The Rev. Martin Luther king Jr., who would today have turned 74, is well remembered as the leading figure in the movement to end American apartheid. But, like so many visionary leaders, King did not limit himself to the single issue with which he was most identified.

In the last years of his life, King was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and, more broadly, of U.S. military adventurism abroad.

King explained that when the United States took the wrong side of fights in distant lands, this made Americans vulnerable to the resentments and the radical responses that are often directed toward superpowers that act out of arrogance and ignorance.

This year, many of the people who will mark King's birthday - including the president and leading members of Congress - are at the same time arguing that the United States should flex her superpower muscles with abandon. Never before has the advocacy for unilateral intervention by the United States been more vocal and aggressive. There are even those who would suggest that it is somehow unpatriotic to discuss the prospect that U.S. interventions abroad might play a role in inspiring terrorist acts and threats directed at Americans.

To counter the madness of the moment, it is appropriate to return to King's wise words. On April 4, 1967, one year before he was assassinated, King spoke at Riverside Church in New York City. The carefully chosen title of his address was, "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence." After detailing his opposition to the Vietnam War, King addressed broad questions of U.S. foreign policy and its impact on America. His words resonate with as much power today as they did in 1967:

There is something seductively tempting about stopping (with a critique of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia) and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality... (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 the immense profits of overseas investment.

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. ...

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 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.

Copyright 2003, The Capital Times

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