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First Jeremy Scahill tweets, then Salon.com follows, then HuffingtonPost has a big front page story, all accusing the Defense Department’s General Counsel of giving a speech wherein he says that Martin Luther King, Jr. would be okaywith the various wars in which the U.S. is currently engaged.
The problem, though, is that is NOT what his speech said. Don’t take my word for it, read the speech for yourself, slowly. It is an insider’s history of the evolution of MLK written by a man, Jeh Johnson, who worked to bring this holiday about and whose family history is intertwined with Dr. King and his advocacy.
It’s upsetting to see a bunch of people who want to reduce a complicated flesh and blood man like Dr. King into some silhouette symbol without nuance, or subtlety. I know, I know; it’s called “branding”.
However, the Dr. King of Jeh’s experience was not a symbol, he was was a real man, and the father of his friend of 35 years. Knowing the human being, Jeh makes the unremarkable statement that Dr. King would have realized that the world is a complicated place. The point of the speech is to lament that while Mrs. King was able to realize her dream of a holiday honoring her slain husband, Dr. King’s dream of a world at peace has not been realized. . . .
Somehow, that got twisted into “Pentagon Official: King would support Iraq, Afghan Wars.” READ THE SPEECH, I dare you to find that in there.
And in all honesty, it’s not totally the fault of the people who jumped on this. For reasons unknown to me, instead of putting up the full text of the Johnson speech, DOD wrote an article that took quotes out of context and with a headline that was at best — ahem — misleading. For this, DOD deserves whatever scorn you care to lay on the department.
Go read the speech, and learn some things about Dr. King that maybe you never knew before.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have known, liked and admired Jeh Johnson for over 20 years, ever since our days on the seventh floor at the U.S. Attorney’s Office-SDNY. When I first saw the Scahill tweet, I knew there had to be some mistake, because the Jeh Johnson I know is simply not that big of a jerk. He’s not any kind of a jerk. Go read the speech.
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Wasn’t King assassinated on the anniversary of his anti-war speech at Riverside Church? Wasn’t the significance of the date part of the message?
Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html
Thanks for the link to the Johnson speech.
I read the speech.
MLK Jr. saw through the lies and recognized the US invasion of Vietnam for the unspeakable atrocity that it was. Johnson clearly implies that King would view the unprovoked acts of US military aggression against the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan as something other than crimes, ostensibly due to the 9/11 attack (with not a single Iraqi or Afghani among the perpetrators) and strangely enough because of his own romanticized belief in the mythical exceptionalism and inherently superior moral virtue that American military personnel are apparently endowed with. (They aren’t volunteers, by the way. Volunteers don’t have jobs, they don’t draw wages, and they can walk away whenever they want. This is no volunteer army; it is a mercenary army made up of the poor and middle class).
I personally believe that MLK Jr. would see through the lies this time, too, and take the same principled stand he took against the war in SE Asia. And I also believe that if he didn’t, he would deserve to be denounced along with all the other apologists for American imperial entitlement who are busy defending the current mass murder operations being waged, once again, against largely defenseless and devastated societies.
Interesting that Bob “The Butcher” Gates managed to ingratiate himself so thoroughly at Morehouse by giving a speech of his own. I too will always remember Bob for some words I heard him say, not in a speech but over a BBC broadcast back in late December 1984 when he was Reagan’s Deputy Director of the CIA and I was an NGO paramedic at a crumbling rural orphanage near Perquin, El Salvador. On the clip they played he was making his case for direct USAF bombing of villages in Nicaragua, villages that I knew were just as full of MADE-IN-THE-USA misery and despair as the one I was living in at the time.
Bob was nothing but a war criminal then, and he’s nothing but a war criminal now.
And Jeremy Scahill is right.
This Post is a defense of the murderers and torturers, such as Johnson. Johnson might be your good friend but there is no shortage of warmongers catapulting the propaganda. Why are you helping them with more pro war propaganda?
Johnson claims Martin would support these criminal wars. NO NO NO! Then Johnson invokes Jesus to support his wars. Jesus does not support war. It is the US government who has left us open to attack time and time again. Ali Mohamed. David Headley, Underwear Bomber, False confessions from torture and Killer Assassination Drones operated by Lockheed.
