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Monday, January 21, 2013

Urgency of Now’s Revolutionary Choice: “Nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation”


Haunting words relevant 46 years on
Reposting from Jill Stein’s reposting of April 4, 1967, speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Further excerpting, minor editing by Carolyn Bennett

Continents: Asia (South Central, Middle East: Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, Palestine, etal) and  Africa (Somalia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Congo, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, etal) suffer U.S. foreign relations model in violence.

[Invading, plundering, corrupting, massacring, occupying, lawless]
Liberators?

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 … revolutionary political force…. We have supported enemies of the peasants …. We have corrupted women and children and killed the men.

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] 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?

…When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered.

W
e 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.
 
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. … War is not the answer.…


Essential ethos: nonviolence

Herein lies 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. 

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 [those] who are called the opposition.…

Getting house in order: 
Internal “values” revolution

A
 true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.…

Tomb of
Dr. King Coretta Scott King

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.

U.S. Activist
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.…


World protests U.S. drones
World revolutionary times

Egyptians protest
All over the globe [people] are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression; 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. …

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. …

 
O
Syrians protest
U.S. interference
ur 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 ….
 
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 [human]kind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.…

Urgency of now

We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. …We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today.… We must move past indecision to action.

Dr. Jill Stein
U.S. activist
2012 
 candidate
U.S. presidency
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.… Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’…

W
e still have a choice: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.





Source

Posted to me ─ a posting of the text from the archives of the Black Radical Congress, encouraged to forward or repost ─ from Jill Stein (Dr.) (HQ@JillStein.org)

This speech was 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. The speech was delivered one year to the day before his assassination, and it signaled a change in approach toward what King only weeks earlier had called the ‘triple evils of racism, extreme materialism and militarism.’

I have excerpted selected portions for contemporary direct relevance.
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