George’s original work on the origins of war inspired me to take a close look at some anthropology and cultural history that followed the migration out of Africa of the invasive species of people that has now covered the earth.

Thousands and thousands of years ago, people learned to speak. Before our cultures developed the written word, we had the spoken word. And humans have been around talking with each other for a long, long time. The first people, as we think of people, showed up in Africa about 200,000 years ago. They walked upright. They made and used tools. They lived together in bands or tribes or family groups. They were descended from a long line of animals that were not strictly speaking “people.” Evolutionary biologists and anthropologists tell us that this line of ancestors went back perhaps six million years. And during that time, before we became, strictly speaking, “people,” we were adapting. We developed tools. We were adapted to eat almost anything. We weren’t good at eating cellulose like the herd animals were, but we made up for that by eating them.

Six million years ago our mammal family tree branched out and we—or our Australopithecus ancestors, the ancestors of homo sapiens, the folks I’m calling “people”—went a different direction from our cousins the gorillas and the chimpanzees.

Six million years.

It took us another four million years or so to become “makers.” And then, for most of the next two million years the “human” genus evolved into a number of different species… Australopithecus became homo habilis, homo neanderthalis, homo rhodesiensis… new discoveries of ancient hominid species turn up from time to time in the fossil record. The most recent, I think, is the Denisovan, a new species discovered in a Siberian cave. All of these species are different from modern people, creatures who in a fit of hubris we named homo sapiens… which is Latin for “wise person.”

How wise are we, if we are the only surviving species of our clade? When our species emerged on the scene there were at least four other kinds of hominins around. Genetic testing shows that there was some interbreeding among the species. But I suspect the reason that homo sapiens survived and the other hominins went extinct is because homo sapiens was just better at making things, including the tools of stone age warfare. Were some of our relatives naturally peaceful? There’s no reason to think they were not. Anthropologists’ perception of the Neanderthals suggests that they were artistic, and like homo sapiens, they adorned themselves and buried their dead.

So for tens of thousands of years we coexisted with others who were like us, but different. We developed languages, and finally, about six thousand years ago—an eye-blink compared to the millions of years of fossil record and the two hundred thousand years of human existence we’ve been talking about—we developed the written word. For a hundred thousand years or so people had been migrating out of Africa and settling into regions they found comfortable. An agricultural revolution occurred and the hunting and gathering cultures shifted to farming and staying pretty much in one place. Among the cultural ramifications that showed up early were religion and law. Both of these very human pursuits were arguably improved by a written language. When literacy appeared, stories and rules that had been handed down by word of mouth were locked into text. And it’s from these early texts that we can gather that homo sapiens has for a long time been interested in making peace as well as war.
Christianity and Judaism share the biblical old testament and the idea that a messiah will come and offer people salvation. In the second chapter of the book named for the prophet Isaiah is this verse:

“And He will judge between the nations, And will render decisions for many peoples; And they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, And never again will they study war.”

“Ain’t going to study war no more…”

There’s an old spiritual that many of us know, Pete Seeger sang it, the Weavers, Holly Near, Emma’s Revolution has a version. It’s probably in our song book…

I’m Gonna lay down my sword and shield
Down by the riverside
Down by the riverside…

And the Chorus goes:
Ain’t gonna study war no more,
Ain’t gonna study war no more

So the same bible that brought us plagues and floods and a Nile River full of blood, the bible that tells the story of Joshua and the battle of Jericho also has that lighter, more peaceful moment.

I think it’s interesting that the Book of Isaiah has a lot about Cyrus the Great, King of Persia in it. Cyrus was Zoroastrian, and so there are cross references between the Hebrew Torah and the clay tablets that the Persians used for historical records.
On one of those tablets, describing his own achievements, Cyrus the Great says:

“Amid jubilation and rejoicing, I entered Babylon in peace to establish a just government and strive for peace. My troops wandered peacefully throughout Babylon. In all of Sumer and Akkad, I gave no cause for fear and no one was terrorized. I concerned myself with the needs and welfare of the citizens of Babylon, Sumer and Akkad, and with promoting their well-being. I freed them from their improper oppression & bondage. I healed their afflictions and put an end to their misfortune. I restored their dilapidated dwellings. I gathered and assisted the displaced held in bondage, to return to their homes.”

