Iraq & Vietnam War Stories

Last year seemed particularly significant because of the convergence of MLK Day with the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, a refreshing bit of history that will be forever linked to some of King’s contributions to our culture.

Unfortunately, President Obama has cast a cloud over Martin Luther King Jr. Day, regarding the most vital gifts from our 20th-century hero.

Sadly paraphrased: Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Barack could run. Barack backpedaled to have his war and a Nobel, too.

In an Oslo auditorium, graced 45 years earlier by Martin Luther King Jr., President Obama last month trivialized King’s choice to follow Jesus and Gandhi, suffer instead of inflict suffering, convert instead of crush. King was presented the Nobel Prize for Peace for steadfastly practicing nonviolence as he led the civil rights movement through violent threats and actual violence against African Americans, liberal activists, his family and his life. Obama was selected for the same distinction for talking the talk and igniting hope that the U.S. could lead the way to peace and reconciliation.

Obama gave an eloquent speech in Oslo, but he appeased our corporate masters, who crave distant wars, never risking their own lives and fortunes as the poor are routinely sacrificed for power and energy supremacy.

Obama undermined the honor, justifying his own quagmire, the vacuous war in Afghanistan, inherited from President George W. Bush. Avoiding the truth that we have much to lose and nothing to gain circulating war-weary troops from bleak objective to senseless atrocity, Obama smeared the success of King’s victory, which proved nonviolent action is the moral, rational and pragmatic answer to oppression and conflict. Obama dismissed the proposition that war is evil, futile and disastrous, denying that nonviolence, as taught and waged by King and Gandhi, has not failed when relentlessly and patiently practiced.

Saying Hitler could not have been stopped by nonviolent resistance, Obama slighted Norway, whose people did exactly that, sparing their country Nazi domination and the devastation suffered by countries with powerful armies.

Jimmy Carter, a former commander-in-chief, said, when he received the Peace Prize in 2002, “War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.”

Of course, Dr. King’s Nobel lecture is filled with memorable lines. It’s incomprehensible to me that Obama could ignore or contradict so many great quotes in his own speech, although we’re accustomed to lip service to King’s memory from apologists for war.

A few lines from King’s 1964 Nobel lecture, almost three years before he powerfully and specifically condemned the Vietnam War:

“This problem of spiritual and moral lag … expresses itself in three larger problems which grow out of man’s ethical infantilism. Each of these problems, while appearing to be separate and isolated, is inextricably bound to the other. I refer to racial injustice, poverty, and war.

“… (W)ar is obsolete. There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminated even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good. If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war.”

It’s easy to name a piece of street for Dr. King. It’s difficult to see his war criticism as anything less than prophetic.

The challenge on MLK Day 2010 is to accept the fact that we have dodged the part of his example intended for us, comfortable Americans who made war and violence our default choices. To honor Dr. King, we have to change, and we have to take President Obama with us.

© 2010 The Spokesman-Review
Rusty Nelson, who was a U.S. Army lieutenant in South Vietnam when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, spent 22 years helping staff the Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane.

I was so cranky I spewed the following; (forgive errors, it’s a rant, after all… and it doesn’t say “genius” anywhere on my resume’):

“All of us that are “of an age” can tell you what the “Legacy” of Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is. But what is more illustrative of changes in America, are the lessons that MLK taught the establishment, corporate oligarchy and Military Industrial Complex.

War resistance and the impact of civil disobedience have been marginalized. The back door draft, “volunteer army” was created by ever increasing economic injustice… fewer jobs, more volunteers. They were able to discontinue conscription. This diminished organized resistance. More and more our military adventures became covert, even extra-governmental. Sometimes political partisans and corporate interests have used our Defense Establishment, secretly for their own personal gains. Side by side with this process, the media has been taken over by energy transnationals and war profiteers. With increasing concentration of ownership and obvious conflict of interest, the freedom of the press has been grievously curtailed. This process began in the 70s’ Congressional Oversight efforts, and became most blatant with Iran Contra. There are media blackouts of whole regions of the world… Latin America, proxy wars in Africa, the true story of post-colonial imperialism, neoliberalism and the Israeli Palestinian Conflict, to name a few. How many Americans really know what horrors took place in our name, in the Balkans, in Africa, or Latin America?

Yes, they learned their lessons well. We get months of Tea Parties but you people cheering led the Iraq Invasion and minimized the work of professional journalists, by not reporting it, and under-reporting, what was the largest global protest in history. It was barely a blip on your corporate screens. You led America to believe that the majority of us were FOR this debacle of neo-con, military adventurism. You are their personal, social engineers.

The combination of media constriction and covert foreign policy created this modern state of amnesia and delusion, which can only result in the destruction of America. The world hangs by a thread.

You are not forgiven. YOU, are them. MLKs legacy is the continuing struggle for social and economic justice, for peace and the restoration of representative government in America… the end of corruption.

You want us to think about race alone. Racial equality is important, but you fake journalists defile his legacy with your selective memory. You pollute the minds of our youth, when you falsely re-write history, to exclude the full breadth of this great American’s life.

Rest in Peace, Martin. Some of us will always remember, and always fight for peace and justice.”