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King Held All Americans Including Himself Responsible for US Atrocity Wars NOT His Government by jay janson
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Click on the link and read and/or listen to King’s sermon that made headlines in bold print on newspapers around the world fifty years ago, and notice it is NOT addressed to the government but to all Americans. (King’s nightmarish sermon came 4 years after “I Have a Dream” at the March on Washington) King spoke to the people to the government which he dismissed as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.
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“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 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.”
The above quote is from Martin Luther King’s sermon BEYOND VIETNAM – A TIME TO BREAK SILENCE, given in New York exactly one year to the day before King received a bullet to his brain.
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
Click on the link above and read, or listen, to King’s sermon that made headlines in bold print on newspapers around the world fifty years ago.
… and notice it is NOT addressed to the government but to the American people. (King gave this nightmarish sermon four years after his “I Have a Dream” speech, ‘March on Washington.’)
In this nightmare sermon, King dismissed his “government as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” and anguished that he had not spoken out earlier, holding himself as well as all Americans responsible for ‘atrocity wars and covert violence on three continents since 1945 to maintain unjust overseas predatory investments.’
Martin Luther King’s powerful sermon, notwithstanding, peace organizations, anti-war groups, progressive journalists, socialist historians, and people marching in protest all point a finger away from themselves and at their own elected and re-elected government and government officials, as if to convey the idea of their innocence of the genocide being committed in someone else’s beloved country – in their name, in the name of all Americans.
Nowhere in the sermon does Martin Luther King say what the government should do, but instead what Americans, should do, and what Americans should stop doing.
Though King was a minister, very few clergy supported King’s denunciation of the genocide in Vietnam. Yes, genocide. “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.”
The Silence of Clergy Today versus Rev. King’s “Silence is Betrayal!”
We rarely hear even a peep from Clergy regarding US invasions and ongoing bombings in seven countries. Is this for its observing the doctrine of ‘Separation of Church and State’ or because the Church has become BOUND to the State and SEPARATED from its faith?
It would seem that given King’s example, mainstream clergy in America has a clear choice. Continue to be silent, copying the shameful role of the Church during the Vietnam War almost to the end, or quote the documented words of a martyred giant the establishment has felt forced to honor with national holiday, the only American so honored.
King was made a saint of civil rights to shut down the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, who condemned American invasions and bombing and was murdered by his government.*
No church is going to lose its tax status for quoting a fellow Reverend Doctor with unassailable national recognition no less! MLK is an icon. King has stature. His words bite true! Only to put King’s words in Sunday sermons now in the nation’s and the world’s hour of need. “For the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”– King followed these words with a horrific description of U.S. crimes against humanity. Click on, and read it!
This is also the advice of former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who King gave a copy of his blistering sermon to.
*
Martin Luther King was shot to death on April 4th, in 1968, in Memphis Tennessee.
On December 8, 1999, a jury in Memphis, Tennessee returned a verdict that civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was the victim of an assassination conspiracy and did not die at the hands of a lone gunman. The verdict:
THE COURT: “In answer to the question did Loyd Jowers participate in a conspiracy to do harm to Dr. Martin Luther King, your answer is yes. Do you also find that others, including governmental agencies, were parties to this conspiracy as alleged by the defendant? Your answer to that one is also yes.”
THE JURY: “Yes!” (In unison).
This verdict followed a three-week trial of a wrongful death lawsuit which the King family filed – but not for money.
Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and in the US by Dissident Voice, Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents and others; 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; 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, and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign, which Dissident Voice supports with link at the end of each issue of its newsletter.