Of course the story is that Cyrus was sent there by Marduk, a deity, who suggested that it was time to put things right, to restore certain temples and so forth. So there was a little bit of conquest required in order to enter Babylon in Peace, but so it goes.

* * *

Over the centuries since we started writing things down, we’ve started to understand ourselves better by studying history. And history they say is written by the winners. Ironically enough the losers are often the more peaceful people. When we started to bring this humanist service together one topic we thought we’d focus on was “Peace,” and –can you believe it?—what came out of that was a closer look at the origins of war.

Many humanists are non-theists, and among us there are peacemakers, people who try to live with an eye on equality, community, integrity, and—often—simplicity.

Howard Zinn was a historian, a playwright, and an activist who was also a humanist. His life’s work focused on a wide range of issues including race, class, war, and history, and touched the lives of many people. He was aware of the crushing fact that the violent and warlike often dominate while the idealistic folks, the peacemakers, are subordinated among them. Here’s what he says about that:

You ask how I manage to stay involved and remain seemingly happy and
adjusted to this awful world where the efforts of caring people pale in
comparison to those who have power?

It’s easy.
First, don’t let “those who have power” intimidate you. No
matter how much power they have they cannot prevent you from living your
life, speaking your mind, thinking independently, having relationships
with people as you like.

Second, find people to be with who have your values, your commitments,
but who also have a sense of humor. That combination is a necessity!

Third, understand that the major media will not tell you of all the acts of
resistance taking place every day in the society, the strikes, the protests, the
individual acts of courage in the face of authority. Look around for the evidence of
these unreported acts, and you will certainly find it. And for the little you find,
extrapolate from that and assume there must be a thousand times as much as
what you’ve found.

Fourth: Note that throughout history people have felt powerless before
authority, but that at certain times these powerless people, by organizing, acting,
risking, persisting, have created enough power to change the world around them,
even if a little. That is the history of the labor movement, of the women’s
movement, of the anti-Vietnam war movement, the disable persons’ movement,
the gay and lesbian movement, the movement of Black people in the South.

Fifth: Remember, that those who have power, and who seem invulnerable are in
fact quite vulnerable, that their power depends on the obedience of others, and
when those others begin withholding that obedience, begin defying authority,
that power at the top turns out to be very fragile. Generals become powerless
when their soldiers refuse to fight. Industrialists become powerless when their
workers leave their jobs or occupy the factories. Matadors cry when the bull
refuses to fight.

Sixth: When we forget the fragility of that power in the top we become
astounded when it crumbles in the face of rebellion. We have had many
such surprises in our time, both in the United States and in other
countries.

Seventh: Don’t look for a moment of total triumph. See it as an
ongoing struggle, with victories and defeats, but in the long run the
consciousness of people growing. So you need patience, persistence, and
need to understand that even when you don’t “win,” there is fun and
fulfillment in the fact that you have been involved, with other good
people, in something worthwhile.

Thinking about those seven pieces of advice from Howard Zinn, I’m still left with the question of whether our warlike behavior is so burned into us genetically that it will always dominate our culture, or can we transcend those hundreds of thousands of years of historical conflict and find a peaceful path into the future?
As he said, a sense of humor is crucial! But in closing I still gotta ask, What’s so funny ‘bout peace, love and understanding?

[Presented today, 2/7/2016 at the Palomar Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Humanist Service]

On Wednesday July 31st, people around the world will fast and take other peaceful, non-violent action in solidarity with the California Prisoner Hunger Strikers. Join family members of hunger strikers along with James Cromwell, Angela Davis, Mike Farrell, Danny Glover, Elliott Gould, Chris Hedges, Alice Walker, and Cornel West. We fast knowing the criminalization that killed Trayvon Martin, and the criminalization that justifies the torture of prisoners in solitary confinement are one and the same.

Today is Day 24 of the California Prisoner Hunger Strike. Beth Hastings and I are fasting today. By fasting publicly we hope to broaden awareness of the enormous injustice and the horrific conditions prisoners must endure every day in solitary confinement in the California penal system. Our fast is a personal response to an appalling situation. In California, nearly 12,000 imprisoned people spend 23 of 24 hours living in a concrete cell smaller than a large bathroom. The cells have no windows, no access to fresh air or sunlight. People in solitary confinement exercise an hour a day in a cage the size of a dog run. They are not allowed to make any phone calls to their loved ones. They cannot touch family members who often travel days for a 90 minute visit; their conversation and their mail is monitored by prison guards. They are not allowed to talk to other imprisoned people. They are denied all educational programs, and their reading materials are censored.

