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Editor’s Note: Today’s powers-that-be like to appropriate the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. much as powerful Christian leaders have long wrapped their personal corruption and tolerance for war in their claimed allegiance to Jesus. During the Bush and Obama administrations, officials have spoken kindly of King’s legacy while downplaying (or ignoring) his principled opposition to waging wars overseas, as William Loren Katz notes in this guest essay: On Jan. 13, the Pentagon commemorated the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with an address by Jeh C. Johnson, the Defense Department’s general counsel, who insisted that today’s wars are not out of line with the iconic Nobel Peace Prize winner’s teachings.
Johnson acknowledged to a packed auditorium that in the final year of his life, King had become an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, but Johnson added: “I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack.” Really? Dr. King’s first anti-war speech, entitled “Declaration of Independence from the War In Vietnam” and delivered on April 4, 1967, at the Riverside Church in New York City, is not only eloquent and passionate but also carefully reasoned and as unmistakable in its message as its title. Dr. King knew his call for U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam would bring challenges to his leadership from his enemies, many of his friends in the civil rights movement, and lead to increased FBI harassment. He spoke at a moment when U.S. officials from the president down warned that communism’s triumph in Vietnam would lead to victories across Asia and beyond. Americans were as fearful of communism then as they are of terrorists today. Nevertheless, King said: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” He minced few words, referring to “my own government” as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Has much changed today when the U.S. boasts the largest military budget in history, one larger than all other countries around combined? The United States still has bases on every continent, and its armed forces fight in and occupy Iraq and Afghanistan for longer than it fought in World War II. Weekly we hear the government contemplates an invasion of or air strikes against Iran’s nuclear building sites. Why would one think that Dr. King would call for withdrawal from Vietnam in 1967 and – had he lived – not call for a withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan now? Would he have failed to see parallels that are as obvious as they are frightening? Early in his address, Dr. King pointed out that “our leaders refused to tell us the truth” about our war in Vietnam. Can we ever forget that the U.S. attack on Iraq was initiated to destroy weapons of mass destruction that never existed, and retaliate against a Saddam Hussein and an Iraq that had no part in the 9/11 attacks on the United States? In the name of Iraqi freedom, our leaders ordered the torture of prisoners and supported corrupt leaders who lack popular support. The people of Vietnam, King said, “must see Americans as strange liberators.” In Afghanistan today those who suffer from drone attacks directed from afar, and from other deadly searches for terrorists, do not see us as liberators. They see a distant power occupying and oppressing innocent civilians. And they see the United States as doomed to fail as earlier foreign invaders have. “The madness of Vietnam,” Dr. King said in 1967, will “totally” poison “America’s soul.” He told how U.S. involvement in Vietnam “eviscerated” its war on poverty begun by President Lyndon Johnson, and instead had its “funds and energies” and “men and skills” drawn into a war “like some demonic, destructive suction tube.” What happens to “America’s soul” as the U.S. budget spins out of control, joblessness and hopelessness reach proportions known only during the Great Depression? Dr. King emphasized how the Vietnam War was “devastating the hopes of the poor at home” and “sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight in extraordinarily high proportion relative to the rest of the population.” In 2011, a volunteer army draws even more heavily on the poor, those without jobs, men and women losing hope of finding meaningful work. Dr. King said then “I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.” Would the man who organized a Poor People’s Crusade before his assassination be silent now? Toward the end of his address at the Riverside Church, Dr. King said: “Somehow this madness must cease. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Viet Nam and the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam . . .. The great initiative in the war is ours. The initiative to stop must be ours.” Was not Martin Luther King Jr. reaching beyond Vietnam when he warned of “approaching spiritual death” and called for “a significant and profound change in American life and policy” and insisted “we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.” Was he only speaking of Vietnam when he said, “War is not the answer?” William Loren Katz, author of forty books on American history, is a visiting scholar at New York University. His website is: williamlkatzl.com To comment at Consortiumblog, click here. (To make a blog comment about this or other stories, you can use your normal e-mail address and password. Ignore the prompt for a Google account.) To comment to us by e-mail, click here. To donate so we can continue reporting and publishing stories like the one you just read, click here. |
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