I’ve been watching C-SPAN this morning, and the requisite MLK segment included Kevin Merida of WaPo and Deborah Simmons of the Moonie Times. (Later, they brought in E&P’s Mark Fitzgerald for the Obligatory White Guy Perspective.) I just love the way everybody in this country - of whatever race or ethnicity - thinks that s/he has a monopoly on King’s legacy and insider information on what King would have thought about X or Y. And it’s never more apalling than when it’s used to justify that which King’s very life held to be unjustifiable.
According to Simmons, King would not have protested the Iraq war. Why not? Well, she says, because he was first and foremost "an unelected politician" who was smart enough not to alienate pro-war forces. So, she’s asked, what about Vietnam? And in an astounding display of revisionist history, she announces that King did not really criticize the Vietnam War, because he was smart enough to know that he needed Jack and Bobby Kennedy.
To which, really, there is only one logical response. Yes, "Beyond Vietnam" was delivered late in the game. Yes, King clearly struggled with the conflicting demands of his Christianity and the political pragmatism necessary to achieve broader societal goals. But there’s a reason why he titled his speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" [emphasis mine]:
Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
Have you heard, or read, anything more resonant to our current situation? I haven’t. The mental midgets who pretend to lead us are constitutionally incapable of thinking in such concepts, much less translating it into the inspiring oratory for which King is so fondly remembered.
But perhaps the most telling line in the speech - the one most indicative of how King really would feel about our illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq - comes later. In discussing how the vietnamese people - "not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply [] the people who have been living under the curse of war" - he demonstrates an empathy, a compassion, that our current "leadership" will never understand, much less possess: "[I]t is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries."
Would that the war criminals currently occupying the White House made such an attempt.
King then walks his listeners through a blunt history lesson, describing, point for point, each of America’s actions in Indochina over the previous two decades. And one of the most heartbreaking passages is this:
After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators — our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem’s methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change — especially in terms of their need for land and peace.
The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy — and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us — not their fellow Vietnamese –the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go — primarily women and children and the aged.
They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them — mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.
Heartbreaking for the tragedy we inflicted upon the Vietnamese people, but heartbreaking, too, because oen could simply replace every reference to "Vietnam" with the word "Iraq," and the passage would stand on its own today. Have we learned nothing?
Apparently, we have not. And so, as Santayana said, we are "doomed to repeat" crimes and tragedies past. Although speaking of the people of Vietnam, King’s words apply no less to the Iraqi people today:
They must see Americans as strange liberators.
I weep for my country, and for Iraq, and for the obscene squandering of Dr. King’s compassionate and fragile legacy.
