Op 4
april 1967, opvallend* genoeg precies een jaar voor hij onder regie van de FBI werd vermoord,
gaf Martin Luther King (MLK) een toespraak in de Riverside Church
(New York) waarin hij de VS de grootste leverancier van geweld noemde op
de toenmalige wereld…….
Hoe
weinig is er veranderd sindsdien, sterker nog je kan nu zonder meer
stellen dat de VS de grootste terreurentiteit ter wereld is, de VS
ook aangeduid als het Vierde Rijk, met haar meer dan 800 militaire
bases over de wereld, de VS met haar voortdurende illegale oorlogsvoering (sinds het begin van de Obama administraties geen dag meer zonder oorlog…),
de VS met haar geheime militaire acties waar het maar uitkomt en met haar
moordprogramma uitgevoerd middels drones…… Alleen deze eeuw heeft de VS met hulp van haar oorlogshond NAVO al meer dan 5 miljoen mensen
vermoord…..
Het is
dan ook schunnig als je ziet dat de reguliere (westerse) media en
politici het moorddadig optreden van de VS steunen zonder te spreken
over het enorme aantal slachtoffers, terwijl ze tegelijkertijd
Rusland, China en Iran durven te beschuldigen van agressie en het
destabiliseren van de situatie in het Midden-Oosten, Azië en zelfs
het westen, de laatste met leugens over cyberaanvallen, waarvoor geen
flinter aan bewijs kan worden geleverd……
Het is juist ook nu van belang de stilte te doorbreken, de stilte over hoe mensen in massa’s worden vermoord door militairen van de VS en haar NAVO-partners, de stilte over het nog steeds verdrukte gekleurde volk in de VS, zelfs na de gekleurde president Obama die dan ook maar weinig of niets voor de gekleurde bevolking heeft gedaan, de politie vermoordt ze nog steeds op grote schaal…., de stilte over het bloedige beleid van Israël tegen het verdrukte Palestijnse volk, mogelijk gemaakt door de VS, de stilte over de genocide in Jemen uitgevoerd door de Saoedische terreurcoalitie, politiek en militair gesteund door de VS, Groot-Brittannië en Frankrijk (waar de laatste 2 hoofdzakelijk zorgen voor wapenleveranties aan Saoedi-Arabië en de training van soldaten), de stilte over de smerige spelletjes die de VS in veel landen speelt om de boel te destabiliseren en zelfs democratisch gekozen regeringen omver te werpen…… (waarna de VS een dictator aanstelt die braaf doet wat de VS verlangt…)
De stilte ook over de enorme vervuiling door het militaire apparaat, ook daarin is de VS de ‘grootste….’ (bovendien een fikse aanjager van de klimaatverandering, om over de vervuiling middels radioactieve munitie maar te zwijgen, de reden voor veel medische ellende nadat de VS is verdwenen**) De stilte over seismische proeven van de VS marine in de oceanen, die alles wat onderwater leeft in de nabijheid doet sterven en verder walvis- en dolfijnachtigen geheel in verwarring brengen, volgens deskundigen één van de redenen waarom zo nu en dan grote aantallen walvisachtigen stranden……. Tot slot de stilte in de reguliere westerse (massa-) media over de meeste van deze zaken (Black Liver Matter >> BLM is al lang weer vergeten….), een stilte die zelfs bewust wordt gehandhaafd door die media, zie ook hoe zogenaamde journalisten van die media, NB collega’s van Julian Assange die hem hebben besmeurd, hem voor verrader en spion hebben uitgemaakt en hem zelfs een charlatan durfden te noemen, terwijl één van de eerste onthullingen op Wikileaks het neerschieten was van burgers door militairen van de VS vanuit een helikopter, waarbij 2 journalisten van Reuters werden vermoord…… Hoe kan je je als journalist keren tegen een collega die dit soort vreselijke oorlogsmisdaden openbaart…???
Oh vergeet ik nog een belangrijke: laten we de stilte doorbreken die wordt veroorzaakt door de hysterie over het Coronavirus en waarmee in korte tijd een groot aantal burgerrechten geweld werd en wordt aangedaan!!
