Barack Obama’s Nobel speech needlessly insulted Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

I find that this section of Barack Obama’s Nobel speech really rankles:

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth:  We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes.  There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago:  “Violence never brings permanent peace.  It solves no social problem:  it merely creates new and more complicated ones.”  As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence.  I know there’s nothing weak — nothing passive — nothing naïve — in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone.  I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.  For make no mistake:  Evil does exist in the world.  A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies.  Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.  To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

One clause renders this passage objectionable: “I face the world as it is.”

I’ve read the passage over a couple of times now, and I can’t avoid this sentence’s seeming insistence that Gandhi and King were pie-eyed children who had the luxury of playing with nonviolence while the president is dealing with the “real world” where violence is sometimes necessary.

I don’t disagree that violence is sometimes necessary, and that the roles of spiritual leader/activist are very different from that of president. But. It seems to me that Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. also faced the world as it was — and created a profound change to a world that was different using techniques of nonviolence.

In Gandhi’s case, he was facing down the British Empire, which though in decline during the years he challenged it was still very formidable. It is possible, I suppose, that the example of facing down horrific tyranny during World War II forced the Brits to recognize, thanks to Gandhi, the moral untenability of their continued rule of India. But at the end of the day, Gandhi was still in India and the British Empire wasn’t. That’s kind of astounding.

As for Martin Luther King, he wasn’t just taking on entrenched power, but an entrenched culture of white superiority. The president doesn’t need any history lessons from me, of course, but the white power structure that King challenged wanted to be intractable:

It is true that Alabama racists aren’t the same as Al Qaeda, and that the British Empire, pledged as it supposedly was to higher ideals, made an easier opponent to shame into surrender than, say, Iran. I don’t dispute that. But the president needlessly insulted Gandhi and King with his assertion that he “faces the world as it is.” The nonviolent leaders were idealistic, yes, but they also achieved a tremendous amount of real change in the real world.