The prophetic words of Martin Luther King
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_5740.shtml
By Gary G. Kohls, MD
Mar 30, 2010
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on
military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching
spiritual death." --Martin Luther King
Those were the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., in his famous April
4, 1967, Riverside Church speech, 43 years ago this Easter Sunday.
The speech was titled "Beyond Viet Nam: A Time to Break Silence." It
was delivered exactly one year to the day of his1968 assassination in Memphis.
The people who heard that speech recognized it as one of the most
powerful speeches ever given articulating the immorality of the Viet
Nam War. Some also saw that King was signing his own death warrant by
exposing so forcefully the war crimes that were being committed daily
in what the courageous Jesuit prophet Daniel Berrigan, who personally
witnessed what was going on in the killing fields of Viet Nam,
described as "an overwhelming atrocity."
King and Berrigan were speaking out from their deeply felt sense of
moral outrage and anguish over the horrible suffering of the millions
of innocent, unarmed Vietnamese civilians. They both knew that women
and children were the main victims of modern warfare, especially wars
that utilized so indiscriminately the massive arsenal of highly
lethal weapons, including one of the US Air Force's favorites,
napalm, which burned the flesh off of whatever part of the body that
the flaming, jellied gasoline splashed on. Berrigan often used the
phrase "The Land of the Burning Children" when he wrote and spoke
about what he had seen in Viet Nam.
Both of these courageous prophets knew about the atrocities that
American soldiers and Marines were ordered to commit in the name of
"anti-communism." And King saw the connections between the killing of
dispensable "gooks" and "slants" on the battlefields of Southeast
Asia and the oppression, impoverishment, imprisoning and lynching of
"dispensable blacks" in America. Racism was alive and well in the US
military and it didn't differentiate between foreign or domestic targets.
King was being faithful to the nonviolent teachings of Jesus of
Nazareth by speaking out against injustice wherever he saw it. He
knew that the willingness to use the violence of racism or the
violence of orchestrated poverty or the violence of militarism had
the same sources: fear of "the other" and the perceived need to
defend, by the use of violence if necessary, one's own wealth and
privilege, no matter how unjustly they were acquired.
King knew that the opposition to his civil rights movement - and now
his outspoken anti-Viet Nam War stance - was formidable: from
indifferent or frightened bystanders everywhere (whose silence gave
consent to the violence) to privileged white Christian churches in
the south who wanted the movement to "go slow" to cruel racists,
including the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens Councils in the south
to J. Edgar Hoover's FBI in the north. Those groups were dangerous
enough, but by speaking out he was opposing entrenched systems of
racism, economic oppression and militarism, each of which had the
power to unleash lethal violence against any and all perceived
enemies, especially those of the powerless underclass.
Tremendous fortunes are made in every war, and the Viet Nam War was
no exception. Weapons manufacturers thrived, becoming more deeply
entrenched as each batch of industry lobbyists and their media
propaganda became more and more successful. Hundreds of billions of
dollars yearly, all tax-and-spend or tax-and-borrow expenditures,
were spent for weapons research and development.
Large numbers of workers were hired to work in hundreds of huge
weapons factories in every legislative district in the nation, and
the economy boomed -- but it boomed on tax money that then couldn't
be spent for other projects. And so the war-making and the wars were
popular with the investor class, the power elite, the Pentagon, the
CIA, most politicians, the defense industries and, of course, the
people who needed the jobs.
King threatened those groups' self-interest, and exactly one year
later he was dead.
King's April 4, 1967 Riverside Church speech in New York City was too
truthful for the masters of war who needed to maintain the myth that
the Viet Nam War was necessary and just. And so at first they tried
to silence King by a massive disinformation campaign to discredit
him, as is always done to altruistic and dangerously progressive
doers and thinkers such as Jesus of Nazareth, Abraham Lincoln,
Gandhi, Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Paul Wellstone.
The easily brain-washable public bought the oft-repeated lies, and
support for King and his civil rights movement dwindled. The US Army,
the FBI and various law enforcement officials led the disinformation
campaign and, on April 4, 1968 a hired assassin other than the framed
James Earl Ray pulled the trigger that ended the life of another in a
long string of prophetic voices for peace and justice.
King was right about a lot of things, including his prophecy that
America was losing its soul. Violence of all sorts has remained a
virtual epidemic since his warning, especially the violence of
poverty, racism and militarism, the "triple evils" that he preached
about so often.
Gun violence, resulting in world record-breaking levels of homicide
and suicide in the US, no longer induces outrage from the average US
citizen. Those making obscene profits in the domestic weapons
industries have sabotaged even the most modest and logical handgun
and assault rifle controls -- all the while flooding America and the
rest of the world with increasingly lethal weapons. It may be too
late now to stop the coming carnage.
Both the affluent and the poor have succumbed to the addictions of
predatory capitalism -- an economic system whose bubble has burst,
despite the frantic efforts of Wall Street banksters that have both
the political and economic power to prop up the broken system with
somebody else's money so that it can return to its old failed, exploitive form.