How are prisoners put into solitary confinement? The prosecutor, judge and jury is a prison official called an Institutional Gang Investigator. The I.G.I.’s ‘evidence’ may be a book the prisoner has read, a tattoo, or some culturally based art the prisoner has created. But most often, the ‘evidence’ comes from another prisoner, a secret informant. With this ‘evidence,’ the I.G.I can ‘sentence’ the accused to a lifetime in solitary confinement.

The primary demands of the hunger strikers are these:

1. An end to long term solitary;
2. An end to the illegal and immoral use of secret informants;
3. An end to punishing whole racial groups for an individual’s actions;
4. Improving conditions to meet basic humane standards for physical and mental health; and
5. Providing educational programs.

What can you do to help?

You can endorse and support today’s “Hunger for Justice” action. Sign on here…

You can join the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition (PHSS) and participate in one action per week in response to some emergency facing the hunger strikers, and in resistance to the torture. These actions may include an email, phone call, letter, or a vigil and will be initiated by the Emergency Response Network of PHSS.

You can contact Governor Jerry Brown:
Phone: (916) 445-2841, (510) 289-0336, (510) 628-0202
Fax: (916) 558-3160
Suggested script: I’m calling in support of the prisoners on hunger strike. The governor has the power to stop the torture of solitary confinement. I urge the governor to compel the CDCR to enter into negotiations to end the strike. RIGHT NOW is their chance to enter into clear, honest negotiations with the strikers to end the torture.

Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam

Delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
April 1967
At Manhattan’s Riverside Church

“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 why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorage, leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. 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 can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.

Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle, 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. Then came the build-up in Vietnam, and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political play thing 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 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.

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. We were taking the young black men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years – especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action. But, they asked, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and 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.

For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a Civil Rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed from the shackles they still wear.

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.” It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the “brotherhood of man.” This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant or all men, for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved His enemies so fully that He died for hem? What then can I say to the Viet Cong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death, or must I not share with hem my life?

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its re-conquest of her former colony.

Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not “ready” for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision, we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants, this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to re-colonize Vietnam.

Before the end of the war we were meeting 80 per cent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will to do so.

After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem’s methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while, the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy, and land reform. Now 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 or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go.

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers destroy their precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least 20 casualties from American firepower for each Viet Cong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children.

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?

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call “fortified hamlets.” The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts’? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.

Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the NLF, that strangely anonymous group we call VC or communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of “aggression from the North” as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem, and charge them with violence while we pour new weapons of death into their land?

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than 25 per cent communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant.

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and non-violence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know of his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded at Geneva to give up, as a temporary measure, the land they controlled between the 13th and 17th parallels. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.

When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the President claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. Perhaps only his sense of humor and irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than 8000 miles from its shores.

At this point, I should make it clear that while I have tried here to give a voice to the voiceless of Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for our troops must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam and 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 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 hearts 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.

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 her people.

In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing the war to a halt. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmare:

1. End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.

2. Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.

3. Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military build-up in Thailand and our interference in Laos.

4. Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.

5. Set a date on which we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.

Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the NLF. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, in this country if necessary.

Meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation’s role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than 70 students at my own Alma Mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy, and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. We will be marching and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military “advisors” in Venezuela. The need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. With such activity in mind, the words of John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. When machines and computers, profit and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look easily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will 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 countries, and say: This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: ” This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from re-ordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are the days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take: offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wombs of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to ad just to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.

We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us re-dedicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.”

Published on Thursday, January 15, 2024 by CommonDreams.org
I believe the Riverside Church speech is copyrighted. I quote it here in its entirety as a mark of respect and as a reminder on this Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday that there is so much more work to do to break the cycle of war and violence.

The Angriest Successful Primary Candidate I Ever Met is the GOP nominee.

Just as Democratic Congresswoman Gabby Giffords hoped, Jesse Kelly beat former state Sen. Jonathan Paton, the heavy favorite in the GOP primary.

I met Kelly in an Editorial Board meeting. Honorable fellow: war veteran, like all the district’s GOP candidates. Indeed, he was a Marine combat platoon leader, the most dangerous job on earth. He is an honest conservative. And a really, really angry guy.