Lees de
toespraak van MLK en zie hoe weinig er is veranderd:
“Beyond
Vietnam”
A
Time to Break Silence
By
Rev. Martin Luther King
By 1967, King had
become the country’s most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and
a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed
militaristic. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at
New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 — a year to the day
before he was murdered — King called the United States “the
greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
Time magazine called
the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for
Radio Hanoi,” and the Washington Post declared that King had
“diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his
people.”
Beyond
Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
By Rev. Martin Luther
King
4 April 1967
Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at
Riverside Church in New York City
I come to this magnificent
house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other
choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest
agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has
brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The
recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my
own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening
lines: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” That time
has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
The truth of these
words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most
difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men
do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy,
especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without
great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within
one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the
issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this
dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by
uncertainty; but we must move on.
Some of us who have already
begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling
to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must
speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited
vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely
this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant
number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the
prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm
dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of
history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us
trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be
sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way
beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
Over the
past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own
silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have
called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many
persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart
of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are
you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of
dissent? Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say. Aren’t you
hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them,
though I often understand the source of their concern, I am
nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the
inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling.
Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in
which they live.
In the light of such tragic
misunderstandings, I deem it of signal importance to try to state
clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church — the church in Montgomery, Alabama,
where I began my pastorate — leads clearly to this sanctuary
tonight.
I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate
plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or
to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to
Russia.
Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the
total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy
of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the
National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the
role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While
they both may have justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good
faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony
to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give
and take on both sides.
Tonight, however, I wish not to speak
with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with
me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has
exacted a heavy price on both continents.
The Importance of
Vietnam
Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not
surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into
the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious
and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the
struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago
there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there
was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white —
through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new
beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the
program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political
plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would
never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its
poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and
skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was
increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to
attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of
reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing
far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was
sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and
to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of
the population. We were taking the black young men who had been
crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to
guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in
southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced
with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens
as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to
seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal
solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that
they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be
silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My
third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows
out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three
years — especially the last three summers. As I have walked among
the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that
Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have
tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my
conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through
nonviolent action. But they asked — and rightly so — what about
Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of
violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted.
Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise
my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without
having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in
the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for
the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands
trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
For those
who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?”
and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have
this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save
the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit
our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed
the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself
unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the
shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston
Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O,
yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And
yet I swear this oath–
America will be!
Now, it should be
incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the
integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If
America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must
read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the
deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who
are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of
protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
As if
the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America
were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me
in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also
a commission — a commission to work harder than I had ever worked
before for “the brotherhood of man.” This is a calling that
takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present
I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the
ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to
the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those
who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they
do not know that the good news was meant for all men — for Communist
and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white,
for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my
ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully
that he died for them? What then can I say to the “Vietcong”
or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I
threaten them with death or must I not share with them my
life?
Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself
the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have
offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true
to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of
the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this
vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the
Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless
and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.
This I
believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem
ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and
deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined
goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the
voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy,
for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our
brothers.
Strange Liberators
And as I ponder the madness of
Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond
to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that
peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the
junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under
the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of
them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful
solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their
broken cries.
They must see Americans as strange liberators.
The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after
a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist
revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they
quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document
of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to
support France in its reconquest of her former colony.
Our
government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not “ready”
for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western
arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long.
With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government
seeking self-determination, and a government that had been
established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love)
but by clearly indigenous forces that included some Communists. For
the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the
most important needs in their lives.
For nine years following
1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For
nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive
effort to recolonize Vietnam.
Before the end of the war we
were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the
French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of the
reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge
financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they
had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of
this tragic attempt at recolonization.
After the French were
defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come
again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the
United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily
divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of
the most vicious modern dictators — our chosen man, Premier Diem.
The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all
opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even
to discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all
this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing
numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that
Diem’s methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have
been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to
offer no real change — especially in terms of their need for land
and peace.
The only change came from America as we increased
our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly
corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people
read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and
democracy — and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and
consider us — not their fellow Vietnamese –the real enemy. They
move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their
fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are
rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So
they go — primarily women and children and the aged.
