MLK and Iraq

Ah, but as a guru of non-violence he [MLK]wouldn't have resorted to occupation.

Don't be so sure. His fellow liberals, clergymen at that, accused King of creating needless conflict.

They deemed him and his troops invaders, and wanted them to pull out of Birmingham, Alabama in the name of peace.

King refused, arguing that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere ... Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial 'outside agitator' idea."

Ooh, how compelling an argument. I'm convinced.

And just what precisely in King's teachings makes this writer believe King would agree with a pre-emptive attack that would lead to said occupation?

I'm amazed every time I look at poll results showing the majority of Americans support such a thing (come on people, how different is a pre-emptive attack from "naked aggression"?), but the idea that MLK would have supported one?!?

 

Just another in the long, long list of people Zombie MLK is going to ************ up when he comes out of the grave looking for revenge. Ward Connerly isn't going down alone.

 

MLK has long since passed, and therefore we cannot ask him what his opinion on the situation is...unless he does come back as a zombie, but most likely all he will say is "brains...."

 

One of the laziest articles I've ever seen, given the fact that all the guy had to do was google (not a verb) MLK and Vietnam to come up with this, among other things.

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
By Rev. Martin Luther King
4 April 1967


There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps the 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 to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the 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 schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. 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 Vietnam? 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. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html

 

Nice catch needs.

Now for one of my favorite party questions: Would non-violent, non-cooperation have worked as a tool of resistance in Nazi Germany? For the sake of argument, say 1936-1939.

 

And we have Godwin...