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The excuse seized upon by reactionary elements within the Nation of Islam to suspend Malcolm X was his remark that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was a case of "chickens coming home to roost," referring to the CIA-orchestrated assassinations of Lumumba in the Congo, Diem in Vietnam, and others. Malcolm's insight was that the often-naked violence the US Empire visits on all the world's people, and the sometimes-hidden violence the rulers and their henchmen inflict on exploited, oppressed and colonized inside the borders of the U.S., has inevitable karmic consequences for the population and political system of the US itself. This has only become more undeniable with every passing year.
Not long after Malcolm's assassination, nor long before his own, Martin Luther King Jr. expressed the same understanding of the nature of this society in his declaration that the U.S. government was the greatest purveyor of violence on the planet. That insight as well has become increasingly irrefutable, as the margins of this "greatness" begin to reach logarithmic proportions. Open US military spending exceeds that of most of the rest of the planet. Add in the domestic military, the prisons and police, the private security apparatus of the corporate sector and the super-rich, and the megatonnage of US armament is virtually incalculable.
And yet the Colossus has feet of clay. Imperialism remains a paper tiger. Its greatest strength...