The New Movement Against War And Racism What would Dr. King do about war, racism, poverty and immigration? In Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final months he vehemently denounced the U.S. war on Vietnam and spoke often about labor issues which crossed racial and ethnic divisions. Dr. King understood that violence meted out on the people of Vietnam grew from the same sources as assaults on the working classes and racial violence in the U.S. Capitalist greed, colonial desire, and Western/European racism coalesced to form an elite ethic of violence.
Dr. King witnessed the consequences of this violent ethic and because of his “commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ” he wrote, spoke and organized against the war on the Vietnamese. Describing the consequences of U.S. imperial violence in a late 1967 sermon (reprinted as “The Trumpet of Conscience” in A Testament of Hope), Dr. King argues:
“I knew that 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 demoniacal destructive suction tube. And so I was increasingly compelled to see the war not only as a moral outrage but also as an enemy of the poor, and to attack it as such….It
was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and die and in extraordinarily higher proportions relative to the rest of the population.”
Given this, how do we answer the question: What would King do (WWKD) in this current political economic environment? Dr. King would lead and/or otherwise help organize the anti-war, immigrant rights, and criminal justice reform movements. An analysis of the current political economic state of the U.S. reveals tremendous similarities to the Vietnam era.
The Arabs/Muslims of this new war on terrorism replace the Vietnamese who replaced the Japanese who replaced the Chinese as the Yellow Peril. Since the late 19th century we have witnessed a continuous dehumanization and fear of Asians what the scholar Edward Said defined as 'Orientalism' in his 1978 book of that name. Chinese workers and their families bore the brunt of white U.S. hatred between 1850 and the early 1900s. Private and public violence, local discriminatory laws and federal immigration policy punished Chinese in the Western U.S. The Japanese war with the U.S. over prominence in the Pacific led to a belief that the Japanese were bloodthirsty killers who didn’t care about life (witness the ‘kamikaze’). The nearly one hundred years of hatred towards Asians led also to the firebombings of most major Japanese cities (see the film, Fog of War, for graphic details from Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under President Lyndon Johnson) and, of course, the inhumane dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The same hatred of ‘yellow’ people justified U.S. atrocities in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Stories of Vietnamese ruthlessness abound in the 1960s and 1970s. “They don’t value life,” the stories said. “They strap bombs to babies,” I heard from some in my parents’ generation. These myths hid My Lai and napalm.
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