Marting Luther King Jr.

[pecunium]

I'm late, but it was 40 years ago he was gunned down.

To borrow a quotation from someone else who was killed early, and turned into a plaster saint, or straw man villian, and to apply them both to the present day.

"To stand in silence when they should be protesting makes cowards out of men"
- Abraham Lincoln

Comments

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Thank you. It absolutely explains to me my unease.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

"To stand in silence..."

Our current leaders like it when we do that.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Leaders, I'm not so sure about. (Def: "Leader: One who figures out what direction people want to go, then moves around to that side and says 'Let's go thisaway!'".) I think of the figures who love for us to be silent as being something like "Dominating Aristocrats". (Okay, I do sometimes use the term "Fearless Leader(s)", but that's sarcasm.)

But ultimately, yes -- Silence Is Complicity. (Mind you, I frequently disagree with those who Speak Out, but at the same time I have to feel respect for the attitude of "Ich kann nicht anders" (or whatever Martin Luther's phrase was).)

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Darn. I knew I should have put leader between quotes. Yes, 'dominating aristocrats' is more like it. Or maybe 'domineering aristocrats' is. Anyway, they may wrap themselves in the flag (mine is too small to wrap even my hand in it, but I do have one in my office), and they may call themselves the True Americans, but, if they had been living in 1776, they'd have sided with Mad King George. Oh, wait...

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

And, darn it, I should've included (in addition) "our Glorious Leader" (also sarcastic). It's sometimes difficult for me to remember that most of the Americans I know (hey, I don't hang out with all that many Senior Citizens, okay?) don't remember the last President we had who displayed a considerable level of the most important quality of Leadership -- John F. Kennedy -- who succeeded in making many of us at least believe/think that he & we were taking significant steps to Improve the World and our lot in it. Others have shown flashes of that, but only against a background of cynical political manipulation. (And, *sigh*, being Old & Jaded, I can't strongly gainsay the argument that JFK wasn't much more than a Manipulator who was more skillful than the others. But his Administration seems, in retrospect and despite its shortcomings, almost a Beacon of Glory in comparison with the GWBush era of unadulterated sleaze and corruption.) Of course I'm coming at this with the idea that the mantra of "No New Taxes" is neither a noble nor a worthy goal for America. Especially when it's achieved by putting enormous unnecessary expenses on our (figurative) credit-card. And with the idea that trying to avoid the Spirit of The Law by trying to alter the meanings of words ("it isn't 'torture' if we call it 'enhanced interrogation'") is ... shameful.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

?the idea that trying to avoid the Spirit of The Law by trying to alter the meanings of words ("it isn't 'torture' if we call it 'enhanced interrogation'") is ... shameful

That's putting it mildly.

I was born in 1955, which may explain why I'm old-fashioned about torture. I grew up with the notion that torture, at least when sanctionned by the State, is something that the Axis's bad guys did. Every time I watch Bridge on the River Kwai, I get this nostalgic yearning for the days when we had the moral high ground.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Having been born in '28, I don't find it easy to latch onto the idea that having been born in '55 is a reason for being old-fashioned. But yes, that timing sounds about right. WWII still seems eminently justified -- They (two aggressive nations bent on conquest & imposing their will on other countries) attacked Us, and after defeating Them (albeit with a few missteps such as Dresden and Nagasaki) we went to considerable effort to help those people get back on their feet, and punished only the worst of their wartime leaders. The Korean War was a bit iffy -- we were supporting a ruthless tin-pot Dictator who probably was somewhat worse than the North Korean Leader at that time -- but the South Korean people managed to turn things around & it appears to have worked out to their eventual benefit.

As one of the Troops fighting there in '52, I heard Stories about "civilian" infiltrators, booby-trapped wounded, &cet., and we certainly speculated much on the Problems of a semi-guerrilla warfare in which anyone might be The Enemy, but this was pretty clearly mostly the kind & level of scuttle-butt all Troops indulge in, and was discounted appropriately.



