April 12, 2017
Page 7
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O PINION
A Powerful Warning Still Relevant Today
Dr. King’s
antiwar speech
50 years later
M arian W right e delMan
Fifty years ago on April 4,
1967, our prophet Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. gave the histor-
ic speech “Beyond Vietnam: A
Time to Break Silence” at New
York City’s Riverside Church. It
was his first major public antiwar
speech and a powerful warning
that a rise in racial hatred, milita-
rism and violence could destroy
by
America.
In his essay “The Land Be-
yond,” originally published in
Sojourners magazine in 1983, Dr.
Vincent Harding, the brilliant his-
torian and theologian and close
King friend who helped draft the
speech, wrote that King’s message
not only required us to struggle
once more with the meaning of
his words, but it also presses us
to wrestle as he did, with all of
the tangled, bloody, and glori-
ous meaning of our nation (and
ourselves), its purposes (and our
own), its direction (and our own),
its hope (and our own).” His in-
structions for how we should re-
read the speech are even more
searing today.
Dr. King was speaking out
against the Vietnam War specif-
ically but also arguing that “the
war in Vietnam is but a symptom
of a far deeper malady within the
American spirit” and that it was
time for our nation to undergo “a
radical revolution of values.”
“When machines and comput-
ers, profit motives and property
rights, are considered more im-
portant than people, the giant trip-
lets of racism, extreme material-
ism, and militarism are incapable
of being conquered,” King said.
“A nation that continues year after
year to spend more money on mil-
itary defense than on programs of
social uplift is approaching spiri-
tual death.”
President Trump’s very first
budget blueprint, which proposes
an increase in defense spending
for 2018 of $54 billion (a 10 per-
cent increase) with $54 billion in
cuts to programs serving the poor
and vulnerable and addressing ba-
sic needs and other non-defense
discretionary spending to pay for
it, plainly shows Dr. King’s mes-
sage is not being heard or heeded.
Just as starkly and presciently,
Dr. King went on to say the revolu-
tion in our national values must re-
ject nationalism and hate: “A gen-
uine revolution of values means in
the final analysis that our loyalties
must become ecumenical rather
than sectional. Every nation must
now develop an overriding loyalty
to mankind as a whole in order to
preserve the best in their individual
societies. This call for a worldwide
fellowship that lifts neighborly
concern beyond one’s tribe, race,
class, and nation is in reality a call
C ontinued on P age 13
Racism, Militarism and Extreme Materialism
Is it too late to
heed MLK’s
warning?
by k evin M artin and the r ev .
d r . h erbert d aughtry
Fifty years ago this month, a
year to the day before he was mur-
dered, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. called us to overcome the
giant triplets plaguing our society
– racism, militarism and extreme
materialism – in his “Beyond
Vietnam: A Time to Break the Si-
lence” address at Riverside Church
in Manhattan. In his speech, Dr.
King decried our descent into a
‘thing-oriented society.’ One won-
ders what he would think of our
current, thing-oriented president.
In the remarkable speech,
co-written with the late Vincent
Harding, King also exclaimed, “a
nation that continues year after
year to spend more money on mil-
itary defense than on programs of
social uplift is approaching spiritu-
al death.”
Unfortunately that is even more
relevant today, as military spend-
ing consumes well over half the
federal discretionary budget, and
President Trump is advocating a
nearly 10 percent, $54 billion in-
crease, equivalent to the entire an-
nual military budget of Russia, for
the Pentagon, and severe cuts to
foreign aid, diplomacy, social and
environmental programs.
King also powerfully, and accu-
rately, linked violence in U.S. cities
to our foreign policy, especially the
terrible war in Vietnam (noting the
Vietnamese must see Americans as
‘strange liberators,’) and acknowl-
edged the pressure put on him by
civil rights leaders to keep silent
about his opposition to the war,
which he of course could not do.
Yet for many, the giant triplets ru-
bric still resonates most powerfully
today among all the words of wis-
dom King and Harding imparted in
the speech.
Racism, extreme materialism
and militarism are still inextricably
linked, and still prevent our soci-
ety’s becoming anything close to
King’s “beloved community.” Of
the three, militarism may be the
one about which Americans are
most ignorant or most in denial.
No serious person could say we
have overcome racism, or dealt
with the extreme materialism and
economic injustice and unsus-
tainability of our “thing-oriented
society.” However, the pervasive
equating of patriotism with support
for war, charges of being soft on
communism, terrorism or defense,
and cynical, coercive ‘support the
troops’ displays (when the best
way to support them would be to
stop our incessant wars) seemingly
prevent any serious examination of
U.S. militarism.
How many Americans know the
U.S. has been at war for all but a
relatively few years (fewer than
20) of our history since 1776? Or
that the U.S. has more than 900
foreign military bases? (China has
one and is about to build a second,
near ours in Djibouti.) Or that we
maintain nearly 7,000 nuclear war-
heads, all tens, hundreds or even
thousands of times more destruc-
tive than the Hiroshima bomb that
killed 140,000 people? Or that the
U.S. conducted more than 1,000
nuclear ‘test’ explosions, and un-
der President Obama, recently
embarked on a 30-year, at least
$1 trillion scheme to upgrade our
entire nuclear weapons arsenal
(unsurprisingly, every other nu-
clear state is now doing the same,
sparking a new arms race)? Or that
the U.S. military is the biggest con-
sumer of fossil fuels on the planet?
Ignorance or denial about these
facts is dangerous, to our society
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falling behind in nearly every indi-
cator of social and environmental
health as we continue to invest in
the war machine, and to the people
on the receiving end of our bombs.
How many countries are we
bombing right now? At least sev-
en we know of: Syria, Iraq, Libya,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and
Somalia. And as Dr. King claimed
the bombs we dropped on Viet-
nam also exploded in American
cities, the blowback to the U.S.
from all the anger we sow and en-
emies we reap in these countries
and around the world, will surely
harm our country.
So what is it about the United
States? Are we in the grip of what
President Eisenhower warned us,
the military-industrial complex
(that he did a lot to empower be-
fore decrying it)? Weapons con-
tractors make a killing, but they
don’t really help the economy.
Military spending is about the
worst way to create jobs and stim-
ulate the economy. Education is
the best, creating 2.5 times more
jobs than military spending, ac-
cording to economists at the Uni-
versity of Massachusetts.
We doubt anyone has any satis-
factory answers to why our coun-
try is so uniquely militaristic, yet
seemingly oblivious to the conse-
quences. Perhaps peace and social
justice activists and political lead-
ers have for too long failed to in-
tegrate the struggles to overcome
the giant triplets.
If that is the case, Martin Lu-
ther King Jr. still points the way
toward a solution, 50 years af-
ter he first called out to us. Is it
too late to hear his wisdom and
change course?
As the impressive grassroots re-
sistance to Trumpism continues to
show up for racial, economic, so-
cial and environmental justice, we
must also show up for peace and
disarmament if we hope to one day
realize King’s beloved community.
Kevin Martin, syndicated by
PeaceVoice, is President of Peace
Action, the country’s largest
grassroots peace and disarma-
ment organizations. The Rev. Dr.
Herbert Daughtry is the National
Presiding Minister of the House of
the Lord Churches.
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