Betraying Dr. King's Words by Omission

Yesterday’s Washington Post led with an editorial entitled, “Martin Luther King Jr.: His words are more relevant than ever this election year.” If only it were true. The Post editorial is a sad example of how powerful institutions like the Post cooperate through omission to bury Dr. King’s challenges to the more fundamental structural problems of poverty and militarism, problems which Dr. King argued were intimately linked and ultimately inseparable from racism.

The editorial diminishes King’s legacy by focusing exclusively on racism, citing a passage from King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech.

Instead of 1963, let’s go to Riverside Church in New York, April 4, 1967, at a conference of Clergy and Laity Concerned, where King spoke out against “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”

Could it be that the Post’s editorial board were a bit uncomfortable with King’s characterization of the United States government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today…”? Or perhaps the Post thought it rude to remind its readers that Dr. King also said, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

If they read the very edition of their own paper in which their editorial appears, the Post’s editorial writers might have thought a little bit about militarism, even if they couldn’t remember that estimates of the cost of the Iraq War already exceed $2 trillion dollars and counting.

The Post’s editorial writers might, for example, have read the story by Walter Pincus that ran on page 13 of yesterday’s paper, with their King editorial on the other side. Pincus wrote about a new Congressional Research Service report (that I know you have all read about already, given the wonderful coverage that this kind of important report always engenders) entitled “The Gulf Security Dialogue and Related Arms Sale Proposals.” (RL34322, January 14, 2008).

This report describes proposed U.S. contributions to the arms race in the Gulf region, subject to approval by Congress. Bush has proposed a $20 billion arms package, including:

--for Saudi Arabia, 900 Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) kits to turn gravity bombs into “smart” weapons that can land within 4 feet of a target when launched from a place 10 miles away; along with 550 500-pound bombs, 250 2,000-pound bombs and another 100 2,000-pounders with penetrating warheads [and] “$631 million in armored vehicles, personnel carriers, towed mortars and machine guns, as well as five sets of airborne early-warning and command and control systems worth $400 million. They would also buy for $220 million 40 Sniper advanced targeting pods, which would upgrade the ability of their F-15s to detect other aircraft at long range.”

--for the seven city-state federation of the United Arab Emirates, Bush is proposing 200 JDAM systems, along with 224 2,000-pound hard-target bombs and 488 500-pounders, plus “…900 Hellfire missiles and 300 blast-fragmentation warheads for use with its U.S. attack helicopters and 2,106 anti-tank TOW missiles that also can be fired from helicopters…” The UAE package also includes “…a $9 billion advanced Patriot 3 missile defense system with nine fire units, 10 phased-array radar sets and 500 missiles.”

--for Kuwait, “… a $328 million package of more than 3,500 TOW missiles…and 80 PAC-3 missiles, kits to upgrade earlier missiles and radars associated with the Patriot anti-missile defense system -- together worth $1.4 billion.

And for those worried about upsetting the military balance between Israel and the other Middle East state, Israel gets 10,000 JDAM kits (in addition to the $30 billion for arms purchases which the U.S. gave Israel last summer).

If the Post were edited by people who truly cared about Dr. King’s entire message, they might have offered us some thoughts on the relevance to today’s world of Dr. King’s words at the Riverside Church speech.

Here are a few excerpts from Dr. King’s 1967 speech. Through the wonders of the Internet, you can not only read the whole speech, you can listen too, and hear Dr. King’s tragic, somber delivery of a speech so infused with pain that it is hard to listen to, a tone that stands in sharp contrast to the cadences of the 1963 speech.

I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. 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.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing.

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality...and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing "clergy and laymen concerned" committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be become an absolute necessity for the survival of man.

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam 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.[emphasis added]