MLK, Poverty, and War

 

Another Martin Luther King Day has gone by with no mention in any of our corporate outlets -- including NPR and PBS – of the speech in which King pointed out that his own country was the world’s greatest purveyor of violence. Specifically, he observed this:  

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government.

That speech was titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” It was delivered in April of 1967 at the Riverside Church in New York City. Many believe it to be the speech that got King killed almost exactly a year later.

The response in the New York Times was typical and telling. The Times is, after all, an enormous business corporation and thus a key part of the U.S. based empire. The Times advised King, in so many words, to stay in his own lane, or to use an old racist expression, to know his place. The two problems King tried to link – poverty and war – were “distinct and separate,” the Times pronounced. And further:

the political strategy of uniting the peace movement and the civil rights movement could very well be disastrous for both causes.

Fast-forward nearly sixty years, and little has changed.

In the past year alone, U.S.-made bombs have exploded over Venezuela, Syrai, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, Palestine, and Somalia. We are the major arms supplier to three of the most brutal suppressors of human rights in the world: Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel.

Meanwhile, in the words of researchers at the Urban Institute, “Wealth inequality is higher in the United States than in almost any other developed country and has risen for much of the past 60 years.”

And corporate media continue to shamelessly ignore the obvious connection between war and poverty.

It’s a common mistake among empires past to ignore the welfare of their own citizens in order to maintain power in faraway places. Or, as Christopher Hedges recently observed: “All empires, when they are dying, worship the idol of war.”  

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