(Name-mce) ListServ When Will We Ever Learn? Dr. King's Forgotten Speech on Peace

[Bill Howe]

Note: I was cleaning up old computer files and ran across this essay that I
posted on the ListServ in 2003.  I did a search for the author - Paul
Rockwell - and found him still fighting the good fight at -
http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/staffpr.html




Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 4:57 AM

Subject: When Will We Ever Learn? Dr. King's Forgotten Speech on Peace





When Will We Ever Learn?

Dr. King's Forgotten Speech on Peace





by Paul Rockwell

Oakland, California





Thirty-five years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech that
changed my life. I was a student at Union Theological Seminary in New York
City in 1967, during the peak of the Vietnam War. Almost by accident a
friend invited me across the street to hear Dr. King deliver a comprehensive
anti-war address at Riverside Church.



It is not the drama, the excitement of the occasion, nor King's mellifluous
voice passing over the hushed sanctuary as he described the holocaust of
Indochina. It is not even the way history later vindicated King's teachings
on war -- everything he predicted came to pass -- that makes his 1967
address so memorable to me. It is the vitality of his teachings for our own
lives, the immediate relevance to the arrogance and jingoism of our time,
that compels me to recall and reread the Peacemaker's masterpiece once
again.



The economic and moral crisis we are facing today -- the ubiquity of violent
crime, the endemic clutch of drugs, the growing poverty of the working poor,
the suffocation of millions of decent lives in the ghettos of our cities --
all date back to that fateful turn when American leaders, pressured by big
corporations, chose war over peace, empire over civil rights and social
progress.



Dr. King saw our crisis coming. "A few years ago," he began from his
well-lit pulpit, speaking in reference to the anti-poverty programs, when
America was moving forward -- "A few years ago, there was a shining moment
in our struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the
poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were
experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I
watched the programs broken. I was compelled to see the war as the enemy of
the poor."



As Dr. King analyzed the hope-wrecking nature of war, I put down my pen,
stopped taking notes, and listened with my heart, as he described, not only
the devastation abroad, the injuries and scarred lives of the working class
youth returning home, but the spiritual costs of imperialism -- the
mendacity of our leaders, the disillusionment of youth. " A nation," he
said, " that continues year after year to spend more money on military
defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."



King reminded his listeners that U.S. lawlessness abroad breeds violence
within the United States as well. "As I have walked among the desperate,
rejected angry men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would
not solve their problems. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about
Vietnam? Wasn't our own nation using massive doses of violence to solve its
problems? 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 against the greatest purveyor of violence in the
world today -- my own government." King never used the term "blowback," but
his message was clear: When America sows the wind, it will reap the
whirlwind in due time.



The Vietnam War is past. The cold war is over. But King's teachings about
the moral and social costs of militarism and empire are as relevant today as
they were 35 years ago. After all, there is still no Marshall Plan for our
cities, no jobs program for our youth yearning for hope and direction.



The recent $396 billion military appropriation is a mockery of economic
justice. While our cities are in decay, Americans pay more for defense than
all potential adversaries and neutral parties combined. The recent $45
billion increase -- a mere add-on -- is more than three times the defense
budgets of Iran, Iraq, Libya, North, Korea, Sudan and Syria combined.



As U.S. corporations continue to globalize weaponry and violence for profit,
the U.S. has become the primary font of arms proliferation in the world.
Subsidized by American taxpayers, U.S. corporations -- Lockheed-Martin,
General Electric, General Dynamics, McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, Hughes
Aircraft, to name a few -- sell lethal weapons to more than 40 countries.
Assault helicopters, tanks, 50-caliber machine guns, hellfire anti-armor
missiles, land-mine dispensing pods, Stinger missiles, fighter jets, rifles,
guns -- mechanized violence has become the main currency of American foreign
policy. There is hardly a major battlefield where U. S. arms are not
involved, and U.S. industries produce arms for both sides in many conflicts:
Britain and Argentina in the Falklands, Ethiopia and Somalia in the Horn of
Africa. According to USA TODAY, U.S. companies, along with France, helped
Iraq build his its arsenal of poison gas and chemical weapons. How easy we
forget that President Reagan sold arms to Khomeini, after which President
Bush (senior) promoted and backed Saddam Hussein's 7-year war against Iran.



King once described the sale of weaponry on a world scale as one of the
great social crimes of the modern age. His 35-year-old speech still sears my
soul, because my own country is still "the greatest purveyor of violence in
the world today." We are all victims, in King's words, of that "deadly
western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so
long."



I left Riverside Church inspired by the intensity of the event. The
following day, King's patriotic address caused an outcry in the Media. TIME
magazine called it "demagogic slander, a script for Radio Hanoi."
Nevertheless I can still hear our teacher reciting the words of James
Russell Lowell: "Though the cause of evil prosper yet 'tis truth alone is
strong."





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Paul Rockwell, formerly assistant professor of philosophy at Midwestern
University, Texas, is a writer and peace activist in the Bay Area.
rockyspad at earthlink.net



-- 
Bill Howe
http://www.billhowe.org

Multicultural Educators to China Summer 2007 Trip -
http://www.billhowe.org/china2007.htm

Past-President
National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME)
http://www.nameorg.org