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US government is ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world’

The United States military has deployed the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (left) to the Persian Gulf. (file photo)

Martin Luther King Jr. was right to call the US government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” American author and political analyst Daniel Kovalik has said.

Kovalik, an academic at the University of Pittsburgh, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV while commenting on a recent poll which has revealed that a staggering 32 percent of all Europeans believe the United States can no longer be considered trustworthy following the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016.

The poll, conducted after the 2020 US presidential election on 15,000 people in 11 European countries, also found that 60 percent of Europeans believed the US political system was “completely” or “somewhat broken.”

The survey was commissioned by the European Council on Foreign Relations and carried out by Datapraxis and YouGov in November and December 2020.

Kovalik said that “it doesn't surprise me. And yes, I think they reflect people's opinions. This follows on two international polls that show that by a wide margin, people in the world think the US is the greatest threat to world peace.”

“The US has since World War II acted, well in the words of Martin Luther King, whose day we celebrate today, as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, and it has conducted this violence to serve its own purposes, to try to control a disproportionate amount of the world's resources; the US even now with about 6% of the world's population controls about 25% of its resources,” he stated.

“And so everything the US does has to be seen through that lens, whether it's military, diplomatic measures, political measures. These are all being done to serve the interests of the ruling class to control the world's resources. So of course, in that context how could the US be trusted? It can't be,” the analyst stated.

Most Americans remember Dr. King Jr. for his dream of what this country could be, a nation where his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Whereas, fewer Americans have heard of Dr. King’s speech in which he called, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

Following is an excerpt of Dr. King's speech, titled "Beyond Vietnam". 

He said it in regard to the US war on Vietnam which he came to oppose.


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