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Racism, Resources, and Nuclear Weapons: Some Refle
Racism, Resources and Nuclear Weapons
Some Reflections on the Rodney King Case
Arjun Makhijani*
The near-total acquittal of the police officers in the
Rodney King case and the angry destruction that followed
emboldened President de Klerk of South Africa to remind the
United States to attend to its own problems of racial injustice
and human rights before instructing others. The advice may be
ill-mannered, but it poses some fundamental questions we must not
shirk. Is the legacy of slavery and the institutionalization of
racism that followed its formal abolition only incidental to the
operation of society as a whole today? Or does it still
basically distort and pervert the core values of equality and
freedom that we cherish?
Did the conquest, genocide and broken treaties by which the
lands on which we live were obtained create a negative aspect to
the national character that still persists? Or is it merely a
fading stain that poses questions for ivory-tower academics to
worry about in this five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's
voyage? In other words, must there be some restructuring of the
political, military, and economic institutions of this country
and of some of its dominant social values? If that is true then
no amount of effort directed at rebuilding the devastated areas
of Los Angeles will address the principal underlying issue: how
to cure the disease of racism in the United States.
Many Whites argue that they did not participate in the
system of slavery or in the grave injustices that went with the
expropriation of native American land. This is true, and indeed,
many Whites have helped fight the ills that resulted from them.
Why, then, should they bear the burdens of programs such as
affirmative action, or pay high taxes to cure ills that seem to
resist solution?
____________________
* Arjun Makhijani is president of the Institute for Energy and
Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Maryland. Rose
Milligan of the Peace Development Fund and Daniel Ellsberg
provided many useful suggestions to improve this article,
though the author, of course, assumes full responsibility for
its contents.
2
Had exploitation and marginalization of many ethnic
groupings in this country and of most people in Third World at
large ended definitively, then these arguments would carry the
day. Indeed, there would be little basis for racism. But the
wanton beating of Rodney King and verdict of the jury are
expressions of the violence and moral corruption that is endemic
in the economic and social system as a whole. Let us look at the
evidence.
Resources and Violence
Since the Second World War, five hundred million children
around the world, mostly in the Third World, but also here in the
United States, have died needless deaths for want of simple
things such as food, clean water and elementary medical care.
Forty thousand children around the world still die that way every
day. Yet there is plenty of food in the world to go around and
the resources that it would take to alleviate the worst aspects
of these ills are a small fraction of the world's trillion-
dollar-a-year expenditures on armaments.
There is a link between the deaths of so many children and
huge military budgets. From local police in villages in the
Third World to nuclear weapons threats, military budgets provide
the instruments of coercion and violence that are one essential
element in perpetuating the enormous poverty that coexists with a
surfeit of goods and wastefulness. A world full of weapons is
one expression of the reality that profit and consumption of the
rich and powerful have a higher priority and a far greater pull
on political will than the needs of the alleviation of suffering
and poverty.
U.S. governmental and corporate policies have led the
international military and economic alliance, across race and
nationality, in order to create and maintain the structure of
this violence in the period after the Second World War. One of
the main methods of U.S. policy has been to link up with the most
convenient local forces, democratic or dictatorial, to establish
or maintain U.S. corporate economic hegemony. This has included
the training of armed forces and military dictators, the covert
overthrow of democratically elected governments, and the threat
of the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear Third World
countries. These elements have often been combined. For
instance, U.S. nuclear-capable bombers were put on alert as the
CIA was assisting the overthrow of the democratically-elected
Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954. And the institutions
representing the rich in the Third World have often actively
sought and collaborated in this system, which continues to result
in the devastation of their own countries and people.
U.S. policy was spelled out in National Security Council
Memorandum number 68 (NSC-68), in 1950. The policy of
containment that it developed was far beyond mere deterrence of a
Soviet nuclear attack on the U.S. or even a Soviet military
3
attack on Europe. "Containment" according to this policy was
linked to keeping the Soviet influence out of the rest of the
world, and fostering an economic system more conducive to U.S.
capitalism -- "attempting to create a healthy international
community," as NSC-68 put it. NSC-68 advocated being ready for
everything from local conventional wars to local nuclear wars to
a war of "global annihilation" should the U.S. not be able to
"hold" any of the "critical points" in the world within its own
orbit relative to the Soviet Union, directly or indirectly.
