This war as an unjust, evil and futile war: MLK on Vietnam/Iraq

[Marleyb]

MLK 1 Unjust Evil and Futile War - mp3
http://ftp.radio4all.net/pub/archive/05.29.04/mlk1-truth.mp3

I will be discussing today one of the most controversial issues confronting our nation. I’m using as a subject from which to preach, why I am opposed to the war in Vietnam.

Now let me make it clear in the beginning, that I see this war as an unjust, evil and futile war. I preach to you today on the war in Vietnam because my conscience leaves me with no other choice. The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international conflicts the truth is hard to come by, because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins.



But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. Ye shall know the truth, said Jesus, and the truth shall set you free.

I’ve chosen to preach about the war in vietnam today
because I agree with Dante,
that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who,

in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.
There comes a time when silence is betrayal.

MLK 2 War on the Poor- mp3
http://ftp.radio4all.net/pub/archive/05.29.04/mlk2-waronpoor.mp3

I come this morning to my protest to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This sermon 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. This morning however I wish not to speak with Hanoi, the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans, who bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.

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



MLK 3- Apathy - mp3
http://ftp.radio4all.net/pub/archive/05.29.04/mlk3-apathy.mp3

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.

Now of course one of the difficulties in speaking out today grows out of the fact that there are those who are seeking to equate dissent with disloyalty. It is a dark day in our nation when high level authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent. Something has happened and people are not going to be silent, the truth must be told. Yes we must stand, and we must speak. There comes a time when silence is betrayal.

MLK 4- Hypocrisy - mp3
http://ftp.radio4all.net/pub/archive/05.29.04/mlk4-applauded.mp3

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.

MLK 5- God is Love - mp3
http://ftp.radio4all.net/pub/archive/05.29.04/mlk5-godislove.mp3

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.

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."

Let us love one another; for God is Love 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 me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart. Above all, with a passionate desire to see our beloved country to stand as a moral example to the world.

I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively and deal forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism. We are presently moving down a dead-end road that can lead to national disaster. America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism. America has strayed away, this unnatural excursion has brought only confusion and bewilderment. It has left hearts aching with guilt and minds distorted with irrationality.

It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home. Come home America.

I call on Washington today, I call on every man and woman of goodwill all over America today, I call on the young men of America who must make a choice today, to take a stand on this issue- tomorrow may be too late.



MLK 6- Now is the Time - mp3
http://ftp.radio4all.net/pub/archive/05.29.04/mlk6-now_isthetime.mp3

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 military government 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 these people and hear their broken cries.

Now let me tell you the truth about it, they must see Americans as strange liberators.

Who are we supporting in Vietnam today, but a man by the name of General Chi, who fought with the French, against his own people. And who said on one occasion that the greatest hero of his life was Hitler- this is who we are supporting in Vietnam today. Oh our government and the press generally won’t tell us these things, but God told me to tell you this morning- the truth must be told.

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 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.

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. This is the role our nation has taken.

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. On 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 that flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation.



Now is the time to make real the promises of Democracy. Now is the Time, to lift our nation from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children. It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment.

Martin Luther King Jr.


Please do more than just read these words
Listen to The Wisdom from The Man himself

This is the kind of thing you cannot digest in one pass, but listen again and again for it to sink it to your soul. What would Dr. King do if he were alive today?

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=9904
http://www.benfrank.net/mlk

[Peace Patriot]

1. The best tribute we can pay to Martin Luther King is to...

...throw Diebold and ES&S election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor' NOW!

Bushite voting machine companies have stolen our right to vote just as surely as the poll tax did.

The "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming code in the new electronic voting systems is non-transparent. It is so secret that not even our secretaries of state are permitted to review it.

Transparency is the first requirement for real elections. Non-transparent elections are not elections. They are tyranny.

The new electronic voting machines are unreliable, insecure and extremely hackable. They are also very expensive, and require on-going upgrades and servicing, increasing their cost and their insecurity.

