FORTY YEARS AGO MLK KNEW
WHY WE MAKE WAR TODAY

From American Rhetoric, an excerpt from Martin Luther King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech:

This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.

And

We must rapidly begin...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.

And

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

Click here for the rest--you can listen to streaming audio of the speech there, too.

Some things will never change. It is obvious today, just as it was to Dr. King in 1967, that the United States wage war for business and nothing else. All the fancy rhetoric that taps deeply into American values, greatly twisting them, about "freedom" and "democracy" is just a bunch of bullshit cover. We send our troops overseas in order to make the world safe for corporations to do business abroad.

Despite all those platitudes about freedom, the greatest American moral value is wealth, which drives everything. King was keenly aware that ending American racism, the crusade for which he is most well known, was inextricably tied to ending American materialism. US state sponsored violence and oppression both here and elsewhere is always about keeping a preferred order of power, but what that order of power most wants is to make money, to do business in as reckless a way as possible, on the cheap: anything threatening that order is necessarily a threat to doing business and maximizing profit, and vice versa. Consequently, ending materialism also means ending war. Which also allows for the ending of racism, which has always been driven by economic concerns.

It's all part of the same phenomenon. King knew well that the worst social ills of our era are different manifestations of the same problem, greed.

Think about that this Martin Luther King day.



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