueprint is Project 2025, which aims
to take a chainsaw to programs that help the poor. Medicaid will be cut and the
spending left to states. Project 2025 calls the U.S. Department of Agriculture
a “welfare agency” and plans to cut SNAP (food stamps) and school meal
programs. Project 2025 aims to dismantle the Department of Education and end
federal aid to low-income schools. On housing, it calls for an end to the
Housing Trust Fund, a federal grant to states to alleviate chronic
homelessness. Project 2025’s plan for the Department of Justice is to shift its
focus to prosecuting officials, colleges and private businesses that promote
social justice. To cap it off, Project 2025 plans to remove any federal workers
that get in the way of Trump’s agenda by using executive order Schedule F,
which makes tens of thousands of them replaceable with Trump loyalists.
Project
2025 is an attack on workers, on the racially marginalized, on LGBTQ people and
the poor. It will cause mass suffering and death. How? The U.S. has 304 million
citizens. The Poor People’s Campaign calculates 140 million are poor and
working poor, and 47 million go hungry, including 14 million children. At the
bottom of this cruel class oppression are 771,800 unhoused people. All of this
kills. The Journal of the American Medical Association cited poverty as the
fourth-leading cause of death in the U.S. each year as 183,000 people die from
poverty-related causes. And nearly 45,000 die because they have no health
insurance.
Project
2025 is an assault on vulnerable people. Trump and the Republicans are
threatening to push the hungry deeper into hunger. They will make the sick
sicker — and many, if you follow the math, inevitably will die. Project 2025 is
racist because poverty in the United States is racialized; 21 percent of
Indigenous people are poor, along with 17 percent of Black people and 16
percent of Latinos.
Project
2025 is also a trap. Republican budget cuts and extremist policies will compell
people to protest them. Marches will roll like waves and hit the wall of police
and draconian laws that Trump builds around his government. Anger will spike in
the streets. When a window is broken or a police car is torched, the trap is
sprung. Trump says he is eager to send in riot police or the military. He has
already given a wink to far right groups like the Proud Boys that like to break
bones.
This
is why we have to turn to King again. His radical legacy is a blueprint to
avoid the trap and defeat Project 2025.
A
Tale of Two Kings
In
April 1963, an incarcerated King wrote the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to
push back against white moderates who feared conflict. He wrote, “I am not
afraid of the word ‘tension.’ I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but
there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for
growth … we must create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise
from the dark depths of racism to the majestic heights of understanding and
brotherhood.”
In
May 1963, his ideas came to life. King created tension not only from nonviolent
direct action, but also from contrasting widely accepted values against less
accepted ones: in this case, the universal value of children’s innocence versus
white supremacy. Firefighters in Birmingham, Alabama, shot high-powered fire
hoses at children. Police let dogs loose to tear at their clothes and skin.
White supremacist and Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor ordered the
assault on the 1963 Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, in which thousands of
Black children walked downtown to protest segregation. They were arrested and
thrown in jail where they sang freedom songs. Reporters filmed it. The world
saw the news and was shocked. A moribund civil rights movement was reenergized.
We
can learn from King how to maneuver from a position of weakness. The civil
rights movement faced hostile officials that used violence to suppress
protests. We face similar threats under Trump and the Republican trifecta. King
faced a hostile public raised on anti-Black racism. We likewise now face a
public turned against “wokeness.” King faced interlocking laws from legal
segregation, redlining and a racist criminal legal system. We face Project
2025, which seeks to recreate, to a degree, the state-sanctioned discrimination
that our ancestors fought to end.
Project
2025 and the second Trump administration will surely set the stage for more
protests. Again, images of families torn apart by government officials may soon
spark rage. News of increased poverty and hunger will likely direct disgust at
Trump and the GOP. Protests and lawsuits might hamper the Trump administration
temporarily, but it is not enough. We must go beyond political trench warfare
and build a progressive supermajority.
Here
is where we shift from the “I Have a Dream” King to the later, more radical
King. He realized the integration of Black people was just the first step; next
was to integrate the poor and working class as well. Which is why, in 1966, he
told his staff that the U.S. must “move toward a democratic socialism.”
Integration
did not mean marginalized people transform themselves to fit into the U.S.
mainstream. No, for King it meant that everyone has a place at the table.
Capitalism must be replaced with democratic socialism, in which people are
integrated by a government that answers their needs for food, housing and jobs
with dignity. That’s why in 1968, King marched in Memphis with striking
sanitation workers and told them in a sermon, “Whenever you are engaged in work
that is at the service of humanity it has dignity and work. You are reminding
the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and
receive starvation wages.”
Mine
Eyes Have Seen the Glory
We
must now pick up the baton from the radical King of 1968. His legacy pulls the
rug from under even the most powerful and violent regimes. King’s political
adherents used his tactic of contrasting widely accepted values (in sociology
known as “consensus values”) to less accepted ones. The goal is to make clear
that most Americans already were progressive.
Rev.
Jesse Jackson thundered in his climatic 1988 Democratic Convention speech,
“What’s the moral challenge of our day? We have public accommodations. We have
the right to vote. We have open housing. What’s the fundamental challenge of
our day? It is to end economic violence.” He evoked a powerful image: “Most
poor people are not lazy. They are not Black. They are not Brown. They are
mostly white and female and young. But whether white, Black or Brown, a hungry
baby’s belly turned inside out is the same color — color it pain; color it
hurt; color it agony.”
In
2016, Anderson Cooper asked Sen. Bernie Sanders about his spirituality. Sanders
said, “I believe as a human being that the pain one person feels, if we have
children who are hungry, if we have elderly people who can’t afford their
prescription drugs, that impacts you and that impacts me. My spirituality is
that we are all in this together.”
Jackson
and Sanders use King’s strategy of turning class warfare into a spiritual
struggle between good and evil. Since class cuts across race and gender, it
becomes a powerful leverage to topple a corrupt Trump administration the way
that King toppled a corrupt Southern white supremacy — and to go further and
build a supermajority. The Democratic Party’s liberal politics will fail unless
there is a call for economic justice.
We
are in a two-front struggle. The Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP and the
ACLU are preparing to fight Trump in the courts and at the ballot box. Yet the
neoliberal Democratic Party is exhausted. Now the left has a historic chance to
follow King’s footsteps and mobilize the poor and workers. To say clearly that
integration means recognizing the working class — the janitors, mass transit
drivers, nurses and undocumented day laborers — who make life possible.
For
King, the Memphis strike wasn’t just a class conflict; it was a spiritual
struggle to redeem humanity. We are not fully realized until we accept
responsibility for the relationships we are in with others. That’s why King
marched with the sanitation workers.
All
around you is the world our forebears in the civil rights movement created for
us. Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass are here. Ella Baker and Fannie Lou
Hamer. And Martin Luther King Jr. They’re still here, marching in spirit.
They’re still leading us.
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