[Peace-discuss] Trumpet of Conscience

[David Johnson]

>
>> Trumpet of Conscience
>> Remembering the Officially Deleted Dr. King
>> by PAUL STREET
>>
>> " It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws ? racism, 
>> poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are 
>> rooted deeply in the whole structure of out society. It reveals systemic 
>> rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction 
>> society of society itself is the real issue to be faced.?[12]
>> Those words ? words you will not hear via ?mainstream? media during the 
>> national King Day celebrations? ring as true and urgent as ever today, as 
>> it becomes undeniable that the profits system?s inner core of despotism 
>> is driving humanity over an environmental cliff. "
>
> Last summer I happened upon a neat find in a used book store. I found an 
> original edition of Martin Luther  King?s posthumously published book The 
> Trumpet of Conscience (New York: Harper & Row, 1968) ? a compilation of 
> five lectures King gave over the Canadian Broadcasting System (CBC) during 
> November and December of 1967, just five months before his assassination 
> (or execution) in Memphis. The CBC had invited King to talk about anything 
> he considered relevant not only in the U.S. but around the world.
>> The Trumpet of Conscience does not jibe well with the conventional 
>> domesticated and whitewashed image of King that is purveyed across the 
>> nation ever year during and around the national holiday the bears his 
>> name.  That image portrays King as a moderate reformer who wanted little 
>> more than a few basic civil rights adjustments in a mostly benevolent 
>> American System ? a loyal supplicant who was tearfully grateful to the 
>> nation?s leaders for finally making those adjustments.
>> The official commemoration says nothing about the Dr. King who studied 
>> Marx sympathetically at a young age[1] and who said in his last years 
>> that ?if we are to achieve real equality, the United States will have to 
>> adopt a modified form of socialism? [2]. It deletes the King who wrote 
>> that the ?real issue to be faced? beyond superficial matter was ?the 
>> radical reconstruction society of society itself.?[3]
>> In his first talk (?Impasse in Race Relations?), King reflected on how 
>> little the black freedom struggle had actually attained beyond some 
>> fractional changes in the South. He deplored ?the arresting of the 
>> limited forward progress? blacks and their allies had attained ?by [a] 
>> white resistance [that] revealed the latent racism that was [still] 
>> deeply rooted in U.S. society.?
>> ?As elation and expectations died,? King explained, ?Negroes became more 
>> sharply aware that the goal of freedom was still distant and our 
>> immediate plight was substantially still an agony of deprivation. In the 
>> past decade, little has been done for Northern ghettoes. Al the 
>> legislation was to remedy Southern conditions ? and even these were only 
>> partially improved? (p.6).
>> Worse than merely limited, the gains won by black Americans during what 
>> King considered the ?first phase? of their freedom struggle (1955-1965) 
>> were dangerous in that they ?brought whites a sense of completion? ? a 
>> preposterous impression that the so-called ?Negro problem? had been 
>> solved and that there was therefore no more basis or justification for 
>> further black activism. ?When Negroes assertively moved on to ascend to 
>> the second rung of the ladder,? King noted, ?a firm resistance from the 
>> white community developed?.In some quarters it was a courteous rejection, 
>> in others it was a singing white backlash. In all quarters unmistakably 
>> it was outright resistance? (p.6).
>> ?The White Man Does Not Abide by Law?
>> Explaining the remarkable wave of race riots that washed across U.S. 
>> cities in the summers of 1966 and 1967, King made no apologies for black 
>> violence. He blamed ?the white power structure?still seeking to keep the 
>> walls of segregation and inequality intact? for the disturbances. He 
>> found the leading cause of the riots in the reactionary posture of ?the 
>> white society, unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural 
>> change,? which? produc[ed] chaos? by telling blacks (whose expectations 
>> for substantive change had been aroused) ?that they must expect to remain 
>> permanently unequal and permanently poor? (9-10, emphasis added).
>> King also blamed the riots in part on Washington?s imperialist and 
>> mass-murderous ?war in [here he might have better said ?on?] Vietnam.? 
