CommonDreams: MLK's Guide for Antiwar Activists

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Published on Monday, January 15, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
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.” ....(more)

The rest of the article is at: http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0115-27.htm

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