MLK Jr.: "Beyond Vietnam" (& beyond the diluting of his message)

[G_j]

Read or better yet, Listen to MLK's most controversial speech. Very powerful...
http://www.aavw.org/special_features/speeches_speech_king01.html

Source: King, Martin Luther Jr. Beyond Vietnam and Casualties of the War in Vietnam. New York: Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, 1986.

BEYOND VIETNAM
April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, NYC

---------------------------------------------------------

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice.

[GrpCaptMandrake]

1. Precisely!

Even this early into the existence of the MLK holiday, the culture is transforming Dr. King into some sort of black Santa Claus. In another couple of hundred years, he'll probably be delivering gifts to good children.

This speech is the one we should be playing on his memorial day. The "I Have a Dream" speech is brilliant and moving, but King's dream is best elaborated in his words delivered a year to the day prior to his martyrdom.

[G_j]

4. some think this speech

cemented his tragic fate.
Uncompromising and revolutionary, there are many passages from this speech which are absolutely taboo for the corporate media.
We will not be hearing them.

[GrpCaptMandrake]

10. I'm going to excerpt audio from the speech

quite heavily on my show tomorrow night. This is the Dr. King we must remember.

www.whiterosesociety.org/Kincaid.html

[G_j]

12. I've listened

to this particular speech many times and it never fails to deeply effect me. Audio is the way to go.

thank you for the link! :thumbsup:
on edit:
I will try to listen tomorrow

[PDittie]

2. One of his best

and so timely today:

"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 more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered. A nation can flounder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy."

[journalist3072]

3. Let's keep this kicked and nominated!!

It always amazes me how Dr. King's words are so relevant still, today.

And especially when he talked about Vietnam. All you have to do today is replace the word "Vietnam" with "Iraq."

[reelcobra]

7. I was proud to tell my daughter about King today

We were walking down the street in Burbank, CA and someone had his picture on their door. She is five and had heard about him in Kindergarten, I'm happy to say.

[journalist3072]

8. That is outstanding!! Teach the babies!

You know, when I think of Dr. King, and the many others who played a vital role in the civil rights movement, I think about the incredible gifts they left us.

They were not afraid to speak truth to power. Inspite of all the injustices being carried out, they loved their country so much that they tried to make America into the country that they knew it could and should be.

And sometimes I ask myself: what is the gift that I, and others in my generation, will leave the next generation?

I have a 10-year old cousin. And I ask myself sometimes: will she and her generation, one day ask our generation why we did nothing to stop the Bush Administration?

When they read about all the crimes committed by this Administration, will they ask us "Did you all try to stop them? Or did you all sit idly by on the sidelines?"

So kudos to you for teaching your daugther about MLK!!!

[Jose Diablo]

5. This is the speech that got him killed I think

In this one, he showed the wrongness of the war in Vietnam, pointing out how contrary to the reasons given for that war, making the Vietnam people free, in actuality the USA was preserving colonialism. First supporting the French in their attempts to recolonize Vietnam. And then our own country's agenda of the wealthy, extracting resources owned by the Vietnam people through force. With the ones paying the price for the war being mostly the poor, both black AND white.

How the underlaying philosophy of pursuit of wealth and materialism was killing the spiritualism of our country. How worship of things was damaging our spiritual ideas of brotherhood, materialism versus people. That was the real battle going on in American, why poverty exists.

From his speech Beyond Vietnam:

"The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality, and if we 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 significant and profound change in American life and policy. So such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyong 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 has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American nnapalm and Green Beret forces have already been activate 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 immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin, 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, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

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 cencern for the social betterment of the countries, 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 hand on the world order as 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 the peoples 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 that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift in approaching spiritual death."


And they killed him for saying this, clueing people in on what was really going-on.

MLK was a very great man, brilliant and a caring person. Anybody that personally knew him I am sure would vouch for his humanity.

[G_j]

6. ~~

[BrotherBuzz]

9. I heard it and feel kinda bummed out

I just listened to Martin Luther King's famous anti-Vietnam War talk on our Sunday morning alternative news program. The situation now is exactly the same as the one he described in great detail in that long talk. The country learned exactly nothing in the intervening forty years. Hard to be optimistic with that understanding.

