Dr. King’s Anti-Militarist Ideals! April 9, 2021 Hilo Peace Vigil leaflet
Honor Dr. King. Come join the 1019th Hilo Peace Vigil and please pass the word and invite others to join as well. Mahalo.
D
r. King’s Anti-Militarist Ideals!
Below are excerpts of an important article By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon in OpEdNews on Easter Sunday, April 4, 2021 which marked the 53rd anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination. Read the full article here:
“King explicitly condemned what he called “the madness of militarism.” And by any reasonable standard, that madness can be diagnosed as pervading U.S. foreign policy in 2021. But today, almost all politicians and mainstream media commentators act as though King never said such things, or if he did, then those observations have little to do with today. But they have everything to do with the USA now in its 20th year of continuous warfare. The Pentagon’s constant bombing in the Middle East and elsewhere is the scarcely noticed wallpaper in the U.S. media’s echo chamber.
King didn’t simply oppose the Vietnam War. In an April 4, 1967 speech at New York’s Riverside Church delivered exactly a year before he was assassinated titled “Beyond Vietnam” he referred to the U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and broadly denounced the racist and imperial underpinnings of U.S. foreign policy. From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, our country was on the “wrong side of a world revolution” suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Global South, instead of supporting them.
King critiqued the economics of U.S. foreign policy, complaining about “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.” And he castigated U.S. federal budgets prioritizing militarism: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
Dr. King pointed out that, in effect, what goes around comes around. As he put it, “the bombs in Vietnam explode at home.” But there is a dire shortage of large progressive organizations willing to say that the bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere have been exploding at home for two decades. Twenty-first century bombs that have been exploding overseas, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, also explode at home in terms of the further militarization of the economy, police, culture and consciousness as well as the misdirection of vital resources to the Pentagon rather than human needs. “It challenges the imagination to contemplate what lives we could transform if we were to cease killing,” Dr. King said as the Vietnam War raged. The massive U.S. military budget still functions the way King described it “some demonic, destructive suction tube.” Yet the silences across so much of the U.S. political spectrum, including the liberal establishment and a great many progressive groups, persist in contempt of what Martin Luther King stood for during the final year of his life.”
No More War! Justice & Peace Go Together!
1. Mourn all victims of violence. 2. Reject violence & war as solutions. 3. Defend civil liberties.
4. Oppose all discrimination, anti-Islamic, anti-Semitic, anti-Hawaiian, anti-Black, anti-Asian, etc.
5. Seek peace through peaceful means and work for justice in Hawai`i and around the world.
Malu ‘Aina Center for Non-violent Education & Action P.O. Box 489 Ola’a (Kurtistown), Hawaii 96760 Phone (808) 966-7622
Email ja@malu-aina.org to receive our posts. For more information www.malu-aina.org
April 9, 2021 Hilo Peace Vigil leaflet – week 1019 – Fridays 3:30-5PM downtown Post Office
-- Jim Albertini Malu 'Aina Center For Non-violent Education & Action P.O. Box 489 Ola'a (Kurtistown) Hawai'i 96760 Phone 808-966-7622 Email ja@malu-aina.org Visit us on the web at www.malu-aina.org
