"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: Martin Luther King: 4 April 1967 at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York
Approaching Spiritual Death
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
Gary G. Kohls, MD
03/29/05 "ICH" - - Those were the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. in his famous speech 38 years ago, April 4, 1967, (Listen to full speech here) one year to the day of his1968 assassination in Memphis, TN. The people who heard that speech recognized it as one of the most powerful speeches ever given articulating the immorality of the Viet Nam War. Some also saw that King was signing his own death warrant by exposing so forcefully the perpetrators of what was known as “the overwhelming atrocity that was Viet Nam.”
King was speaking out from his deeply felt sense of outrage and anguish over the horrible suffering of millions of innocent and unarmed Vietnamese civilians. King knew that women and children were the main victims of a whole host of highly lethal US weapons, including one of the US Air Force’s favorites, napalm, which burned the flesh off of whatever part of the body that the flaming, jellied gasoline splashed on.
King knew of the atrocities that our GIs were ordered to commit in the name of “anti-communism.” He saw the connections between the killing of dispensable “gooks” on the battlefields of Southeast Asia and the oppression, impoverishment, imprisoning and lynching of “dispensable blacks” in America.
King was being faithful to his commitment to the nonviolence teachings and life of Jesus of Nazareth by speaking out against injustice wherever he saw it. He knew that the violence of racism, the violence of orchestrated poverty and the violence of militarism have the same sources: fear of “the other” and the willingness to protect one’s own wealth and privilege from the poor and underprivileged.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8405.htmBy Rev. Martin Luther King
"I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government.