Dr. Martin Luther King’s Prophetic Warning, Denouncing the Merchants of Death
Over the past three years, a collective of volunteer researchers, lawyers, and commentators created The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, dedicated to holding accountable four weapon manufacturing corporations based in the U.S. Their tribunal amassed copious evidence to prove that Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon) and General Atomics (a company which manufactures weaponized drones) are guilty of committing war crimes. On January 15, 2025, as the world marks the birth of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, a press conference announced the Tribunal’s verdicts and release the report of ten international jurors who have weighed the evidence submitted to them.
Of necessity, the evidence was culled from examining a limited range of devastatingly criminal U.S. “forever wars,” of brutal and needless wars of choice. The Tribunal focused on specific U.S. war crimes and crimes against humanity in the invasions, occupations and aerial assaults which followed the “9/11” attacks in 2001.
What if we could enlarge the Tribunal, bringing before it war crimes occurring right now, the U.S.-assisted massacres we watch in real time on our phone and computer screens?
Certainly, one witness we would beg to appear for testimony would be Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who was the director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital when such a place existed. The Tribunal would wish to amplify his testimony on the harrowing weeks of siege during which Israel subjected his hospital to artillery and aerial bombardment. They would help to record his story of witnessing assassinations targeting medical staff, field executions of people clutching white flags in an attempt to surrender, the hospital’s forced evacuation with at-gunpoint humiliation stripping of women and girls. The initial attacks disabled the hospital’s operational capacities by targeting power generators and oxygen production equipment, but now an iconic photo shows Dr. Abu Safiya walking towards an Israeli tank through collapsed buildings and rubble. The Tribunal would like to interview him, but he is being held without charge by Israel’s military.
Our tribunal would surely turn to three of the world’s most crucial international human rights groups for testimony.
On December 5, 2024, Amnesty International concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Its research documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, “Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity.”
On December 19, 2024 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) stated that “repeated Israeli military attacks on Palestinian civilians over the last 14 months, the dismantling of the health care system and other essential infrastructure, the suffocating siege, and the systematic denial of humanitarian assistance are destroying the conditions of life in Gaza.” The report says there are “clear signs of ethnic cleansing” by Israel as it wages war in Gaza.
Also issued on December 19, 2024 was a report from Human Rights Watch, entitled “Extermination and Acts of Genocide,” stating that Israel has killed thousands of Palestinians in Gaza by denying them clean water which it says legally amounts to acts of genocide and extermination.
Corroborating the testimony of health care workers and human rights advocates in Gaza would be Pope Francis’s January 9, 2025, message to international diplomats. Pope Francis denounced Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, calling the humanitarian situation in the Palestinian enclave “very serious and shameful.” Pope Francis referenced the deaths of children who froze to death because of Israel’s destruction of infrastructure: “We cannot in any way accept the bombing of civilians. We cannot accept that children are freezing to death because hospitals have been destroyed or a country’s energy network has been hit.”
Recommendations made by jurors in the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal call for major weapon makers to pay reparations for suffering caused. They echo the words of Pope Francis, whose message to the assemblage of diplomats made this appeal: “With the money spent on weapons and other military expenditures, let us establish a global fund that can finally put an end to hunger and favor development in the most impoverished countries, so that their citizens will not resort to violent or illusory solutions, or have to leave their countries in order to seek a more dignified life”.
Considering such testimony from so many diverse sources, one might expect that U.S. lawmakers would re-evaluate their murderous, unwavering support of Israel. Instead, on January 9th, 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to sanction the International Criminal Court in protest of its arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister.
Who are the criminals? U.S. news coverage of five former or current presidents gathered for the funeral of President Jimmy Carter never hinted that hideous wars of choice along with massive increases in weapon sales had marked the administration of each of the five. There was no mention of President Biden’s order to send eight billion dollars of weapons to Gaza. This gathering of U.S. presidents is referred to as “The World’s Most Exclusive Club.” Exclusive indeed. What other club of so few has caused so much suffering to so many?
On April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famously insightful, prophetic speech about another illegal U.S. war of choice – “Beyond Viet Nam: A Time to Break the Silence” – in which Dr. King said: “Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken: the role of those who make peaceful resolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.”
Dr. King’s verdict, in this speech, on the momentous first anniversary of which he was taken from us, was that “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.”
The four defendants before our Tribunal certainly did their part to pressure these five other criminals toward their varied crimes, but we all have a choice to hold ourselves accountable in the face of Dr. King’s warning that we are approaching spiritual death. One step toward reconciling with wisdom, justice and love would be to demand the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya from an Israeli prison so that we could humbly learn from him about war crimes and reparations.
Kathy Kelly (Kathy.vcnv@gmail.com) is World BEYOND War’s board president and one of three rapporteurs who helped coordinate formation of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal.
Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break the Silence
April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York
The sermon which I am preaching this morning in a sense is not the usual kind of sermon, but it is a sermon and an important subject, nevertheless, because the issue that I will be discussing today is one of the most controversial issues confronting our nation. I’m using as a subject from which to preach, “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam.”
Now, let me make it clear in the beginning, that I see this war as an unjust, evil, and futile war. I preach to you today on the war in Vietnam because my conscience leaves me with no other choice. The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. “Ye shall know the truth,” says Jesus, “and the truth shall set you free.” Now, I’ve chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.
The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing, as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we’re always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on. Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony. But we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for in all our history there has never been such a monumental dissent during a war, by the American people.
Polls reveal that almost fifteen million Americans explicitly oppose the war in Vietnam. Additional millions cannot bring themselves around to support it. And even those millions who do support the war [are] half-hearted, confused, and doubt-ridden. This reveals that millions have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism, to the high grounds of firm dissent, based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Now, of course, one of the difficulties in speaking out today grows the fact that there are those who are seeking to equate dissent with disloyalty. It’s a dark day in our nation when high-level authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent. But something is happening, and people are not going to be silenced. The truth must be told, and I say that those who are seeking to make it appear that anyone who opposes the war in Vietnam is a fool or a traitor or an enemy of our soldiers is a person that has taken a stand against the best in our tradition.