Johnson is just another war profiteer getting well paid to lie. But Johnson’s wars have put me and many other people into poverty.
You and Johnson also neglected the COINTELPRO, government attempt to destroy Martin Luther King Jr. It was successful. Martin was assassinated. Stop defending the well paid warmongers in the Pentagon.
Bob was nothing but a war criminal then, and he’s nothing but a war criminal now.
“And Jeremy Scahill is right.”
Am I missing something …. did you mean to say this?
Not every member of the armed services is a murderer or a torturer. An awful lot are just kids with no other job prospects and looking to get some college aide. Some are actually committed patriots who have been every bit as appalled as you and I over the things that have come to light.
Today’s military does things that we don’t traditionally think of as warmaking, like building roads and power plants and sewer systems.
It’s weird, we outsource some of the fighting to outfits like Blackwater, but keep in-house things like construction work and training of the workers who will operate infrastructure once we are gone.
Right now in Afghanistan they are finishing up the construction work before the troops withdraw.
When you are speaking to a group of warriors about what they have in common with a man famous for his adherence to non violence, you don’t have a long list to choose from.
So, he chose to emphasize their service. The infrastructure and training that they will leave behind.
Yesterday, in an email, Marcy suggested to me that such a speech could have been used to celebrate the integration leadership that the armed forces has exhibited going back to, I think it was, Truman and which will soon be made more complete with the end of DADT and the fact that military service and the associated college benefits has been the path out of poverty for some who were born disadvantaged.
Maybe that would have been a better topic, I don’t know. I could see people get PO’d about the military patting itself on the back.
When I read this speech the final conclusion is what hit me the hardest: that although Mrs. King got her dream of a holiday honoring her husband, it is a sad irony that Dr. King did not get his dream of peace.
I know that it mentions what Obama said about the wars in his Nobel acceptance speech, and some people have read that as conflating Obama’s position with MLK’s. Obama’s position is very different than MLK’s and Obama said as much in his own Nobel speech.
I did not have that confusion between which was Obama’s position and which was MLK’s when I read the Johnson speech. However, if others did, that is a potential problem of inartfulness. Since, I suffered no such confusion, I don’t actually “see” the problem and have to accept on faith if others say they found it confusing.
I wonder though, would they have been confused if they had ONLY read the speech without coming to it with preloaded animus created by the headlines and created by that god-awful article written by the DOD flack.
I really believe the problem here is that misleading article which attributes to that speech things that were not in there and were not intended to be implied.
Because of the article, people are trying to find support for the article in the speech and reading things between the lines that they might not have, but for the crappy article.
Make no mistake about it, DOD deserves to be smacked around for putting out that article and that headline, but that does not change what this speech means in its totality.
You want to be mad at somebody, be mad at the idiot who started this whole mess by misrepresenting what was in that speech.
“Those in today’s volunteer Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps have made the conscious decision to travel a dangerous road, and personally stop and administer aid to those who want peace, freedom and a better place in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in defense of the American people.”
No, we are not there as coming down the road to offer aid rather we are the criminals who beat, robbed and left for dead or left death behind, the form of depleted uranium, the fellow in the ditch. The death, destruction and the turning our promising young into murderous thugs is nothing the Dr. Martin Luther King,Jr. would endorse in any way shape or form.
Sounds like your dear friend engages in some serious denial about the business end of the magnificent “merican murder machine and the ground meat we leave behind for which there is no aid this world can offer.
Historically speaking, one would have to conclude that Dr. King would have opposed all wars. He was an advocate of non-violence.
We are not there in any way to better the Afghanistan people’s lot in life. With all of the drone attacks, murdering civilians, night raids to keep the pot stirred, and fighting the taliban (which was not a reason to be there) when Al Qaeda was no long really operative, we are in no way doing anything that MLK would condone. In addition, nothing we are doing in the ME is in anyway protecting us from anything.
Ms. Kouril, I think that friendship can distort our vision as much as any poorly written headline.
The all-volunteer army is there to make a paycheck.
The Armed Forces are hiring, this is a pitch to get those in direst straits (African Americans of course) to enlist.
