topic by
Human Bean
7/17/2002 (11:23) |
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Martin Luther King
My third reason [for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision] moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
Source: speech, first delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered
Martin King
'This discontent is sound and healthy. Nonviolence saves it from degenerating into morbid bitterness and hatred. Hate is always tragic. It is as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated. It distorts the personality and scars the soul. Psychiatrists are telling us now that many of the inner conflicts and strange things that happen in the subconscious are rooted in hate. So now they are saying, 'Love or perish.' This is the beauty of nonviolence. It says you can struggle without hating; you can fight war without violence. We must never succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle, for if this happens, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.'
Martin Luther King
'This is a role our nation has taken. The role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the priveleges and pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. I'm convinced that if we are to get on the right side fo the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin to 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, militarism, and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies... True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look on uneasily upon the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West invest in 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'. Western arrogance of feeling 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.'
Source: speech, first given at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 (a year to the day before he was murdered)
Martin Luther King, Jr.
War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrows.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy . . . Now they languish under our bombs and consider us . . . the real enemy.
Source: speech, Why I oppose the war in Vietnam
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Peace is not simply the absence of conflict, but the existence of justice for all people.
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