When asked about priorities, he gave an answer that, while perfectly suitable for a former Marine officer, it seemed a bit over the top for a prospective member of Congress: “We’ve got to kill all members of radical Islam.”

And, when asked if he could work with Democrats in Congress: “I hope there’s no Democrats left in Congress when I get there.”

Look, I like shock theater, too. And I’ve been known to be a bit edgy at times. But Kelly is that rare conservative who takes politics so personally that he has morphed into his worst enemy. Like far-left liberals, he doesn’t believe his political opponents are merely wrong; they’re evil: “I think liberals are destroying the nation. We had better go fight them in Washington before they destroy our children’s future.”

No wonder Giffords is smiling these days. Kelly dissed candidates endorsed by Sarah Palin as people “who will sell our principles down the river.”

Kelly is such a loser that he was only able to take second (“worser”) place on Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World.” Of course it should be mentioned that Olbermann was suspended the day after this broadcast because he contributed to Congresswoman Giffords’ campaign. Ahh, ethics…

The U.S. is far better off with this treaty than without it. It strengthens the security of the U.S. and our allies and promotes strategic stability between the world’s two major nuclear powers.
— Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense

The US Senate is considering ratification of the new START treaty with Russia. The deliberations, broadcast on C-Span, provide an opportunity to see Senators at their best and worst. A two-thirds majority will be needed to ratify the treaty, and the obstructionists are out in force attempting to deny the Obama administration any progress on any program, regardless of how much sense it makes. Ratification of START makes sense simply because the old treaty lapsed last December and without a treaty in effect, there is no mechanism to monitor the two countries’ progress toward the modest disarmament they’ve agreed upon. Sadly, ratification would be a concrete accomplishment of the administration. The take-no-prisoners competitive posture of the right-wing in America seeks to deny Obama any progress toward any goal. So, although a bi-partisan roll call of defense experts, military leadership, past and present Secretaries of State and Defense and countless others favor ratification, all it takes is thirty-four obstructionist Senators to draw down the curtain on any disarmament progress for the next four or five years.

Jeff Sessions of Alabama is a piece of work. C-Span, dry and formalistic though much of the content may be, provides an opportunity to see Sessions and his ilk at work ripping apart the fabric of the United States of America.

Coretta Scott King, Albert Schweitzer, and Benjamin Spock famously brought public attention to the horror of nuclear war when they founded The Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy (SANE) in 1957. At that time, the US and the Soviet Union had entered an arms race with the common strategic goal of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). They were building bombs and bombers and missiles as fast as possible in order to make sure that no one on the planet would survive a nuclear war. The MADness continues to this day, albeit somewhat less dramatically. As of mid-2009 fewer than 5000 strategic atomic warheads are deployed by the combined forces of the United States and the Russian Federation (Russian MADness, US MADness). There are oodles of tactical nukes deployed of course, but these weapons are small potatoes, their yields about the same as the modest devices that ended World War II with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tactical nukes don’t count in the Strategic Arms book keeping biz.

Besides the US and Russia, at least seven other countries have nuclear arsenals, but none have tied their defense strategies to the craziness of mutually assured destruction. Here’s a link to an article in support of the START treaty by Robert Gates, former Bush and now Obama Secretary of Defense.

A couple of days ago I said…

So what did I learn last night that the fans who were saving their energy for today’s football game might have missed? Here’s a list:

• Condaleezza Rice was on the Jon Stewart show this week flogging her autobiography and her own peculiar brand of Presbyterianism. In an effort to remain fair and balanced, Stewart will have Medea Benjamin on the show this coming Tuesday.

That’s wrong. According to The Daily Show website, the Jon and Condi show will be re-run tonight. Last week when I heard Medea say she’d be on the Daily Show on Tuesday, I think I misinterpreted. According to Facebook rumor, she is filming something today that will probably run next week.

* * *
Meanwhile, Ed Henry at CNN reports,

In the final week leading up to the midterm election, President Obama will appear on the “Daily Show” for the first time since taking office as host Jon Stewart takes his popular show on the road to Washington.

I think the last week in October is going to be a big one for Jon Stewart and company; a big one too for the US of A, if we can get everyone stirred up enough to vote on the first Tuesday in November. Apathy is the democracy killer.