There are virtually no audit/recount controls on electronic voting. One third of the country voted without any paper trail at all in 2004 (non-recountable elections). The rest have extremely inadequate auditing for election errors and fraud that occurs at the speed of light, and inside a black box with no scrutiny, and that only need one hacker and a couple of minutes to change thousands, even millions, of votes, leaving no trace.

The voting machine companies who control these machines are run by rightwing Bushites, who are the only beneficiaries (in addition to corrupt election officials) of the $4 billion electronic voting boondoggle, funded by Bush's "pod people" in Congress, and mis-named "The Help America Vote Act." HAVA encouraged a rush to purchase these machines, permitted lavish lobbying by the companies, and failed to require a paper trail for the 2004 election. (Tom Delay blockaded it.)

Our elections used to occur in the public venue, run by elected officials. They are now run by private corporations who refuse to disclose how they are tabulating our votes. Our elections have been effectively privatized.

We have been hoodwinked. We have been sold a bill of goods. We have been had.

The great progressive, antiwar majority in this country has been disenfranchised by electronic voting systems, just as surely as black voters were being disenfranchised in the 1960s.

Martin Luther King knew how important voting is. His 1965 campaign concentrated on voting rights, supported by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Without the right to vote, we can do nothing. We have no sovereignty as a people, no power. With it, we can change the world!

The Bushite assault on everybody's right to vote has been combined with a new assault on black voting rights, in Ohio and other places, with egregious violations of the Voting Rights Act in 2004.

In the South, in the 1960s, it was the Democratic Party that was at fault for denying black voting rights. Today, it has been the Democratic Party's fault for remaining silent while Bushite corporations took over our election system. The Democratic Party, the party of the people, did a turnaround in the 1960s, and became the champion of black voting rights and civil rights. It can turn around again, and become the champion of transparent elections and the voting rights of all. It can, and it must--because if it doesn't, our democracy is over. Whatever corruption has been involved in this electronic voting boondoggle, and behind that corruption, additional corruption on the war, must be rejected.

I strongly believe that the American people learned the lessons of Vietnam, and I believe it on the basis of fact not speculation. 58% of the American people opposed the Iraq war before the invasion, in Feb. 2003--across the board in all polls. Before all the lies were exposed; before the full horror and cost of it were known. 58%! And that number has hardly changed except to go up. The American people were not fooled; they were bludgeoned. And when we tried to oust these war criminals, our votes were switched from Kerry to Bush, inside these black box voting machines, by computer programs that neither we nor anybody else--except Bush's friends at Diebold and ES&S--were permitted to scrutinize. I think we are being ruled by a fascist junta which has the purpose of using this country's military and all our resources for unjust war and for private gain, in bold and deliberate violation of the lessons of Vietnam, and contrary to the will of the people.

The great majority of Americans are peace-minded and justice-loving. The issue polls and the approval polls, over the last several years, and the real exit polls on election day, all show this overwhelmingly. The American people know an unjust war when they see one, and they wanted no part of this one, and they continue to want no part of it, in even bigger numbers than before. The power that is being wielded over us to force us into unjust war is illegitimate, and the only way to seize it back, and to restore our sovereignty as a people, is to rid this country of voting machines that are controlled by Bush friends and major donors with secret programming.

Black and white together, Democrat and, yes, Republican, together, and all parties and all Americans together, we MUST restore our right to vote. We must do it NOW. We shall overcome!

[Marleyb]

2. great post- I agree

"I strongly believe that the American people learned the lessons of Vietnam, and I believe it on the basis of fact not speculation. 58% of the American people opposed the Iraq war before the invasion"

...and yet the corporate media and democratic leadership still give the impression that the American people were all for the war. That is why Kerry had to be FOR the war.

At this point, we cannot wait for another election. We have to think outside of the box. But I like your idea of throwing the voting machines in the boston harbor hmmmmm...

[Marleyb]

4. cool...you started a post about this...

The best tribute we can pay to Martin Luther King is to...throw Diebold and ES&S election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor' NOW!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x409299
:toast:

[Marleyb]

3. full transcript

link from this DU post
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x143844

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html

[Marleyb]

5. forgot to mention

these are audio clips of the vietnam speech set to peter gabriel's "passion". They are really powerful- great to play at gatherings...or just listen to everyday...