Yes, we must stand, and we must speak. [tape skip]… have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam. Many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns, this query has often loomed large and loud: “Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?” Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say. And so this morning, I speak to you on this issue, because I am determined to take the Gospel seriously. And I come this morning to my pulpit to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation.
This sermon is not addressed to Hanoi, or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Nor is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in a successful resolution of the problem. This morning, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans, who bear the greatest responsibility, and entered a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.
Now, since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is…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 that there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the Poverty Program. There were experiments, hopes, and new beginnings.
Then came the build-up in Vietnam. And I watched the program broken as if it was 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. And you may not know it, my friends, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor, and much of that fifty-three dollars goes for salaries to people that are not poor. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor, and 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 hope of the poor at home. It was sending their sons, and their brothers, and their husbands to fight and die in extraordinarily high proportion relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by 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 a 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 school room. So we watch them in brutal solidarity, burning the huts of a poor village. But we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago or Atlanta. Now, 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 ghettos 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 non-violent action; for they ask and write me, “So what about Vietnam?” They ask if our 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 first having 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 the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence I cannot be silent. Been a lot of applauding over the last few years. They applauded our total movement; they’ve applauded me. America and most of its newspapers applauded me in Montgomery. And I stood before thousands of Negroes getting ready to riot when my home was bombed and said, we can’t do it this way. They applauded us in the sit-in movement – we non-violently decided to sit in at lunch counters. The applauded us on the Freedom Rides when we accepted blows without retaliation. They praised us in Albany and Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. Oh, the press was so noble in its applause, and so noble in its praise when I was saying, Be non-violent toward Bull Connor; when I was saying, Be non-violent toward [Selma, Alabama segregationist sheriff] Jim Clark. There’s something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, Be non-violent toward Jim Clark, but will curse and damn you when you say, “Be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children. There’s something wrong with that press!
As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964. And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was not just something taking place, but it was a commission – a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of Man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances. But even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ.
To me, the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men, for communists and capitalists, for their children and ours, for black and white, for revolutionary and conservative. Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved His enemies so fully that he died for them?
What, then, can I say to the Vietcong, or to Castro, or to Mao, as a faithful minister to Jesus Christ? Can I threaten them with death, or must I not share with them my life? Finally, I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be the son of the Living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood. And because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned, especially for His suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come today to speak for them. And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak not now of the soldiers of each side, not of the military government of Saigon, but simply of the people who have been under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution until some attempt is made to know these people and hear their broken cries.
Now, let me tell you the truth about it. They must see Americans as strange liberators. Do you realize that the Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation. And incidentally, this was before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. And this is a little-known fact, and these people declared themselves independent in 1945. They quoted our Declaration of Independence in their document of freedom, and yet our government refused to recognize them. President Truman said they were not ready for independence.
So we fell victim as a nation at that time of the same deadly arrogance that has poisoned the international situation for all of these years. France then set out to reconquer its former colony. And they fought eight long, hard, brutal years trying to re-conquer Vietnam. You know who helped France? It was the United States of America. It came to the point that we were meeting more than eighty percent of the war costs. And even when France started despairing of its reckless action, we did not.
And in 1954, a conference was called at Geneva, and an agreement was reached, because France had been defeated at Dien Bien Phu. But even after that, and after the Geneva Accord, we did not stop. We must face the sad fact that our government sought, in a real sense, to sabotage the Geneva Accord. Well, after the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come through the Geneva agreement. But instead the United States came and started supporting a man named Diem who turned out to be one of the most ruthless dictators in the history of the world. He set out to silence all opposition. People were brutally murdered because they raised their voices against the brutal policies of Diem. And the peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States influence and by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem’s methods had aroused.
When Diem was overthrown, they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace. And who are we supporting in Vietnam today? It’s a man by the name of general Ky [Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky] who fought with the French against his own people, and who said on one occasion that the greatest hero of his life is Hitler. This is who we are supporting in Vietnam today. Oh, our government and the press generally won’t tell us these things, but God told me to tell you this morning. The truth must be told.
The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support and all the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now 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 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 towns and see thousands of 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. 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 of the nation’s only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the United Buddhist Church.
This is a role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolutions impossible but refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. I’m convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be changed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation.
It will look across the seas and see individual 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 say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, “This is not just.” 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 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.
Oh, my friends, if there is any one thing that we must see today is that these are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. They are saying, unconsciously, as we say in one of our freedom songs, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around!”
It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo, we shall boldly challenge unjust mores, and thereby speed up the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the rough places shall be made plain, and the crooked places straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”
A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing, unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of mankind.
And when I speak of love I’m not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of John: “Let us love one another, for God is love. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.”
Let me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and, above all, with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. And there can be no great disappointment where there is not great love. I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively and forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.
We are presently moving down a dead-end road that can lead to national disaster. America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism. The home that all too many Americans left was solidly structured idealistically; its pillars were solidly grounded in the insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage.
All men are made in the image of God. All men are bothers. All men are created equal. Every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Every man has rights that are neither conferred by, nor derived from the State – they are God-given. Out of one blood, God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. What a marvelous foundation for any home! What a glorious and healthy place to inhabit. But America’s strayed away, and this unnatural excursion has brought only confusion and bewilderment. It has left hearts aching with guilt and minds distorted with irrationality.
It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home. Come home, America. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.” I call on Washington today. I call on every man and woman of good will all over America today. I call on the young men of America who must make a choice today to take a stand on this issue. Tomorrow may be too late. The book may close. And don’t let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, “You’re too arrogant! And if you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I’ll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know my name. Be still and know that I’m God.”
Now it isn’t easy to stand up for truth and for justice. Sometimes it means being frustrated. When you tell the truth and take a stand, sometimes it means that you will walk the streets with a burdened heart. Sometimes it means losing a job… means being abused and scorned. It may mean having a seven, eight year old child asking a daddy, “Why do you have to go to jail so much?” And I’ve long since learned that to be a follower to the Jesus Christ means taking up the cross. And my bible tells me that Good Friday comes before Easter. Before the crown we wear, there is the cross that we must bear. Let us bear it – bear it for truth, bear it for justice, and bear it for peace. Let us go out this morning with that determination. And I have not lost faith. I’m not in despair, because I know that there is a moral order. I haven’t lost faith, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. I can still sing “We Shall Overcome” because Carlyle was right: “No lie can live forever.” We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant was right: “Truth pressed to earth will rise again.” We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell was right: “Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.” Yet, that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the bible is right: “You shall reap what you sow.”