>> The military aggression against Southeast Asia stole resources from 
>> Johnson?s briefly declared and barely fought ?War on Poverty.? It sent 
>> poor blacks to the front killing lines to a disproportionate degree. It 
>> advanced the 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 in his second CBC lecture, adding that he ?could not 
>> be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor? (p. 23).
>> Racial hypocrisy aside, King said that ?a nation that continues year 
>> after year to spend more money on military defense [here he might better 
>> have said ?military empire?] than on programs of social uplift is 
>> approaching spiritual doom? (p.33).
>> Did the rioters disrespect the law, as their liberal and conservative 
>> critics alike charged? Yes, King said, but added that the rioters? 
>> transgressions were ?derivative crimes?born of the greater crimes of 
>> the?policy-makers of the white society,? who ?created 
>> discrimination?created slums. [and] perpetuate unemployment, ignorance, 
>> and poverty?.[T]he white man,? King elaborated, ?does not abide by law in 
>> the ghetto. Day in and day out he violates welfare laws to deprive the 
>> poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes 
>> and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; he violates laws on 
>> equal employment and education and the provision of public services. The 
>> slums are a handiwork of a vicious system of the white society.? (p.8).
>> Did the rioters engage in violence? Yes, King said in his fourth lecture, 
>> but noted that their aggression was ?to a startling degree?focused 
>> against property rather than against people.? He observed that ?property 
>> represents the white power structure, which [the rioters] were 
>> [understandably] attacking and trying to destroy? (pp. 56-57). Against 
>> those who held property ?sacred,? King argued that ?Property is intended 
>> to serve life, and no matter how much we surround with rights and 
>> respect, it has no personal being?
>> ?The Roots are in the System?
>> What to do? King advanced significant policy changes that went against 
>> the grain of the nation?s corporate state, reflecting his agreement with 
>> New Left Radicals that ?only by structural change can current evils be 
>> eliminated, because the roots are in the system rather in man or faulty 
>> operations? (p.40). King advocated an emergency national program 
>> providing either decent-paying jobs for all or a guaranteed national 
>> income ?at levels that sustain life in decent circumstances.? He also 
>> called tor ?demolition of slums and rebuilding by the population that 
>> lives in them? (p. 14).
>> His proposals, he said, aimed for more than racial justice alone. Seeking 
>> to abolish poverty for all, including poor whites, he felt that ?the 
>> Negro revolt? had come to challenge what he called ?the interrelated 
>> triple evils? of racism, economic injustice/poverty (capitalism) and war 
>> (militarism and imperialism). It had ?evolve[ed] into more than a quest 
>> for desegregation and equality? by becoming ?a challenge to a system that 
>> has created miracles of production and technology to create justice.?
>> ?If humanism is locked outside the system,? King said in his opening 
>> lecture, ?Negroes will have revealed its inner core of despotism and a 
>> far grater struggle for liberation will unfold. The United States is 
>> substantially challenged to demonstrate that it can abolish not only the 
>> evils of racism but the scourge of poverty and the horrors of war?.? (pp. 
>> 16-17, emphasis added).
>> There should be no doubt that King meant capitalism when he referred to 
>> ?the system? and its ?inner core of despotism.?[4]
>> ?They Must Organize a Revolution?. Against the Privileged Minority of the 
>> Earth?
>> No careful listener to King?s CBC talks could have missed the radicalism 
>> of his vision and tactics. ?The dispossessed of this nation ? the poor, 
>> both White and Negro ? live in a cruelly unjust society,? King said in 
>> his fourth lecture. ?They must organize a revolution against that 
>> injustice,? he added (p. 59)..
>> Such a revolution would require ?more then a statement to the larger 
>> society,? more than ?street marches? King proclaimed. ?There must,? he 
>> added, ?be a force that interrupts [that society?s] functioning at some 
>> key point.? That force would use ?mass civil disobedience? to ?transmute 
>> the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force? by 
>> ?dislocate[ing] the functioning of a society.?
