Politics

No one knows what the revered civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would say today about the war in Iraq. However we do know what he said about the war in Vietnam.

“..and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without have first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government…” -Martin Luther King

Selected quotes from Dr. King’s sermon:

“…it is estimated that we spend 500,000 dollars to kill each enemy solider while we spend only 53 dollars for each person classified as poor. And much of that 53 dollars goes for salaries to people who are not poor, so I was increasing compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and attack it as such. Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and die in extraordinary high proportions relative to the rest of the population.</p>

We were taking the black young men who had been cripple by society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in South-East Asia which they had not found in South-West Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with a cruel irony of watching negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same school room. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village but we realize that they would hardly live in the same block in Chicago or Atlanta…”</blockquote>

“…and who are we supporting in Vietnam today? It’s a man by the name of General Ky who fought with the French against his own people and who said on one occasion that the greatest hero of his life is Hitler. This is who we’re supporting in Vietnam today. Oh our government and our press generally won’t tell us these things, but God told me to tell you this morning…”

“..and don’t let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of police man of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment and it seems that I can hear god saying to American: ‘you are too arrogant’ …”