With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when the lion and the lamb will lie down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid because the words of the Lord have spoken it.
With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when all over the world we will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last!” With this faith, we’ll sing it as we’re getting ready to sing it now. Men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. And nations will not rise up against nations, neither shall they study war anymore. And I don’t know about you, I ain’t gonna study war no more.
Transcript by Gary Handman, UC Berkeley Media Resources Center, 2006
King Was Not a Pacifist: He Was an
Anti-Imperialist
January 20, 2025
Image by Joshua J. Cotten.
In his condemnation of the U.S. war on the people of Vietnam, Martin Luther King Jr.’s stance was not a pacifist one. King was not necessarily anti-war so much as he was against the U.S. empire and its machinations against the Vietnamese and their generational struggle for self-determination. In fact, King would discuss openly how land redistribution was necessary after years of brutal French colonization and how the U.S. actively prevented this as a political strategy. At one point, King stated, “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?”[1]
Despite the tradition of twisting King’s words and analysis to fit a liberal and conservative paeon to American exceptionalism (i.e. the civil rights movement was simply a “correction” to form that more “perfect union”), King was a stalwart radical and a fervent anti-imperialist.[2] Indeed, in King’s speech decrying the U.S. bloodshed in Vietnam, he didn’t mince words. “After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem,” King had stated at the time, generating swift anger from the White House and even among allies within the civil rights movement itself, those who were more willing to make that bargain with the powerful of ending formal Jim Crow in exchange for their support for America’s wars abroad.[3]
Although King is oftentimes presented as a “peaceful” man who loved everyone, both by liberals and conservatives alike, he was an astute political strategist. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King was explicit about how politics and change was a battle over power, and the exposure of “law and order” as a facade. “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored,” had been King’s response when him and other civil rights activists had been called out by white clergymen for sowing “division” in society rather than patiently wait for incremental change under a totalitarian system that disappeared and killed so many, most of them black.[4] Rather than concede to this non-analysis, King embraced disruption as the singular tool that would force the hand of the dominating white population to at least come to the negotiating table.
At the core of the civil rights movement was direct confrontation with those elements that ran Jim and Jane Crow, from private business to more explicit “political” forces. African Americans won their freedom through economic boycotts and political agitation, not by begging for their inalienable rights under a white supremacist and pro-capitalist constitution.[5] King himself stated in what would be his final published work, “The Negro has not gained a single right in America without persistent pressure and agitation.”[6]
Limitations to King’s politics do exist when compared to other notable radicals of that era, like George Jackson, an avowed Marxist-Leninist.[7] One of the major differences that one could point to between King and Malcolm X, earlier on in their careers, was Malcolm X’s insistence from the beginning of his time as a preacher for African Americans to tie themselves to the broader anti-colonial struggle that was sweeping through the globe.[8] King, of course, would hold that similar view but was far more outspoken on it much later in his political career, unlike Malcolm X who spoke on such issues often and openly.
There was also some level of vagueness when it came to King’s association with economic policies that veered away from capitalist thinking and dogma. Anti-capitalism was at the heart of King’s politics and he wasn’t someone who feared being associated with communism or even Marx. In fact, King had attended the funeral of the great W.E.B Du Bois, citing Du Bois’ Marxist analysis and worldview.[9] Still, there were claims made by King that kept the door open in terms of what he exactly believed in terms of what form of socialism was required, if any. One could easily argue that King was a social democratic and not a revolutionary socialist.[10] This is where the insights of a younger group of radicals, like a Jackson or an Assata Shakur, and the analysis of someone who preceded all of them, that of Claudia Jones, prove substantial.[11] For them, as should be accepted by most on the left by now, the “free market” and its concentration of basic resources by the privately owned business elite had to be completely overturned, and replaced by some form of functional form of government that provided what the masses of working people needed to not just survive, but to thrive and dream. There is no middle ground, when it comes to the benefit of the masses across the globe, between capitalists and the exploited.
Still, near the end of his life, King was far more vocal on matters of poverty and class, wanting to help organize a poor people’s march on the nation’s capital.[12] One of the final political acts he’d taken part in was the Memphis sanitation worker strike among black workers who felt marginalized and woefully mistreated by white employers and their white peers. “Whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity, and it has worth,” King had said directly to the sanitation workers there.[13]
The next day King was murdered by a white gunman firing a bullet at him from a rooftop. At the time, most white Americans had turned against King as he strived for a far more just and equitable society than just one that sought the ending of explicitly racist laws.[14]
In the end, King had played his role in a movement and political culture that was successful on many fronts. The U.S. invasion of Vietnam would end. The fall of one of the world’s most brutal system of domination and control, Jim and Jane Crow, was due to the efforts of people like King and the army of volunteers and people committed to not just justice in terms of “inclusion” but had been dedicated to creating a society whereby people could register to vote, could choose to own a home, could access jobs, without the threat of death looming over them daily. Such a defeat of a rabidly oppressive system could never be overlooked or seen as inevitable. There was a time and place when many African Americans probably believed that apartheid would last forever, and that the best hope they had in terms of building some normal life was to flee the land they and their ancestors had toiled and made prosper. It took the efforts of groups like SNCC, the SCLC, the armed deacons for defense who protected King, and King himself for such a system to find its end, to crumble and be replaced.[15] They defeated this monstrosity and stopped a war from plunging even more Vietnamese into a swamp of death and destruction through their radical ends, and their willingness to pursue a different type of world through direct challenges to power, with King oftentimes being the one leading such efforts.
In the contemporary political environment, one could imagine King standing up against the U.S. empire, an empire that has only grown stronger since the fall of the Berlin Wall, an empire of death dealing and sleights of hand (it’s not an invasion for oil, it’s called “spreading democracy”) that spans the globe with over 800 military bases scattered on nearly every inch of planet earth.[16] Palestine would probably be at the forefront of his actions. Not to mention tapping into the growing anger and frustration domestically against two political parties so wedded to war and irrational economic policies.
