Much has been said about Ron Paul\u2019s foreign policy.\u00a0 Some of it has been good.\u00a0 A lot of it has been not so good.\u00a0 And there is no one who objects more strongly to his foreign policy than his fellow Republicans.<\/p>\n
Paul\u2019s foreign policy is \u201cisolationist,\u201d \u201cna\u00efve;\u201d and \u201cdangerous.\u201d\u00a0 On foreign policy, Paul is \u201cto the left\u201d of President Obama.\u00a0 He is an \u201cultra-radical leftist.\u201d\u00a0 Because of his insistence that it is the dominant ideology of \u201cinterventionism\u201d\u2014what Paul and others characterize as \u201cmilitarism\u201d and \u201cneo-imperialism\u201d\u2014that accounts for an increase of Islamic hostilities toward theUnited States\u2014Paul, his detractors claim, \u201cblamesAmerica.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
This is the first thing of which to take note.<\/p>\n
Accompanying this phenomenon is another: with Ron Paul\u2019s surging popularity, his enemies have resorted to playing against him what black Florida Congressman Alan West rightfully calls \u201cthe last card in the deck\u201d: the race card.\u00a0 Because of some newsletters that he published a couple of decades ago, Paul has been accused of \u201cracism.\u201d<\/p>\n
So Paul is a dangerous isolationist, an American \u201cblamer,\u201d if not a hater, and a \u201cracist.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
This deserves to be born in mind as we turn our attention, in just a couple of weeks, to another American with whom Paul is not ordinarily linked\u2014at least not in any positive sense.<\/p>\n
Every January the public sector grinds to a halt and one solemn event after the other unfolds as Americans remember Martin Luther King, Jr. on his birthday.\u00a0 This is relevant to discussions regarding Paul\u2019s foreign policy, for the very same Republican contributors to Fox News, talk radio, National Review, <\/em>and The Weekly Standard<\/em> who spare no occasion to blast away at Paul for his <\/em>views will be equally ready to lavish praise upon Dr. King.<\/p>\n King\u2019s position on foreign policy, you see, was vastly more similar to Paul\u2019s than it is to any other Republican candidate.\u00a0 In fact, it shares much more in common with Paul\u2019s understanding of foreign policy than it shares with President Obama\u2019s.\u00a0 The difference between King and Paul, however, is that for however blunt Paul can be, the language in which he characterizes his position isn\u2019t as damning as that the terms in which King cast his <\/em>position.\u00a0<\/p>\n Although Republicans like to speak of King as if he was a neoconservative before there were neoconservatives, the fact of the matter is that if anyone was an \u201cultra-radical leftist,\u201d it was King.\u00a0 This is the thesis for which Michael Eric Dyson makes a compelling case in his 1996 book, I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n I am no fan of Dyson, a hard leftist himself.\u00a0 But he is to be commended for this insightful work on a sorely misunderstood historical figure.\u00a0 To appreciate King\u2019s approach to foreign policy, Dyson situates it within his larger moral vision, a vision, according to Dyson, within which the goal of \u201cracial justice\u201d figures centrally.\u00a0<\/p>\n Although we hear little of this on MLK Day, King had come to believe that \u201cthe vast majority of white Americans are racists, either consciously or unconsciously.\u201d\u00a0 How could they not be?\u00a0 According to King, America\u201cwas born in genocide.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cRacial supremacy\u201d was in America\u2019s DNA from the beginning, a fact that is seen from its treatment of \u201cthe original American, the Indian [.]\u201d\u00a0 King condemned Americaas \u201cperhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population.\u201d\u00a0 Near the end of his life, he concluded that if Americahad any hope of changing, there would have to be \u201ca reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values<\/em>\u201d (emphasis mine).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n America\u2019s \u201cracism\u201d extended to its foreign policy.\u00a0 The Vietnam War, King declared, was \u201csenseless\u201d and \u201cunjust.\u201d\u00a0 It is Americans, he continued, who are the \u201ccriminals in that war,\u201d forAmericahas \u201ccommitted more war crimes almost than any nation in the world.\u201d\u00a0 The United States is \u201cthe greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.\u201d\u00a0 American foreign policy vis-\u00e0-vis the fight against communism generally and the Vietnam War specifically was nothing more or less than \u201ca new form of colonialism.\u201d\u00a0 Furthermore, even asAmericasubjected non-whites to unjust treatment overseas, it continued its assault upon blacks here: black soldiers, he remarked, were drafted in an \u201cextraordinarily high proportion to the rest of the population.\u201d\u00a0 Dyson credits King with \u201cshowing the lethal links between racism, militarism, and poverty.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Interestingly, just as King\u2019s conceptions of domestic and foreign policies are bound together by a single moral thread, so too do Ron Paul\u2019s views on the same co-exist within a unified ethical vision.\u00a0 Moreover, although King was a leftist while Paul is certainly not, there are similarities between the two.<\/p>\n Importantly, like King, Paul too regards American foreign policy as \u201cimperialistic\u201d and \u201cmilitaristic,\u201d and the wars in which we are engaged as \u201cunjust\u201d and \u201cimmoral.\u201d\u00a0 He has also suggested, on more than one occasion, that it is animated by a subtle but enduring bigotry against Muslims\u2014virtually all of whom are non-white.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Like King, Paul posits an inseparable connection between the federal government\u2019s aggression toward non-whites abroad and what he perceives to be its unjust aggression toward non-whites here at home.\u00a0 The so-called \u201cWar on Drugs,\u201d Paul thinks, is \u201cracist\u201d in conception and effect, for not only has its prosecution had the effect of transforming black communities into warzones, blacks are disproportionately incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses.\u00a0<\/p>\n At the center of King\u2019s worldview is the goal of racial equality; at the center of Paul\u2019s is liberty for all.\u00a0 Still, they both note a racial subtext that unitesAmerica\u2019s domestic and foreign policies, a subtext to which they equally object.<\/p>\n Let me be clear: I agree with neither MLK nor <\/em>Ron Paul on these matters.\u00a0 Nor would I want to be read as suggesting that the latter is something like a clone of the former.\u00a0 If I thought this, I would not <\/em>have invested countless hours into arguing for Paul\u2019s presidential candidacy.<\/p>\n Rather, my point here is simply to show that their radically disparate treatment of King and Paul exposes exactly the sort of intellectual dishonesty and inconsistency that we have come to expect from Republican politicians and their media propagandists.\u00a0 In treating King reverentially while treating Paul unconscionably, Republicans convict themselves of the most crass sort of cynicism, for when it comes to the issues under discussion, Paul is much closer to King than are they. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Much has been said about Ron Paul\u2019s foreign policy.\u00a0 Some of it has been good.\u00a0 A lot of it has been not so good.\u00a0 And there is no one who objects more strongly to his foreign policy than his fellow Republicans. Paul\u2019s foreign policy is \u201cisolationist,\u201d \u201cna\u00efve;\u201d and \u201cdangerous.\u201d\u00a0 On foreign policy, Paul is \u201cto…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n