Voices from our past

April 5th, 2007

Here are the words of a couple of my hero’s … they’re passed, now, both from assassin’s bullets.

We don’t seem to have hero’s around, these days — Bush and Guiliani were a 21st century version, but that didn’t last long; their feet were clay and the rains came pretty quickly to dissolve that into mud. Maybe that’s good, with no “rescue” in sight, we’ll have to rescue ourselves and that’s hard, gritty and difficult work; no hero stuff involved.

Maybe we have to wise up about what a hero is — both Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had messy lives, had affairs on the side, had a cumbersome collection of supporters to manage. They came to us during a time when we did not try to climb into bed with our candidates and our leaders, when we didn’t want to examine their books or their private lives; we just listened to them and responded to the humanity in their voices.

These words might have been written for today, and that’s the real horror of our times — that forty years ago these voices were silenced and we did not finish their work. History is still waiting … and if we’re going to restore this nation, their words must continue to drive us forward.

Jude

Robert F. Kennedy
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., HuffPo
04.04.2007

In 1968, my father, running for President, addressed in a speech, the White House’s proposal for a troop surge in Vietnam. Robert Kennedy had initially supported the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Forty years later, as Congress and the White House debate the further escalation of yet another war that has already claimed the lives of an astounding 640,000 Iraqis, killed 3,256 U.S. soldiers and wounded another 50,000, his words should have special resonance to those of our political leaders who are still searching for the right course in Iraq:

“I do not want–as I believe most Americans do not want–to sell out American interests, to simply withdraw, to raise the white flag of surrender. That would be unacceptable to us as a country and as a people. But I am concerned–as I believe most Americans are concerned–that the course we are following at the present time is deeply wrong. I am concerned–as I believe most Americans are concerned–that we are acting as if no other nations existed, against the judgment and desires of neutrals and our historic allies alike. I am concerned–as I believe most Americans are concerned–that our present course will not bring victory; will not bring peace; will not stop the bloodshed; and will not advance the interests of the United States or the cause of peace in the world. I am concerned that, at the end of it all, there will only be more Americans killed; more of our treasure spilled out; and because of the bitterness and hatred on every side of this war, more hundreds of thousands of [civilians] slaughtered; so they may say, as Tacitus said of Rome: “They made a desert, and called it peace.” …

“The reversals of the last several months have led our military to ask for more troops. This weekend, it was announced that some of them–a “moderate” increase, it was said–would soon be sent. But isn’t this exactly what we have always done in the past? If we examine the history of this conflict, we find the dismal story repeated time after time. Every time–at every crisis–we have denied that anything was wrong; sent more troops; and issued more confident communiques. Every time, we have been assured that this one last step would bring victory. And every time, the predictions and promises have failed and been forgotten, and the demand has been made again for just one more step up the ladder. But all the escalations, all the last steps, have brought us no closer to success than we were before. . . . And once again the President tells us, as we have been told for twenty years, that “we are going to win”; “victory” is coming….It becoming more evident with every passing day that the victories we achieve will only come at the cost of the destruction for the nation we once hoped to help….

“Let us have no misunderstanding. [They] are a brutal enemy indeed. Time and time again, they have shown their willingness to sacrifice innocent civilians, to engage in torture and murder and despicable terror to achieve their ends. This is a war almost without rules or quarter. There can be no easy moral answer to this war, no one-sided condemnation of American actions. What we must ask ourselves is whether we have a right to bring so much destruction to another land, without clear and convincing evidence that this is what its people want. But that is precisely the evidence we do not have….

“The war, far from being the last critical test for the United States, is in fact weakening our position in Asia and around the world, and eroding the structure of international cooperation which has directly supported our security for the past three decades….All this bears directly and heavily on the question of whether more troops should now be sent–and, if more are sent, what their mission will be. We are entitled to ask–we are required to ask–how many more men, how many more lives, how much more destruction will be asked, to provide the military victory that is always just around the corner, to pour into this bottomless pit of our dreams? But this question the administration does not and cannot answer. It has no answer–none but the ever-expanding use of military force and the lives of our brave soldiers, in a conflict where military force has failed to solve anything yet….

“But the costs of the war’s present course far outweigh anything we can reasonably hope to gain by it, for ourselves or for the people of Vietnam. It must be ended, and it can be ended, in a peace of brave men who have fought each other with a terrible fury, each believing he and he alone was in the right. We have prayed to different gods, and the prayers of neither have been answered fully. Now, while there is still time for some of them to be partly answered, now is the time to stop….

“You are the people, as President Kennedy said, who have “the least ties to the present and the greatest ties to the future.” I urge you to learn the harsh facts that lurk behind the mask of official illusion with which we have concealed our true circumstances, even from ourselves. Our country is in danger: not just from foreign enemies; but above all, from our misguided policies–and what they can do to the nation that Thomas Jefferson once told us was the last, best hope of man. There is a contest on, not for the rule of America, but for the heart of America….I ask you to go forth and work for new policies–work to change our direction–and thus restore our place at the point of moral leadership, in our country, in our hearts, and all around the world.”