In an era of extreme disinformation and cooptation, while the younger generations drift further and further away from the actual events and ramifications of the late 1960s, it is incredibly important to elevate King, not merely as a thoughtful and intriguing figure, but very much so as a radical thinker, and as someone who would still face pushback and retaliation from those in power today, whether it be Trump and his sycophants or Biden, whose own legacy is one of bloodshed and blatant hypocrisy.
The triple evils of militarism, racism, and poverty still plague us, the same evils that King bravely condemned in his speech against the war over Vietnam. Would King be given the space to write for the Atlantic or to even speak on MSNBC? Would he have endorsed someone as brutal as Biden, or as vacuous as Harris? No. But he’d also demand we did more than be frustrated at the state we are in.
“We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now,” he once wrote, warning, “In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late.”[17]
1. Martin Luther, King. Jr., “Beyond Vietnam,” American Rhetoric, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm. ↑
2. Hajar Yazdiha, “How the distortion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s words enables more, not less, racial division within American society,” The Conversation, Jan. 12, 2023, https://theconversation.com/how-the-distortion-of-martin-luther-king-jr-s-words-enables-more-not-less-racial-division-within-american-society-195177. ↑
3. David Garrow, “When Martin Luther King Came Out Against Vietnam,” New York Times, April 4, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/opinion/when-martin-luther-king-came-out-against-vietnam.html. ↑
4. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/letter-from-a-birmingham-jail/552461/. ↑
5. Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: The Free Press, 1984). ↑
6. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 96. ↑
7. George Jackson, Blood In My Eye (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1972). ↑
8. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine Books, 1964). ↑
9. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Honoring Du Bois,” Jacobin, Jan 21, 2019, https://jacobin.com/2019/01/web-du-bois-martin-luther-king-speech. ↑
10. King, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? ↑
11. Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1987); Claudia Jones, A Fighting Dream: The Political Writings of Claudia Jones (New York: 1804 Books, 2024). ↑
12. “Poor People’s Campaign,” Stanford, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/poor-peoples-campaign. ↑
13. Colette Coleman, “The 1968 Sanitation Workers’ Strike That Drew MLK to Memphis,” History, Jan. 23, 2024, https://www.history.com/news/sanitation-workers-strike-memphis. ↑
14. “King’s Assassination: A Timeline,” PBS, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/memphis-hunt/. ↑
15. Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). ↑
16. David Vine, “Where in the World Is the U.S. Military?,” Politico, July/August 2015, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/us-military-bases-around-the-world-119321/. ↑
17. King, Where Do We Go From Here, 202. ↑
Martin Luther King, Jr., Vietnam, and Gaza
Before my mind was turned to the subject of my title, I started to write a piece called “Are the Dead Nostalgic?”
It’s a touchy philosophical question that has no definitive answer. It seems flippant in an impossible way, which it is, but its flippancy holds a secret message. So I asked the dead who would speak to me and got a few mixed and muffled replies. You can understand their reluctance to say anything. If I heard correctly, one of them said, “You should ask the living.” Most didn’t answer, which had me wondering why. Were they disgusted with us?
I have always heard that nostalgia was not good for you since it kept you rooted in the past; that this ache for home – the good old days that may or may not have existed but you miss them nevertheless – prevented you from living Zen-like in the present or looking forward to the future. But I wondered if nostalgia could be a form of utopian hope in reverse at a time when humanistic utopian thinking is at a nadir, overwhelmed by the machine dreams of people like Elon Musk and those at the World Economic Forum.
This denigration of nostalgia assumed you were alive. I was wondering about the dead. What did they think? Did they wish they were still alive? Was being alive the good old days for them or did they feel they were finally home and that life had been a dream?
Or did the dead have no future, no nothing, or perhaps some afterglow of sorts, an everlasting rest in peace, whatever that may mean, a phrase that always seemed to me a bad knock on life. Who wants to sleep forever?
I guess I was thinking that if I could get in touch with the dead and get them talking, they might also tell me what it was like to be dead. Although I am no statistical whiz, I figured there were a lot more of them than us and the odds were pretty good that someone there would spill the beans.
I thought of this recently when watching the new film about Bob Dylan’s early years, A Complete Unknown, when his girlfriend, Sylvie Russo (based on Suze Rotolo, played by Elle Fanning) gets angry at him for concealing his true past and identity, and he replies, “People make up their past, Silly, they make up what they want; forget the rest.”
This was especially true for Dylan in his early years and has a ring of truth for everyone to a lesser extent, whether it’s from memory lapses or some sense of wanting to fictionalize their pasts for reasons known only to them. Our memories and forgeteries are interesting creative faculties.
But as I said, I was interested in the dead. Did they also do that? Were they nostalgic?
Then this proclivity of mine toward philosophical thought and dark humor flipped in my mind as the pictures of dead and weeping Palestinian children swept in and tortured me in dreams. I had seen the photos and videos of the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians and felt sick and outraged afterwards. I have written against it many times. Yet as I wrote about this issue of nostalgia, I felt like a speculator in abstractions, and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s experience when on January 14, 1967 he was at an airport restaurant thumbing through a Ramparts magazine and saw an article by the journalist William Pepper, “The Children of Vietnam” that featured photos of Vietnamese mothers holding dead and napalmed children. In 1999, the author James W. Douglass (JFK and the Unspeakable, etc.) wrote an essay describing this serendipitous event for King:
The final chapter of Martin Luther King’s life began on January l4, l967, the day on which King committed himself to deepening his opposition to the Vietnam War. He was at an airport restaurant on his way to a retreat in Jamaica. While looking through magazines, he came across an illustrated article in Ramparts, “The Children of Vietnam.” His coworker Bernard Lee never forgot King’s shock as he looked at photographs of young napalm victims.
He froze as he looked at the pictures from Vietnam. He saw a picture of a Vietnamese mother holding her dead baby, a baby killed by our military. Then Martin just pushed the plate of food away from him. I looked up and said, “Doesn’t it taste any good,” and he answered, “Nothing will ever taste any good for me until I do everything I can to end that war.”
