DESCRIPTION:
What the world and most every Americans under the age of fifty, do not know (for it having been criminally suppressed in all US media for nearly a half-century), is that exactly one year before being assassinated, Rev. King condemned the US war in Vietnam and all previous “atrocity wars and covert violence on three continents since 1945 meant to maintain unjust predatory investments” and held all Americans, including himself, responsible for these atrocity wars for “not being willing to give up the pleasures and privileges that come from the immense profits from those predatory investment the wars and violence had been protecting.
TEXT:
For having seen it televised to the point of saturation, the first thing that comes to mind about Rev. Martin Luther King for most people around the world and in the US, are his opening words before a massive civil rights demonstration in the US capitol Washington DC, “I have a dream!”
Also somewhat well known is that King was shot to death five years later.
What the world and most every Americans under the age of fifty, do not know (for it having been criminally suppressed in all US media for nearly a half-century), is that exactly one year before being assassinated, Rev. King condemned the US war in Vietnam and all previous “atrocity wars and covert violence on three continents since 1945 meant to maintain unjust predatory investments” and held all Americans, including himself, responsible for these atrocity wars for “not being willing to give up the pleasures and privileges that come from the immense profits from those predatory investment the wars and violence had been protecting.
In Europe, on April 8th, 1967, as your author descended stairs to the Hotel lobby, his eye rebounded as it caught a glimpse of the news stand, for the headlines in bold large print on all the newspapers from around the world: “KING CONDEMNS US WARS,” “KING CONDEMNS US WARS FOR PROFIT,” ” KING CALL US GREATEST PURVEYOR OF VIOLENCE IN WORLD.”
US media from New York Times to tabloids, from TV News Networks to radio and magazines vilified King as a traitor to his country and a disgrace to his race, removing himself as a leader by his shameful sermon at Riverside Church in New York City. Elected officials and politicians ranted about him being worst than just unpatriotic.
Fifty years ago, with powerful media and popular government spokespersons denouncing King as a traitor without ever referring to the truthful history and current genocidal situation in Vietnam, the average American got the message that agreeing with King’s truthful statements would be social and political suicide. In America’s Baptist churches, both ministers and congregations, were at first reticent to speak, then slowly carefully let it be known they could not go along with King. Some of King’s fellow civil rights leaders within the national coalition King led, felt the need to be vocal in dissent from King saying involving themselves with the war in Vietnam would sidetrack the civil rights movement. Though King’s prominence as an American leader was diminished, his plans for a second nationwide march on Washington being planned with the theme connecting poverty to the war in Vietnam was going forward in strength when King received the bullet to his brain that stopped that march on poverty and the war. One imagines that those investors of trillions of dollars in the Vietnam war breathed a sign of relief, having feared King could stop their wars as he stopped segregation.
In the weeks after King’s assassination, the African American poor in most major and some minor cities rioted with much loss of life and great destruction. To get the image of King off and out of the streets so to speak, the image of King was ‘promoted’ upstairs to most great American hero, the only American hero to have a three day official national holiday celebrating his birth. And perhaps that mollified many in the nation’s African American communities and made them less likely to notice the complete tight media black out of any mere mention of King’s condemnations of US wars.
In his world shaking New York sermon ‘Beyond Vietnam a Time to Break Silence’ Martin Luther King held all Americans, including himself, “responsible for atrocity wars and covert violence on three continents since 1945, all meant to maintain lucrative unjust predatory investments.” Though King throughout his sermon spoke to his fellow Americans, dismissing his government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” we have, in all these intervening years since his assassination, become used to seeing those few protesting US wars pointing a finger at their own government and away from themselves.
King gave his audience a succinct history of US crimes in Vietnam beginning in 1945 that would today awaken understanding of the history of all previous and subsequent US crimes against humanity in small defenseless nations. King’s warning to humanity of a continuing illegal and genocidal use of the nation’s armed forces, secret services and media has been blacked out of Western media and all sources of information for nearly a half century. What would happen today if people read and heard the video on the Internet rarely clicked on to baring Luther King’s horrific descriptions of merciless abominable mass murder of a peaceful innocent Buddish population of mostly rice farmers, for example: “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 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 cooperated in the crushing in the crushing Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.”
Those who are old enough to have heard King’s anguished plea for the lives of non-white brothers and sisters and their children in Vietnam and other poor countries, have maintained a silence that King called betrayal. “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” And that time has come for us.” But since even King’s own family and his closest colleagues and friends have maintained a betraying silence as they pursued political careers during wars so profitable for the Industrial Military Financial Complex that engendered them. In retrospect, it was not to be expected that anyone would raise his voice, seeing what happened to King.
For nearly five decades, even America’s thousand African American celebrities, somehow, either out of fear or lack of interest, have cooperated by their silence with America’s total blackout of Martin Luther King’s anguished cry, “Silence is betrayal!” and have remained silent, indifferently silent, while non-white men, women and children by the millions have perished ‘in harms way’ of Americans, including Black Americans, in uniform. (Why the rest of the world has produced no vocal King follower is a topic for another article, but the snow job of Rockefeller ushering a person of color as the latest Commander-in-Chief of the White Colonial Power ruled planet is of no small importance.)
