Thursday April 3, 2008, 9:24 am
"The time is always right to do what is right"
(Martin Luther King Jr)

Thursday April 3, 2008, 9:26 am
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
(Dr. Martin Luther King jr, "Letter from Birmingham Jail", April 1963)

Thursday April 3, 2008, 9:26 am
"In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
(Martin Luther King, Jr.)

Friday April 4, 2008, 6:50 pm
When Dr. martin Luther King declared that "Injustice anywhere is a threat to Justice everywhere", he spoke a very bright and shinning truth because we can see this happening today in our world. Dr. King will be remembered as one of the great heroes of humanity for his role in awakening us to our biases, prejudices and discrimination so that we could rectify them and become better human beings.

Friday April 4, 2008, 11:27 pm
The New Assassins Don't Use Guns

Today marks the fortieth anniversary of Martin Luther King's death. 1968, like 2008, was an election year in a time of war. Then, as now, a bitter political battle was raging. But the '60s were a time when gunfire changed the political landscape. Today's assassins use different weapons.





We have neither the time nor the ability to address the issue of assassination conspiracies here. The '60s saw the deaths of JFK, King, Bobby Kennedy, and Malcolm X. I can't rule out the possibility of conspiracy in these murders -- after all, Lincoln's death was a conspiracy -- but can't resolve the question either way.



What can be said is that assassination was part of the spirit of those times. Whether by design, or as the result of unseen social forces, murder became a force for political change over and over again during the course of that decade. But something changed -- the zeitgeist? a secret cabal's strategy? -- and the killings stopped. Left-leaning leaders stopped dying, and while there were several unsuccessful attempts against conservatives (Wallace, Ford, Reagan) the chain of assassination seemed to have ended.






But then, they're not needed anymore. A new form of political murder has taken its place -- character assassination. Over the last two decades, the Right has learned how to destroy its enemies without leaving a body. Hit teams roam the country, willing and eager to destroy reputations and careers, with the U.S. press corps as accomplices.



If Martin Luther King were alive today there would be no need for gunfire. He died just as he began speaking out forcefully against the Vietnam War. Were he alive to speak out against the occupation of Iraq -- as he undoubtedly would -- it's easy to imagine how the the character assassins would conduct their hit.



First, an "unnamed source" in the Justice Department would start talking to friendly reporters -- off the record, of course -- about "evidence" that Dr. King was receiving money from suspect Middle Eastern sources. Then the FBI's recordings of Dr. King's private life would be leaked to a friendly media outlet -- probably Matt Drudge. After that, Fox News would scour all the available video of Dr. King's speeches, carefully editing them so that they sound more inflammatory and less peace-loving. They would then broadcast them in an endless loop, as the YouTube hits of these misleading clips reached into the millions.

» article continues...

Saturday April 5, 2008, 11:52 am
dday and digby at Hullabaloo touch on some of the real motivations for one of the terrible events of the 20th Century.

dday picks up some often-forgotten lines of a very famous speech, forgotten because they didn't invoke a mystic vision of the future but solid, hard-edged but non-violent action:

"...Now the other thing we'll have to do is this: Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people. Individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively -- that means all of us together -- collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine. Did you ever think about that? After you leave the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and I could name the others, the American Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That's power right there, if we know how to pool it.

"We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles...

"....we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy -- what is the other bread? -- Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on town -- downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right."


That alone marked him, but not to the Klan, that marked him to the Company. That, and this quote that digby remembered:

...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 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.

...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.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:


"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."


If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.

In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war...


King's call to start serious economic boycotts by the massed economic power of the people instead of idiotic violence, along with his recently announced opposition to the Viet Nam war, were the real reason he was killed.

Similarly, Malcolm X's final moves were towards an awareness of the broader economic and social injustice of those who would rule, and the realization that poor white and black were locked in a struggle that in reality enslaved both to the $ystem.

The Kennedy brothers had similar epiphanies, seeing beyond their designated roles in the struggle to rule the world, they saw what really ruled it. Trying to change that, they met fate.

Forget that "lone gunman" silliness.

Monday April 7, 2008, 1:39 am
I have a dream....
I have a dream...

Seem..we still have a dream...and a dream..appear to maintain a dream..

Monday April 7, 2008, 1:55 am
"Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor;
it must be demanded by the oppressed"
(Martin Luther King Jr)

Monday April 7, 2008, 4:02 am
Not demanded only Ben, fight needed too..

Tuesday April 8, 2008, 5:21 am
"An eye for an eye leaves the world blind"
(Mahatma Ghandi)

Tuesday April 8, 2008, 5:29 am
"Nonviolence doesn't always work - but violence never does"
(Madge Michaels-Cyrus)

Wednesday April 9, 2008, 6:49 am
Thank you Ben,,,true, you save me sometimes..:-)

Wednesday April 9, 2008, 8:47 am
I am so sad was miss understood by you. I was not talking about revenge (eye for eye...), and not about fighting (combat, conflict, struggle, battle..whatever this word can be understood) but about fight for CAUSE..
As well as Gandhi fought for his goals and his cause with all his life..

Wednesday April 9, 2008, 9:52 am
OK Melita,
I believe in non-violence.
And I believe in civil disobediance too.
The pen is my sword...

"First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
then you will win!"
(Mahatma Ghandi)

Sunday July 18, 2010, 8:29 am
"Non-Violence in Peace and War"

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
- Mahatma Gandhi -

Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

I would also like to remember still to John F. Kennedy

Sunday July 18, 2010, 5:29 pm
Martin Luther King Jr was a wonderful human being, i'm just reading his life story. Thank You Ben.

Monday July 19, 2010, 1:18 am
Thanks Ben.

Monday July 19, 2010, 8:19 am
Thank Ben , he was a great person !!!

Tuesday July 20, 2010, 2:05 am
Thanks, Ben, noted-but who in the world could anyone here catch up on your many many posts, read and note them all? that's a full time job,-regardless of the extremely high quality of your posts! :)

Tuesday January 18, 2011, 4:14 am
Love Him!