Martin King was overwhelmed with grief and outrage. Against all advice from his associates in the civil rights movement, he realized he must publicly and unequivocally oppose the Vietnam war, which he did two-and-a half months later on April 4 at Riverside Church in the New York City in his famous speech – Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence – in which he denounced the U.S. war against Vietnam, linking it to his battle against racism and for economic justice for everybody. He became a revolutionary. It led to his assassination by the U.S. government exactly one year later on April 4, 1968 in Memphis. But his legacy lives on, despite the official MLK Day attempts to reduce him to a manageable dead threat and a one-trick pony.
Conscience calls at odd moments to roil one’s soul. It sneaks into one’s dreams and daytime thoughts, even in synchronous ways as I realize that today’s date is January 14th, 58 years to the day MLK saw those photos in Ramparts.
Just yesterday, while listening to a podcast, I heard the historian Peter Kuznik say that when he asks his students at American University, who have all been to the Vietnam Memorial wall and seen the names of the 58,318 dead Americans, how many Vietnamese were killed in the war, they answer in the range of 90,000. While on a trip to Hanoi last year, Kuznik learned that the official Vietnamese count is 5 million, to which one could add another 1 million Thai, Laotian, and Cambodians. Kuznik had been assuming the 3.8 million dead Vietnamese figure was correct, but his bright students had no idea because their knowledge of history is abysmal.
Similarly, just this past week, the English medical journal The Lancet reported that the death toll in Gaza in the first nine months as a result of Israel’s genocidal assault was about 40 % higher than reported by the Palestinian Health Ministry. The study’s best estimate puts the number of dead Palestinians (excluding the severely injured, those dead from starvation, those missing under the rubble, etc.) at approximately 64,000 from October 7, 2023 to June 30, 2024. Of those, the study concluded that approximately 60 % were women, children, and old people. As everyone knows, Israel has turned Gaza into a wasteland and a killing field that has continued to the present day, with Israel furiously continuing to attack, killing 38 Palestinians yesterday.
As with the death figures from Vietnam, these numbers are no doubt greatly underestimated and can be multiplied by three, four, or more. But if you follow the corporate mainstream media, especially in the U.S. and its adjuncts, you will learn nothing of this. It is assumed that people don’t care and are more interested in strange flying objects over the skies of the northeast that have ostensibly disappeared until they will be revived, the sex and drinking habits of Trump’s cabinet nominees, and the latest sports and celebrity news.
Many don’t care and many do, but people generally feel battered and overwhelmed by the insane condition of the country, the endless news reports of all the things to fear, the political dirty tricks and propaganda, the corruption, the rip-offs, the lies and posturing, etc.
Many have been so dumbed down by the endless propaganda that they will believe anything.
Most people may not know how to articulate their rage and disgust, but they sense that something is terribly wrong and fear it will get worse. They may not want to take it anymore and are mad as hell but realize screaming out their windows at the air as in the classic film Network will not remedy anything. They wait in dread, depressed, but deny it.
Half the voting population has invested their hopes in Trump just as the other half did with Biden – both delusional in the extreme. Those dead Palestinian children that torment me are the results of the Biden administration’s alliance with fellow Israeli Zionist Netanyahu – two bloody nihilists – now to be replaced by Trump, a third enthusiastic supporter of genocide.
Those of us who have been speaking out for years are also tired. I am tired. The recent Israeli/U.S. bloody victories in the Mideast came as a shock to those who hoped Israel and the Netanyahu government would be forced to desist. The opposite has occurred. Lebanon, Syria, Yemen – is Iran next?
(And you will notice that I have not even mentioned Ukraine and the U.S. war against Russia.)
It’s heavy stuff, hard on the spirit, so perhaps you can understand my desire to delve into philosophical and artistic matters from time to time.
I think of the poem To Those Born Later, by the German poet Bertolt Brecht:
What kind of times are they, when
A talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
That man there calmly crossing the street
Is already perhaps beyond the reach of his friends
Who are in need?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .They say to me: Eat and drink! Be glad you have it!
But how can I eat and drink if I snatch what I eat
From the starving, and
My glass of water belongs to one dying of thirst?
And yet I eat and drink.I would also like to be wise.
In the old books it says that wisdom is:
To shun the strife of the world and to live out
Your brief time without fear
Also to get along without violence
To return good for evil
Not to fulfil your desires but to forget them
Is accounted wise.
All this I cannot do.
Truly, I live in dark times.
Yes, so do we. But the most terrible atrocities have taken place on a vast scale for a very long time. Are they seen as almost normal now, the “new” reality? So much so that our faculty for forgetting and dismissing them far outweighs our will to remember?
Yet sometimes a time to break the silence is always now, and a message comes to us to remember to speak out. The official organs of the government and press on January 20th will once again urge everyone to remember Martin Luther King, Jr. as a statue from the past, frozen in time, a fighter for racial justice but nothing else. His opposition to the triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism will be ignored. Who will say that if he were alive today he would condemn the genocide in Gaza, the U.S. war against Russian via Ukraine, and war making throughout the world? In his speech from Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 that led to his death, he said:
We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The “tide in the affairs of men” does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on…” We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.
No doubt Satan will be laughing with delight as Donald Trump is sworn in as president on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
I still wonder: Are the dead nostalgic? I hope so.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: "Our nation was born in genocide"
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, the day he delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. (Photo: Wes Candela | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
- By Levi Rickert
Opinion.
In the United States, only two individuals are honored with federal holidays named after them: Christopher Columbus and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. While Columbus Day remains controversial, particularly among Native Americans, Dr. King’s legacy is widely embraced across Indian Country.
For Native Americans, the celebration of Christopher Columbus as a national figure is profoundly troubling. Columbus, a sailor who landed in the Americas by mistake, symbolizes the beginning of centuries of oppression, colonization, and the near erasure of Indigenous cultures. In response, Native communities have worked tirelessly over recent decades to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a celebration of resilience and the rich histories of Native peoples.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., however, holds a different place in Native hearts. His dedication to justice and equality resonated deeply within Indian Country, where the fight for sovereignty, water rights, and the preservation of Native cultures continues. Dr. King’s unwavering call for equality for all Americans—regardless of race—spoke to the shared struggles of African Americans and Native Americans alike.
