#474: What Would King Say?

      Had he lived, Martin Luther King, Jr. would have turned 90 this past week.  As the nation celebrates his birthday, it is easy to honor King as a champion of civil rights, perhaps even easy to note that in 2019 America risks losing some of the gains he championed. 

But it is much harder for us to actually honor him as our national prophet--as America’s conscience--because that means honoring all the causes he stood for.  And those causes taken together, have not merely lost ground; they have nearly disappeared from our public discourse. 

Let me survey what King called the “three great evils,” and ask two questions: What would King say now?  And: Who in our public life still speaks for King? 

Racial Injustice.  Most celebrations honoring King focus on him as leader of the civil rights movement.  And surely a key message in his mission was that people be judged not “by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” By 1968 King had witnessed many gains, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  And since then, African-Americans have continued many gains. 

Still, were King alive today he might well say that too often people continue to be judged by the color of their skin, whether in efforts to suppress black votes, or in cases of police shooting unarmed Blacks, or in the rollback of the Voting Rights Act itself. 

And more recently the challenge of accepting people of color has increasingly focused, not only on the descendants of slaves, but also on immigrants and their children (indeed, our first Black president was the son of an immigrant, not the descendant of slaves).  And while King did not face the same issues over immigration that we face now, it’s easy to know what he might say--in fact he already actually said it:

“We may all have come from different ships, but we're in the same boat now."

Indeed, by the end of his career King would be increasingly clear that the evil of racism was not just a problem for U.S. blacks, but for all those oppressed by others:

“In one sense the civil rights movement in the United States is a special American phenomenon which must be understood in the light of American history and dealt with in terms of the American situation. But on another and more important level, what is happening in the United States today is a relatively small part of a world development.”

Looking around today, King might well say we remain far from fulfilling the goal of racial justice for all.

Inequality.  In later years King spoke more and more about economic inequality.  He often called it “poverty,” since up to 1968 the middle class was still gaining in wages and benefits, so it made sense to focus on those below the poverty line.  But since King’s death, the U.S. has seen nearly 50 years of steadily declining real wages even for the middle class, and we now see a wealth gap worse than any time since the great depression of the 1930s.  So when King spoke of poverty, he said:

“Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.’ When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.”

This question of a “broader distribution of wealth” has changed since his death, with fewer below the poverty line but more struggling to make ends meet as wealth has been even more concentrated.  This makes King’s view not less, but even more timely.  Today he would surely repeat these words:

“Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children... God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty.”

War. King lost many supporters and became an even more controversial figure when he campaigned against the Vietnam War.  Even other civil rights leaders felt this was not his role.  But they did not realize that, for King, this was the inevitable result of his own growing vision. 

Once he decided that nonviolence was the key to fighting racism, and once he incorporated the theories of Gandhian nonviolence into his own Christian theology, that naturally altered his views on war, as he moved from a “just war” perspective to pacifism.  He called this his “pilgrimage to nonviolence”:

“I felt that while war could never be a positive good, it could serve as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force. War, horrible as it is, might be preferable to surrender to a totalitarian system. But now I believe that the potential destructiveness of modern weapons totally rules out the possibility of war ever again achieving a negative good.”

Indeed, King seemed to know that without a concerted anti-war strategy, the threat of mass destruction would spread.  Today’s worries about North Korea, Iran, and the U.S. abandoning the INF treaty all echo King’s warning:

“Nations are not reducing but rather increasing their arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. The best brains in the highly developed nations of the world are devoted to military technology. The proliferation of nuclear weapons has not been halted…On the contrary, the detonation of an atomic device by the first nonwhite, non-Western, and so-called underdeveloped power, namely the Chinese People’s Republic, opens new vistas of exposure of vast multitudes, the whole of humanity, to insidious terrorization by the ever-present threat of annihilation.”

When accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King made his rejection of militarism clear:

“I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of nuclear annihilation... I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow... I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed.”

I have no doubt that he would say matters now have only become worse.  Since 9/11 the U.S. has engaged in multiple, seemingly endless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere. And unlike the Vietnam era, these wars are not even especially controversial.  In the 1960s a band of public leaders loudly opposed U.S. war policy: King, Robert F. Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and many others.  In 2019, who are the public leaders opposing our warlike foreign policy? 

Yet our troop deployments and arms sales (not to mention defense pending) far outstrip all other nations.  It is as if Americana have accepted that war is inevitable and peace is impossible. King would disagree:

“World peace through non-violent means is neither absurd nor unattainable. All other methods have failed. Thus we must begin anew. Non-violence is a good starting point.”

For Catholics today, King’s views are important for three reasons. 

First, his views on race, economic inequality, and peace fit almost exactly with Catholic Social Teaching of the last 50 years--especially with the teachings of the last four popes.  You can look it up! 

Second, King agrees with the Church that these three issues are linked:

“We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together…you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others…the whole structure of American life must be changed.”

Third, King’s vision of the contemporary world exactly matches the Catholic vision emerging from Vatican Council II (1962-1965).  The Council saw technological progress as the hallmark of modern life, and praised such progress but offered this caution: technological progress confers new power, but the good use of that power requires a matching progress in wisdom and goodness. 

Here is how King saw the same “moral lag”:

“Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this.”

For King, as for Vatican II, this “moral lag” is at the root of what he calls the world’s three great evils:

“This problem of spiritual and moral lag, which constitutes modern man’s chief dilemma, expresses itself in three larger problems which grow out of man’s ethical infantilism. Each of these problems, while appearing to be separate and isolated, is inextricably bound to the other. I refer to racial injustice, poverty, and war.”

And for King, as for Vatican II, the challenge lies in our moral progress catching up to our technological progress:

“Mankind’s survival is dependent upon man’s ability to solve the problems of racial injustice, poverty, and war; the solution of these problems is in turn dependent upon man squaring his moral progress with his scientific progress, and learning the practical art of living in harmony”

Based on his own words, then, King’s voice still speaks to our time, much the way Catholic Social Teaching does.  Taken together, they represent our brightest wisdom and our clearest hope--but who will champion of such vision? 

On a day when many seek to fence in King’s legacy to narrow questions of race, we should rededicate ourselves to his broader cause of waging nonviolent combat against racism, inequality, and militarism. 

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2019

#453: To Honor the Dead: Pursue Peace—or Perpetual War?

I could not avoid a strong sense of irony during the week leading into Memorial Day 2016.

Last week saw President Obama’s appearance at Hiroshima, a report on US-Russia-China nuclear talks, a trade opening to Vietnam, and my personal viewing of two movies about bombing: “Children of Nagasaki” and “Eye in the Sky.”

The observation of Memorial Day itself remains full of irony, inasmuch as the original practice of the holiday promised a different message.  At first “Decoration Day” aimed only to honor the fallen Union Soldiers of the Civil War, but the actual observances soon included decorating graves of Confederate soldiers as well, even though many southern states kept a separate holiday for this purpose. Then, after World War I, the focus enlarged again to include all fallen America soldiers in any war.

The irony is that, while this history acknowledged the dead on both sides of the Civil War, no other war gets the same recognition. The assumption is that the Civil War is unique because, even though they fought for two separate countries under two different flags, the dead on both sides were Americans. In short, only American lives matter on Memorial Day. “Enemy” lives from other wars do not--nor do civilian lives (the so-called “collateral damage") that typically outnumber military deaths in modern war.

"Collateral" remains

Had Memorial Day’s focus enlarged further to remember all war dead, it might have become our national day for reflecting on the tragic loss of tens of millions of lives in wars world-wide since the Civil War. Instead, it has become a patriotic celebration in which we remember only the service of soldiers, and only US soldiers. The focus is less on the tragedy of war and more on glorifying the sacrifice of our warriors. Instead of citizens wearing poppy pins or black armbands to remember war’s fallen, we see ballplayers wearing camouflage on their baseball caps.

 But the chief irony came from President Obama himself, when he spoke at Hiroshima and called the atom bombing symbolic of the risks contained in humanity’s technological leap forward:

In the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction; how the very spark that marks us as a species -- our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will -- those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction…
The wars of the modern age teach this truth.  Hiroshima teaches this truth.  Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us.  The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution, as well. 

I find this statement true, and important, but also ironic, for two reasons. 

First, because its message is nearly identical to the message delivered by Vatican Council II (1962-1965). Surveying the signs of the times to reset a vision for the future of the Catholic Church in the world, the Council called for wisdom sources to keep pace with modern technological power, to harness that power for good:

The modern world shows itself at once powerful and weak, capable of the noblest deeds or the foulest; before it lies the path to freedom or to slavery, to progress or retreat, to brotherhood or hatred…

Man judges rightly that by his intellect he surpasses the material universe, for he shares in the light of the divine mind. By relentlessly employing his talents through the ages he has indeed made progress…especially in his probing of the material world and in subjecting it to himself. Still he has always searched for more penetrating truths, and finds them...

The intellectual nature of the human person is perfected by wisdom and needs to be…

Our era needs such wisdom more than bygone ages if the discoveries made by man are to be further humanized. For the future of the world stands in peril unless wiser men are forthcoming.

So Obama’s point is well made, but more than 50 years later, and one can argue that those 50 years technological power has remained largely unchecked by wisdom, without much concern about steering that power in the right direction.

This problem is particularly acute if we talk about the role of the United States: are we helping wisdom to keep pace by promoting peace, or aiding runaway power in the form of perpetual war? Thus the second irony: the president’s good message risks contradicting many of his own administration’s policies

For example, the latest “START” deal to limit nuclear may do quite the opposite, as the New York Times recently reported:

The United States, Russia and China are now aggressively pursuing a new generation of smaller, less destructive nuclear weapons. The buildups threaten to revive a Cold War-era arms race and unsettle the balance of destructive force among nations that has kept the nuclear peace for more than a half-century.

In fact, the US is expected to "revitalize" its nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years at the cost of up to $1 trillion!

Moreover, the Times reported last week that a new Pentagon census of the US nuclear arsenal reveals that “Mr. Obama has reduced the size of the nation’s nuclear stockpile at a far slower rate than did any of his three immediate predecessors, including George Bush and George W. Bush.”

Also last week, the process of normalizing relations with Vietnam took a similar turn. President Obama announced that the US is lifting its decades-long embargo on military arms sales to Vietnam, saying: “The decision to lift the ban…was based on our desire to complete what has been a lengthy process of moving toward normalization with Vietnam.”

 This strikes me as a devil’s bargain: achieving further reconciliation with our former enemy at the cost of feeding the proliferation of arms in Southeast Asia.  But this of course promotes and extends America’s longtime role as the #1 arms dealer in the world.

None of these events mark America as a country dedicated to promoting peace.  Rather, they seem to reflect a belief in either the necessity or even the virtue of perpetual warfare.  At best this means that America is resigned to violent responses to violence around the world rather than leading us in a different direction.  At worst it means that we embrace the grip of violence because it is profitable for us.  As Pope Francis explained to schoolchildren visiting the Vatican last spring: "Many powerful people don't want peace because they live off war."

During Obama’s visit to Hiroshima, the media rehashed the old debate about the wisdom of dropping atomic bombs on Japanese cities. Most mainstream media admitted that the decision remains controversial, yet implied a near-consensus that the bombings saved lives by avoiding an invasion. 

There is of course no way to resolve the dispute because there’s no way to prove an alternative history that never occurred.  But these facts are true: (1) both General MacArthur and General Eisenhower declared the bomb unnecessary; (2) the Japanese with the high command was prepared to surrender if the emperor’s role was preserved; (3) the US instead insisted on “unconditional surrender,” which was a deal breaker; (4) after surrender, the emperor was protected anyhow. Arguably, then, an invasion was not necessary, except for American stubbornness. (See: http://swaincrosscurrents.blogspot.com/2015/08/ivespent-last-week-reflecting-on-70-th.html )

But the debate about Hiroshima and Nagasaki will continue because of two distinct moral views about the use of violence.  In one view (championed by the majority of characters in the new movie “Eye in the Sky”), killing, even at the cost of innocent lives, can be justified on the speculation that such killing will save more lives.  The other view (the minority view in the movie) is that the ends do not justify the means, that one must not kill innocents even in the hope of saving other lives. 

In the first view, it is numbers that count: “The greatest good for the greatest number.” In the second view, it is intention and virtue that counts: “Do no harm,” even if one risks great sacrifice.  In the movie, these two views clash over the life of a single innocent girl.  But in real life, these two views may be the difference between policies of perpetual warfare and policies that move, however achingly, toward peace.

One “survivor” of the Nagasaki bombings (who later died of radiation sickness) wrote in 1946 about the experience of his family. His story, in its homespun, almost dull way, reflects the kind of fervent commitment to peace that has kept Japan free of nuclear weapons and strictly limited its military spending.

 But his memoirs did not appear for 20 years after World War II because the American “occupational censors” would not allow their publication. And the movie version of his “Children of Nagasaki” could not be made for 20 more years, finally appearing in 1983.  The irony here: the movie’s delay enabled the director, like the original writer a dedicated Catholic, to include footage of John-Paul II visiting Hiroshima to proclaim Catholicism’s anti-nuclear principles.

The censorship of this story, like last week’s opposition to any US apology for the bombings, reflects how the world’s most powerful nation continues to avoid acknowledging its part in the global devastation that marked most of the 20th century.  And we continue to pretend that we are not responsible for massive killings in the 21st century.

And so as Memorial Day arrives, we wave our flags and salute our soldiers and remember their service and sacrifice and feel proud of our nation.  We see little mention of the 140,000 who died at Hiroshima, the 80,000 who died in Nagasaki, the uncounted thousands who died of radiation sickness in the years that followed, the 3 million Vietnamese who died during the Vietnam War, or the 200,000 Iraqis who died following the American invasion.

We think of ourselves as the home of the free and the brave--and no doubt that is true.  But neither freedom nor bravery guarantees virtue.  And if we seek a future of peace rather than perpetual warfare, we will need a nation famous not just for its freedom, not just for its bravery, but for its goodness and moral courage.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2016

#435 70 Years Later--STILL Under A Cloud

I’ve spent the last week reflecting on the 70^th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki--amid breaking news about the Iran nuclear deal and the re-opening of Japan's first nuclear plant shut down after the 2011 meltdown. My reflections expanded beyond the scope of this blog, so I searched for my earlier thoughts. In 2005 I wrote this post observing the 60th anniversary. Most of it is still timely, so I finally chose to re-post it with some more recent thoughts in brackets.

Still Under a Cloud



The 2015 Observance

Today only charred and mangled bars remain to mark the spot where the kids poured out of the school that day and raced to climb the monkey bars that stood in the corner of the schoolyard. The children died when The Bomb fell on them that day, 60 years ago this week.

After one A-Bomb landed on Hiroshima and another fell, three days later, on Nagasaki, the Japanese took to calling the A-bomb “the original child bomb,” since there had never been anything like it before.  Indeed, in a split second those two bombs unleashed evil forces that eventually killed 250,000 human beings, mostly civilians. 

The events marking the 60^th anniversary of history’s only nuclear attacks are to be found everywhere this week. In Japan, a “global pilgrimage honoring civilian casualties of war” called “Stonewalk” will end when participants finish dragging a one ton memorial stone from Nagasaki to Hiroshima. And in Hiroshima, local officials will screen internet-delivered photos taken worldwide to commemorate the exact moment the first A-bomb dropped.

The Day After

In Europe, an international walk will finish the 250km distance from Ypres, Belgium (where chemical weapons were first used) past NATO headquarters in Brussels to the NATO nuclear base at Kleine Brogel.

In Canada, Toronto will mark the occasion with a daylong “Day for Peace” observance calling for the elimination of all nuclear weapons.

In America, Time Magazine has already devoted its cover story to the anniversary, including extensive interviews with some of the 85,000 “hibakusha” (witnesses to the bombs themselves) who remain alive today. In New York City, a 4000km “Bike for Peace” journey will finish after first passing through Vienna, Prague, Dresden, Berlin, Leipzig, Bonn, Paris, and then (after crossing the Atlantic by air) Montreal, Ottawa, and Washington, DC.

And a vigil sponsored by 1300 citizens’ organizations, including the Catholic Worker, Maryknoll of New York and DC and Pax Christi USA from five different states will be held at the Oak Ridge (Tennessee) nuclear weapons plant. The vigil will include a three-hour long reading of the names of the dead from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In hindsight the A-Bomb was a classic case of a new and dangerous technology where no one asked the basic ethical question: “just because we can do this now, does that mean we should do it?” In fact the historical evidence is that the intention to use the bomb, at any cost, led to a parade of pretexts (much like Iraq half a century later).

Originally, of course, the Manhattan project began as a nuclear arms race to beat the Germans to the bomb. The Germans foiled that plan by surrendering first, so the U.S. turned its bombsites on Japan. When it became clear the Japanese surrender was near, the U.S. postponed the decisive Potsdam conference until the bomb was ready –and insisted that the Potsdam declaration include the demand for Japan’s “unconditional surrender.” This demand deadlocked the Japanese high command, postponing surrender until the bomb could be dropped. It was still a race however, since the Soviets were themselves about to declare war and invade Japan.

Once the bombs were dropped, Truman and others claimed they had prevented invasion and saved the lives of a million American soldiers.

[But US intelligence knew, from code-breaking and from the Russians, that Japan was already in the process of surrendering in July 1945. Both Supreme Allied Commanders, Douglas McArthur and Dwight Eisenhower, told President Harry Truman the bomb wasn’t needed. Later Ike publicly declared “it was not necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” The US chose to bomb Hiroshima anyway, rather than concede the single negotiating point that was holding up the Japanese: an assurance they could keep the emperor (Truman gave this assurance secretly through the Swiss anyway, but only after the bomb was dropped). Rather than allow the Japanese to surrender by accepting this single condition publicly, the US chose to slaughter more than 250,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.]

The Allied demand for “unconditional surrender” delayed the war’s end because the Japanese were reluctant to surrender the emperor himself. But at the war’s end, Japan was allowed to keep the emperor anyway. In other words, the U.S. could have achieved the same result without demanding “unconditional surrender” –and without either A-bombs or invasion.