The history of the implementation of this policy shows that
in practice every government (and even institutions within
countries such as political parties and labor unions), no matter
how democratic, that sought local control over resources so as to
exclude or even moderately limit multinational corporations was
vilified, subverted and opposed vigorously as "communist," while
governments that allowed an "open door" to foreign capital were
supported even when they were viciously dictatorial. Indeed, the
U.S. has been instrumental in setting up or helping create many
dictatorial governments.
The uranium of the Congo and Namibia, the gold and diamonds
of South Africa and other African countries, the oil of Iran and
Arabian countries like Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Libya, were among
the resources whose control occupied a large portion of U.S.
policy, not only for itself. These resources were also at the
center of post-war recovery in Europe and Japan. They were
essential to the success of the Marshall Plan in rebuilding
Western Europe.
Many of the nuclear war scenarios that the Pentagon used for
planning purposes started with a crisis of control of oil in the
Persian Gulf. It was the quest for control of these same
resources that caused the U.S. and Britain to overthrow the
elected Iranian government, headed by Mossadegh, in 1953 and
replace it by a pliant dictator. This was the "Shah of Iran" who
had initially been put there as Britain's puppet when his father
supported the fascists during World War II. Through terror and
torture, the Shah made protest outside the mosques essentially
impossible. This led to a radical Islamic revolution in 1979;
the crisis that followed has not yet ended. Oil loomed so large
in these events that James Schlesinger, who had occupied various
positions in government, including head of the CIA, Secretary of
Defense and Secretary of Energy, felt the overthrow of the Shah
was the most serious setback to capitalism since the Bolshevik
revolution.
This pattern of exploitation of resources and cheap labor by
the U.S. and Western Europe was designed to keep social and
economic conflict far away from the areas where Whites lived or
came to occupy and make their own. It was a pattern that emerged
slowly, over a hundred years or so, after the poor in Europe
4
became very angry and began beheading the rich and the powerful
during the French revolution in 1789.
But aims and policies so cynical and inhumane could not fail
to be reflected in the home countries of their originators. It
is difficult to compartmentalize immorality. When profit and
power are put before people (rather than in their service) then
we should expect to see expressions of this towards all people,
including White people. Examples abound all over the world. The
nuclear establishment provides many graphic illustrations.
The Nuclear Weapons Establishment
Nuclear threats that were used against others have rained
down radioactivity on the U.S. When the Pentagon was looking for
a site to test nuclear weapons on the continental U.S., it chose
the one in Nevada because it controlled the land, though that
land belongs by treaty to the Shoshone people. As another
example, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) decided not to
improve uranium mine ventilation where mainly Navajo miners
worked that had high levels of radioactivity so that it could
better study the effects of radiation on health and set standards
for other workers.
There were effects on White people also. The AEC knew full
well that by choosing a western site, the tests would cause
fallout of radioactivity over nearly the whole country because of
the prevailing winds from the west. Indeed, one of aims of the
nuclear establishment was to use nuclear testing as for
"reeducation" of people so that they would "feel at home with the
idea of neutrons trotting around."
The University of California at Berkeley gets commissions
for designing nuclear weapons at the Lawrence Livermore
Laboratory; an editorial in 1960 in its Engineering alumni
magazine, opined that the "major birth defects" in six thousand
children from atomic fallout could be justified in the face of
the of the "need" for nuclear weapons for deterrence and
especially for use in "brush fire" wars, such as the one in
Korea.
The Atomic Energy Commission experimentally released
radioactive iodine-131 from its Hanford, Washington plant which
wound up in children's milk. It rained down well over half-a-
million pounds of uranium from its Fernald, Ohio plant, called
the Feed Materials Production Center, which had a water tower
with a logo resembling that of the Purina company of pet food
fame, making it appear benign. It denied benefits to sick
veterans who had obeyed orders, marching into ground zero after
atomic tests. It experimented on pilots, the cream of the armed
forces, by making them fly though mushroom clouds shortly after
atomic tests, to see if they could fight in nuclear wars. And it
refused to recognize that the diseases and suffering of the
5
downwinders and atomic veterans could be connected to their
exposure from weapons production and testing. That is still the
case with the vast majority of workers and people living near the
weapons plants. All this was done, often in contravention of
laws, to a predominantly White population in the name of
"national security."