Growing up, Dr. King was a personal hero to me. I recall vividly drawing his portrait in chalk during my freshman year of high school art class—a small act that reflected my admiration for him. Over the years, I’ve returned to his writings often. As a Potawatomi, I find his words inspire hope for marginalized communities, including Native Americans, who have faced systemic inequities throughout American history. His commitment to achieving justice through nonviolence has always resonated with me, aligning with the values I strive to uphold.
In his 1963 book, Why We Can’t Wait, he referenced the origins of racism in the United States when he called the Indigenous people of this land the “original American.” Dr. King writes:
"Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles of racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it."
Dr. King’s acknowledgment of the atrocities committed against Indigenous peoples was rare among non-Native leaders of his time. He openly recognized the “shameful” chapters of American history that sought to annihilate Native populations. Few others dared to confront these truths as he did, especially in an era when many glorified the actions of their ancestors while ignoring the suffering of ours.
Though Dr. King was assassinated more than 50 years ago, his message remains deeply relevant today. At a time when democracy feels increasingly fragile, his words continue to serve as a guiding light. In his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, often considered one of the greatest political addresses of the 20th century, he declared, “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.” These words still resonate, reminding us of the urgent need to confront inequality and injustice.
Throughout that speech, Dr. King spoke of America’s founding documents—the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence—as a “promissory note” guaranteeing equality and justice for all. He described the persistent inequalities faced by African Americans as a “bad check” returned for insufficient funds. These same inequalities extend to Native communities, where disparities in healthcare, housing, economic opportunities, and voting rights remain glaring.
Today, as we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Day, it is important to not only reflect on his achievements but also to recognize how far we still have to go. His vision of equality is a reminder that we cannot merely look to the past; we must also commit to building a future that upholds the principles of justice for all Americans.
Dr. King’s dream is as vital now as it was during his lifetime. It is a call to action for all of us—to make real the promises of democracy and to ensure that future generations inherit a more just and equitable society.
Thayék gde nwéndëmen - We are all related.
In Unity and Commitment
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
NATIVE NEWS ONLINE
Guest Opinion.
I wanted to take this opportunity to assure you, our supporters and colleagues, that we at the Native American Rights Fund will stay strong and committed in the ongoing fight for justice. In the spirit of Martin Luther King, we will not back down in the face of hate. We will not crumple under the pressure of injustice. The fight for Native rights, for Tribal sovereignty, and for a more just nation continues.
When they threaten to take away our national monuments and sacred places, we will be there to stop them. When they try to disenfranchise Native voters, we will be there to amplify the Native voice. When corporate greed endangers our homelands and waters, we will not back down. We will continue to be at attention as long as it takes to ensure that justice is served. We remember our past to protect our future. We fight for our sacred lands. We fight for our sustained cultures. We fight for our people and our Tribal Nations.
This is a long fight, but we are committed. With your support and the support of people like you, we have been representing Tribal Nations and Native people for more than fifty years. We do not always win, but we never give up because losing is not an option. We are the last line of defense for Native rights. We will not back down in holding governments accountable. We will not back down in protecting Native lands, culture, and people.
Know that together, as we have so many times before, we will make progress.
Remembering MLK, Jr. 2025
I confess that I don’t always pay attention to federal holidays and the people or historical events they usually honor. I don’t stop much and look much at statues either. There’s a Paul Revere statue in the North End of Boston, depicting the hero with a lantern on horseback. I used to pass it on the way to the Michelangelo School, which I attended around 1968, when I was residing with my mother and brother at Chardon Street Home, a family shelter. I didn’t think much about the statue or about Paul Revere, the Founding Father and newspaper publisher, or of the lanterns as beacons lit to proclaim America’s resistance to the tyranny of taxation without representation. I was just an Anglo-Irish kid, learning Italian for a while (“Dov’è la biblioteca?” I still remember after 57 years), and was more concerned with poverty and homelessness than Liberty.
Many decades later, I connect Revere in my mind with the depiction of him in the Marx Brothers Movie, Duck Soup, wherein he is seen sleeping with his horse, while Revere’s wife sleeps in the same room in an adjacent single bed. Also, Revere’s lanterns are associated in my mind with the ancient philosopher Diogenes, who would walk through town in broad daylight carrying a lantern, sarcastically looking for an honest man. In some representations of his reality, he is seen living out of a barrel with attractive women lined up to chat him up. That seemed to me an enviable life for a while. Until feminism hit me like a freight train and I reformed. And treated the rest of my life like a 12-step program. Unfortunately, this approach often meant I hooked up with 12-step women. Ouch.
MLK was murdered in April 1968. By whom is still in dispute to this day. Given what I’ve seen and read, I’d go with: The FBI did it or allowed it. They followed him everywhere. Everywhere he went you could see eyes peering out from behind curtains that seemed to belong to Leonardo DiCaprio; it was like some kind of dream world whipped up by David Lynch. The FBI back then wasn’t exactly that one depicted on TV by Efrem Zimbalist Jr., after all, which I watched religiously at the shelter. They were protecting America from career recidivists; today the corporations would qualify.
MLK can get lost in the remembrance of that tumultuous year of violence. RFK Jr.’s dad, Robert, was murdered in June after winning the California primary, giving him high prospects for success in the November election. 1968 saw the disruptions in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, with riots and police beatings leading the beleaguered Walter Cronkite, who had practically sobbed on air five years earlier when announcing JFK’s death, to now announce Chicago had fallen into “a police state.” The riots, which featured the Yippies running a pig named Pigasus for president, led to the Chicago 7 trial (it had been the Chicago 8, until they moved the bound and gagged Bobby Seale to a separate, but equal trial). Abbie Hoffman and the others went on trial for what he presciently called “thought crimes.” And 1968 featured the Vietnam war and the growing population of counterculture resistance to it and the draft which swept up late teens, who had no right to vote but would have to die if picked to fight in the jungle against “communism.”
MLK was a peacenik. Non-violent, the kind the fascists hate most. These days when the US war machine can’t send boots to the ground somewhere they settle for making economies scream. Gloves off stuff. (See Iraq.) Many corporate types and deep staters wanted to see MLK’s dream scream. That dream seemed to support or accommodate socialist thinking. And MLK calling for the elimination of skin color as a determining factor in our collective value system roiled many whiteys. And when MLK spoke out against the war, he became a target of the UnAmerican element. It is worth citing at length what he said to a captive audience at Riverside Church in 1964
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 this 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.
