A Lesson For Today from Another Time

If you want to understand how America chooses (and funds) its allies in a conflict, it helps to understand what America's own values look like in a conflict.

"They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go -- primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one [enemy*]-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them -- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers."

"What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?"

-- Martin Luther King, Jr., speech delivered on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City (* King used “Vietcong” here, which I replaced with a view toward delaying the reader’s recognition of the Vietnam context.)

In his remarks to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) on March 1, 1991, President George H.W. Bush concluded, “It's a proud day for America. And, by God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”

Have we? Have we kicked it - or are we invested in it, doubling-down on our Vietnam policy in 2024?

The memory of Vietnam may be fading and blurring, but the political investment in curating that memory has taken on a curious significance and even urgency in the decades since Bush insisted we’d put the matter behind us.

If we take Dr. King’s contemporaneous assessment of America’s role in Vietnam as accurately characterizing one of the many lenses for that war, during that era, in which America’s approach to war-making and its regard for civilian life were viewed as being rooted in a lust for imperialism and the preservation of American hegemony, is it not fair to say that bankrolling Israel’s militarism in Gaza is an official affirmation of the counter-argument to Dr. King’s view, also widely held in that era (and gaining a resurgence of acceptance today) in which America’s engagement in Vietnam was viewed as idealistic, strategic, and even noble - insofar as the American hegemony was received by the invitation of a foreign regime and it was expressed as an intervention that was absolutely necessary to prolong the Pax Americana, even at the cost of a brutal war which some noisy, unpragmatic lightweights could not stomach?

Budgets are moral documents and, as such, the decision by Congress and President Biden to fund the military action in Gaza, essentially plants the same moral flag in Gaza that America officially planted on the Vietnam peninsula. Whether this fiscal decision is viewed as idealistic and righteous or it’s viewed, as King viewed America in Vietnam, a foul escapade in racist imperialism, we fly the same moral flag.

There are those who are invested in restoring American pride for its intervention in Indochina and there are those who want to never repeat the mistakes made there. It would be folly to try to persuade anyone to change their mind as to how they perceive Vietnam because the memories cannot be liberated from bias on account of being too fuzzy with age and also too raw and recent.

I’m just here to note that Dr. King reminded me this morning that America has returned, flag in hand, to a place it only professes it wants to escape.