Abstract
“Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit… declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.” When Dr. Martin Luther King spoke these words during his speech “Beyond Vietnam: A time to break the silence,” on April 4, 1967 in Riverside Church, they were met with condemnation. The backlash was widespread and intense; yet many people consider this speech as the most powerful and important of his life. It is against the backdrop of fighting in Ukraine that we seek to understand what Dr. King asked the people of the United States to do on this day in 1967, in the midst of the Vietnam War, that is, to take a look inward at what he would later call the “triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarization,” and the need for a revolution of values. In this editorial, we consider the insidiousness of militarization, its links to poverty and racism, and the need for a feminist social work response.
Because the full impact of militarization on social justice is beyond what one editorial will allow, we focus on how militarization has been deployed in areas of concern to feminism and social work. The U.S. actions as a post-genocidal settler colonial nation, ongoing systems of racism and economic inequality, the dynamics of Central American migration to the U.S., and policing and the prison industrial complex reveal how militarization has facilitated cycles of violence and trauma. We recognize the tragic suffering and death in Ukraine, and acknowledge the Russian people who are speaking truth to power at great peril, and, in this editorial, we look beyond the current situation to examine the impact of militarization and opportunities to resist it.
The United States is a nation built on genocide and slavery, and the violence and militarization that these horrific projects required have remained a central part of its ethos and functioning. Dunbar-Ortiz (2018) has documented how the right to bear arms is connected with both the genocide of Indigenous people and the enslavement of Africans. Of course, both of these projects had money and profit at their core. Jeannette Rankin, a social worker from Montana and the first woman elected to federal office in the U.S., voted in Congress against U.S. involvement in World Wars I and II and led demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Representative Rankin “argued that money is the chief motivation for war” (Cook, 1991, p. 94). She believed that we must find other ways to resolve disagreements, stating, “For centuries war has been romanticized to the point that people hardly notice its failure as a method of settling political disputes…. History shows plainly that the war method has always created more problems than it has ever solved. Killing a young man cannot kill an idea or the emotion of an ideal” (Rankin, 1971, p. 84, as cited in Cook, 1991, p. 99). In this way, militarization is used to perpetuate colonization and economic inequality, both of which are anchored in and capitalize on racist beliefs. This background is important for understanding the motives and effects of the heightened militarization of the second half of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries.
The Cold War fueled militarization and divided the world into a chessboard in which blocks or nations were allocated to a sphere of influence of either the U.S. or U.S.S.R. To claim a block on the global chessboard, the U.S. fought on the side of the French colonizer in Vietnam, used chemical weapons, and was responsible for well over a million civilian deaths of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian people. At the same time, working-class U.S. soldiers—white, black, and of other racial/ethnic groups—bore a disproportionate brunt of the pain and violence, as many middle- and upper-class white Americans used their privilege to avoid the draft.
Prior to the Cold War, much of the land in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador was owned by U.S.-based fruit companies. These companies crippled local economies, and when local people tried to demand change, the U.S. military was used to quash the efforts. Later, as Cold War fears loomed against the backdrop of revolutionary Cuba, the CIA trained soldiers and helped to create local death squads. By the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. was propping up violent dictators across Central America, two of whom have been accused of war crimes by the world court for the mass killings of Indigenous populations. When we talk about migration, we need to see and consider the U.S. role in creating conditions of violence, poverty, and environmental destruction that people are desperate to escape.
The Biden administration has announced a goal of stemming immigration by helping to build the economies of Central American countries. While this might sound better than the vicious and dehumanizing alternatives of the previous administration, Vice President Kamala Harris’ statement to would-be migrants—“Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our borders” (BBC News, June 2021)—underscores the continuity of policy between the Biden and Trump administrations. A feminist social work response would be one based on accountability, reparations, and localization. In order for people/communities/nations to heal, an accurate accounting of the facts is needed, the U.S. needs to acknowledge its role in economic exploitation, enabling violent dictators, and supporting the creation of death squads. The U.S. owes financial repair, affected communities must have a role in determining what that would be, and all efforts need to be led by local communities. At the same time, immigration policy must also be seen as a strategy for repair.
The war in Ukraine cannot be untangled from the fetishizing of military hardware. Much support internationally for Ukraine has come in the form of weapons. The recent history of the infiltration of weapons of war into everyday life cannot be ignored. The U.S. federal government arms local domestic police forces with weapons of war through a program called “1033,” named for the section of the National Defense Authorization Act of 1997 that created it. This Act allows the Department of Defense to give state, local, and federal law enforcement agencies military hardware. Since this Act passed, the U.S. has spent over $15.4 billion on the militarization of police, on equipment that includes combat vehicles, rifles, military helmets, and misleadingly named “non-” or less-lethal weapons, some of which have featured in police raids and police violence against protesters, including recent protests for racial justice (Lawrence & O’Brien, 2021). These weapons have been turned on protestors and fueled violence, notably in Ferguson, MO after the police murder of Michael Brown. During the George Floyd march in Atlanta, I (Elizabeth) was at the CNN Center when our march was forced to end by tanks and soldiers with shields.
We believe this analysis of militarization could be extended further and joined with a call for peace and pacifism. The “romanticization” of war should not distract us from these points, or be used to justify further militarization. Nor should the mutually supporting logics of what Elizabeth Bernstein, in her critique of anti-trafficking organizing, identifies as intertwined “carceral feminism and militarized humanitarianism” (Bernstein, 2010). In her analysis, Bernstein identifies how anti-trafficking framing rooted in images of powerless victims obscures the political economy that drives poverty, de-politicizes responses, and slides seamlessly into calls for increased arrests domestically and military interventions internationally to secure “human rights.” In essence, these policies are designed to “protect women” reproduce violence; this is a key point we are making about militarization. As social workers, we know that intergenerational trauma is extended and fortified by ongoing violence. Thus, militarized, carceral systems cannot create a path towards social justice, peace, or a foreseeable end to trauma. We also wonder about social work's complicity in militarization through our embrace of “military social work” programs, particularly those that promote understanding of military culture and treating trauma without critical examination of what has created it.
In 1967, Dr. King reminded us that the tragedy of war requires a collective solution, and that militarization is an evil. Then, and now, militarization has kept us distracted from the idea of building the beloved community and instead is linked to greed, domination, and perpetuating a cycle of violence and trauma. We conclude this editorial with questions we hope can be useful in a feminist critique of militarization and call for alternatives. How can we build processes of transformative justice to solve disputes? How can we raise awareness of our shared humanity and interdependence? How can we protect people and communities from violence without perpetuating it?