Is this not the talk of a do-gooder communist? Lower case. He believed in community.
MLK had enemies, real in-need-of enema types — like the one DiCaprio played in J. Edgar. In 1968 the FBI was trailing the Dreamer everywhere. Hoover set up COINTELPRO, which targeted dissidents and disruptors and counterculturalists and feminists and Communists and Black Panthers. And even the KKK, which was established by southern Democrats. (“If you know your history / Then you would know where you’re coming from / Then you wouldn’t have to ask me / Who the heck do I think I am” – Bob Marley). Hoover set up his agents “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the activities of these movements and especially their leaders. The gagging and roping of Bobby Seale was a poster for the secret war on the Black American Man (BAM). The FBI had been after MLK to commit suicide. Threatening to expose his sexual dalliances. And this coming from J. Edgar, whose peccadilloes included cross-dressing and some say the Watergate whistleblower’s nickname — Deep Throat — was a reference to Hoover. Apparently, the stuff about Hoover was most likely mythology at work, but fuck him for ruining so many lives with similar reputation demolitions.
There was a time, even as recent as 30 years ago, when I might have thought of MLK and wept to the tunes expressing the grief and frustration of peaceful humans captured in such songs as Kris Kristofferrson’s “They Killed Him,” and U2’s “(Pride) In the Name of Love.” But I haven’t felt that way in a long time; I still well up some, but the rage against the machine feeling seems gone or suppressed. There seems to be no one to point to as a point of reference for the skulduggeries and thuggeries of the world, except, of course, the invisible and unaccountable Deep State that gets up to things so ugly and criminal behind our backs and scrutiny that we can only cringe. In 1968, we had Richard Nixon to point to, rightfully so. Daniel Ellsberg reveals in his memoir, The Doomsday Machine, that he was terrified that Nixon and Kissinger would have him rubbed out because of what he knew about Tricky Dick’s secret plans to nuke North Vietnam into submission. Ellsberg writes,
PRESIDENT: I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?
HENRY KISSINGER: About two hundred thousand people.
PRESIDENT [reflective, matter-of-fact]: No, no, no … I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?
KISSINGER [like the president, low-key]: That, I think would just be too much.
PRESIDENT [in a tone of surprise]: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you? I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.
Your president is not a crook, Nixon said, defending Watergate’s cover-up. No, instead, he was a mass murderer-in-waiting.
Ed Snowden not only talked about such deep dark system machinations in his revelation of XKEYSCORE, which allows an intel agent instant access to a target by phone or email, and which he vividly brings to life in LOVE INT, one chapter of his must-read memoir, Permanent Record, where he talks about how he and his Deep State buddies sat around spying on the private doings of love interests they had. One can only guess how the IC and FBI would have spied on MLK today with the newfangled gizmos available, like Israel’s Pegasus, a commercial variation of XKEYSCORE.
These newfangled, highly sophisticated tools of surveillance had their roots in the doings of the FBI and CIA and other IC agencies throughout the Sixties, with their infiltrations of dissident populations in the US. Hoover pretended he was rooting out Communists, which is to say, anti-Capitalists, that is, those who would redistribute the wealth. It’s what MLK referred to in the speech above as “experiments” in token socialism. That’s essentially what all the goody-two-shoes we’ve murdered in the US have been after, tweaking the economics to make life a little more bearable for those without the means or equal protections to succeed or thrive in nourishment. The Cold War became largely an economic war, where the US reversed the Domino Effect and ended pushing global neoliberalism enforced by neo-conservatist bullying tactics, like making the economies of other nations scream.
In 1975, Idaho Senator Frank Church’s Committee revealed to the American population that what Dwight D. Eisenhower had warned us about in his final address to the nation as president in 1960 — the rise of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) — had achieved fruition and was now a fleur de mal in the rosy garden of liberty with pricks abounding. Specifically, his Committee revealed that an illicit confederation existed between the NSA, FBI, CIA, and the Mafia, especially in relation to the Kennedy Administration. Church revealed that the security state had attained such a reach that all human communication across the planet were subject to being intercepted and that we were approaching a bridge over an abyss which once crossed could seal the doom of democracy. That was 50 years ago that he worried — before the Internet came and sealed the deal. MLK and Malcolm X were bound to create dissent and resistance to a system that already presaged an inevitable governance by oligarchic forces.
Today, when I think of MLK and his legacy, I think of his propositions that included not only non-violence and a redistribution of wealth (a bit) but of a world that still seemed salvageable for humans. He came out of a zeitgeist that still largely believed that Love was all you needed to get by — a slogan that was the golden rule at heart. Such sentiment lasted, more and less, even until Leonard Cohen sang of love as the only engine of survival in his song “The Future” (1992). MLK would be absorbed into The Blob today. Just another brand. He died with his influence and integrity intact. Today, the trick seems to be not so much to love others as to avoid being cancelled by them. That’s a dystopian turn away from the communitarian approach MLK favored and a definitive indication that we have crossed the bridge over the abyss and have descended into the Land of Nod, the homestead of Cain and his devils.
Today, Inauguration Day, Jan 20 2024, is MLK Day, and that will be forgotten, and it feels like that lumps in the throat queasy you get at the end of the film, Omen III. It’s not that DJ is the Antichrist himself, but that he is the boffo mask worn by the Deep State now in control and ready to bring us fire and rain. And I don’t mean, James Taylor.
A day before Donald Trump’s inauguration and the same day that—thousands of miles away— hostages were released in Gaza, the Third Baptist Church of San Francisco pulled out all the stops to honor the memory and the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was January 19, 2025, a day to remember for many days to come. There were sermons and songsful, music on a piano, an organ, and a guitar and praying, too. Amen and hallelujah!
At the end of the morning, a lavish buffet/banquet fed one hundred-plus worshippers who sat down together, ate and talked and laughed and shared personal histories. There was no BBQ but there were salads, pastas, and fried chicken, and tea and coffee and desserts.
