Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library, Washington, DC by Jay Janson
TV programs celebrating the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.' "I Have a Dream!" speech at the great 1963 March on Washington over three weeks have been given prime viewing time and prominent coverage in America's war promoting, justifying and hailing monopolized media. King the civil rights leader and patriotic American, is the only King the white establishment of permanent war wants Americans and the world to know about.
Young people reading this article will wonder what on earth it is all about.
Wasn't Rev. Dr. King the hero of the civil rights movement, and now famous and beloved all around the world? Yes he was. But once he had gotten the attention of America on the cruel suffering it was imposing on its black citizens, he had bravely and fiercely turned to demanding attention to Americans mass murdering a million poor Vietnamese in their own beloved country, often as not in their own homes.
"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 country. This is a role our nation has taken, " refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. This is not just. My government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today!"
This will come as news to most Americans under thirty years of age and most of the entire US population who either will have not heard, or forgot, that King raged against US atrocity wars - or have it tucked away in the back of their minds as an insignificant event. War investor owned media, TV channels, radio stations, newspapers and magazines have magically somehow all collaborated by 'gentleman's agreement' never to speak of, write about or even mention King having dismissing his government as the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world," and his having held himself, America and Americans, responsible for "atrocity war in Vietnam and covert homicide on three continents meant to maintain unjust predatory investments.' [1]
Forwarding to 2013, and the programs celebrating the 50th anniversary of the great 1963 March on Washington and focusing on King's wonderful uplifting and encouraging "I Have a Dream' address, we find zero mention of King's later nightmarish sermon, which shook the world and for which King was vilified as a traitor and unpatriotic by every major US newspaper.
King Accused America and Americans of Murder
Four years after his "I Have a Dream,' Martin Luther King had, in the name of Jesus, accused the whole nation of responsibility not only of years of horrific daily atrocities on the Vietnamese as America destroyed Vietnam, but of overt and covert violence and genocidal policies on three continents. [1] The whole war establishment, from surprised politicians already uneasy about dooming the peasants of Vietnam; from conscious-bitten media anchors and editors inventing criminal war justification; from unnerved high clergy incriminating themselves with "Just War' rationalizing; from the frightened troops drafted to kill Vietnamese shooting at them in defense of their own country; down to a probably taken-aback David Rockefeller, surrounded by a somewhat startled intricate maze of speculating investors and war profiteering bankers in the center of which Rockefeller's calculating confidant Henry Kissinger was seeing to the running of the Holocaust building in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; all were fumbling about how to best damage control this anguished outcry of sanity from the charismatic preacher who had wooed half the nation a few years before with at the huge march of Washington, with his "I Have a Dream.'
Anxious about a white backlash, most ministers and congregations of King's own black Baptist ministry, in patriotic support of the war(s), disassociated themselves from King's demand that America and Americans make these atrocity wars and attacks on three continents meant to maintain unjust predatory investments unacceptable and inoperable by the non-cooperation, non-support, non-acquiescence and conscientious objection that America and Americans were perfectly capable of. [1]
In 1963 blacks in in many parts of America were being lynched at will, were being brutally beaten and tortured by police, were segregated off in daily life, subjected to insults, scorn and oppression, throughout the land blocked from educational and employment opportunities enjoyed by whites, their communities targeted economically, police dogs unleashed at them if protesting, and everywhere unprotected by the laws that protected white citizens. But at the same time, the first million of what would be three million Vietnamese, and a million Laotians and Cambodians were being slaughtered in a second Holocaust that employed more than twice the amount of bombs dropped during World War Two by all sides.
In 1967, King said he could be silent on longer, "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 on 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 hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see 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. 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? We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops... We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men."
(Notice King said, " We " and not the government he dismissed as "the greatest purveyor [not cause] of violence" . Yet, today's peace activists and journalists, nevertheless go on pointing their fingers at government and away from themselves. [1] )
Thus, less than four years after spelling out his dream for America, King, cried out, "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 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."
No Progress in America Until It Stops its Wars on the Poor Overseas
King said progress toward racial and economic justice could not be made while Americans denied the very right to live to the poor overseas and using up necessary human and financial resources. [1] By contrast, today's antiwar groups divide their time and resources in the name of progress for Americans at home that King pointed out as logically impossible.
Fortunately for the wealthy speculating investors of some trillion dollars in war for profit, King was silenced, either as reported for being black, or more logically for the safety of those great investments in death and destruction he was so dangerously charismatic in condemning and opposing.
During the 2013 "I Have a Dream' anniversary, and during the past forty-four years there has been carefully no mention of the 1967 King, the older King, the wiser King, condemner of America's cruel and senseless wars, who belatedly wanted to include the poor being slaughtered overseas for US investment profits in his dream of a just America.
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