President Obama accepts his Nobel Peace Prize by calling Afghanistan a "just war." The Nobel chairman claims "Dr. King's dream has come true." What?
By Daniela Perdomo, AlterNet
Posted on December 10, 2009, Printed on December 10, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/144488/
Yesterday I was reeling in advance of Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, because the press had gotten wind that he would use his time at the podium to explain that Afghanistan is part of his larger plan for peace. Not surprisingly, the Orwellian slogan, WAR IS PEACE, flashed in my mind.
I was embarrassed for the committee that had awarded him the prize, as they'd made clear they were honoring him in hopes of reinforcing the international community's hopes that Obama's administration would not follow in the Bush cadre's warring footsteps. And now they were going to have to sit and hear him speak of war as a medium for its antonym -- peace. How excruciating.
My empathy seems to have been misplaced, however, because the Nobel chairman opened the Oslo ceremony with a speech in which he declared that "Dr. King's dream has come true."
Really?
It is hard for me to understand the comparison between a president who says war can be "morally justified" -- as Obama did -- and a civil rights leader who in a famous 1967 sermon, explained that he opposed the war in Vietnam on moral grounds.
The parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan are many, and have been detailed by almost as many. But Obama's speech today, combined with the ludicrous lauding of him as the peace-making heir to King made me pause and revisit a speech that in so many ways could have been given today.
In 1967, King drove home his belief that the "giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation" in America had stripped it of the moral right to instruct any other nation on the ways of its government and society.
He lamented that "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
King gave this speech as he watched the civil rights movement's progress take a backseat to an unpopular, unjustifable war abroad. I can only imagine that he would feel the same heart-wrenching disappointment today, when at least 10 percent of Americans are unemployed, home foreclosures are rising, over 40 million people are uninsured, and social programs across the country are being cut as we all the while fund yet another morally bankrupt war.
In that beautiful sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, King spoke of his hope that "a true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies." Four decades later and that revolution of values has not come.
Indeed, King likely would have interpreted Obama's speech today as the same kind of "Western arrogance" he saw the United States display toward Vietnam.
And it wasn't just Vietnam he thought was wrong -- King hoped for a day when the world order would "say of war, 'This way of settling differences is not just.'" To King, of course, there was no such thing as a "just war."
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Listen to MLK's 1967 sermon in its entirety:
Daniela Perdomo is a contributing writer & editor for AlterNet. Follow her on Twitter.
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