Were Dr. King alive today, I’m sure he would be questioning President Obama’s efforts to stop the International Criminal Court
in Spain from continuing prosecution efforts against the U.S.
Terror Attacks in Iraq, and Afghanistan/Pakistan. He would no doubt be behind our only present hope -Nigeria- in bringing to Justice the
the criminal shadow president Dick Cheney, and his filthy crony political crime family. DOD is run by Rothschild Zionists these days it seems, hell bent on blaming Muslims for the U.S. putting the World past the Peak Oil Mark.
“When you are speaking to a group of warriors about what they have in common with a man famous for his adherence to non violence, you don’t have a long list to choose from.”
The list gets longer when you toss out the Bush-propandized “warrior” status and return “soldier” to the esteem and focus it once had. I had hoped Obama and Johnson would do that right away, but they didn’t.
No return to the old version of soldiers creed.
This:
would have given him more to work with.
But David Dayen did link to full remarks.
http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/01/14/jeh-johnsons-full-remarks-at-pentagon-on-martin-luther-king-and-afghanistan/#comment-80383
Those showed the proverbial strawman carryover that the Bushies bequeathed to Obamaco
You know – pulling out of Vietnam wasn’t a lay dow of arms that left us vulnerable to communist overthrow of our govt. It doesn’t excuse this kind of nonsense to say that Dr. King was a “real man” to Johnson.
His invocation of the good samaritan story – as the guy who tried to keep the collateral murder video covered up, the one where the
soldiercrows over killing the good samaritan who was trying to help the injured and then, when he sees the maimed children, snorts *that’s what they get* – was way less than compelling.Did he specifically say the string of words that King would have supported the Afghan and Iraq wars? No – he didn’t, just like Bush didn’t have to very directly, very often, say the precise words “Iraq was behind 9/11″
When you say that we are fighting in Afghanistan and Dr. King wouldn’t have wanted you
soldierswarriors to lay down your arms and leave America vulnerable to attack – what was he saying?Iraq/9-11. Dr. King/Afghan deployments.
One’s as egregious as the other.
It was an awful conflation and he should be ashamed.
I think it’s perfectly fair to characterize what Johnson said that way. He certainly does suggest that MLK would support our wars, which is false.
Almost all the speech is interesting and important, and then at the end where he talks about the “complicated world”, he starts lying.
Carlos is right. Johnson clearly implies that King would support the Afghan war.
First, Johnson relates King’s story about the priest and the Levite walking on a road and failing to stop to help a man in need. Then Johnson implies that we are in Afghanistan to “stop and administer aid to those who want peace, freedom and a better place” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Overall, Johnson is trying to argue that our invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan is somehow consistent with MLK’s call to help those in need. Johnson should be ashamed of himself.
Here’s the problem I have with your post here and your journal entry in particular: you are elevating one wrong over another in an extremely reactionary way. The motivations of individual service members can be human, humane, exemplary. They can decide to serve in whatever capacity they can based on a feeling or an understanding that their service is based on aid, assistance, or justice. That by itself is commendable! However, when you are discussing the institutional effort, you can’t fall back on this nicety. This is where Johnson has really acted in a criminal way in my eyes. The mission of the DoD doesn’t and necessarily cannot simply take place in this aforementioned context, and that is an empirical fact made particularly clear by the history of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.
You say, “An awful lot are just kids with no other job prospects and looking to get some college aide.” This is undeniably true. This can only be another reason for condemnation of the DoD in King’s eyes. Don’t let me speak for the dead, hear it yourself:
“And you may not know it, my friends, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor, and much of that fifty-three dollars goes for salaries to people that are not poor. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor, and attack it as such.” -Dr. MLK, Jr. 1967 Ebenezer Baptist Speech
Their participation in these unjust wars we can see perhaps with some humanity and humility, knowing we also participate in this same injustice but just in different capacities–as willing consumers of goods coming from greedy companies, which all too often vocally or financially support these imperialist wars.
No, Ms. Kouril. This was not “started…by misrepresenting what was in that speech.” You don’t need to read between the lines to see what is a self-evidently gross appropriation and misrepresentation of Dr. King’s character by Jeh Johnson.