Martin Luther King and Satyagraha
Dr. King was not a passive man. He believed in aggressively and directly confronting evil. Such action require great courage and sacrifice and a willingness to suffer even unto death. Dr. King also believed that violence was always evil. He believed that physical violence in a righteous cause unravels all potential good and turns righteousness into evil.
Dr. King would not want the United States and the world to stand aside and do nothing to help the people of Iraq or Afghanistan (or Darfur). Insofar as Americans in these places are helping people - healing the wounded, educating children, protecting the innocent, seeking peace - then they are doing work that Dr. King would have approved of.
Insofar as Americans are bombing villagers, killing innocents (or even killing combatants), and maiming children they are performing acts that Dr. King would see as unqualified evil.
Wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete. There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminated even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good. If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war. ~ Martin Luther King's Nobel Lecture
If we assume that life is worth living, if we assume that mankind has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war and so let us this morning explore the conditions for peace. ~ MLK, A Christmas Sermon on Peace
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. ~ MLK, Beyond VietnamThe United States spends more on military defense than all other nations of the world combined. Fifty-four percent of Federal spending goes to the military.
Sorry, Mr. Johnson, Dr. King would not support America's wars. A fact, Mr. Johnson, I believe you know very well.
2 comments:
from the speech April 4, 1967
"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 the veins of peoples 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."
posted from the Far North
These are the same clowns that hate the MLK birthday holiday and deride all of the programs that MLK would have stood up for, even to the point of arguing that those programs to help those less fortunate are "un-Christian". Apparently, the only use they have for him is to make up stories abut what he would have believe, as they try to recast him in their image.
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