Anyone curious about King’s attitude to war and its relationship to domestic politics need only read any one of his later speeches on the subject – King understood that North Vietnam was a repressive government and shared responsibility for the destruction wrought by the War, but opposed the war anyway anyway, for example in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech of April 4th, 1967 he observed that:
“This speech 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. Neither 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 the successful resolution of the problem.”
Nor was he unclear or evasive about a major reason for his opposition:
“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.”
He explicitly linked his devotion to the civil rights struggle with his anti-war stance:
“Over the past two years, as I 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. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your people?”They ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church-the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate-leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight…”
As he linked it to his religious convictions:
“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 and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft 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 man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I'm not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. 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 Saint John: "Let us love one another (Yes), for love is God. (Yes) 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 us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.”
And if challenged their events of 9/11 he might well have replied:
“We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."
Finally, he was completely clear about what he perceived as the responsibility to bring his opinion before either the public or politicians, even as he agonized over the knowledge he might be incorrect:
“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 are 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.”
One can’t say with certainty what King would have thought of the Iraqi Occupation, but IMO him woud certainly have opposed it. And I doubt he would have been reluctant to say so, or upset if anyone else did, in a eulogy at another anti-war leader’s funeral;.
As for the conviction that King was a supporter of some sort of Horatio Alger plan for the elimination of poverty and that his is an essentially conservative legacy that has been hijacked by Statist Radicals and Multicultural Opportunists, that’s pure fantasy. King was a strong believer in, and supported of, massive Federal anti-poverty programs, and his political legacy clearly belongs to the left wing of the Democratic Party and is almost completely antithetical to programs of the last few Republican Administrations – as intellectual history the view is hooey and as a political ploy it convinces nobody but the people who are spouting it.
Love him, or hate him, but don’t misrepresent or misunderstand him: Martin Luther King would likely have been berating just about everything the Bush administration says and does.
And if he had chosen the occasion of a funeral to do the berating, he would deserve the scorn that is currently being heaped on Jimmy Carter and Joseph Lowrey.
The politicization of a memorial service is viewed, by most, as unseemly, rude, and ill-mannered. MLK never struck me as any of those, and I doubt he would have sunk into the mire that we all witnessed yesterday.
Well, first, I do not see the Iraqi war as an "adventure."
The rest is very Interesting....Do I read it right? King was willing to let others suffer in order to simply help the poor at home?
Maybe King was not the humanitarian that I envisioned him as. Perhaps he was so enamored with black power that families being raped and murdered meant little to him if they occured outside the US?