“Been a lot of applauding over the last few years. They applauded our total movement; they’ve applauded me. America and most of its newspapers applauded me in Montgomery. And I stood before thousands of Negroes getting ready to riot when my home was bombed and said, we can’t do it this way. They applauded us in the sit-in movement–we non-violently decided to sit in at lunch counters. The applauded us on the Freedom Rides when we accepted blows without retaliation. They praised us in Albany and Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. Oh, the press was so noble in its applause, and so noble in its praise when I was saying, ‘Be non-violent toward Bull Connor’; when I was saying, ‘Be non-violent toward [Selma, Alabama segregationist sheriff] Jim Clark’. There’s something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, ‘Be non-violent toward Jim Clark’, but will curse and damn you when you say, ‘Be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children.’ There’s something wrong with that press!”
“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. When machines and computers, profit and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look easily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing 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.” 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 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.
Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.”
Filed under: US, Videos | 12 Comments
Tags: imperialism, Martin Luther King, Racism, US, War
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“When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews, You are talking anti-Semitism.”
That quote, even if genuine, is not a denouncement of opposition to Zionism as an ideology. It was an off-the-cuff response to someone who had apparently made very harsh remarks about Zionists as people. In any case, if Dr. King did mean what you want him to have meant, then he was wrong. No one is infallible.
Whether or not he said that, it makes no odds. He would not have looked at the violence in Gaza and said nothing, period.
What is so amazing is that this guy, who said such radical things, was so forthright and determined in his views about foreign policy (to the extent that Chomsky looks like a quiet retiring chap), made so many powerful enemies and was eventually executed, presumably because he was so dangerous, is now considered the archetypal American hero. Whilst the battle is clearly not yet won in terms of racial justice in America, it’d be kinda nice if all those politicians who fall over themselves to sound like him actually took time to listen to his words on foreign policy. They might then not be quite so keen.
“…is now considered the archetypal American hero.”
Yes, as Gary Younge put it:
Aggg did you see McCain the other day. He said MLK would fight in Iran.
ugh – that must surely be a new low from the man who brought us “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran”. D’ya have a link, perchance?
They were talking about it on the Daily Show.
And here is the full transcript.
I lied, he didn’t quite say that MLK would bomb Iran. But he did imply that MLK’s legacy was on his shoulders. The lying, cheating, warmongering little shithead.
Well, this is ambiguous. The “brave soul” McCain is here referring to could be himself, striving heroically against “cruelty” and “injustice” to “disturb the peace of tyrants” by, err, bombing the shit out of people. Somehow I doubt MLK would approve.
McCain would have likely despised MLK for his opposition to the Vietnam war.
“Forty years after King’s death, the ability of America to both mythologise the man and marginalise his meaning is all too cruelly apparent.”
This is such an important point. It was only the other day that I heard a BBC reported say something like, “with Obama running for president, King would be amazed at the strides this country has taken!”. His name is always invoked in this manner – to show that his dream came true and that, now, anyone can accomplish anything, unlike in those old days when there were poor people, many of them black… oh wait ;/. CNN apparently had a whole special on him, can’t imagine how that went.
I tend to see MLK as the classic example of the US establishment taking a mass popular movement built on individual suffering and struggle, and attributing it to some impressive speeches and some guy’s willpower. That said, he couldn’t have give a speech!
That last bit meant to say ‘couldn’t half give a speech” ^_^