Martin Luther King, Jr., Vietnam, and Gaza

Before my mind was turned to the subject of my title, I started to write a piece called “Are the Dead Nostalgic?”

It’s a touchy philosophical question that has no definitive answer. It seems flippant in an impossible way, which it is, but its flippancy holds a secret message.  So I asked the dead who would speak to me and got a few mixed and muffled replies. You can understand their reluctance to say anything. If I heard correctly, one of them said, “You should ask the living.” Most didn’t answer, which had me wondering why. Were they disgusted with us?

I have always heard that nostalgia was not good for you since it kept you rooted in the past; that this ache for home – the good old days that may or may not have existed but you miss them nevertheless – prevented you from living Zen-like in the present or looking forward to the future. But I wondered if nostalgia could be a form of utopian hope in reverse at a time when humanistic utopian thinking is at a nadir, overwhelmed by the machine dreams of people like Elon Musk and those at the World Economic Forum.

This denigration of nostalgia assumed you were alive. I was wondering about the dead. What did they think? Did they wish they were still alive? Was being alive the good old days for them or did they feel they were finally home and that life had been a dream?

Or did the dead have no future, no nothing, or perhaps some afterglow of sorts, an everlasting rest in peace, whatever that may mean, a phrase that always seemed to me a bad knock on life. Who wants to sleep forever?

I guess I was thinking that if I could get in touch with the dead and get them talking, they might also tell me what it was like to be dead. Although I am no statistical whiz, I figured there were a lot more of them than us and the odds were pretty good that someone there would spill the beans.

I thought of this recently when watching the new film about Bob Dylan’s early years, A Complete Unknown, when his girlfriend, Sylvie Russo (based on Suze Rotolo, played by Elle Fanning) gets angry at him for concealing his true past and identity, and he replies, “People make up their past, Silly, they make up what they want; forget the rest.”

This was especially true for Dylan in his early years and has a ring of truth for everyone to a lesser extent, whether it’s from memory lapses or some sense of wanting to fictionalize their pasts for reasons known only to them. Our memories and forgeteries are interesting creative faculties.

But as I said, I was interested in the dead. Did they also do that? Were they nostalgic?

Then this proclivity of mine toward philosophical thought and dark humor flipped in my mind as the pictures of dead and weeping Palestinian children swept in and tortured me in dreams. I had seen the photos and videos of the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians and felt sick and outraged afterwards. I have written against it many times. Yet as I wrote about this issue of nostalgia, I felt like a speculator in abstractions, and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s experience when on January 14, 1967 he was at an airport restaurant thumbing through a Ramparts magazine and saw an article by the journalist William Pepper, “The Children of Vietnam” that featured photos of Vietnamese mothers holding dead and napalmed children. In 1999, the author James W. Douglass (JFK and the Unspeakable, etc.) wrote an essay describing this serendipitous event for King:

The final chapter of Martin Luther King’s life began on January l4, l967, the day on which King committed himself to deepening his opposition to the Vietnam War. He was at an airport restaurant on his way to a retreat in Jamaica. While looking through magazines, he came across an illustrated article in Ramparts, “The Children of Vietnam.” His coworker Bernard Lee never forgot King’s shock as he looked at photographs of young napalm victims.

He froze as he looked at the pictures from Vietnam. He saw a picture of a Vietnamese mother holding her dead baby, a baby killed by our military. Then Martin just pushed the plate of food away from him. I looked up and said, “Doesn’t it taste any good,” and he answered, “Nothing will ever taste any good for me until I do everything I can to end that war.”

Martin King was overwhelmed with grief and outrage. Against all advice from his associates in the civil rights movement, he realized he must publicly and unequivocally oppose the Vietnam war, which he did two-and-a half months later on April 4 at Riverside Church in the New York City in his famous speech – Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence – in which he denounced the U.S. war against Vietnam, linking it to his battle against racism and for economic justice for everybody. He became a revolutionary. It led to his assassination by the U.S. government exactly one year later on April 4, 1968 in Memphis. But his legacy lives on, despite the official MLK Day attempts to reduce him to a manageable dead threat and a one-trick pony.

Conscience calls at odd moments to roil one’s soul. It sneaks into one’s dreams and daytime thoughts, even in synchronous ways as I realize that today’s date is January 14th, 58 years to the day MLK saw those photos in Ramparts.