The Inner Cities
When the actions of public policy are dominated by the goals
of profit and power, other ends will fall by the wayside when
they are inconvenient, almost as a matter of habit. One
connection between nuclear threats and the beating of Rodney King
is the unjustified use of force by governments on people. Such
use of force has occurred in other systems than capitalism, of
course, notably in the former Soviet Union. A lack of
accountability to the people is the common thread between them.
There is another connection. Military forces around the
world, but most notably those in Europe, Japan and the U.S.,
maintain control over the borders of the wealthy areas, keeping
impoverished and marginalized people out. With the fall of the
Berlin wall, which the Soviet system used to keep educated people
locked in, this policy of locking people out has become more
transparent in Europe. In the U.S., it is ever so clear in the
militarized border with Mexico, complete with searchlights, not
far from Los Angeles. The goods and resources and cheap labor
from the Third World are welcome, and even obtained by force, but
the people must be kept out, except as convenient.
It is difficult for governments and the dominant sections of
society to admit to themselves, much less to others that the
content of their deeds is at fundamental variance with the
professed ideals of freedom and equality. Racism is one way for
those who benefit from unjust arrangements to rationalize away
and project onto the oppressed a more difficult, complex and
disturbing reality. Certainly, the problems of the Third World
or of inner cities are not caused by external forces alone.
There are internal forces, such a drugs and violence as well that
are basic. But there is a dynamic by the which negative internal
and external forces interact. The unbridled use of force and the
financial and military aspects that are involved in it form an
essential part of that negative dynamic, as does the failure of
society to deal squarely with the problem of racism. The fact
that the current president of the country was elected partly on
the basis of a racist advertisement (the "Willie Horton" ad) is a
stark symbol of the external factors that drive the hopelessness
that many young people in the inner cities feel, which is one
cause of a negative internal dynamic.
The inner cities of the U.S. are a kind of internal Third
World; local police forces execute an internal military policy.
One important factor to keep in mind is that inner cities in the
6
U.S. now consist mainly of people for whom the larger economy has
little use in the production of profit, having found ample cheap
labor in the Third World. Therefore, a military containment of
the inner cities, rather than exploitation in any old-fashioned
sense, is now a principal objective. This policy has many
similarities with the U.S. "pacification" program during the Viet
Nam war.
Inner cities have now become heavily armed, frustrated and
violent places without hope for many of their residents. Police,
prisons, and society at large have become more brutal in the
policy of containment as even as they grow more fearful. As the
U.S. experience in Viet Nam shows, such policies have a way of
becoming uncontrollably violent, immoral and unjust.
Violence, Profit and Accountability
Like people without hope in many parts of the world, young
men in U.S. inner cities have noticed that control over property
can be had with armed force. Is there a moral difference between
setting up and arming dictators in foreign countries for the sake
of profit and taking local property by a stick-up? Is there a
moral difference between selling billions of dollars of armaments
to torturers and dictators who use them to kill thousands of
people and keep millions in thrall and selling drugs and
committing drive-by murders in the street?
While President Bush decries the looting, many have noticed
he did not similarly decry the wanton looting by Michael Milken
that contributed to the Savings and Loan crisis, and cost
thousands of people their jobs while he made more than five
hundred million dollars as a single year's compensation from the
junk bond firm of Drexel Burnham Lambert, headquartered in Los
Angeles. Young people without hope of a decent life around the
world have noticed the utterly amoral arming of both sides in the
Iran-Iraq war, and the cynical turns from arming and assistance
to Saddam Hussein to war against him to a de facto acceptance of
his remaining in power at the end of the war so that insurgents
fighting to be liberated would not come to control the oil, among
other cynical reasons.