Side-by-side, at round tables with linen napkins, there were whites and Blacks, men and women, children and their parents, Jews and gentiles, locals and out-of-towners, Americans born and raised in the South and in northern California, too. There were Black Jews and Arab Jews and Black men and women who looked African and also as white as any white person.
At the banquet the pastor’s words were manifest. He had invited one and all to “make new friends and continue the legacy of faith, hope, and love.”
If anyone wanted proof that the spirit of MLK was alive and well, the Third Baptist Church provided all the necessary ammunition. And if anyone wanted evidence that the alliance between Jews and Christians was alive and well, that was in evidence, too. It wasn’t merely a relic of the civil rights movement when rabbis and members of their congregations joined “Negroes” to call for an end to segregation and an end to discrimination based on color.
Pastor Amos C. Brown from the Third Baptist Church and Rabbi Ryan Bauer from Congregation Emanu-El joined their voices and called for Truth not glitter and community not chaos. “We must raise our voices against hate,” Rabbi Bauer said. He added that “we can have both Palestinian sovereignty and Israeli security.” The audience cheered.
“Church is more fun than a synagogue,” Bauer observed. Indeed, it seemed to be a spectacle and a ritual with colorful characters and a profound sense of spirituality.
Pastor Brown urged the congregation to make “resistance our vocation.” He spoke unequivocally when he said that Donald Trump was “evil” and that for Trump to put his hand on the Bible was “blasphemy.” The Reverend Devon Crawford added his sentiments and invited the congregation “to make trouble in order to survive.”
The Third Baptist Church has hosted an “annual pulpit exchange” with Congregation Emanu-El for the past 38 years. The church was founded in 1852 almost a decade before the outbreak of the American Civil War. “Our two faith communities have joined hands in interfaith and intercultural worship, bound by a shared commitment to social justice, cultural celebration and intellectual stimulation,” Pastor Brown said.
On the way out of the church, I said goodbye to my new friends. “I’m really a heathen,” I told an elderly woman with purple hair and a long flowing gown that was red and black and orange. “Come back again,” she said. Indeed, I might do that. The Third Baptist Church of San Francisco is my kind of house of worship.
Dr. ML King: Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?
By Ted Glick
Photograph Source: Matt Brown – CC BY 2.0
In the organizing meetings over the last two months leading up to and at yesterday’s positive March of Resistance in Newark, NJ, endorsed by 308 organizations, African American leaders of this multi-racial, multi-issue effort have spoken often about the importance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last book: Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?
The demonstration in Newark yesterday was one of over 300 local actions around the country interconnected by the Women’s March/People’s March. Many tens of thousands of people altogether, possibly 100,000 or more, made it very clear that there is a grassroots based, multi-issue, popular movement of resistance coming out of the blocks ready to fight in an organized way against the Trump/MAGA efforts to take this country back decades. We Won’t Go Back!
60 years after Dr. King wrote this book, we are truly faced with the same question: chaos or community?
This is a piece of work that has a great deal to say to those of us who want a world where justice, peaceful settling of conflicts, and protection of and connection with the natural environment are foundational principles.
I have gone through this book, for the third time over the last couple of years, and pulled out what I consider to be some, by no means all, of Dr. King’s words that seem most appropriate to our reality today. In the order that they come up in the book, here they are:
“The hard cold facts today indicate that the hope of the people of color in the world may well rest on the American Negro and his ability to reform the structure of racist imperialism from within and thereby turn the technology and wealth of the West to the task of liberating the world from want.” page 59
“We will be greatly misled if we feel that the problem will work itself out. Structures of evil do not crumble by passive waiting. If history teaches anything, it is that evil is recalcitrant and determined, and never voluntarily relinquishes its hold short of an almost fanatical resistance. Evil must be attacked by a counteracting persistence, by the day-to-day assault of the battering rams of justice.” page 136
“The only answer to the delay, double-dealing, tokenism and racism that we still confront is through mass nonviolent action and the ballot. Our course of action must lie neither in passively relying on persuasion nor in actively succumbing to violent rebellion, but in a higher synthesis that reconciles the truths of these two opposites.” page 137
“These must be supplemented by a continuing job of organization. To produce change, people must be organized to work together in units of power. . . [We must] engage in the task of organizing people into permanent groups to protect their own interests and produce change in their behalf.” page 139
“The future of the deep structural changes we seek will not be found in the decaying political machines. It lies in new alliances of Negroes, Puerto Ricans, labor, liberals, certain church and middle-class elements. . . A true alliance is based upon some self-interest of each component group and a common interest into which they merge. Each of them must have a goal from which it benefits and none must have an outlook in basic conflict with the others.” page 159
“We need organizations that are permeated with mutual trust, incorruptibility and militancy. Without this spirit we may have the numbers but they will add up to zero. We need organizations that are responsible, efficient and alert.” page 169
“We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing’-oriented society to a ‘person’-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered. . . Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism.” pages 196, 197, 200 and 201
On his 96th birthday, long live the spirit and wisdom of this truly great human being and revolutionary, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Ted Glick has been a progressive activist and organizer since 1968. He is the author of the recently published books, Burglar for Peace and 21st Century Revolution, both available at https://pmpress.org . More info can be found at https://tedglick.com.
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Ted Glick has devoted his life to the progressive social change movement. After a year of student activism as a sophomore at Grinnell College in Iowa, he left college in 1969 to work full time against the Vietnam War. As a Selective Service draft resister, he spent 11 months in prison. In 1973, he co-founded the National Committee to Impeach Nixon and worked as a national coordinator on grassroots street actions around the country, keeping the heat on Nixon until his August 1974 resignation. Since late 2003, Ted has played a national leadership role in the effort to stabilize our climate and for a renewable energy revolution. He was a co-founder in 2004 of the Climate Crisis Coalition and in 2005 coordinated the USA Join the World effort leading up to December actions during the United Nations Climate Change conference in Montreal. In May 2006, he began working with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and was CCAN National Campaign Coordinator until his retirement in October 2015. He is a co-founder (2014) and one of the leaders of the group Beyond Extreme Energy. He is President of the group 350NJ/Rockland, on the steering committee of the DivestNJ Coalition and on the leadership group of the Climate Reality Check network.
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