They
watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their
crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas
preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the
hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower
for one “Vietcong”-inflicted injury. So far we may have
killed a million of them — mostly children. They wander into the
towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes,
running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children,
degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children
selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their
mothers.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with
the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words
concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest
weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new
tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of
the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these
voiceless ones?
We have destroyed their two most cherished
institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their
land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the
nation’s only non-Communist revolutionary political force — the
unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the
peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and
killed their men. What liberators?
Now there is little left to
build on — save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations
remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of
the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. The peasants may
well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as
these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them
and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our
brothers.
Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary
task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies.
What of the National Liberation Front — that strangely anonymous
group we call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America
when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of
Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in
the south? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led
to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity
when now we speak of “aggression from the north” as if
there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us
when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of
Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of
death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even
if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men
we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that
our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest
acts.
How do they judge us when our officials know that their
membership is less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist
on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they
know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam
and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this
highly organized political parallel government will have no part?
They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is
censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely
right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form
without them — the only party in real touch with the peasants. They
question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace
settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are
frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political
myth again and then shore it up with the power of new violence?
Here
is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it
helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to
know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see
the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we
may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are
called the opposition.
So, too, with Hanoi. In the north,
where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the
waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak
for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and
especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are
the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and
the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth
and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the
colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French
domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up
the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth
parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us
conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely
brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized
they had been betrayed again.
When we ask why they do not leap
to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also it must be clear
that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops
in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military
breach of the Geneva agreements concerning foreign troops, and they
remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of
supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of
thousands.
Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us
the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how
the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been
made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and
built up its forces, and now he has surely heard of the increasing
international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north.
He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of
traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor
and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of
the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a
poor weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its
shores.
At this point I should make it clear that while I have
tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on
Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called
enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything
else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in
Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war
where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding
cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short
period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are
really involved. Before long they must know that their government has
sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more
sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy
and the secure while we create hell for the poor.
This Madness
Must Cease
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I
speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam.
I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are
being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the
poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at
home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the
world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I
speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great
initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be
ours.
This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of
Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:
“Each
day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the
Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The
Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies.
It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the
possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process
they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image
of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and
democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.”
If
we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the
world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become
clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American
colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope
is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear
installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of
Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative
than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have
decided to play.
The world now demands a maturity of America
that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we
have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that
we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The
situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our
present ways.
In order to atone for our sins and errors in
Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this
tragic war. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our
government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult
process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish
conflict:
End all bombing in North and South
Vietnam.
Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such
action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
Take immediate
steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing
our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in
Laos.
Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation
Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play
a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam
government.
Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from
Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.
Part of
our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant
asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime
which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what
reparations we can for the damage we have done. We most provide the
medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country
if necessary.
Protesting The War
Meanwhile we in the
churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our
government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must
continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse
ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by
seeking out every creative means of protest possible.
As we
counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for
them our nation’s role in Vietnam and challenge them with the
alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this
is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own
alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the
American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I
would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their
ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors.
These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at
the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is
to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide
on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all
protest.
There is something seductively tempting about
stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has
become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must
enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even
more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper
malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering
reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and
laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be
concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about
Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and
South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names
and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and
profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us
beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living
God.
In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that
it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world
revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern
of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military
“advisors” in Venezuela. This need to maintain social
stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary
action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American
helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why
American napalm and green beret forces have already been active
against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the
words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years
ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will
make violent revolution inevitable.”
Increasingly, by
choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken — the
role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to
give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense
profits of overseas investment.
I am convinced that if we are
to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must
undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the
shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a
“person-oriented” society. When machines and computers,
profit motives and property rights are considered more important than
people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are
incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will
soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our
past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the
good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial
act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be
transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and
robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion
is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and
superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars
needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look
uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With
righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see
individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in
Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no
concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This
is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed
gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The
Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others
and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of
values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This
way of settling differences is not just.” This business of
burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with
orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins
of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody
battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged,
cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that
continues year after year to spend more money on military defense
than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual
death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the
world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is
nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering
our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence
over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a
recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it
into a brotherhood.