Addictions to entertainment, gambling, shopping, drugs (both legal
and illegal), sports and religion have overwhelmed the lives of
uncounted millions of Americans who then have no time or energy left
to nurture their souls.
The 1980s, 1990s and 2000-2009 American Decades of Greed I, II and
III were spent trying to attain excess wealth at any cost. Greed
tends to blow out the spark of spirituality in addicted persons and
institutions, whether one wins or loses in the violent dog-eat-dog
competitions. And then there are the other billions of innocent
bystander-victims in the developing world who are also wounded from
the battles when their resources are cunningly stolen from them by the winners.
At the end of his Beyond Viet Nam speech, King concluded:
War is not the answer. We still have a choice today; nonviolent
coexistence or violent co-annihilation. We must move past indecision
to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace and justice
throughout the developing world -- a world that borders on our doors.
If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and
shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power
without compassion, might without morality and strength without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and
bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the
calling of the sons (and daughters) of God, and our brothers (and
sisters) wait eagerly for our response.
America, especially its majority Christian lay or clergy leaders
(whether fundamentalist, conservative, moderate or liberal) has
failed the vision of Martin Luther King. The patriotic American
Christian churches may also be on the brink of spiritual death. The
hundreds of billions of American tax dollars wasted annually for war,
war preparations and the massive, endless costs of the physical and
mental health care that has to be given to combat-traumatized
veterans is money that is then unavailable for programs of social
uplift, including hunger relief, poverty reduction, affordable
housing, education, health care or meaningful jobs.
America has been gradually sealing its doom with the unending string
of Pentagon-supporting White House administrations since 1963, when,
after already having ignored Eisenhower's warnings about the
military/industrial/congressional complex, the peacemaker US
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. With the subsequent
warmongering Johnson and Nixon administrations, America started
incurring the massive national debt to pay for past and future wars,
reaching a high point in the Reagan years. That debt reached a
crippling $7 trillion during Cheney/Bush war-mongering regime, and
that was before the economic crash of 2008 that ultimately added to
the debt to the tune of $12 trillion! This is an unsustainable debt
obligation and will make everything worth paying for unaffordable.
The wealthy Wall Street financiers and members of the investor class
always profit handsomely from war. But the federal borrowing to pay
for war (with interest to the upper classes), plus the inflation that
always follows wars will, some sad day, have to be paid back by we
the taxpaying public, our children and/or our grandchildren.
Is American spiritually dead yet? Many observers feel that its
spiritual corpse has already been hoisted up onto the idolatrous
altars of the Gods of Wealth and War.
The elite High Priests of the ruling class, which are the embodiment
of King's "triple evils" are shamelessly still eliminating, one by
one, the rights and ideals that America's Founding Fathers fashioned
over 200 years ago. The Constitution may have been irretrievably
shredded during the Decade of Greed III.
Are we "sheeple" aware that we are being sacrificed to the spirits of
ruthless, soulless capitalism, compassionless militarism, excess
luxury wealth, blind patriotism, a bought-and-paid for US Supreme
Court and the decidedly unChristlike Gods of War and Wealth?
It may not be too late for a resuscitation attempt on the spiritually
wounded hulk. But that will only succeed if the people awaken from
their slumber and stop being so distracted by the trivia that can so
easily fill up our every waking hour. A resuscitation could happen if
we start listening to the prophetic voices that are calling out the
warnings and ignore what the agents of hatred are saying.
Perhaps true democracy could be revived if organize in protest
against the tyrants, if we start refusing to purchase what the ad
agencies are persuading us to purchase and if we start rejecting the
corporate media's propaganda that is mainly serving their masters' wishes.
We need to shake off our addictions to dangerous substances and
behaviors. We need to rage against the machine, demand to get our
lost freedoms back and aggressively support the tiny handful of true
peace patriots that are still hanging on in our broken Congress,
(most of whom happen to be in the nearly invisible "democratic wing
of the Democratic Party").
And we need to stop the financial and moral hemorrhaging that is
happening in the various hot and cold wars that are taxpayer funded
in and around the 130 countries where America has unsustainable,
budget-busting military bases. (The Pentagon budget lately averages
$700 billion per year which amounts to $2 billion per day with no
visible return on investment, except to the oil industries and the
Wall Street financiers!)
If these efforts for peace don't happen soon, we're in for a taste of
economic chaos, hyperinflation, hunger, armed rebellion, street
fighting, civil wars, concentration camps and the police
state/fascist totalitarianism that doesn't seem to be feared by many
of the far right-wing anti-democrats in our midst.
Perhaps the wish of the ultraconservative Republican operative Grover
Norquist will be realized. He has infamously proclaimed: "I don't
want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size
where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." Be warned.
--
Dr. Kohls is a retired physician who writes about peace, justice,
militarism, mental health and religious issues.
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