Just yesterday, while listening to a podcast, I heard the historian Peter Kuznik say that when he asks his students at American University, who have all been to the Vietnam Memorial wall and seen the names of the 58,318 dead Americans, how many Vietnamese were killed in the war, they answer in the range of 90,000. While on a trip to Hanoi last year, Kuznik learned that the official Vietnamese count is 5 million, to which one could add another 1 million Thai, Laotian, and Cambodians. Kuznik had been assuming the 3.8 million dead Vietnamese figure was correct, but his bright students had no idea because their knowledge of history is abysmal.

Similarly, just this past week, the English medical journal The Lancet reported that the death toll in Gaza in the first nine months as a result of Israel’s genocidal assault was about 40 % higher than reported by the Palestinian Health Ministry. The study’s best estimate puts the number of dead Palestinians (excluding the severely injured, those dead from starvation, those missing under the rubble, etc.) at approximately 64,000 from October 7, 2023 to June 30, 2024. Of those, the study concluded that approximately 60 % were women, children, and old people. As everyone knows, Israel has turned Gaza into a wasteland and a killing field that has continued to the present day, with Israel furiously continuing to attack, killing 38 Palestinians yesterday.

As with the death figures from Vietnam, these numbers are no doubt greatly underestimated and can be multiplied by three, four, or more. But if you follow the corporate mainstream media, especially in the U.S. and its adjuncts, you will learn nothing of this. It is assumed that people don’t care and are more interested in strange flying objects over the skies of the northeast that have ostensibly disappeared until they will be revived, the sex and drinking habits of Trump’s cabinet nominees, and the latest sports and celebrity news.

Many don’t care and many do, but people generally feel battered and overwhelmed by the insane condition of the country, the endless news reports of all the things to fear, the political dirty tricks and propaganda, the corruption, the rip-offs, the lies and posturing, etc.

Many have been so dumbed down by the endless propaganda that they will believe anything.

Most people may not know how to articulate their rage and disgust, but they sense that something is terribly wrong and fear it will get worse. They may not want to take it anymore and are mad as hell but realize screaming out their windows at the air as in the classic film Network will not remedy anything. They wait in dread, depressed, but deny it.

Half the voting population has invested their hopes in Trump just as the other half did with Biden – both delusional in the extreme. Those dead Palestinian children that torment me are the results of the Biden administration’s alliance with fellow Israeli Zionist Netanyahu – two bloody nihilists – now to be replaced by Trump, a third enthusiastic supporter of genocide.

Those of us who have been speaking out for years are also tired. I am tired. The recent Israeli/U.S. bloody victories in the Mideast came as a shock to those who hoped Israel and the Netanyahu government would be forced to desist. The opposite has occurred. Lebanon, Syria, Yemen – is Iran next?

(And you will notice that I have not even mentioned Ukraine and the U.S. war against Russia.)

It’s heavy stuff, hard on the spirit, so perhaps you can understand my desire to delve into philosophical and artistic matters from time to time.

I think of the poem To Those Born Later, by the German poet Bertolt Brecht:

What kind of times are they, when
A talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
That man there calmly crossing the street
Is already perhaps beyond the reach of his friends
Who are in need?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

They say to me: Eat and drink! Be glad you have it!
But how can I eat and drink if I snatch what I eat
From the starving, and
My glass of water belongs to one dying of thirst?
And yet I eat and drink.

I would also like to be wise.
In the old books it says that wisdom is:
To shun the strife of the world and to live out
Your brief time without fear
Also to get along without violence
To return good for evil
Not to fulfil your desires but to forget them
Is accounted wise.
All this I cannot do.
Truly, I live in dark times.

Yes, so do we. But the most terrible atrocities have taken place on a vast scale for a very long time. Are they seen as almost normal now, the “new” reality? So much so that our faculty for forgetting and dismissing them far outweighs our will to remember?

Yet sometimes a time to break the silence is always now, and a message comes to us to remember to speak out. The official organs of the government and press on January 20th will once again urge everyone to remember Martin Luther King, Jr. as a statue from the past, frozen in time, a fighter for racial justice but nothing else. His opposition to the triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism will be ignored. Who will say that if he were alive today he would condemn the genocide in Gaza, the U.S. war against Russian via Ukraine, and war making throughout the world? In his speech from Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 that led to his death, he said:

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The “tide in the affairs of men” does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on…” We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

No doubt Satan will be laughing with delight as Donald Trump is sworn in as president on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

I still wonder: Are the dead nostalgic?  I hope so.