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I have to admit that, as I read the nightmarish front-page stories daily and yes, I'm old enough to still read the New York Times in print every morning and absorb the latest news about Vladimir Putin's egregious war in Ukraine, I can't help thinking: how strange that our own nightmarish wars, involving the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries nowhere near our borders, and a set of other conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa, never got this kind of attention. It mattered not at all that, according to the Costs of War Project, they would result in close to a million dead (hundreds of thousands of them civilians) and at least another 38 million of us (or, being American, perhaps I should say them) displaced from their homes. Our wars never got covered like this, front-page-style, day after day, week after week, and by now, sadly enough, we can nearly say month after month, often to the near-exclusion of anything else, including the ongoing destruction of this planet. Today, unbearably little of what once was known as America's "Global War on Terror" is remembered, no less memorialized. In fact, I can't remember anything quite like the coverage of the ongoing Ukraine horror since at least the days right after 9/11.
That, I suppose, is the difference between wars started by the good guys on Planet Earth (us, naturally) and those started by the bad guys (the Vlad and crew). And Vladimir Putin is indeed a brutal autocrat, not to speak of a genuinely unnerving and disturbing human being.
It's sad indeed that, in these years, as TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author most recently of After the Apocalypse: America's Role in a World Transformed, reminds us today, we've not had someone like Martin Luther King to speak out against the devastation we (and yes, in this case, I do mean we Americans) have been causing on this planet in this century. I have no doubt that, if he had been alive, King would indeed have spoken out strongly against our wars, as well as the present Russian horror in Ukraine. With that in mind, consider for a moment the world that he might have wished for us, instead of the one we have. Tom
Putin Changed the Subject
But Confronting Martin Luther King's "Giant Triplets" Is More Urgent Than Ever
I recently participated in a commemoration of Martin Luther King's address "Beyond Vietnam A Time to Break Silence," originally delivered on April 2, 1967, at New York City's Riverside Church. King used the occasion to announce his opposition to the ongoing war in Vietnam. Although a long time coming in the eyes of some in the antiwar movement, his decision was one for which he was roundly criticized, even by supporters of the Civil Rights Movement. He was straying out of his prescribed lane, they charged, and needed to get back where he belonged.
This year's 55th anniversary event, also held in Riverside Church's magnificent sanctuary, featured inspiring Christian music and a thoughtful discussion of King's remarks. Most powerful of all, however, was a public reading of the address itself. "Beyond Vietnam" contains many famously moving passages. King, for example, cited "the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools" and would not allow them to live "on the same block in Chicago." And he reflected on the incongruity of young Black men being sent "eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem."
For me, at least, what that commemorative moment brought into sharp focus was his lacerating critique of American freedom. And there, to my mind, lies its lasting value.
Between theory and practice between the aspirations expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, on the one hand, and the pervasive presence of what King labeled the "giant triplets" of racism, materialism, and militarism on the other there still looms, even in our own day, a massive gap. His address eloquently reflected on that gap, which, with the passage of time, has not appreciably narrowed.
King was neither the first nor the last observer to note the debased and shoddy nature of American-style freedom as actually practiced. Nor was he unique in pointing out the hypocrisy pervading our politics. Yet because of the moral heights to which he had ascended, his critique had a particular bite.
In 2022, we have arrived at a moment, however belatedly and reluctantly, when most (though by no means all) Americans at least acknowledge that racism forms an ugly thread that runs through our nation's history, mocking our professed devotion to liberty and equality for all. Of course, acknowledgment alone hardly entails remedy. At best, it makes remedies plausible. At worst, it offers an excuse for inaction, as if merely confessing to sin suffices to expunge it.
The attention given to racism of late has had exactly that unintended effect relieving Americans of any obligation even to acknowledge the insidious implications of materialism and militarism. In that sense, even now, two of King's giant triplets barely qualify for lip-service. In the political sphere, they are either ignored or, at best, treated as afterthoughts.
Presidents typically have lots to say about lots of things and Joe Biden has very much adhered to that tradition. Rarely indeed Jimmy Carter being the only exception I can think of do they train their sights on the impact of materialism and militarism on American life. On those two subjects the otherwise garrulous Biden has been silent.
Speaking in a prophetic register in his address, King had described the Vietnam War as "but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit." And although that war ended half a century ago, the deeper malady still persists. It can be seen in the widespread inequality and crippling poverty that pervade what is still the world's richest nation, as well as in our country's continuing appetite for war, whether waged directly or through proxies. Above all, we see it in a stubborn refusal to recognize the kinship of lingering racism, ubiquitous materialism, and corrosive militarism, each drawing on and sustaining the others.
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