War Is Peace

Today was Martin Luther King Jr. day, and at least here in Bloomington, King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech of April 4, 1967 got its fair share of attention. The community radio station broadcast the entire speech on Alternative Radio this morning, and Bring It On, the African-American affairs program, referred to it. I've often quoted the part where King referred to the United States as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," but I hadn't listened to or read the entire speech before, and I'm glad I finally did.

King presented an accurate account of US involvement in Vietnam, which I suspect would still be news to most Americans. For example:

After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States' influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

But, as he said, King was just as concerned with American troops as with the Vietnamese:

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

He also addressed this earlier in the speech, in words that are still painfully relevant today.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me 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. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and 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. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

I don't know what King would say about our current President and our present wars if he were alive today. Some people online were sure he would be excoriating President Obama; I'm not so sure of that. King privately hated President Kennedy, and he wasn't terribly fond of President Johnson either; but publicly he was diplomatic. I don't know what he'd think of Obama, or what balance he'd find between satisfaction at the US electing a black President on the one hand, and disapproval of Obama's doing exactly what King had spoken against in 1967. (I admit, I'm sure that he would disapprove.)

What I do know is Obama's contempt for King. (Compare his praise of Ronald Reagan.) In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, he said:

As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naïve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their [King and Gandhi’s] examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.

And you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Funny thing, though: I don't see King condemning defensive violence in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech, though he didn't exactly endorse it either. He recognized that the US was the aggressor, and that the Vietnamese were defending themselves against it. He hoped for a negotiated settlement, but he recognized that the Vietnamese had good reason to distrust the US, and that the US was the principal obstacle to peace in Vietnam.

The real trouble with Obama's remarks here is that his wars are not defending the US: they are wars of aggression. Nor do they protect us: they make the world less safe, giving people some very good reasons to want to attack us. His succeeding account of post-WWII American foreign policy is equally dishonest, though this line is entertaining: "To begin with, I believe that all nations -- strong and weak alike -- must adhere to standards that govern the use of force." Except for the United States, of course. If our wars were really "self-defense," I'd expect King to regard them as compassionately as he regarded the resistance of the Vietnamese.

In his Nobel speech Obama continued:

For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

There's more in the speech along the same lines. (Whatever It Is I'm Against It dissected it mercilessly.) So: could a non-violent movement halt American violence around the world? I don't know; nonviolent resistance in Iraq did pressure Bush into permitting elections there, but American forces are still there, though they've mostly been replaced with mercenaries. Obama's lack of awareness that his justification for military violence also justifies defensive violence against his regime is a sign of how out of touch with reality he had already become within a year in office, and he hasn't gotten any better since then.

Roy Edroso has a post at alicublog about rightbloggers who observe MLK Day (a day on ... not a day off!) by trying to prove that King was really a conservative and therefore The Blacks should vote Republican. Judging from his examples, their heart really isn't in it anymore. A commenter, Mr. Wonderful, observed that there's "something so sad and desperate about their endless efforts to 'prove' that X--a show, a star, a song, a movie, a new entree at Outback, a floor wax, a new chewing gum-- 'is really conservative.'" True dat, but is it any sadder than liberals' conviction that King was a liberal, or that Barack Obama is a progressive?

The Shamelessness of the Powerful

From Lenin's Tomb:

We understand the sheepishness about speaking of violence in social movements. It is not a comforting or politically sympathetic thought that popular violence has been productive; that without it, unjust systems would not have been overturned. Yet, aside from the fact that the automatic assumption against violence is actually an assumption against popular violence, the intriguing thing is how easily it shades into an assumption against disruption as such. For example, following a recent direct action at UC Berkeley, the Chancellor complained: "It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience." In fact, linking arms and obstructing police is precisely an example of non-violent civil disobedience. If there was a textbook, this would be in it. The elite arbiters of protest ethics, who are always assuring us of our right to peaceful protest, conveniently forget what "civil disobedience" actually is. At the same time, what is often truly regrettable about what is called violence (usually small scale property damage) is its tactical implications. Sure, there is a moral case against anticapitalist protesters spraypainting graffiti or breaking windows. One could certainly apply similar standards retrospectively to striking miners and steelworkers who made US history in frequently violent struggles that went well beyond property damage. However, as someone once said, every morality presupposes a sociology, and in this case the moral argument implies the point of view of the ruling class. The point of the exercise of disruptive power is not to empathise with the ruling class, but to gain leverage over the ruling class.

