On the Banality of Evil & On the Anniversary of the Assassination of Martin Luther King
On the morning of the 5th of April 1968, Americans living in their nation’s capital roused to find the city aflame as hordes of angry protesters spilled onto the streets. Marching to a chaotic thrum of shattering glass and fire truck sirens, the protestors catapulted rocks and bottles into the windows of stores and other commercial buildings, forcing them open to be looted and set ablaze.
The evening before, on this very day fifty-seven years ago, Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr had been assassinated, shot in the face while standing on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where just a day prior he had delivered his famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. The Washington riots continued for four days, with similar protests erupting in over 100 other cities across America.
Glancing out of the window of the World Bank headquarters in Washington DC, the institution’s new president, Robert McNamara, watched the smoke billow over the city as he met with his staff, having taken control of the Bank just three days before King’s assassination. McNamara had served in the 1940s as a Harvard Business School professor, then as an executive at Ford Motor Company in the 1950s – ultimately becoming its president in 1960 – and then as US Secretary of Defence under presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
McNamara’s transition to the head of the World Bank was entirely consistent with his world view, based on his belief that geopolitical peace and stability depended far less on the military power of the US and its allies than it did on reducing global poverty. Put simply, pursuing economic growth without also attending to reducing wealth inequality could only ever produce social instability. In a particularly influential speech delivered in Montreal in 1966, McNamara had summarised the issue in simple terms, stating, “There is an irrefutable relationship between violence and economic backwardness. And the trend of such violence is up, not down. Now, it would perhaps be somewhat reassuring if the gap between the rich nations and the poor nations were closing and economic backwardness were significantly receding. But it is not. The economic gap is widening”.
McNamara therefore advocated that the US and other industrialised nations, more than half a century ago, should take responsibility for helping developing nations in the process of modernisation, which, it was believed, would produce economic growth, reduce wealth inequality, and lead to social and political advancement. It was not only within the power of wealthier nations to do so, McNamara argued, but also in their best security interests.
Witnessing the violence playing out around him in April 1968 as the Civil Rights Movement raged against the injustices of the policies that had structured and maintained a socially segregated and economically unequal society, McNamara was only further convinced of the critical role that the World Bank could play in galvanising the US’s national security strategies against threats both foreign and domestic. It was a novel, and far more powerful, argument than those that had come before, which had been based largely on humanist appeals to industrialised nations to establish a more equitable world order.
Up until 1968, the Bank, founded in the wake of World War II to support reconstruction efforts in Europe and Asia, had largely limited itself to the relatively straightforward task of evaluating project proposals for infrastructure projects and granting loan requests. From 1968 to 1981, however, the role of the World Bank was fundamentally altered as its primary activity became targeting poverty reduction around the world. McNamara, in essence, sought to establish the Bank as a channel through which development funds could be funnelled to those countries that, in his words, “genuinely need and request our help and which demonstrably are willing and able to help themselves”.
Witnessing, on Wednesday 2nd of April US president Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” broadside attack on the entire global system of trade, exercised via sweeping non-sensical tariffs, for a simple motive that he set out very clearly at the beginning of his speech – that is “to make America wealthy again” – it occurred to me that Robert McNamara would have been ashamed to have served for such an administration.
Ideologically, McNamara was fighting communism during his leadership at the World Bank. In fact, he would later face heavy criticism for his role in advancing the US’s involvement in the Vietnam War during his tenure as Secretary of Defence from 1961 to 1968. But his purpose at the World Bank, and overall, his purpose as an expression of America’s role in the liberal world order, was to undo the wrongs of slavery, to unravel global inequality, to aid poorer nations towards social and economic development, so that they would not fall prey to the evils of totalitarianism.
How deeply tragic then, that, only fifty-seven years later, after all of the turmoil and trouble that the world has endured since that fateful day when Reverand King was assassinated, that the leader of the wealthiest nation on earth, by far, would justify his actions against poorer nations – even specifically against one of the poorest, and by far the most unequal, South Africa – not for ideological reasons, nor for reasons rooted in self-determination and freedom, but for wealth. For money. More of it. How sadly banal this evil is.
By David Buckham
David Buckham is founder and CEO of Johannesburg-based international management consultancy Monocle Solutions and author of 6 published books.
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