Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968)
Martin Luther King was assasinated 40 years ago today.Most people know of Dr King's early battles against discrimination in the Southern states, but fewer are aware of how his thinking developed in the latter part of his life. By 1967, Dr King was tying his critique of racism in American society into a broader social critique that encompassed the role of Western economic and state power - then imposing itself as ruthlessly on Vietnam as it is today in Iraq.
This was crystallised in his awesome speech of April 1967, at the Riverside Church, Manhatten.
King said that the US was in Vietnam, not to liberate it, but "to occupy it as an American colony". He roundly condemned his government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today". The Vietnamese, he said, "must see Americans as strange liberators", describing the US record of denying Vietnamese independence, including support for "one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem [for Iraq, read former US-UK favorite Saddam Hussein]"
He continued:
"Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy....They watch as we poison their water...They wander into the hospitals, with at least 20 casualties from American firepower for each Viet Cong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children...How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem, and charge them with violence while we pour new weapons of death into their land?....Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases...We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers"
And then King went further, identifying the war as "but a symptom of a far deeper malady...[a] pattern of suppression". He warned that "We will be marching and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy...When machines and computers, profit and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered". Describing "the Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them", King warned that "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death".
Lets be under no illusions. King would have been sickened by the Iraq war, and would have seen through the nonsense of "liberal interventionism" in an instant. Members of the political class on both sides of the Atlantic will spend today, in their public utterances, trying to borrow a part of the great man's legacy for themselves. But how many among them would be able to give a speech like the one King gave at the Riverside Church?
Rest in peace.
Labels: Racism, US Imperialism
posted by David Wearing at 1:10 PM
3 Comments:
It's interesting to look at the media reaction to that speech - Time magazine, for example, denounced it as "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi", while the Washington Post decided that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."
It fucking nauseating to see the latest crop of warmongers attempt to appropriate King's legacy. As you say, if he were alive he'd have vehemently opposed them and they'd probably be condemning him as "anti-American".
By the end of his life King had realised that "reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced" - and certainly, as his son said today, many of the problems King struggled against remain very much an issue today:
"The 2006 US census showed black household median income was 61 per cent of white household income, unchanged for a decade. More than 24 per cent of black households lived below the poverty line.
The US has 2 million people behind bars, and half of them are black, even though blacks are only 13 per cent of the population. A 10th of all black men between the ages of 20 and 35 are in jail."
"One-third of Hispanics and one-fifth of blacks were uninsured in 2006, compared with just over ten percent of whites.
African Americans are 79 percent more likely than whites to live in neighborhoods where industrial pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health danger. In 19 states, African Americans are more than twice as likely as whites to live in neighborhoods where air pollution seems to pose the greatest health danger. A similar pattern holds true for Hispanics in 12 states and for Asians in seven states.
African Americans have the highest death rate and shortest survival of any racial and ethnic group in the U.S. for most cancers. The death rate for all cancers combined is 35 percent higher in African American men and 19 percent higher in African American women than in white men and women. Lung cancer accounts for the largest number of cancer death among both black men (31%) and black women (22%), followed by prostate cancer in men (13%) and breast cancer in women (19%). Breast cancer is a major killer of black women. Black women under the age of 50 are 77 percent more likely to die from the disease than white women of all ages. "
Thanks very much for those links, Jamie.
There's also been some good articles on this from Gary Younge and Michael Eric Dyson.
cheers. This was excellent:
"Forty years after King's death, the ability of America to both mythologise the man and marginalise his meaning is all too cruelly apparent. His symbolic likeness is effortlessly incorporated into America's self-image as the land of relentless progress. Meanwhile, his legacy of struggling against poverty and imperialism is undermined with every passing day. Had he lived he would most certainly have been loathed. In order for America to love him, he first had to die."
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