>> ?The storm is rising against the privileged minority of the earth,? King 
>> added for good measure. ?The storm will not abate until [there is a] just 
>> distribution of the fruits of the earth?? (p. 17). As this reference to 
>> the entire earth suggested, the ?massive, active, nonviolent resistance 
>> to the evils of the modern system? (p. 48) that King advocated was 
>> ?international in scope,? reflecting the fact that ?the poor countries 
>> are poor primarily because [rich Western nations] have exploited them 
>> through political or economic colonialism. Americans in particular must 
>> help their nation repent of her modern economic imperialism? (p. 62).
>> In the Trumpet of Conscience you read a democratic socialist 
>> mass-disobedience world revolution advocate who the guardians of national 
>> memory don?t want you know about when they honor the official, 
>> doctrinally imposed memory of King.
>> Regression, Betrayal, and ?The Mendacity of Hope?
>> The threat posed to that official memory by King?s CBC lectures ? and by 
>> much more that King did and said and write in the last three years of his 
>> life ? is not just that they show an officially iconic gradualist 
>> reformer to have been a radical opponent of the profits system and its 
>> empire. It is also about how clearly King analyzed the incomplete and 
>> unfinished nature of the nation?s progress against racial and class 
>> injustice, around which all forward developments pretty much ceased in 
>> the 1970s, thanks to a white backlash that was already well underway in 
>> the early and mid-1960s (before the rise of the Black Panthers) and to a 
>> top-down corporate war on working class Americans that started under 
>> Jimmy Carter and went ballistic under Ronald Reagan.
>> The ?spiritual doom? imposed by militarism has lived on, with Washington 
>> having directly and indirectly killed untold millions of Iraqis, Central 
>> Americans, South Americans, Africans, Muslims, Arabs, and Asians in many 
>> different ways over the years since Vietnam.[5] Accounting for half the 
>> world?s obscene military expenditure, the U.S. maintains Cold War-level 
>> ?defense? (empire) budgets to sustain an historically unmatched global 
>> killing machine (which operates from more than 1000 bases located in more 
>> than 100 ?sovereign? nations) even as the current record-setting number 
>> of officially poor Americans remains stuck at 46 million, a very 
>> disproportionate number of whom are black and Latino/a.
>> It is ironic that Barack Obama keeps a bust of King in the White House?s 
>> oval office to watch over his regular betrayal of the martyred peace and 
>> justice leader?s ideals. Consistent with Dr. Adolph Reed Jr.?s early 
>> (1996) dead-on description of the future President as ?a smooth Harvard 
>> lawyer with impeccable credentials and vacuous to repressive neoliberal 
>> politics?[6], President Obama has consistently backed top corporate and 
>> financial interests (whose representatives have filled and dominated his 
>> administrations, campaigns, and campaign coffers) over and against those 
>> who would undertake serious programs to end poverty, redistribute wealth 
>> (the savage re-concentration of which since Dr. King?s time has produced 
>> a New Gilded Age in the U.S.), constrain capital, and save livable 
>> ecology as it approaches a number of critical tipping points on the 
>> accelerating path to irreversible catastrophe. Thus is that one of 
>> Obama?s supporters was moved in late 2012 to complain that a pres
>> ident ?whose platform consists of Romney?s health care bill, Newt 
>> Gingrich?s environmental policies, John McCain?s deficit-financed payroll 
>> tax cuts, George W. Bush?s bailouts of filing banks and corporations, and 
>> a mixture of the Bush and Clinton tax rate? was still being denounced as 
>> a leftist enemy of business by the Republicans.[7]
>> Obama has opposed calls for any special programs or serious federal 
>> attention to the nation?s savage racial inequalities, so vast now that 
>> the median of white households is 20 times that of black households and 
>> 18 times that of Hispanic households. He has done this while the fact of 
>> his ascendency to the White House has deeply reinforced white America?s 
>> sense that racism is over as a barrier to black advancement and has 
>> generated its own significant white backlash that only worsens the 
>> situation of less privileged black Americans. He has made it clear that 
>> what Dr. King called (white) America?s unpaid ?promissory note? and ?bad 
>> check? to black America [8] will remain un-cashed under his watch ? 
