Editorial: King's call for peace

[Algorem]

http://www.dailynewstribune.com/opinion/8999002551047159807
Monday, January 15, 2007 - Updated: 12:43 AM EST

In the 38 years since he was gunned down, Martin Luther King Jr. has been transformed from man to myth, a process facilitated by the decision to create a national holiday in his honor. Like all holidays, MLK Day has become simplified and ritualized in countless school assemblies, TV specials and community breakfasts. For those who don't hold him in living memory, King's story has been boiled down to a few soothing facts: Martin Luther King Jr. was a black minister who led protests in the South against segregation; he made a speech in Washington about a dream he had of racial equality; he was assassinated in Memphis and everyone cried.

This condensation of history deprives America of the Martin Luther King who was a man, not a symbol. Limiting his activism to the struggle against Jim Crow laws in the South ignores his protests against racism in the north and poverty that debased Americans of all races. The annual recitations of his powerful "I have a dream" speech neglects too many of King's other speeches, depriving us of other words that ring true today.

This Martin Luther King Day, Americans should hear more than his 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. This year, let's tell our children about what happened when King heard the call of his conscience to speak out against an unjust war on the other side of the world.

The war in Vietnam, King said, "is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world. Our involvement in the war in Vietnam has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has strengthened the military-industrial complex; it has strengthened the forces of reaction in our nation. It has put us against the self-determination of a vast majority of the Vietnamese people, and put us in the position of protecting a corrupt regime that is stacked against the poor."...



King Quotes

http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/about_king/warandpeace/wpquotes.htm

I want to say one other challenge that we face is simply that we must find an alternative to war and bloodshed. Anyone who feels, and there are still a lot of people who feel that way, that war can solve the social problems facing mankind is sleeping through a great revolution. President Kennedy said on one occasion, "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind." The world must hear this. I pray to God that America will hear this before it is too late, because today we’re fighting a war.

I am convinced that it is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world. Our involvement in the war in Vietnam has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has strengthened the military-industrial complex; it has strengthened the forces of reaction in our nation. It has put us against the self-determination of a vast majority of the Vietnamese people, and put us in the position of protecting a corrupt regime that is stacked against the poor.

It has played havoc with our domestic destinies. This day we are spending five hundred thousand dollars to kill every Vietcong soldier. Every time we kill one we spend about five hundred thousand dollars while we spend only fifty-three dollars a year for every person characterized as poverty-stricken in the so-called poverty program, which is not even a good skirmish against poverty.

Not only that, it has put us in a position of appearing to the world as an arrogant nation. And here we are ten thousand miles away from home fighting for the so-called freedom of the Vietnamese people when we have not even put our own house in order. And we force young black men and young white men to fight and kill in brutal solidarity. Yet when they come back home that can’t hardly live on the same block together...

[Briar]

1. Since atrocities are inevitable in any war

the only way to observe the Geneva Conventions is to avoid going to war. I'd vote for that. Which party has the guts to propose it in nation states which to justify their very existance must play the macho warrior rather than the girly peace keeper?