King’s Prophetic Call for Peace
Eric Stoner, TomPaine
April 05, 2007

Forty years ago this week, on April 4, 1967, and a year to the day before his tragic assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rose to the pulpit of New York’s Riverside Church to deliver one of the most controversial speeches of his life.

Entitled ” Beyond Vietnam,” the address was King’s first public antiwar speech, and he gave it only after much trepidation and prayer. Believing that silence in the face of injustice is in fact complicity with evil, King wrote in his autobiography that, “The time had come—indeed it was past due—when I had to disavow and dissociate myself from those who in the name of peace burn, maim and kill.”

As anticipated, King was roundly criticized at the time for straying from civil rights, not only by the mainstream media, but also by allies such as the NAACP. “It was a low period in my life,” he wrote. “I could hardly open a newspaper.”

Now, however, history has vindicated the truths that King so bravely spoke that day, and his testimony is rightfully seen as a prophetic masterpiece.

While still mesmerizing, listening to the speech today can also be somewhat disconcerting. It painfully reveals how little has changed and how politicians, both then and now, use the same rhetorical devices to scare the public into supporting misguided policies. By simply swapping the word ” Iraq” for “Vietnam,” and “terrorism” for “communism” King’s speech could be given today, with little need for editing.

Before describing in some depth how the U.S. betrayed the Vietnamese, first by supporting “the French in their abortive effort to re-colonize Vietnam,” then by propping up the “vicious” dictator Diem and finally by nearly wiping the country off the map through its extensive bombing and use of napalm, King said: “They must see Americans as strange liberators.”

In Iraq parallels abound. The U.S. supported Saddam Hussein as he massacred his own people during the 1980s, obliterated Iraq during the first Gulf War, imposed oppressive, deadly sanctions for nearly 13 years and finally invaded and occupied the emaciated country in 2003. In place of napalm, the U.S. military has now switched to another, more effective chemical to burn Iraqis—white phosphorus. And in our noble effort to bring democracy, we’ve also generously littered the country with cluster bombs and thousands of tons of poisonous depleted uranium, which will cause dramatically increased rates of cancer and birth defects for generations. Strange liberators, indeed.

Speaking of the soldiers, King said:

We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

One can only imagine the cognitive dissonance of our soldiers today, knowing that every reason that they were originally given to kill and be killed has been thoroughly debunked, even by the mainstream press. Moreover, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority’s blatant effort to privatize nearly everything in Iraq, and our current advocacy for Iraq’s new oil law—which if passed by the Iraqi Parliament will be highly advantageous to foreign, meaning American, oil companies—can leave little doubt whose side we’re currently on.

Speaking on the bogeyman of his time, King declared: “War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons.” The greatest defense against communism, he argued,

is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

The same can undoubtedly be said for terrorism, which cannot and will not ever be defeated by violence or war. Apart from the fact that terrorism is a tactic used in asymmetric warfare, not a tangible enemy, even the U.S. intelligence community has concluded that our wars have only exacerbated the threat of another attack and fanned the flames of international extremism.

King is perhaps most relevant today, however, when he takes that extra step in his analysis to address the roots of the conflict. “The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit,” King poignantly noted, brought on by what he called, “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism” that plague our society.

Hesitantly calling his own government, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” King issued a piercing warning that reaches us across the decades loud and clear: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

As the bloated Pentagon budget swells further—this year to over $600 billion—America becomes more of a one-trick pony, known the world over not for its kindness and generosity, but rather its brutality and dangerous quick trigger.

While that spiritual death seems closer now than ever, I think that King would still hold out hope that we could see the light before its too late and live up to ourselves. But to do so, we must snap out of our culturally-induced coma and lead that “revolution of values” that King called for and that we remain so desperately in need of. ++

The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV
Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, CommonDreams
4/4/07

It’s become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King’s death, we get perfunctory network news reports about “the slain civil rights leader.”

The remarkable thing about these reviews of King’s life is that several years – his last years – are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn’t take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they’re not shown today on TV.

Why?

It’s because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation’s fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without “human rights” – including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for “radical changes in the structure of our society” to redistribute wealth and power.

“True compassion,” King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

By 1967, King had also become the country’s most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 – a year to the day before he was murdered – King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” (Full text/audio here)

From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” King questioned “our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America,” and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Third World, instead of supporting them.

In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.”

You haven’t heard the “Beyond Vietnam” speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 – and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post patronized that “King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”

In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People’s Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor” that would descend on Washington – engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be – until Congress enacted a poor people’s bill of rights. Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection.”

King’s economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America’s cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its “hostility to the poor” – appropriating “military funds with alacrity and generosity,” but providing “poverty funds with miserliness.”

How familiar that sounds today, nearly 40 years after King’s efforts on behalf of the poor people’s mobilization were cut short by an assassin’s bullet.

In 2007, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and most in Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. They fund foreign wars with “alacrity and generosity,” while being miserly in dispensing funds for education and healthcare and environmental cleanup.

And those priorities are largely unquestioned by mainstream media. No surprise that they tell us so little about the last years of Martin Luther King’s life. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves