Martin Luther King on War

Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Constitution quoted the passage below from a King speech in 1967 as part of an essay on the response of Christians to the war in Iraq.

"I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government."

However, King's comment resonates far more broadly in American society than that. The U. S. is the most violent of the advanced industrial nations by far. There's more murder, more rape, more police, more prisoners, more prisons, and more executions than any of the countries of Western Europe or Japan. Almost as heartbreaking as the violence itself is the way that violence is romanticized in the American media. It is hard to say which American television, movies, and popular music romanticize more: theft, fraud, murder, and serial murder or the almost equally violent investigation and punishment of crimes by the police apparatus. In fact, the glamorization of violence by the media is so pervasive that it is almost impossible to escape or avoid.

Nevertheless, it is important to remember King's observation that "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" is our own government. We normally associate the evil of violence with "bad guys" like Osama bin Laden, but the destruction that the Bush administration has caused in Iraq--perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead-- outstrips anything that bin Laden has either done or projected. Going even beyond that, the right-wing routinely rhapsodizes over the possibility of upping the level of violence in the Middle East to WWII levels where we nuked Hiroshima and firebombed Hamburg and Dresden.

Obviously, America can't just give up the path of violence cold turkey. If we did we would have the cultural version of delirium tremens, the hallucinatory disorder that alcoholics and drug addicts fall into when they stop consuming their substance of choice too quickly. But we can resume the work of developing alternative skills and strategies for dealing with problems both here and abroad.