Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day - here are some lessons for today from MLK

MLK’S Guide for Antiwar Activists -- by Ira Chernus

This year on Martin Luther King Day everyone will be reading -- or should be reading -- Dr. King’s famous denunciation of the Vietnam war: “A Time To Break Silence.” For those of us working to end the war in Iraq, it holds a valuable lesson: Once we’ve expressed our moral outrage, we’ve only just begun the real work.

Dr. King expressed outrage more eloquently than anyone. But he knew that, if we really want to bring peace, we need to talk to people who aren’t outraged -- people who think in terms of American self-interest -- and convince them on their own terms that we’ll be better off bringing our troops home.

So parts of his sermon sound more like an academic lecture by a political scientist. He had done his homework. He understood the fundamental structures of political life in Vietnam, past and present. He offered a tightly argued analysis, explaining why the facts on the ground pointed toward U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam as the only logical conclusion.

More importantly, King had mastered the fundamental structures of political, economic, and social life here at home. He could explain why a hard-headed analysis of America’s self-interest led inevitably to an antiwar position. But to make his case he had to explain that the war itself was not ultimately the problem. The war was not an isolated evil. It was a symptom of a whole network of ills that were embedded in American life and poisoning America’s soul.

For example, King acknowledged that violence in the streets of our cities, especially the poorer neighborhoods, was a serious problem troubling middle-class America. But a society can’t ask its poor people at home to desist from violence while it pays billions for massive state-sponsored violence abroad. “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos,” King explained, “without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government.”

Why does the government purvey so much violence? Here King showed that he was becoming an economist as well as a political scientist: “We are on the side of the wealthy and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.” And he was quick to link the divide of rich against poor in Vietnam with the same divide here at home: “America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.”

Of course he also saw that “the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population.” His concern was not just for African-Americans or people of color. He linked the racial divide directly to the class divide.

By the time he publicly denounced the Vietnam war, King was rapidly learning to connect the dots that connected racism to classism and militarism in American life. He was coming to see the exploitation of blacks in the U.S. as the paradigm for the exploitation of all poor Americans. And his preaching on behalf of the poor had a hard-headed practical edge: “We must make the nonproducer a consumer or we will find ourselves drowning in a sea of consumer goods.”

Why are so many people kept in poverty, even though it threatens to bring down the whole economy? King’s most basic answer was the nature of capitalism: “The profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system, encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspire men to be more I-centered than thou-centered…Capitalism fails to realize that life is social.” He saw that private property, nearly all of which was owned by whites, supported and embodied the white power structure.

He also saw the same greed embodied in the global power structure, dominated by U.S. corporate interests. Poverty here was directly related to the increase in U.S. capital investments abroad, he explained. That created more poverty and oppression in other nations. To sustain those oppressive structures, the U.S. had to build up its military and be prepared to fight wars. Thus racism, poverty, materialism, militarism were all interwoven and “deeply rooted in the whole structure of our society.”

It was this whole structure, he said, that led inexorably to the tragedy of Vietnam. So he denounced the war because it was not an aberration from noble U.S. values. It was a logical and predictable outcome of self-destructive U.S. values. It was a symptom of the deeper intertwined evils of racism, classism, capitalism, imperialism, militarism, and an obsession with technology that made things more important than people.

A society built on such a dehumanizing basis will naturally dehumanize and exploit other persons, King argued. Property is the most basic symbol of exploitation. This, he said, was the meaning of the riots that began breaking out in northern black ghettos in 1964. The seemingly blind destruction of property was, above all, a protest against the institutionalized exploitation built into U.S. society -- the same exploitation that led inexorably to wars abroad. When a society makes machines and property more important than people, King explained, it cannot stop “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism.”

Once he saw all of the nation’s ills as interconnected symptoms of a single underlying disease, he recognized that ending a particular war was only the beginning of a much broader and deeper change. “We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values,” he proclaimed. “We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ to a ‘person-oriented’ society.” And that would serve the best interests of all Americans.

If that shift has begun at all, it certainly is not rapid. In 2007 we still face all the same interwoven ills that King saw forty years ago. We would face them even if the Supreme Court had done the right thing in 2000 and sent George W. Bush back to Texas. As it is, we have all the old problems now compounded by a neoconservative leadership that equates military power with moral virtue. It’s all about showing the terrorists that we have the “stomach” for war, Dick Cheney says. If only we had the eloquence of a Martin Luther King, Jr., today to denounce this terrible perversion of morality.

For those of us who oppose the war in Iraq, King’s great sermon teaches us that it’s not enough to speak out against one war, as if it were an isolated problem. We can and should use this war as a bright light to illuminate all the dark corners of the American system.

For the first time since the Vietnam war, a majority of the country recognizes that the government has done a terrible wrong. That means people may be willing to listen to questions they’ve never taken seriously before: Why has the government made such a mistake for the second time in forty years? Can it be just an accident? Or does it tell us something about the way the American political and economic system works?

Once people begin to ask those questions, it opens up a rare opportunity to get them thinking about the fundamental structures of the system that lead to war. That’s what Dr. King wanted people to think about, talk about, and be outraged about in 1967. That’s the guidance his words still offer us today.

(Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea and Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin .chernus@colorado.edu)