Photos courtesy of The Intercept: Secretary of State Antony Blinken, April 26, 2022. (Al Drago/Pool Photo via AP) / Avril Haines, director of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, April 14, 2021. (Saul Loeb/Pool via AP) / President Joe Biden, April 29, 2022. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh) / White House press secretary Jen Psaki, April 26, 2022. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
The Russian government has been revving up its World War III and nuclear war rhetoric and boasting of the country’s military capabilities since Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24.
Putin put Russia’s nuclear deterrent forces on high alert and many Americans question whether President Joe Biden will feel pressured to enter the war.
Would civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. support such an action? Dr. King was anti-war are a proponent of nonviolent resistance.
Black Americans say they’ve been in an ongoing war at home for centuries.
“Black Americans had @ least 200 city/towns burned to ground by whites. Another 100 flooded with water. We’re the only U.S. citizens bombed by our government on U.S. soil. We had crack dropped in our communities just to fund war. Black Americans have long been at war,” tweeted Noirdos @noirdosser.
“So true. We have been at war EVERY day and in every way, since 1526,” tweeted The Atavist @DSCBland.
If Biden is marching toward another war, who is advising him? Some point to a secretive group of advisers from the WestExec Advisors group, which was co-founded in 2017 by Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
WestExec Advisors is a consulting firm founded by Blinken, Michèle Flournoy, Sergio Aguirre, and Nitin Chadda, all former officials in the Barack Obama administration. While the company does not disclose all its clients’ identities, WestExec workers have included Lisa Monaco, current deputy attorney general; Robert O. Work, who served as the 32nd United States Deputy Secretary of Defense for both the Obama and Trump administrations from 2014 to 2017; Avril Haines, who currently serves as the director of national intelligence in the Biden administration; David S. Cohen, who has served as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency since January 2021; and outgoing White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
This high-powered, secretive consulting firm has become “Biden’s Cabinet in waiting,” Politico reported. The firm is packed with former top Democratic national security and foreign policy officials who raised money for the Biden campaign.
Weeks after the November 2020 presidential election that brought Biden to power, Politico, in a Nov. 23, 2020 article, quoted WestExec describing itself as “quite literally, the road to the Situation Room” and “the road everyone associated with WestExec Advisors has crossed many times en route to meetings of the highest national security consequences.”
The company’s website said it’s a “diverse group senior national security professionals with the most recent experience at the highest levels of the U.S. government.”
The company was founded to offer what it said was “unique geopolitical and policy expertise” to companies seeking to navigate “external factors and relationships that affect businesses” in Washington and around the world. WestExec said that “it does not lobby, does not act as an agent of foreign principals and does not work for any governments or state-owned enterprises,” New York Times reported.
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Dr. King often spoke out against America entering into foreign wars, especially since the U.S. had not taken care of or secured the rights its own citizens, especially Black Americans and the poor.
In one speech, King Jr. declared there were three evils in the world.
“Three major evils—the evil of racism, the evil of poverty, and the evil of war. These are the three things that I want to deal with today,” said King in his “America’s Chief Moral Dilemma” speech, delivered at University of California at Berkeley on May 17, 1967. The Atlantic reprinted the speech in 2018.
“Now I want to deal with the third evil that constitutes the dilemma of our nation and the world. And that is the evil of war. Somehow these three evils are tied together. The triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. The great problem and the great challenge facing mankind today is to get rid of war … We have left ourselves as a nation morally and politically isolated in the world. We have greatly strengthened the forces of reaction in America, and excited violence and hatred among our own people. We have diverted attention from civil rights. During a period of war, when a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, social programs inevitably suffer. People become insensitive to pain and agony in their own midst,” he said.
Prior to this, King spoke out against the Vietnam War at the Riverside Church, New York City, on April 4, 1967. In his speech, “Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence,” King encouraged other Black clergy to speak out against the Vietnam War, declaring America had failed Black Americans.
“Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the Black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem,” Dr. King said.
King continued, “And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.”
Photo (L-R): Secretary of State Antony Blinken testifies during a Senate Foreign Relations committee hearing on the Fiscal Year 2023 Budget in Washington, April 26, 2022. (Al Drago/Pool Photo via AP)/Director Avril Haines of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) testifies during a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing about worldwide threats, on Capitol Hill in Washington, April 14, 2021. (Saul Loeb/Pool via AP)/President Joe Biden speaks during a meeting with Inspectors General in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, April 29, 2022. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)/White House press secretary Jen Psaki speaks during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, April 26, 2022. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh).
