SPIRITUAL DEATH:

(graphic: "Miss Liberty Cries" by Stephanie Bingham)

"ENLARGING ON MARTIN LUTHER KING'S PROFOUND TRUTH THAT MILITARIZED AMERICA IS APPROACHING SPIRITUAL DEATH"

by Dr. Gary G. Kohls, an American physician, writer and peace activist.

1/15/07

"A nation that continues, year after year, to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

Those were the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., in his famous speech on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his 1968 assassination in Memphis, TN. The people who heard that speech, articulating the immorality of the Vietnam War, recognized it as one of the most powerful speeches ever given. Some also saw that Dr. King was signing his own death warrant by having so forcefully exposed the perpetrators of what Thomas Merton accurately characterized as "the overwhelming atrocity that was Vietnam."

Dr. King was speaking out from his deeply-felt sense of anguish and outrage at the horrible sufferings and deaths of millions of innocent Vietnamese civilians, mostly noncombatants. King knew that women and children were the main victims of a whole host of highly lethal American weapons, including one of the US Air Force's favorites, napalm bombs, which burned the flesh off of any part of the body upon which the flaming, jellied gasoline was splashed.

Dr. King knew about the atrocities that our troops were ordered to commit in the name of "anti-communism." He saw the connections between the killing of dispensable "gooks" on the battlefields of Southeast Asia and the oppression, impoverishment, imprisonment and lynching of "dispensable blacks" in America.

Dr. King was being faithful to his commitment to the nonviolence teachings, and the nonviolent life, of Jesus of Nazareth by speaking out against injustice wherever he saw it. He knew that the violence of racism, the violence of orchestrated poverty, and the violence of militarism ultimately have the same sources: fear of "The Other"; and the willingness of the powerful elite to use violence to protect their own wealth and power from the poor and underprivileged, from whom opportunity was denied or wealth was extracted.

Dr. King knew that the opposition to his nonviolence movement was formidable: from cruel Klan members and their sympathizers in the fascist South, to King's conservative Southern "Christian" clergy colleagues, to indifferent bystanders everywhere, to J. Edgar Hoover's racist FBI in the North. Those forces were dangerous enough, but by speaking out, he was opposing an entrenched pro-war system with the capability for unleashing enormous violence against any and all perceived enemies, domestic or foreign.

Tremendous fortunes are made in every war, and the Vietnam War was no exception. Weapons manufacturers thrived, becoming more deeply entrenched with every passing year. The US government made huge expenditures for weapons research and development. Huge numbers of workers were hired for weapons manufacture and development. And the economy boomed -- but on money borrowed from the taxpayers. And so the war was popular with the elite war profiteers, investors, right-wing Christians, the Pentagon, the CIA, the politicians, the defense industries and the people who needed the work. But King's pro-peace, anti-war stance threatened the self-interest of those groups, and exactly one year later, he was dead.

Dr. King's speech on April 4, 1967, at the Riverside Church in New York City was too truthful for the American Masters Of War who had, up to that time, brainwashed the populace to believe that their Vietnam War was just. And so at first they tried to silence him by a massive disinformation campaign -- just as has been done to idealistic and, therefore dangerous, progressive thinkers such as Jesus of Nazareth, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Paul Wellstone. The easily brainwashable public bought the lies, and support for Dr. King and his nonviolent civil rights movement waned. The US Army, the FBI, and various law enforcement officials led the campaign to discredit King but he pressed on.

Hence, on April 4, 1968, a hired assassin other than the framed James Earl Ray pulled the trigger that ended the life of another in a long line of prophetic liberal voices.

Time has shown us that Dr. King was right about many things, including his prophecy that America was losing its soul. Violence of all types is epidemic, especially the violence of poverty and racism. Gun violence, from homicide to suicide, is also epidemic. Those making obscene profits in the weapons industry have sabotaged even the most modest controls on handguns and assault rifles -- all the while flooding America and the world with increasingly lethal weapons. It may be too late now to stop the coming carnage.

Both the affluent and the poor have succumbed to the seductive addictions of exploitive, corrupt capitalism -- a predatory economic system that has run so far amok that it may be about to crash. Entertainment, gambling, compulsive shopping, drugs (both legal and illegal), sports and religious addictions have overwhelmed the lives of many Americans, who then have no time or energy left to tend to the soul.

The 1980s and 1990s were the Decades of Greed I and II. Most Americans spent them trying to attain wealth and power regardless of the cost. Greed blows out the spark of the divine inside those who succumb to its Siren song. And this inevitable loss of compassion in both the "winners" and the "losers" worsens the plight of billions who live in the developing world -- suffering victims whose natural and capital resources have been stolen from them, and are still being stolen from them at this very moment.

And so, at the end of his famous Vietnam speech, Dr. King concluded:

"War is not the answer. We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace and justice throughout the developing world -- a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without foresight."

"Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons (and daughters) of God, and our brothers (and sisters) wait eagerly for our response."

America -- certainly including the majority of its Christian leaders and followers (whether fundamentalist, conservative, moderate or liberal) -- has failed the vision laid out by both Martin Luther King and Jesus of Nazareth. Today, not only our nation, but also its churches, are on the brink of spiritual death.

The hundreds of billions of tax dollars we waste annually on war and preparation for war is money that is unavailable for programs of social uplift -- especially hunger relief, poverty reduction, affordable housing, better education, life-sustaining medical care, and meaningful living-wage jobs. Unbeknownst to us four decades ago, America may have sealed its doom when the pro-militarist Johnson and Nixon administrations started incurring massive deficits through rampant military spending. And now, under the Bush-Cheney regime, the US national debt has reached an astoundingly crippling $9 TRILLION -- most of it incurred to feed the war machine and its shameful ongoing mass slaughter of innocent civilians, mostly women and children, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, the wealthy financiers and investors are profiting handsomely from this imperialist carnage, and the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex is making huge profits from public loans that someone else in another generation will have to pay back.

Today, America's spiritual corpse is being hoisted up on top of the idolatrous altars of soulless-and-godless capitalism, incredibly decadent consumerism, morally-blind patriotism, compassionless xenophobic nationalism, uncritical glorification of death-worshipping militarism, and misplaced faith in its decidedly un-Christ-like God of War.Is it too late for an attempt to resuscitate the ghastly skeletal remains of America from its macabre Dance of Death? Does the political will exist to even try?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Gary G. Kohls, M.D., of Duluth, Minnesota, is an associate of Every Church A Peace Church: http://www.ecapc.org