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Militarism Must Be Conquered

By Ben Chitty

Long-time VVAW member Ben Chitty was invited to participate in a celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1967 Riverside speech against the war, produced by the Village Playback Theatre as a benefit for Pax Christi. He was asked to address in particular the issue of militarism. The event was staged on January 25th at Judson Memorial Church in New York City.

In his speech at Riverside Church, Dr. King spoke of moving to "the high ground of a firm dissent based upon the mandate of conscience and the reading of history." I'm no preacher, and I'm not going to talk about conscience. But I do know something about history.

Now maybe this is a little ironic. The war Dr. King came to oppose in 1967 did finally end eight years later, and without any of the true revolutions he hoped would stop the war. In fact, just as he predicted, we went on to repeat the war, over and over and over again — Afghanistan, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, Panama, Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, Serbia, Afghanistan again, Iraq.

Per Odman and Ben Chitty at Vets Day Parade in Manhattan, November 11, 2008.

A little more irony -- during his campaign Barack Obama quoted Dr. King's Riverside speech when he explained he was running for President because of "the fierce urgency of now." Then in his inauguration speech, when he listed the people whose labor and sacrifice made our prosperity and freedom possible, he said, "For us they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg, Normandy and Khe Sanh."

Stirring words, but Khe Sanh? The idea that the marines at Khe Sanh fought to give us prosperity and freedom is laughable. You could make a better case for Fallujah.

Saigon fell in 1975. Over the years since then people have said many things about Vietnam which are not true. People said we could have won the war, if only we had avoided some mistakes. People said we were fighting for democracy, and even if we lost we were doing the right thing. People said the war was over, so we should forget about it and just move on.

None of these are true.

Mistakes were made, but to win the war we had to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese. To persuade them we had to kill them. We were good at killing, and the more we killed, the closer we came to losing the war.

What we called democracy was actually a brutal and corrupt puppet regime we installed in Saigon in 1954, and followed with a succession of military dictatorships after 1963. Our country's best and brightest orchestrated the American war in Vietnam, but it was never about democracy.

Saying the war is over passes over our failure to deliver on the Paris Peace Accord promises of aid for reconstruction, and over decades of embargo, and over the continuing casualties - the Vietnamese still being maimed and killed by the bombs and mines and toxins we left behind.

But more important, saying the war is over lets us obscure the fact that we are still the same kind of society, the same kind of country, the same kind of people, who send our sons and daughters to faraway lands to kill the people who live there until they agree to do what we say.

Which brings me to militarism, one of the giant triplets which Dr. King warned had to be conquered before we could end the threat of wars like Vietnam. Other folks are here to talk about materialism and racism - I guess I'm the designated hitter for militarism.

By militarism Dr. King meant more than misdirected economic investments. Militarism means we use military violence to solve social and economic problems, not just wars to protect property like in Southeast Asia and Central America, but wars for scarce resources, like in the Persian Gulf and the Horn of Africa.

Militarism encourages individual violence. If Dr. King were to speak about militarism today, he would surely discuss the role of misogyny. In today's Army one in three servicewomen suffer sexual harassment, abuse, or rape, and domestic violence occurs in military families at more than twice the civilian rate.

Militarism breeds cynicism. Consider our weapons. In Vietnam we used the defoliant Agent Orange, though we knew it was toxic and persistent. In the first Gulf War we used depleted uranium, and now more than a third of the Americans who served in Desert Storm are disabled or dead, and not from enemy action. Now we experiment with DIME ordnance — dense inert metal explosives which shred flesh with metal powder making medical treatment useless.

To make your own soldiers sick, to delight in the deaths of innocents — how much more cynical can you get? Here's how. We torture enemy combatants even though experts in interrogation tell us that torture produces unreliable intelligence. But we can't stop, lest we be thought too weak to protect the homeland. That political deployment of militarism may be the most depraved cynicism of all. The President won election in 2004 based on the urgency of a war we could have stopped a year before, a war we did not even have to fight. Between Karl Rove's campaign to re-elect a war-time president and Richard Nixon's use of American POWs to justify extending and expanding the war in Indochina, what's to choose?

I started with a comment about the irony in President Obama's use of a phrase from the Riverside speech when his inauguration speech so clearly misconstrued the nature of the war Dr. King opposed. That irony reminds me of something else. I fought in Democratic wars. Lyndon Johnson was president when I first went to Vietnam in September 1966, and still in office when I left for the last time in November 1968. George W. Bush was an incompetent commander-in-chief, a disaster as a decider, but the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq have been ratified again and again by the people we keep electing to serve our interests. So the problem is not a few bad apples in the White House and the Pentagon, though Rumsfeld and Cheney were pretty rotten. The problem is the kind of politics we practice, the kind of nation we try to be, the kind of people we are. It's in us - the people - where militarism, like materialism and racism - must be conquered.

Since Dr. King's speech in 1967 the stakes have been raised. If you think the Cold War was bad, try the Global War on Terror. If you think the rising tide of revolutionary demands was a challenge, try climate change. Speaking truth to power is not enough — we have to save ourselves from ourselves for ourselves.

Let me end with one more observation from history. When you work for revolutionary change, you always lose. You lose again and again, right up to the very moment that you win.