>> consistent with his preposterous 2007 campaign claim (at a commemoration 
>> of the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March) to believe that blacks had already 
>> come ?90 percent? of the way to equality in the U.S.[9]
>> Completing the ?triple evils? hat trick, Obama ? he of the of personally 
>> approved Special Forces Global War on (of) Terror Kill List ? has 
>> embraced and expanded upon the vast criminal and worldwide spying and 
>> killing operation he inherited from Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and 
>> Bush. He has tamped down their spent and failed ground wars only to ramp 
>> up and inflate the role of unaccountable special force and drone attacks 
>> in the spirit of his dashing and reckless imperial role model John 
>> Fitzgerald Kennedy. In waging his deadly and disastrous air war on Libya, 
>> he did not even bother with the pretense of seeking Congressional 
>> approval. Meanwhile he has far outdone the Cheney-Bush regime when it 
>> comes to repressing antiwar dissenters, not to mention those who oppose 
>> the rule of the 1 percent ? smashed by a coordinated federal campaign in 
>> the fall of 2011.?As all kinds of journalists have continuously pointed 
>> out,? Glenn Greenwald notes, ?the Obama administration is more aggressiv
>> e and more vindictive when it comes to punishing whistleblowers than any 
>> administration in American history, including the Nixon administration.? 
>> [10]
>> ?A Calling Beyond National Allegiances?
>> Thinking of the FTBP?s imperial record, I am reminded of something King 
>> said in his second CBC lecture. Explaining why he had turned against the 
>> Vietnam War, King noted that ?a burden of responsibility was placed upon 
>> me in 1964: I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a 
>> commission ? a commission to work harder that I had ever worked before 
>> for ?the brotherhood of man.? This is a calling which takes me beyond 
>> national allegiances ?to the making of peace? (p.25).
>> In answering that call, King stood to the portside of leading U.S. 1960s 
>> social democrats like Bayard Rustin, A Phillip Randolph, and Michael 
>> Harrington.  These and other left leaders (e.g. Max Shachtman and Tom 
>> Kahn) were unwilling to forthrightly oppose the US-imperial assault on 
>> Indochina because of their misplaced faith in pursuing the fight against 
>> poverty in alliance with the pro-war Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO 
>> [11] Besides opposing the war on moral grounds, King understood very well 
>> that expenses of crushing Vietnam were precluding and cancelling out 
>> anti-poverty spending.
>> A Testament of Radical Hope
>> Perhaps the Obama experience is at least a lesson on how progressive 
>> change is about something much bigger than a change in the party or color 
>> of the people in nominal power. That is certainly something King (who 
>> would be 85 today) would have thought has been able to witness the 
>> endless mendacity of the the nation?s first half-white president 
>> first-hand. ?The black revolution,? King wrote in a posthumously 
>> published 1969 essay titled ?A Testament of Hope? ? embracing a very 
>> different sort of hope than that purveyed by Brand Obama in 2008 ? ?is 
>> much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing 
>> America to face all its interrelated flaws ? racism, poverty, militarism, 
>> and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole 
>> structure of out society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial 
>> flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction society of society itself 
>> is the real issue to be faced.?[12]
>> Those words ? words you will not hear via ?mainstream? media during the 
>> national King Day celebrations? ring as true and urgent as ever today, as 
>> it becomes undeniable that the profits system?s inner core of despotism 
>> is driving humanity over an environmental cliff and that it has become 
>> eco-?socialism or barbarism if we?re lucky.?
>> Paul Street (paul.street99 at gmail.com) is the author of many books, 
>> including Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (Rowman & 
>> Littlefield, 2007), Segregated Schools (Routledge, 2005) and They Rule: 
>> The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014).
>> *******************************************
>