Controversial New Video of Obama’s Pastor

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A new video of Jeremiah Wright has surfaced, showing Barack Obama’s pastor of 20 years praising Marxism and discussing his ties to communists in El Salvador and Nicaragua and the Libyan government. {snip}

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In the video, which captures Wright’s appearance at a September 17, 2009, anniversary celebration of Monthly Review, Wright said that while the “corporate media” provide a “binary lens” of the world, in such terms as “communist versus Christian,” Monthly Review offers what it calls “no-nonsense Marxism.”

He added: “You dispel all the negative images we have been programmed to conjure up with just the mention of that word socialism or Marxism.”

He called America “land of the greed and home of the slave.”

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At the Monthly Review celebration, however, he went into more detail about his own personal and political philosophy. He said that “My work with liberation theology, with Latin American theologians, with the Black Theology Project and with the Cuban Council of Churches taught me 30 years ago the importance of Marx and the Marxist analysis of the social realities of the vulnerable and the oppressed who were trying desperately to break free of the political economics undergirded by this country that were choking them and cutting off any hope of a possible future where all of the people would benefit.”

He said that his “exposure to the FMLN in El Salvador, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and my presence at the 15th Jamahiriya in Libya taught me what I have read in the pages of the Monthly Review which is, as Joshua Stanton says, though we need not always agree with one another we must do the work necessary to at least understand one another.”

The FMLN was the armed wing of the communist movement in El Salvador, while the Sandinistas are the communist movement in Nicaragua. The Cuban Council of Churches is controlled by the Castro regime.

Interestingly, Wright used his appearance at the Monthly Review event to quote Frantz Fanon, the revolutionary also cited in Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father.

However, his only reference to Obama in the speech came when he complained about Obama going to “beg the big fat cats” on Wall Street to stop irresponsible financial practices.

In a recap of the celebration, the Monthly Review editors declared, “We would like to thank all those who participated in this extraordinary event. Dr. Wright captured the tone of the evening, declaring that: ‘Militarism, capitalism and racism, domestic oppression, foreign military aggression, victims of neo-colonialism, victims of community and national racism, and the Cold War days in its infancy to the needless war in Vietnam in its [MR’s] second decade, through wars of greed in Afghanistan and Iraq in [its] sixth decade’ were all incisively covered by the magazine. He spoke of Monthly Review’s indefatigable insistence on the need to put ‘people before profits,’ and its unflinching criticisms of inequality, injustice, and the realities of capitalism.”

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