EMAIL SIGN UP!
Most Popular This Week
- Wisconsin Bill Would Treat Organic Milk, Sharp Cheddar, Brown Eggs as "Junk Food"
- Patent Filing Claims Solar Energy ‘Breakthrough’
- Climate Change's 'Evil Twin': Ocean Acidification
- Disaster Capitalism Strikes as Hedge Funds Circle Near-Bankrupt Municipalities Like Vultures
- Ignoring Bee Crisis, EPA Greenlights New 'Highly Toxic' Pesticide
- Patent Filing Claims Solar Energy ‘Breakthrough’
- Wisconsin Bill Would Treat Organic Milk, Sharp Cheddar, Brown Eggs as "Junk Food"
- Climate Change's 'Evil Twin': Ocean Acidification
- In 'March Toward Disaster,' World Hits 400 PPM Milestone
- Ignoring Bee Crisis, EPA Greenlights New 'Highly Toxic' Pesticide
Popular content
Today's Top News
King’s Message of Nonviolence Should Not Be Overlooked
Martin Luther King Day this year is strikingly poignant, as the United States soon will inaugurate the first black president in its history. That this could happen in our lifetime was not expected and inspires awe.
The Barack Obama presidency potentially can transform the consciousness of Americans and people around the globe. For blacks, seeing such a successful and respected role model will serve as powerful inspiration. We should allow ourselves to fully soak in this incredible event. The effects will continue throughout the presidency and for generations to come.
Obama's pending inauguration actually overshadows Martin Luther King Day, and the news media focus on how far America has come toward reaching King's "dream" of racial equality. As significant and exciting as an Obama presidency is, it does not encompass the vision that Martin Luther King Jr. ultimately held.
The media fixate on only a part of King's dream. In the final years of his life, King moved from concentrating on civil rights for blacks to other issues he deemed important, even critical.
King realized that poverty needed to be dealt with in America. Poverty was not as popular a message as civil rights. Favorable and abundant media coverage dried up. Then on April 4, 1967, King gave the "Beyond Vietnam" speech at the Riverside Church in New York City. Although he had been warned not to do so, King spoke out against the Vietnam War. Moreover, King spoke of a larger soul-sickness in America of which the war was only a symptom. This was not a popular message.
King spoke out against the militarism and the hyper-nationalism that he saw in his country. He viewed it as a form of idolatry. "A true revolution of values will lay hand 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 the 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."
King came to see war as an impractical solution to humanity's challenges: "The choice is not between violence and nonviolence. It is between nonviolence and nonexistence." These sound like radical words, even foolish. However, our own intelligence agencies have concluded that the Iraq war actually has increased the likelihood of terrorism. In a world with increasing nuclear weapons, and more biological and chemical weapons, violence might be the most naive thing in which to believe.
Martin Luther King Day commemorations neglect King's evolution and the fact that he devoted his final years to opposing American militarism. He claimed, "The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today (is) my own government." These are strong words. King spoke out forcefully. But the stakes are high: humanity's survival.
Decades later, King's message is sanitized, omitting parts of his dream for humanity that may be critical.
How would King feel about Obama? He might not be as happy as many people might assume. King might care less about Obama's race than he would about the president-elect's positions on poverty and stopping war.
Obama promises less violence and more diplomacy; he is not a proponent of nonviolence though, and has spoken explicitly of killing.
King warned about a "descending spiral of violence" that I believe we are seeing today. If Obama continues the metaphor of a "war on terror," it would be a nightmare for King, not a dream come true.
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
7 Comments so far
Show All"The choice is not between violence and nonviolence. It is between nonviolence and nonexistence." -- indeed, this is probably what put the set up the snuff job on him in motion.
If not that then, "The greatest purveyor of violence...is my own gov't" would also have been enough -- remember, he didn't say these once but many times in the time up to his murder, he spoke truth to power and paid the price all too often required of prophets.
____________
All the bombs are in the hands of terrorists!
Sioux Rose
CHUCK: I totally agree. The "ifs" of life are a subject of vast intrigue. IF Dr. King had lived, perhaps Obama would have been well-mentored. I still find myself returning to the glib comment used in reference to Obama's Attorney pick, Eric Holder. Something like began his career by doing good and then opted to do well, a slick way of suggesting the all-too typical sell-out to mammon and the appendages of temporal success.
The older I get, the more I realize how powerful, omniscient, wise and prophetic Dr. King really was. I admire him greatly.
The conservatives have already done that. In fact, without violence, they've been able to dumb down the electorate. It's like an armed populace that is still defenseless for having its freedoms pulled out from right under their noses. Dr. King knew how to reframe the issues and put forth a new awareness. It's a shame that the party isn't learning from Dr. King. The pen is mightier than the sword !
Terrance Mitchell
Redfield, South Dakota
For those of you unfamiliar with Dr. King's greatest speech "Beyond Vietnam--A Time to Break Silence", nearly all of the speech and its entire transcript can be found at:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
It is a fitting meditation for his birthday celebration coming up on Monday and a good perspective from which to view the Obama innauguration the following day. Most of all, as you listen (or read) remember that this speech is nearly 42 years old--and ask yourself: What has changed in the intervening time?
Poet
Poet:yes, I have heard it. All day tomorrow, Jan.19, 2009, WBAI 99.5FM is doing ML King Jr. material, special programs. WBAI is the Pacifica Network station in NYC. Live streaming online, www.wbai.org Pacifica's website is www.pacifica.org and Pacifica has a wonderful archive: www.pacificaradioarchives.org Good last line question. I have to think about it, beyond the fact that I aged. Many of us still are doing things as can, as we did in the 1960s and are still antiwar. I never met Dr. King, but met someone he worked with once.
Dr. Kings statement " the choice is between non-violence and non-existence " was so true and prophetic. We must all learn to live together non-violently or we will all surely die together violently. Dr. King was a great man of courage and integrity. He was the paradigm of non-violence that Mahatma Gandhi spoke of when he said: "Ahimsa (non-violence ) is not cowardice ". If you are not ready to pay with your life, like Dr. King, that is not non-violence. The saddest thing is after 40 years the sapience and epiphany of Dr. King has not been taken seriously.What he warned us about has not changed and the U.S.Government is still the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.
I agree with the attention being given here to King's speech "Beyond Vietnam."
The question of why did it take until 1967 to give it is, however, is, perhaps, a complex historical study. (A favorite author of mine, Lewis Mumford, spoke out in 1964. And look at Chomsky.)
My favorite piece is not a speech but is King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," (1963,) his key defense of nonviolence against religious (Christian and Jewish, 3 Reverends, 4 Bishops and a Rabbi) opposition. I consider it to be King's most important statement. I like to put the two pieces side by side to emphasize King's counterthesis about "tension" versus the original thesis about being nice, civil, bipartisan.
King was the great reconciler at the mythic level to Charles Hampden-Turner in a short section of Maps of the Mind.
There's a fascinating examination of related issues in a chapter "Dissent and Rebellion in the Laboratory" in Charles Hampden-Turner's 1971 movement classic, Radical Man: The Process of Psychosocial Development, (the published version of Hampden-Turner's doctoral dissertation at Harvard, "Towards a Humanistic Psychology") and throughout the whole book. That chapter, however, is a must read for the movement. Hampden-Turner later says Radical Man is buttressed with more than 1,000 research findings, which seems obvious. It's a very important study.
It didn't take "decades later" to sanitize King. Jonathan Kozol examined this in his 1975 book, "The Night is Dark and I Am Far from Home: A Political Indictment of the US Schools," which apparently had a 4th edition in 1990.