[Debate about invasion statistics continues in 2015, all of it hypothetical. What is NOT debatable is this: the purpose for which the bomb was dropped was NOT to prevent invasion, but to enforce the demand for “unconditional surrender” (the invasion was being planned for the same purpose!). Thus the ethical test becomes: Were the conditions requested by the Japanese grave enough to justify the bomb—or even to justify an invasion?]

In this sense, “unconditional surrender” turned out to be the symbolic “WMD” of WWII: a pretext for attack that turned out not to matter at all. Had the US dropped that demand, the pretext for the bomb would be gone. The REAL WMDs, of course, were the bombs themselves (just as nuclear weapons remain the true WMDs today).

But President Truman was determined to intimidate the Soviets with American might, which meant the A-Bomb became the first shot in the cold war. And besides, Truman and many of his advisers shared the widespread popular desire to get revenge against Japan for the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

President Roosevelt had called that attack a “day that would live in infamy.” In recent years, Japan has apologized for that attack, and Japanese public opinion generally believes that Japan was wrong to go to war. The U.S. by contrast, has never apologized for taking revenge –and most Americans still feel the bombs were justified.

The history is debatable, but here’s the bottom line today: those days began a new age of terror we have not yet escaped. Sixty years later, people are still dying from those two bombs, and new children are still being born with defects caused by those bombs. The suffering goes on, sixty years after war’s end.

The Cold War has come and gone, but we do not have peace. Yet the US has kept most of its nuclear arsenal, and US policy still clings to threatening our ”first use” of nuclear weapons on our enemies.

[In fact, the US remains the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons, and the only major power that has refused to renounce their “first use” in the future.]

The Nukes remain—and they remain (as both John Kerry and George Bush agreed) the number one threat today. By maintaining its threat to use them, the US taunts adversaries and extremists to build their own nukes. So we have entered a “second nuclear arms race” where “second tier” nations and terrorists vie to join the US in the exclusive, one-member “Nuclear Attackers” club.

[The “Nuclear Club” has spread to China, India, Israel, and Pakistan – proliferating the promise of nuclear weapons before the eyes of all the world’s angry men. Which is precisely why the Iran deal is a hot political issue now. The US opened the nuclear Pandora’s Box]

Thus, and perhaps worst of all, a dangerous moral genie escaped the bottle at the end of World War II, when civilian populations became fair game for WMDs. It didn’t start with the A-bombs of course—US firebombs had already killed 900,000, mostly civilians, in Japanese cities—including 85,000 in Tokyo in a single night. But 250,000 killed by two split-second blasts brought violence against civilians to another level.

[As one participant said: the difference the Bomb made was not that it was so destructive--but that it was “so easy.”]

Today, every day, somewhere in the world, an average of 2174 people die from war. Nine out of ten are civilians—and half of them are children. It is a fine and patriotic thing to support our troops—but it is also a smokescreen obscuring the moral problem of modern war, because troops are no longer the main victims of war. Women and children are. It is governments, not armies, that make war policies—and now it is ordinary people, not troops, who suffer the most from them. Civilian deaths in Iraq, for example, outnumber US troop deaths nearly 100 to 1.

Many US Catholics remain unconcerned about our moral liability here, despite the clear teaching of the Church, which singled out war on civilians for the only condemnation issued by Vatican Council II:

“Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and humanity, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.”

[Moreover, even at Vatican II---50 years ago this year—the cost to our planet and people was clearly named in prophetic language that Pope Francis is finally getting people to hear:]

The arms race in which an already considerable number of countries are engaged is not a safe way to preserve a steady peace, nor is the so-called balance resulting from this race a sure and authentic peace. Rather than being eliminated thereby, the causes of war are in danger of being gradually aggravated. While extravagant sums are being spent for the furnishing of ever new weapons, an adequate remedy cannot be provided for the multiple miseries afflicting the whole modern world. Disagreements between nations are not really and radically healed; on the contrary, they spread the infection to other parts of the earth. …Therefore, we say it again: the arms race is an utterly treacherous trap for humanity, and one which ensnares the poor to an intolerable degree. –Gaudium et Spes #80 ]

World War II ended the war of battlefields and trenches, and the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki linked war and terror forever. Now the military is merely a cog in the war machine—and civilians are its fuel. Today, it’s convenient to define “terrorism” as attacks on civilians—but it did not start on 9/11. It sprouted as Blitzkrieg, it grew into firebombing, and it finally blossomed as the mushroom cloud that still hangs over the world and infects the planet with terror.

 © Bernard F. Swain PhD 2005, 2015