This kind of positive revolution of values
is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer.
Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or
nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through
their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its
participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise
restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a
Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in
the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not
the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not
engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust
for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism
is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with
positive action seek to remove thosse conditions of poverty,
insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed
of communism grows and develops.
The People Are
Important
These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men
are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and
out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality
are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are
rising up as never before. “The people who sat in darkness have
seen a great light.” We in the West must support these
revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency,
a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice,
the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary
spirit of the modern world have now become the arch
anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism
has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgement
against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the
revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to
recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes
hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and
militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge
the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when “every
valley shall be exalted, and every moutain and hill shall be made
low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places
plain.”
A genuine revolution of values means in the final
analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than
sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to
mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual
societies.
This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts
neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in
reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all
men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept — so readily
dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force
— has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When
I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak
response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great
religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love
is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate
reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about
ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of
Saint John:
Let us love one another; for love is God and
everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth
not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God
dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.
Let us hope
that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer
afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of
retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the
ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of
nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of
hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : “Love is the ultimate force that
makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning
choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory
must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.”
We
are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted
with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life
and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination
is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked
and dejected with a lost opportunity. The “tide in the affairs
of men” does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out
deperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to
every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue
of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too
late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully
records our vigilance or our neglect. “The moving finger writes,
and having writ moves on…” We still have a choice today;
nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.
We must
move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for
peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world — a
world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be
dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved
for those who possess power without compassion, might without
morality, and strength without sight.
Now let us begin. Now
let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter — but beautiful
— struggle for a new world. This is the callling of the sons of God,
and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds
are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our
message be that the forces of American life militate against their
arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there
be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their
yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The
choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must
choose in this crucial moment of human history.
As that noble
bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:
Once
to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the
strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some
great cause, God’s new Messiah,
Off’ring each the bloom or
blight,
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and
that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet ’tis
truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And
upon the throne be wrong:
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And
behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping
watch above his own.
FBI
‘honors’ Martin Luther King Jr., 50 years after plotting to
‘neutralize’ him
=============================================
* Ik ben ervan overtuigd dat deze toespraak van Martin Luther King tevens zijn doodvonnis was, niet voor niets dat hij precies een jaar na deze toespraak werd vermoord door de FBI…….. (hoe ongelofelijk cynisch, maar ja wat wil je: de FBI en dan ook nog eens in de 60er jaren, toen Hoover, de topgraaier van deze terreurrorganisatie, zich nog oppermachtig voelde, al werd er al flink aan z’n stoelpoten gezaagd)
** Wat doet denken aan het enorme aantal slachtoffers in Vietnam door het gebruik van Agent Orange door de VS in die smerige door de VS gevoerde illegale oorlog, nog steeds eist dat Agent Orange slachtoffers onder kinderen die een leven vol ellende wacht……
Zie ook: ‘Joe Biden, de nieuwe VS president heeft een ‘grote’ racistische geschiedenis‘
‘Martin Luther King: vrede en gelijkheid is mogelijk‘
‘Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: 8 wijze lessen!‘)
‘Martin Luther King: de moord van 50 jaar geleden door de VS overheid uiterst beperkt herdacht‘
‘NAVO, het grootste militaire verbond maakt zich schuldig aan grootschalige terreur i.p.v. de vrede te bewaren‘ (o.a. geluidsfragmenten met het protest van King tegen de oorlog in Vietnam)
‘Martin Luther King: de moord van 50 jaar geleden door de VS overheid uiterst beperkt herdacht‘
‘Martin Luther King jr. vermoord door de overheid, aldus rechter……..‘
‘De oorlog tegen het arme deel van de VS bevolking‘
‘Nam Kurt Cobain zijn eigen leven? Niet volgens een flink aantal mensen‘
‘Martin Luther King misbruikt door Radio1‘
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