“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about [Iraq]? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. 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 to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government.”
“If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in [Iraq]. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad [Iran] into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of [Iraq] immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.”
“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 veins of people 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.”
Are these words from the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright? No.
These words are excerpts from Rev. Martin Luther King’s speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” which he gave on 4 April 1967. I’ve replaced “Vietnam” with “Iraq” and “China” with “Iran” in the excerpt above. If you have a minute, read the speech in its entirety here. It’s strangely prescient.
1 comment:
Minister GOTCHA! Though I've never heard Jeremiah Wright speak so eloquently - I figured something was up.
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