Gott Mit Uns

Soldiers of the German Wehrmacht wore belt buckles with the words "Gott Mit Uns" inscribed upon them: God With Us.

Robert Scheer at Truthdig has written an essay with this title: "Would God Ever Damn America?

He wonders what it would take for God to express his wrath on us as a country. He refers to comments made by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright as well as comments by right-wing Christian poohbahs such as Pat Robertson and John Hagee.

Then he says this:

"I know what the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. would say were he alive today, for it would be consistent with his denunciation of the Vietnam War in a sermon at New York's Riverside Church a year before his assassination. Recounting his difficulty in spreading the message of nonviolence and personal responsibility to the very ghetto youths that the Rev. Wright has worked with for four decades, King stated, 'I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.'

King delivered that speech the year that Wright ended his six years of service in the U.S. Marine Corps and Navy, for which he received three commendations from President Lydon Johnson, whom King was confronting. No doubt Wright was influenced by King's oratory decrying 'the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens ... 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.' And neither could Wright."

You can read the entire article by Mr. Scheer here.