Reply #8: HERE ARE SOME FINE WORDS OF PEACE BY MARTIN LUTHER KING: [View All]

[Jeffersons Ghost]

Martin Luther King, Jr., Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution (minor changes and deletions to update content are odvious)

I want to say one other challenge that we face is simply that we must find an alternative to war and bloodshed. Anyone who feels... that war can solve the social problems facing mankind is sleeping through a great revolution. President Kennedy said, "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind." The world must hear this. I pray to God that America will hear this before it is too late, because today we’re fighting a war.

I am convinced that it is one of the most unjust wars... in the history of the world. Our involvement in the war... has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has strengthened the military-industrial complex; it has strengthened the forces of reaction in our nation. It has put us against the self-determination of a vast majority of... people, and put us in the position of protecting a corrupt regime that is stacked against the poor...

This war puts us in a position of appearing to the world as an arrogant nation. And here we are ten thousand miles away from home fighting for the so-called freedom of people when we have not even put our own house in order. And we force young black men and young white men to fight and kill in brutal solidarity. Yet when they come back home they can hardly live on the same block together.

The judgment of God is upon us today. And we could go right down the line and see that something must be done—and something must be done quickly. We have alienated ourselves from other nations so we end up morally and politically isolated in the world. There is not a single major ally of the United States of America that would dare send a troop to Vietnam, and so the only friends that we have now are a few client-nations...

This is where we are. "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind," and the best way to start is to put an end to this war, because if it continues, we will inevitably come to the point of confronting _______, which could lead the whole world to nuclear annihilation.

It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world -- may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.