Another point that confirms Richard Seymour's analysis here is the way that the corporate media and those who quote them always speak of police violence as if it were the protesters' doing: "protesters clashed with police" is a soundbyte that could be applied (and probably has been) to the pepper-spraying of the students at UC Davis: what it means is that protesters' heads "clashed" with police batons, or protesters' faces "clashed" with police pepper spray.

For more doublespeak, see UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi's response to calls for her resignation. Glenn Greenwald wrote today that Katehi

went on Good Morning America and explained why she should not resign or otherwise be held accountable: “we really need to start the healing process and move forward.” On a radio program in the afternoon, she expanded on this view by saying: “We need to move on.” So apparently — yet again — the only way everyone can begin to “heal” and “move forward” is if everyone agrees that those in power with the greatest responsibility be fully shielded from any consequences and that their bad acts be simply forgotten. I wonder where she learned that justifying rationale?

As an added bonus, Greenwald also quoted Dick Cheney's endorsement of Obama's foreign policy, with this "gracious" expression of Cheney's "gratitude for being fully shielded for his crimes."

I was very upset when we had talk by the Justice Department about prosecuting the intelligence professionals who’d carried out our policies in the enhanced-interrogation area. They’ve backed off that since. That’s good.

Extremists to the Left of Me, Moderates to the Right of Me!

I'm in the final fifty pages of Manning Marable's biography of Malcolm X, and I've been troubled by some of its political and social judgments. In fairness, though, many of the participants and observers of the Civil Rights Movement in the 50s and 60s came to similar conclusions; what troubles me is that forty years later, so many people are still trapped in the mistakes of the period.

Probably the main issues I'm thinking of are violence and racial separation. I've long challenged other whites who said that Malcolm and the Nation of Islam advocated and even practiced violence against whites. Even in the 1960s, while I was still a kid, I could see that Malcolm (the Nation's most visible spokesman at the time) was talking primarily about self-defense against white violence both official and freelance. True, many whites publicly and officially deplored the freelance violence by vigilantes, but most of them never did much about it. This was partly because white terrorism, especially in the South, could target dissident whites as well as uppity blacks, as shown by the murders of white civil rights workers in Mississippi and elsewhere in the 60s. That the killers were able to evade capture and conviction for decades was the result of white solidarity, though intimidation was no doubt also involved. Maybe the US government should have responded to white terrorism in the South the way it responded, say, to peasant resistance in South Vietnam: by leveling white communities, burning them to the ground and moving the survivors to "strategic hamlets" until the troublemakers had been smoked out and eliminated, or at least until southern whites, without exception, had embraced non-violence. In my bleaker moods I've sometimes thought so.

I'm not ignoring or minimizing the history of white racist terror in the north. As Marable recounts, the Nation of Islam never did much in the south; Malcolm's constituency was poor urban blacks, who faced racism in the north and knew it. (The passage I quoted from Malcolm X in a previous post came from a major section dealing with anti-racist struggle in the north during the 1930s and 1940s.) And this continued down to the present day; northern whites responded in large numbers to Richard Nixon's incitement and encouragement of their racism.

What bothers me is the notion advanced by the Nation of Islam and by Malcolm X as its spokesman, and accepted by Marable and many other self-styled moderates, that Martin Luther King Jr. and other Civil Rights leaders who rejected violence even in self-defense, were not "radicals" or "extremists." Malcolm liked to declare that "[Whites] should say thank you for Martin Luther King, because Martin Luther King has held Negroes in check until recently" (414). This was absurd on two counts. First, when Malcolm was invited to visit Selma, Alabama, in 1964,

... Malcolm could not refuse. The beauty of the Selma struggle was its brutal simplicity: hundreds of local blacks lined up at Selma's Dallas County building daily demanding the right to register to vote; white county and city police beat and harassed them. By the first week in February thirty-four hundred people had been jailed, including Dr. King. Under cover of darkness, terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan harassed civil rights workers, black families, and households. On February 4, Malcolm addressed an audience of three hundred at the Brown's Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Significantly, while the event had been arranged through SNCC, after some negotiations it was formally cosponsored by King's SCLC. Malcolm's sermon praised King's dedication to nonviolence, but he advised that should white America refuse to accept the nonviolent model of social change, his own example of armed "self-defense" was an alternative [411-412].

