Bernie Sanders, Dr. King, and the Triple Evils
Something was Missing at Bernie’s talk to the SCLC.
By Paul Street
August 02, 2015 "Information
Clearing House"
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In the final years of his life, the increasingly radical Black Civil
Rights, peace, and social justice leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
spoke and wrote against what he called “the triple evils that are
interrelated.” The first such evil was racism, deeply understood to
mean not just prejudiced white sentiments and formal segregation in
the U.S. South but the racially separate and unequal functioning of
the nation’s basic institutions and social structures.
The second evil was poverty and economic inequality – class
injustice, which King rooted in capitalism. That system, King felt,
“produces beggars” alongside luxuriant opulence, necessitating “the
radical redistribution of economic and political power.”
The third evil was U.S. military imperialism – no mere afterthought
in King’s critique of the American System. Explaining why he had
turned openly against Washington’s monstrous war on Vietnam in 1967,
King argued that conscience did not permit him to remain silent on
the crimes the “strange [American] liberators” were committing in
Southeast Asia. At the same time, he noted, his condemnation of
America’s role as “the leading purveyor of violence in the world
today” (a description that still rings true today) was strongly
linked to his struggles against racial and economic disparity in the
U.S.
Reflecting on the race riots that washed across U.S. cities in the
summers of 1966 and 1967, King blamed the reactionary posture of
“the white society, unprepared and unwilling to accept radical
structural change.” He also attributed the violence to U.S.
militarism. The Pentagon, King noted, sent poor blacks to the front
killing lines to a disproportionate degree. It modelled the
destructive notion that violence was a reasonable response and even
a solution to social and political problems. Black Americans and
others sensed what King called “the cruel irony of watching Negro
and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a
nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same
school. We watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a
poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same
block in Detroit,” King said.
At the same time, King knew that U.S. war and militarism stole
resources from the nation’s briefly declared and barely fought “War
on Poverty.” Besides murdering peasants and others in Southeast
Asia, the deadly imperial expenditures had crushed “hope for the
[U.S.] poor – both black and white.” The anti-poverty program was
“broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle plaything of a
society gone mad” on a militarism that drew “men and skills and
money like some demonic destructive suction tube…A nation that
continues year after year to spend more money on military defense
than on programs of social uplift,” King added, “is approaching
spiritual death.”
Recently, the nominally democratic-socialist, Scandinavia-admiring
Democratic Party presidential candidate and U.S Senator (“I”-VT)
Bernie Sanders spoke to Dr. King’s old organization – the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) – in an attempt to
demonstrate his commitment to racial justice. Reflecting the
influence of the Black Lives Matter movement that has arisen in
response to racist police killings, Sanders came to the SCLC armed
with a surplus of terrible statistics on US racial disparities and
institutional racism. He showed himself knowledgeable on these
topics, though he was far too ready to portray racism as merely an
economic problem and he failed to mention the persistent deep de
facto residential and educational segregation – the continuing
American race apartheid – that contributes richly to racial
inequality in the US today.
Sanders seemed eager to wrap himself in the legacy of Dr. King.
Bernie trumpeted his own youthful work in the 1960s Civil Rights
Movement. He quoted King on the disgraceful existence of mass
poverty in a land of prosperity and on the obscenity that (as King
noted in Memphis, Tennessee just days before his assassination)
“most of the poor people in our country are working every
day…and…making wages so low they cannot begin to function in the
mainstream of the economic life of our nation.” After praising King
for understanding that (in Sanders’ words) “it is useless to try to
address race without also taking on the larger issue of [economic]
inequality” (one might counter that it is essential to fight racism
and racial division to struggle usefully against economic
injustice), Sanders moved into long, fact-filled reflections on
wealth and income inequality and corporate plutocracy in
contemporary New Gilded Age America. He reiterated his standard
campaign denunciations of the Republican Party, the right-wing
billionaire Koch brothers, and the Supreme Court’s oligarchic
Citizens United decision. He denounced Republican efforts to
disenfranchise Black voters. He called for major federal jobs
programs and infrastructure investments, combined with progressive
taxation and single-payer health insurance, to fight poverty, create
good jobs, and redistribute wealth and power in the U.S.
It was a good progressive speech on numerous levels. Dr. King would
have politely applauded throughout most of it. At the same time, the
great Civil Rights leader would have been disturbed by the absence
in Sanders’ oration of any comprehension or concern whatsoever
regarding the last of King’s “triple evils.” As King would certainly
note if he were alive today, Bernie is – just like some of King’s
fellow democratic-socialist Civil Rights and anti-poverty leaders
(Bayard Rustin, Michael Harrington, and A. Phillip Randolph) in the
mid-1960s – hung up on the U.S. war machine.
Sanders’ silence on the final component of King’s great triplet at
the SCLC is consistent with his long and ongoing record of
supporting Washington’s criminal military adventures (when they are
commanded by U.S. Presidents from the Democratic Party) abroad and
Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. The Senator barrels ahead,
calling for expensive (and desperately needed) domestic social and
environmental programs without making any serious reference to how
the United States’ gargantuan war budget devours more than half of
the nation’s federal discretionary spending – without any attention
to Dr. King’s warnings on “spiritual death.” He upholds the
social-democratic Scandinavian welfare states as a role model for
the U.S. without noting the critical fact that Denmark, Norway, and
Sweden dedicate comparatively tiny portions of their budgets to
military spending. He seems unwilling to acknowledge that the U.S.
cannot have the progressive changes he advocates as long as it
remains a military superpower with tentacles of deadly and vastly
expensive force in nearly every corner of the planet.
"Once again make the United States the leader in the world in the
fight for economic and social justice, for environmental sanity and
for a world of peace." But when was the US ever such a leader? It
was a curiously propagandistic statement with little respect for the
historical record. Dr. King would rightly have found it very odd.
Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm,
2014)
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