We managed to retain most of the higher moral ground and white hats we'd acquired in WWII. Some of these Good Guy Points even stuck through the Viet Nam War -- despite some horrible incidents we could dismiss as anomalies if we worked hard enough at it.

But somewhere around the year 2000 we got a Presidential Administration and Congressional Majority (with pitifully little serious opposition from the Minority Party) that eagerly embraced most of the trappings & core attitudes of the kind of third-world Governments most Americans had always been thankful and proud that we didn't have. The first time I heard of a prominent government official, speaking in public, defending the use of what most reasonable people would consider torture, and he was neither fired nor impeached, I _knew_ that we had joined the ranks of the Bad Guys Third-Rate Countries.

Sadly, I'm not sure when, or if, we can work our way out of this ranking. It is not, I think, the Will of the People that we try -- now that all other major countries have abandoned this approach -- to dominate the world by military force, but in eight years or so a Government/Nation can acquire a substantial amount of momentum or inertia, not to mention insidious corruption. And by that I mean moral and ideological corruption, as well as the theft of public monies.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

One really saddening thing is that the People have given up on the stories that define it, the oldest story of this Nation being that there was this King who oppressed the People and the People threw the King out to seek its own fairer ways. Those stories may have been simplistic, they may have glossed over the ugly bits, but they were about what we thought we were, what we thought we should be. Today, we have 'leaders' who publicly discuss whether or not torture should be used against people who may be guilty.

Not sure I'm making any sense.

As for whether or not the Nation can recover... I think I'm a bit more optimistic than you are, maybe because I was born elsewhere. The rest of the world may be willing to let us make amends, even if we have to eat a lot of crow. Mind you, they'll never trust us if a Republican gets the top job.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

You're making perfect sense. I've had fights with people about that very thing, in this vary place. (an example is here).

How a person seems themself has a great bearing on how they react to things. How a nation sees itself affects how the people see themselves. To give up on, "we don't do things like that" is a worrisome thing.

I think we can recover, but it will take a lot of work, and won't be as quick as I would like, because some of the things which need doing (public admissions of guilt, if nothing else) will be resisted by a lot of people. They will resist because they still don't want to admit that we can do wrong things.

Even when they were baying for those wrong things (perhaps because of it).

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

To give up on, "we don't do things like that" is a worrisome thing.

Back in 2005, I attended NASFiC in Seattle. One of the panels was about warfare and inevitably turned into the then recent war in Iraq. At some point, John G. Hemry, who served in the Navy, said "This is not what we're about." That explains why he's one of the very few writers of military SF that I can stand.

Thanks also for the link. I never talk politics with my cubicle neighbors, but if they brought up the subject, I wonder what I'd say to them. Probably the things I've mentionned in this thread. Things like "Would you want your child to be at the receiving end of torture?"

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

That's what he said.

The full quotation is apposite to your sentimient.

"Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise"

"Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders".

Though, as I recall it, there was an extra clause, "Gott helfe mir, between the two.

It's a sentiment Quakers are very familiar with.

TK

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Yup. The Quakers are notorious for that. I suppose it comes from some basic assumption -- probably derived from Judaism -- that humans have a responsibility to help God perfect the world He created. (I am in awe of the Quaker who stood up in a Meeting (in Birmingham, IIRC) and Spoke Forth -"It has come to me that it is not consistent with the Will of God or the Teachings of Christ that men should _own_ other men"-, and of the other Quakers who, often to their economic disadvantage, led the movement that eventually resulted in the abolition of slavery, first in the U.K., then in the United States.)

Despite having a (maternal line) grandfather whose native language was German (or the Swiss form of it), I have only a few words of it, and was uncertain of the spelling, but wanted to use Luther's original phrase because the translations I've seen all seem a bit less forthright and lacking in the sense of "I am inescapably doomed to do this".