There are exceptions to the above mentioned. Hon. Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, is unrelenting in referring to King’s words and speaks eloquently to the subject of American genocide. Perhaps waiting in the wings for less dangerous weather is Obama’s ex-family minister Rev. Jeremiah Wright of “God damn America for her crimes against humanity!” TV sound bite fame during Obama’s 2008 election campaign.
Your author believes that the half-century of continual destruction of US ‘humanitarian’ bombings, ‘humanitarian’ invasions and ‘humanitarian’ occupations that have gone on since King’s outcry was silenced, might have created enough unease for folks to be ready to see the difference between truth and lies, should King’s Beyond Vietnam be given rebirth.
Amazingly brazen titles of recent articles of a conservative former Under-secretary of the Treasury under President Ronald Reagan and former editor of the Wall Street Journal, writer Paul Craig Roberts, strike this author as portending public disillusionment:
‘The Proof Is In: The US Government Is The Most Complete Criminal Organization In Human History’;
‘US Government Drives Toward War With Russia’;
‘The “War On Terror” Is The Hoax Foundation Of The Police/Spy State’;
‘Americans Stand Naked Before Injustice’;
‘The Fate of Children in the Amerian Police State’;
‘The Rule of Law no Longer Exists in Western Civilization;’
‘This is America Today’ – a gutless, cowardly population that accepts mass murder of women and children and destruction of countries without protest.’
Another conservative, Ron Paul, during 2012 debates for Republican candidate for President was heard on prime time new programs repeating over and over again for two weeks saying, ‘All the bombings, invasions, occupations beginning with those of Korea were illegal and unconstitutional and a horrible taking of lives.’
Will it happen in 2016, during the weekend holiday in the United States dedicated to Martin Luther King’s birth date that of the dozens of nations presently under attack, whether by US NATO UN military or economic warfare, one will field a celebrity status leader reading to the public from King’s long suppressed sermon Beyond Vietnam – a Time to Break Silence?
If a crack in the ice is opened up, the crack will spread until a river of life saving truth is navigable.
This would be to the protection of everyone on Earth, for as Indian writer Arundhati Roy writes in ‘Capitalism a Ghost Story, “the multinationals own the Indian government, which budgets officially the starving to death of millions of children annually.” King had cried out, “There will be no progress on social issues, as long as the poor abroad are killed using the enormous human and financial resources that make any such progress impossible.”
If it became widely known, that America’s hero condemned his government as, “the US government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” it would disable credibility of war criminal media and their ability to justify humanitarian genocide after humanitarian genocide, and end the civil rights movement being a war supporting movement. It will be a hell of lot harder for media to denounce Rev. King after praising him as a great American for a half-century.
It will be an opportunity for Martin Luther King’s words to help Russia, Syria, Venezuela and all nations under US attack by quoting suppressed ‘Beyond Vietnam a Time to Break Silence. King identified the genocidal danger the US represents, for all humanity to be aware of for its own protection, and not to be fooled by its war investors owned media.
Eventually the world will understand that King was assassinated to protect the $trillions invested in these wars that will continue as long their profitability continues and the world public is disinterested in making them unprofitable for the compensations, reparations and indemnities that will eventually be awarded tens of millions of victims and survivors of unlawful death, injury, deformed birth, destruction and theft of natural resources. The changing world balance of economic power Eastward and Southward now underway will bring this justice about, but better sooner than wait.
The complete text of Beyond Vietnam a Time to Break Silence can be read, or King’s voice heard, at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
or by simply googling ‘Beyond Vietnam American Rhetoric.’
And after listening or reading King’s Beyond Vietnam, one might scroll down the Ramsey Clark co-founded educational and stimulus website Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign containing the pertinent laws and a country by country history of us crimes in 19 nations. http://prosecuteuscrimesagainsthumanitynow.blogspot.com can be viewed by googling name.
Finally, those interested may check out:
War-Promoting Media’s Snow Job and King’s Condemning US Wars for Predatory Investments which contains links to OpEdNews Author jay janson’s forty articles on King’s last year on Earth.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/War-Promoting-Media-s-Snow-by-Jay-Janson-Dr-Martin-Luther-King_KingWarCondemnationBlackOut-140122-788.html
Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents in 67 countries; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India, Sweden and the US; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents, Kerala, India; Minority Perspective, UK; Einartysken, Sweden: Saker Vineyard, Germany; Dissident Voice; Ta Kung Pao; Uruknet; Voice of Detroit; Mathaba; Ethiopian Review; Palestine Chronicle; India Times; MalaysiaSun; China Daily; South China Morning Post; Come Home America; CubaNews; TurkishNews; HistoryNews Network; Vermont Citizen News have published his articles; 300 of which are available at: click http://www.opednews.com/author/author1723.html ; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign: (King Condemned US Wars) http://kingcondemneduswars.blogspot.com/ and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign http://prosecuteuscrimesagainsthumanitynow.blogspot.com/ featuring a country by country history of US crimes and laws pertaining.
