The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks out against the Vietnam War during an April 4, 1967 speech at the Riverside Church in New York. (Common Dreams)
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in one of his most important but too-often overlooked speeches, "Beyond Vietnam":
This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I’m not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: “Let us love one another (Yes), for love is God. (Yes) And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. . . . If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.” Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.
We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.”
I post this to make a point about the failure of our memories, remind us that none of us have clean hands when it comes to war, peace and the failure to aid refugees and migrants (legally, they occupy different statuses, though in reality many are fleeing some kind of violence, whether oppression and war or environmental and economic disaster). Tavis Smiley, during a discussion with Brian Lehrer yesterday, offered a response to criticism of Trump's comments defending Vladimir Putin on Sunday to Bill O'Reilly that we need to take to heart.
Trump told O'Reilly: "Lots of killers. We've got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country's so innocent?
Don't get me wrong. As Smiley points out, Trump's comment was not offered as a criticism of our long national history of institutional violence, which starts with genocide of Native Americans and the systemic violence of slavery and runs through various military invasions, excessive force by law enforcement, drone warfare, deportations, and so. It was meant to justify his own penchant for violence, his own claim of personal exceptionalism and his desire to return America to some vague and mythical past. Trump, after all, spent the campaign criticizing eight years of Obama/Clinton foreign policy as weak, implying that it was not violent enough.
But, and I think this is what Smiley was getting at, we do the nation a disservice by pretending that what we are witnessing over the last three weeks has no precedent. I wrote in an earlier post -- and in an upcoming Progressive Populist column -- previous presidents and Congressses have laid the groundwork for what we are seeing, so in many ways Trump is just the culmination of the war on terror and the history of violence that King talks about above. At the same time, Trump is an aberration, something far worse than anything we've witnessed in the past. His policies may build on those of the George W. Bush administration -- and the Obama administration to a lesser degree -- but they are far worse, far more dangerous, far more unhinged and disrespectful of the ideals we've cited as the nation's raison d'etre.
We need to find a way, as we resist, as we oppose, as we stand up to Trump's authoritarian tendencies, his xenophobia and hatred, and the efforts of his allies to tear down the gains we have made in recent years, to be honest about our own failures and not to excuse past administrations for those failures.
Trump was right -- I can't believe I just typed those words. We are not so innocent. But he was right for the wrong reasons. Rather than follow him down the spider hole into an era of expanded hatred and violence, we need to take heed from Dr. King and remember that "History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate."
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