I've been to three meetings in the past month about the war in Iraq. Those meetings were pretty well-attended, but I don't think we have developed an effective strategy to try to break through and reach the sleeping majority. That would require shock treatment.

Sure, there is the core of people who know what is going on and are already activated. Those are the people who only pay attention to alternative media such as Democracy Now and Pacifica Radio and radical websites. But that leaves a huge, passive group in the middle which has been well-conditioned since the late 70's to avoid participation in the political process. I encounter so many people like that every day. They have resigned themselves to passivity and just getting by day to day.

I'm in a funk and I want to know how to break this cycle. Dammit, MLK had a message and yet there are still people that choose to attack the messenger. Maybe I should just go rake my leaves and shut the fuck up.

[cantstandbush]

11. It's a bitch, ain't it? n/t

[G_j]

13. I know what you mean

this is what people really need to hear. We needed to hear it before invading Iraq, we need to hear it today!
The sad part is that we 'honor' MLK, yet many parts of this speech will never be spoken of in the corp. media because they are too critical of America.

In many senses we are worse off today.

[GrpCaptMandrake]

14. It's best to start by understanding that this is nothing new

Fewer than half the colonists in 1775 supported the Revolution. They may not have had "American Idol" back then, but they certainly did have work to do every day, crops to get in, horses to keep shod, bread to be baked, children to be clothed.

We're actually ahead of the game, since more than half the people support impeachment, believe * is running the war poorly, etc.

But some of this is also a matter of comparing apples and oranges. In 1775, the issue was armed rebellion and insurrection. In King's 1967, it was about taking to the streets and stopping the war via principles of non-violence. Granted, he was killed and it took a few years, but the war was stopped, and largely as a direct and proximate result of the action of "feet on the street." The follow-up was the problem. When the war ended, and Nixon left, our side thought we had won. We hadn't. Dr. King would've recognized that. The lesser folk who remained did not.

Nixon may have been gone, but his minions weren't. Rumsfeld was Ford's Chief of Staff. Cheney "sat by the river" until the body of his enemy flotated by. George Bush toadied about in relative obscurity until his moment arrived. Ronald Reagan watched and waited. W. sucked on his toes and snorted coke.

It's the age old lesson of the battlefield rout: once the enemy is on the run, they must be chased down and slaughtered in their disarray (See Lao Tzu). If the victor does not do that, the loser will, inexorably, rise again, and, quite often, prevail.

I think you're somewhat incorrect in saying that we learned nothing in the intervening forty years. That's not true. What we didn't do was finish the job. Ronald Reagan proved that. Bush 1 proved that. Frankly, Bill Clinton proved that.

And that's what we lost with the death of Dr. King. Had he lived, he might have completed the mission. He might have destroyed not just racisim, but the paradigm of an America that projects its might by violence.

What's the job now? The job is to keep the activist corps motivated and on-message. This will not be an armed struggle. It must be accomplished by non-violent means. We must cultivate the ground that will germinate the seed of the next great leader. It is not for us to complain about our lack. It is for us to make the way for that leader. John the Baptist didn't bitch about not getting to be "the One." He made the way.

Those who actively seek to be "the One" will always fail. "Some are born to greatness. Others have greatness thrust upon 'em." It is this latter category that we watch for. It is our job to be clear-headed enough to recognize him or her when they come.

For what it's worth.

On edit: No matter how hard you try, there's always one more typo.

[G_j]

16. interesting

nice contribution to the discission.

In regards to chasing down the enemy (don't you mean Sun Tzu?)
look at the number of Iran/Contra figures in positions of power today.
If Iran/Contra had been persued we might not be in the situation we are in now. That was near a fatal mistake. It remains to be seen if we can get to the bottom of it and really clean house this time around.

[GrpCaptMandrake]

17. I did mean "Sun Tzu"

My bad. Thanks for noticing.

he Iran-Contra gang was largely made up of old, unreconstructed Watergate thugs.

Listened to the Gore speech today. He seems to be saying much the same thing. Also makes many of the same points about the rarity of democracies in the march of history.

[G_j]

15. ~~