by Jacob G. Hornberger

January 19, 2026

What will be scrupulously avoided in the mainstream press today — Martin Luther King, Jr., Day — will be what King pointed out about the U.S. government — that it is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Of course, that statement is as true today as it was in 1967. When it comes to violence, including killings, there is no doubt that the U.S. government has made America Number 1. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, that is not something to be proud of.

Invasions, occupations, wars of aggression, state-sponsored assassinations, extra-judicial executions, kidnappings, torture, sanctions, indefinite detention with denial of due process and trial by jury, and forced deportations — all based on tremendous violence and much of it resulting in massive death and suffering.

One of the fascinating aspects of all this governmental violence is how normalized it has become in American society. That’s because Americans have been indoctrinated into believing that it’s all necessary to protect “national security” and to keep them safe and secure. When it comes to U.S. governmental violence, the consciences of many Americans, including many church ministers, have been stultified and paralyzed.

Consider sanctions, for example. Hardly any American questions the morality of U.S. sanctions imposed on foreign citizens. They have become a standard, go-to policy that most Americans have come to accept as a normal part of America’s foreign policy.

But sanctions are anything but normal. They target with death and suffering the citizenry of foreign regimes whose governments refuse to kowtow to the U.S. Empire. The idea is to target the citizens of those countries with death by starvation or illness in the hope that they will rise up in a violent revolution, oust their regime from power, and replace it with a pro-U.S. regime.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, that is one of the reasons people condemn terrorism — that it inflicts harm on citizens as a way to bring about a change in policy by their government. That’s the mindset that drives sanctions.

Sanctions are a regime-change operation on the cheap. That is, they are designed to protect U.S. military forces from death or injury in an invasion and occupation. They are designed to sacrifice “only” foreigners, whose lives are considered less valuable than the lives of American soldiers.

Iran is a good example of the violence, death, suffering, crisis, and mayhem that come with U.S. sanctions. Keep in mind something important about Iran: It has never attacked the United States. Nonetheless, for decades the U.S. government has used sanctions to bring death, suffering, crisis, chaos, and economic privation to the Iranian people — in the hopes that they would ultimately revolt against their own government, which U.S. officials label as an opponent, rival, or competitor of the U.S. government.

When the sanctions recently accomplished their aim, the result was predictable — the Iranian regime just shot and killed thousands of Iranian protestors, who were unable to defend themselves owing to Iran’s strict gun-control laws. The Iranian protests are now as dead as those protestors. Of course, it didn’t help that they were encouraged to protest by President Trump’s promise to come to their assistance with military strikes.

The same thing happened with Venezuela. Many years ago, U.S sanctions were imposed on the Venezuelan people with the same aim — to create economic chaos, suffering, death by starvation, and illness among the Venezuelan people, with the aim of encouraging them to violently revolt against their tyrannical regime. When millions of Venezuelans fled the country and came to the United States in a desperate attempt to save their lives, they were treated with extreme brutality and forced to return home to face almost certain death.

What would be wrong with just having left Iran and Venezuela alone? So what if people had been free to prosper under tyrannical regimes, including ones that didn’t kowtow to the U.S. Empire. People all over the world prosper under tyrannical regimes. Why should people be made to suffer under the nonsensical rubric that Iran, Venezuela, Russia, China, Cuba, Korea, and others are “our” adversaries, opponents, rivals, or competitors?

Consider the invasions and wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq. Neither country had ever attacked the United States. Nonetheless, the U.S. government unleashed a massive rampage of violence against both countries that resulted in the deaths, maiming, and injury of millions of Afghans and Iraqis.

Don’t forget about the U.S. interventions in the civil wars in Korea and Vietnam, the latter of which Martin Luther King, Jr., ardently and courageously opposed, even though U.S. officials labeled him a “traitor,” just as they did with Cassius Clay when he courageously refused to comply with their draft order. The violence unleashed by those invasions resulted in the deaths of millions of Koreans and Vietnamese. Keep in mind, again, that those two countries never attacked the United States. The massive U.S. violence was justified by the old ridiculous Cold War rubric that the Reds were coming to get us and, therefore, that it was necessary to kill them over there before they came over here.

Think about their many state-sponsored assassinations. The CIA assassination attempts against Cuban president Fidel Castro come to mind, which are treated with a yuk-yuk humor by the mainstream press. Those were nothing more than attempts at murder. After all, what legal or moral justification existed to kill Castro? That he was a communist? That he refused to obey orders of the U.S. Empire? Neither of those reasons servse as a moral or legal justification for killing anyone. Yet, those assassination attempts are considered perfectly valid and normal by a large number of Americans, including those who say they believe in the Ten Commandments.

Today we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr., for his leadership in the area of civil rights. But we must also remember him for the tremendous courage he displayed with his fierce opposition to the massive violence that came with the conversion of the U.S. government to a national-security state after World War II. Is it any wonder that U.S. officials in the Pentagon, the CIA, and the FBI concluded that King was a grave threat to U.S. “national security” — one who needed to be spied on, harassed, arrested, incarcerated, blackmailed, and ultimately murdered? (See James Douglass’s new book Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK.)