Come Look Inside - Images of Iraq, Words of Martin Luther King
By Chlamor, Democratic Underground
Special Thanks To DU Contributor, Chlamor For Giving Me Permission Rerun This Excellent Submission And Congrats On Reaching 1,000 Posts!
April 3, 2005
My 1.000th Post:Come Look Inside-Images of Iraq, Words of MLK
By Rev. Martin Luther King
"I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government.
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
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.
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.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population.
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam-Iraq.
They must see Americans as strange liberators.
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.
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