In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thich Nhat Hanh, 1967.
On April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his most controversial and courageous speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” to some three thousand congregants at the Riverside Church in New York City. For speaking forcefully against the war and for attempting to bridge the civil rights and peace movements, he was condemned by a vast majority of Americans, by even the liberal press, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, and by a majority of the civil rights movement. On April 30, he delivered a version of the speech, “Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam” at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. There are few moments when a speaker of such oratorical gifts has fused the historical, the analytical and spiritual so elegantly and have been so damning of the rulers of his time. And so it should come as no surprise that these are some of his least well-known speeches, least shown on MLK day, have the smallest online presence, and accompanied by comparatively so little historical analysis.
Sadly, in these fifty years since Dr. King’s little has changed in America’s imperial behaviors. Should one replace Iraq and Afghanistan for Vietnam one would find little incongruity.
Here are a few excerpts from his perhaps most radical speech, words that resonate with all the pages of this website:
"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
"A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.
"A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth...
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
A pall has spread across much of the American landscape. It has the dank, enervating odor of spiritual death, as Americans sell their souls for a day's wages, a big screen TV, and all the cheap cheese and red meat they can eat. Whereas every American was at least aware of a war effort during World War II, and the Vietnam war was hungrily digested by a media naive nation, our country can now kill hundreds of thousands of people in our name as we live completely unaffected and voluntarily ignorant. Our military defense and offense has reached historically unprecedented power, as the following diagrams illustrate.
With 4% of world population, the U.S. generates 22% of GDP and 37% of official military spending.
This map cleverly shows the outsized U.S. military expenditures.
Note that the United States did not have money in its pockets to pay for the Afghanistan & Iraq Invasions. Instead, it borrowed from the banks, which, according to numerous studies, will ultimately cost the U.S. about $5 trillion.
The U.S. spends nearly double the official Dept. of Defense Budget because many of the costs of war, "defense," and maintaining the military are not included in the DoD budget. One may be excused for not knowing this, given the media complicity in the fiction.
Back to official DoD spending, this time given per capita. Here we can easily make out the huge Reagan and Bush II increases in military spending.
This simply makes the obvious point that, even using the conservative DoD spending, the U.S. outspends everyone by extraordinary sums. Also note that many of the other big spenders are U.S. allies.
These are the countries in which the U.S. has bases and "lily pads" (temporary bases and airfields).
This map shows number of bases by the size of circles.
Estimated deaths due to either direct U.S. intervention, U.S. proxy wars, U.S. backing, or U.S. assistance (Lucas, 2015) . The list is hardly exhaustive and the numbers are contested.
No other country is responsible for as much suffering around the world.
REFERENCES
Lucas, J.A. (2015) US Has Killed More than 20 Million People in 37 “Victim Nations” Since World War II. Global Research.
Also:
Ambrose, S.E. (1990) Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938. Penguin Books, New York.
Blum, W. (1995) Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine.
Chomsky, N. (2015) Who Rules the World? Metropolitan Books. New York.
Crawford, N.C. (2016) US Budgetary Costs of Wars Through 2016: $4.79 Trillion and Counting Summary of Costs of the US Wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan and Homeland Security. Watson Institute, International & Public Affairs, Brown University
Galeano, E. (1973) Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Monthly Review Press, New York.
Stiglitz, J.E. and Bilmes, L.J. (2008) The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. W.W. Norton & Company, New York.
Tirman, J> (2012, January 6) Why Do we Ignore the Civilians Killed in American Wars? The Washington Post.