The location of the inner cities inside wealthy countries
introduces objectives other than military containment -- namely,
the alleviation of poverty and unemployment. These issues become
more acute when the larger society is reminded through dramatic
events, such as those that followed the videotaping of the
beating of Rodney King, of the potential for a more general
destructiveness that stems from the hopelessness that many young
people in the inner cities feel.
Past programs have been based on a mixture of containment of
and charity towards African-Americans. They are unlikely to
address the real needs of the people they are directed to -- how
7
could they, when even the basic communication between the
presumed benefactors and the beneficiaries is missing? Indeed,
one of the basic elements that has been missing from that dialog
is that recognition in policy that people who live in the inner
cities know their problems, have ideas about their solutions, and
have the leadership that it will take to address them. The
respect that a dialog that begins with such a premise implies has
been an ingredient of some local successes; its absence as a
matter of policy in the country at large has been one essential
component of the failure to address the problems of the inner
cities.
Finally, programs directed at inner cities do not exist in a
vacuum. They are part of a larger system of policies. How can
programs address the long-term issues of social stability and
harmony, health care and job security that all of us need to live
safe and satisfying lives, when such a huge proportion of the
resources of the country continues to be devoted to military
spending. This parallels in foreign policy the emphasis on
police and prisons for inner cities, while at the same depriving
us all of essential resources for peaceful purposes.
A New Direction
There is another direction, at once more practical, moral
and hopeful which can help us get out of this mess. We must
confront together the fundamental problems of the U.S. and global
economies that have given rise to so much injustice, suffering
and environmental devastation. We must fundamentally reevaluate
programs inspired by fear and guilt that make White society put
combinations of money and police and prisons into inner cities,
hoping that somehow the basic problems will go away. Instead, we
must address the needs of particular communities and areas in the
context of the larger community in the country and the world.
This will help us address the root causes of the persistence of
racism, violence, and misery which lie in the inequities of the
larger global social and economic system.
There is ample precedent for this great common enterprise.
People of all ethnic backgrounds have struggled shoulder-to-
shoulder in this country and throughout the world for justice,
decency and a modicum of well-being for everyone. In the
nineteenth century, when there were signs in New York City that
proclaimed "Irish and dogs not allowed," Blacks and Irish
Americans struggled side-by-side in unions for better wages and
working conditions, until racism divided them late in the
nineteenth century. Blacks and Whites fought for civil rights,
and some died together in that struggle, far above the color
barriers that had been set up for them. Whites did not hesitate
to follow Martin Luther King, as a leader of all the people of
this country, and not only African-Americans. Millions of
Blacks, Whites, soldiers, pacifists, draft resisters and other
civilians struggled together to end the Viet Nam war.
8
We have common problems enough. The lack of good schools,
safe neighborhoods, and health insurance affects Blacks
disproportionately, but it affects everyone. So does the
shortage of well-paid jobs. The degradation of the environment
may affect communities of color disproportionately, but few
breathe truly clean air everyday, or are confident that it will
be better for their children. While toxic dumps are located
disproportionately in rural areas and in communities of color,
few can escape the ill-effects of toxic chemicals in our midst.
Even the lack of leadership in Washington, corrupted by military
and corporate machinery that greases elections with copious sums
of money, has become a pressing common problem.
There is a tradition of struggle at the grassroots that can
provide the basis for success. The examples above show that it
has already done so in many areas. Just in the recent past that
tradition has helped to shut down nuclear weapons production in
this country. It has slowed the deadly international trade in
toxic wastes. It has spawned a movement for safe energy and sane
lifestyles. In the Sanctuary movement, of the 1980s, many
Americans, including Whites, provided shelter to Central
Americans fleeing war and violence, thereby opposing the U.S.
government at considerable risk and cost to themselves. And
millions of Americans, Black and White, worked together to assist
the struggle of the people of South Africa against apartheid,
which is probably the real cause of President de Klerk's peevish
comments about the Rodney King case.
A common struggle, moved by the value that everyone has a
right to a decent and peaceful life, good government and a
healthy environment, can provide the common bonds to enable us to
overcome racism in this country, and exploitation around the
world.
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