2011/01/17

Did Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have a dream to go to war?

"BraveNew World Foundation" has disputed the absurd claim by our "Pentagon", that, if King were alive today, he might support the war in Afghanistan. Nothing could be further from the truth: When he was alive, Dr. King said VERY clearly: "A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs is approaching spiritual death." More than 10,000 people died in the Afghanistan War last year alone. This year, our government plans to spend $107 billion on the war. We believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would repeat his admonition to US polcymakers on their responsibility: "I speak as one who loves America. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours." Martin Luther King, Jr. was a national hero who called on us to have the moral courage to stop another war that wasn't making us safer, and that wasn't worth the cost. Sergeant Brown, the gentle and highly trained medic of my Advisory Team in Ngo Trang, north of Kontum was one of Dr. King's disciples. Every night, he would read the worn-out bible which his family had sent him to seek solace after the insane butchery around us. A scrawny and tiny chicken, which he had nursed to health with Army furnished Tetracycline, became one of his constant companions. Life, no matter how small and, to the un-initiated unimportant, was always worth saving, but most of all, he saved my team, and me, from becoming too emotionally hardened in that terrible conflict, which often succeeded in making us mere robots in an evil cause.

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