General Discussion

El_Johns

(1,805 posts) Thu Jan 16, 2014, 02:43 AM Jan 2014

America Betrayed MLK for Condemning US Wars for Predatory Investments

On TV, the week-end before the Martin Luther King Jr.’ birthday holiday, see all the celebrities, Black, white, Asian, Latino. They will come to praise King and bury again King’s condemnation of US atrocity “wars meant to maintain unjust predatory investments on three continents.” [1]

They will hail King to heaven, loudly, to drown out anyone whispering that King called their dirty government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world...” [1]

But with the horrific carpet bombing of Laos and the holocaust Americans put upon Vietnam after paying the French army for eight years to retake the colony it had turned over to Japan during the Second World War, our now more worldly aware and politically informed successful hero Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in early 1967, now knew enough, AND HAD HAD ENOUGH.

He said:

“A time comes when silence is betrayal.” And that time has come for us. “They languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury.

“So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones? We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing — in the crushing of the nation’s only non-Communist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church.

“We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in the rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.” [1]

For forty years now, one had read and heard the highest admiration for Rev. King from the same New York Times, Washington Post, other newspapers and electronic media that in 1967, after Rev. King made embarrassing world headlines with his sermon “Beyond Vietnam – a Time to Break Silence,” vilified him as “a traitor,” and “a disgrace to his race!”

http://voiceofdetroit.net/2014/01/15/america-betrayed-rev-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-for-condemning-u-s-wars-for-predatory-investments/

By the time King made the "Beyond Vietnam" speech, Smiley tells host Neal Conan, "he had fallen off already the list of most-admired Americans as tallied by Gallup every year." Smiley continues, "it was the most controversial speech he ever gave. It was the speech he labored over the most."

After King delivered the speech, Smiley reports, "168 major newspapers the next day denounced him." Not only that, but then-President Lyndon Johnson disinvited King to the White House. "It basically ruins their relationship," says Smiley. "This was a huge, huge speech," he continues, "that got Martin King in more trouble than anything he had ever seen or done."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125355148