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.
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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
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true revolution of
values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our
past and present policies.…
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| 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.
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| 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.…
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| World protests U.S. drones |
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| 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. …
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| 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.’…
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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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