It’s heartbreaking and infuriating to observe that this weekend — officially dedicated to commemorating the legacy of a great pacifist and visionary of a more just world — was hijacked by Hollywood and rededicated to a film, which serves to glorify American militarism; attempt once again to justify the unthinkably savage slaughter waged for a decade in Iraq; and reignite hatred against Arabs and Muslims. Just check Twitter.
There is nothing heroic about invading a foreign land on false pretenses, brutalizing and murdering the captive civilian population and destroying civilian infrastructure, as well as thousands of years worth of buildings and antiquities. Clint Eastwood’s attempt to humanize the militants among us who undertook this slaughter is yet another insult to the memory of all those who fell victim to America’s merciless war machine, American and Iraqi alike.
Granted, the film does figure into a larger genre of racist propaganda that serves to provide an “artistic” complement to the narrative provided by state media. (Another work) that falls into this category is Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker.”“The Hurt Locker” and “American Sniper” are of the same ilk, as they aim to instruct us that the inhabitants of the Middle East are sub-humans.
As Martin Luther King Jr. demonstrated heroically, there is no glory in violence and no honor in upholding institutionalized murder carried out by agents of the state. As he proclaimed in 1967, “The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery.”
I pray that we may free ourselves of the deception that it is our divine calling to police and brutalize the world, rejecting “rationalizations,” such as these films, of our violence. I pray also that we wholeheartedly accept Dr. King’s message that we still have much to do here, improving our own country by focusing on the betterment of our own populace.
Once again, it is disheartening to observe that this year’s commemoration of MLK was overshadowed by the release of a shameless glorification of war. Thankfully, neither the sniper who took King’s life nor all the militants in the world can crush the dream of peace that lives somewhere within each of us. Long live MLK!
Jordan MacKenzie
First-year linguistics graduate student
[A version of this story ran on page 7 on 1/21/2015 under the headline “MLK and ‘American Sniper’: Light will drive out darkness"]
