By Alice Slater*
This article was originally published in The Nation on January 24 with the caption: 'The US Has Military Bases in 80 Countries. All of Them Must Close.' It is being reprinted with their permission.
NEW YORK (IDN-INPS) – On the weekend of Martin Luther King Day (January 15), Baltimore University fittingly hosted more than 200 activists in the peace, environment, and social-justice movements to launch a timely new initiative, the Coalition Against US Foreign Military Bases.
Ajamu Baraka, Green Party vice-presidential candidate and co-founder of the Black Alliance for Peace, opened the meeting reminding us that Reverend King, in his historic anti-war speech more than 50 years ago at Riverside Church in New York, called the government of the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” adding that “the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit,” while warning that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”