Notice that whites, in and outside of the South, did not see nonviolent action as 'holding Negroes in check' -- quite the opposite. Local authorities tried to check it themselves, with violence, and allowed white terrorist groups to harass, assault, and kill Civil Rights Workers. Look at this excerpt from King's "Letter from the Birmingham City Jail," addressed to white "moderate" ministers in 1963:

You spoke of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of the extremist. I started thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency made up of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, have been so completely drained of self-respect and a sense of "somebodiness" that they have adjusted to segregation, and, of a few Negroes in the middle class who, because of a degree of academic and economic security, and because at points they profit by segregation, have unconsciously become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up over the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement.... I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need not follow the "do-nothingism" of the complacent or the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. There is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest....

But as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist in love -- "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice ... Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ ... So the question is not whether we will be extremists but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice --or will we be extremists for the cause of justice? ...

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this. Maybe I was too optimistic.

Somehow I'd thought of this as a document of the 1950s; that it comes from 1963, after several years more of struggle as King and the nonviolent wing of the Civil Rights Movement had become ever more militant, is even more telling. Notice too that King began by playing the classic Golden Mean game, with himself the reasonable moderate between total quietism at one extreme, and the other extreme, represented by Elijah Muhammad, that "comes perilously close to advocating violence" -- but then he recognized (if only rhetorically, at first) that in the eyes of white America he was an extremist. If this be extremism, make the most of it!

The mistake here is the common belief that "moderation" in rhetoric equals "moderation" in policy, that black people especially are obliged to keep their voices low and evenly modulated, their rhetoric pacific and polite. That this is a mistake is shown by the fact that during his lifetime, King was always seen by whites as a dangerous radical. After all, one of his books was entitled Why We Can't Wait, with the epigraph "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." Wait a minute, doesn't that sound more like the demagogic rhetoric of a Malcolm X?

Malcolm's move from the Nation of Islam led him into engagement with "mainstream" civil rights groups and even a tentative alliance with whites -- but the Civil Rights movement hadn't stood still either, and as Marable admits, Malcolm and the Movement met more or less in the middle as more and more activists rejected King's supposedly conciliatory stance in favor of more militance, and less nonviolence. While King adhered to nonviolence, he too became more militant, and he'd never really been conciliatory. He became less conciliatory as time went on. It's a pity Malcolm didn't live to see it.

But the bigger irony is that if anyone was 'holding the Negro in check' it was Elijah Muhammad, who counseled blacks to refrain from political action of any kind, including voting. (In this he was like white religious leaders such as Jerry Falwell, who in the same era counseled his flock to avoid such worldly activity.) One reason Malcolm came into conflict with his mentor, on Marable's account, was that he kept straining at the leash, unable to refrain from building connections with black groups working actively against racism in the north and elsewhere. And despite the Nation's rhetorical appeal to violence, when it came down to brass tacks Muhammad had no stomach for it. (Not unreasonably, since blacks were outgunned by the white state.) When white police in Los Angeles murdered an unarmed Muslim named Ronald Stokes while raiding a mosque in 1962, Muhammad ordered his followers to "stand down" (208), to Malcolm's shock.

The time had come for action, and surely Muhammad would see the necessity in summoning the Nation's strength for the battle. But the Messenger denied him. "Brother, you don't go to war over a provocation," he told Malcolm. "They could kill a few of my followers, but I'm not going to go out and do something silly" [208].

On the other hand, Muhammad could stomach Muslim violence against his own. The Fruit of Islam (FOI), the Nation's paramilitary wing, regularly beat and terrorized members who misbehaved or dissented, culminating in the execution of Malcolm himself. The police tended to unconcern about these peccadilloes, as about black-on-black violence generally, and Marable says there is evidence that some FOI higher-ups -- including, possibly, one of the assassins -- were police informants.

In the end, Marable can't make up his own mind. On the same page, he writes first that "To Malcolm, armed self-defense was never equated with violence for its own sake" (485); two paragraphs later, that Malcolm "had also come to reject violence for its own sake, but he never abandoned the nationalists' ideal of 'self-determination" (485-6). And:

Given the election of Barack Obama, it now raises the question of whether blacks have a separate political destiny from their white fellow citizens. If legal racial segregation was permanently in America's past, Malcolm's vision today would have to radically define self-determination and the meaning of black power in a political environment that appeared to many to be "post-racial" [486].

Even in the 1960s, the existence of de facto, as opposed to de jure (that is, legal) racial segregation was recognized. The notion that the mere removal of Jim Crow laws automatically eradicated racism in America is beloved of many whites -- "You've got your rights, so what more do you want from us?" -- but most blacks know better. I don't think the current political environment is "post-racial" by any stretch of the imagination; the election of Barack Obama certainly doesn't make it so. "Many" would agree with me.