When Martin Luther King, Jr. came out unequivocally against the war in Viet Nam, he was attacked from all sides, including strong criticism from many of his allies. They said that civil rights and peace didn’t mix, that he was hurting the cause of his own people. King responded that he understood their concerns, but nonetheless it saddened him. It saddened him, he said, because it meant that his allies didn’t really know him, and that they didn’t really know the world they lived in.
It’s easy to forget the revolutionary Martin Luther King when the dominant narrative—entombed in the gauzy haze of official memory—is such a sugary and uplifting story:
Once upon a time there were some mean white people (in the South) and some bad laws. But then a Saint came along and told us to love one another. He led a bus boycott, had a dream, gave a speech, and won a peace prize. Then, we were all better, and he got shot.
It’s sweet and simple, and in large part untrue. The real Martin Luther King, Jr. was an activist for just thirteen years, a loving and angry pilgrim in pursuit of justice, and he grew and changed dramatically each year of his journey. King’s speeches and sermons in the last years of his life are a chronicle of struggle, set-back, re-thinking, connecting issues, seeking new allies, going deeper, fighting harder.
In the last years of his life he was fighting explicitly for economic and global justice connected to racial justice. He spoke of the link between a rotting shack and a rotted-out democracy, between imperial ambitions abroad and betrayal of justice at home. He noted that the American soul was poisoned by war and racism, and raised the question of whether America would go to hell for her sins.
Concretely he said that the American people bore the greatest responsibility for ending the war since our government bore the responsibility for starting and sustaining it. He called the U.S. “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” and argued that he could not condemn desperate, angry young men who picked up guns until he first condemned his own government. He urged resistance to the war and counseled youngsters not to join the armed services. And he said the U.S. was on the wrong side of the world revolution, that we would need to rekindle a revolutionary spirit in order to create a “revolution in values”—against militarism and racism and extreme materialism—that could lead to restructuring our economic and social system top to bottom.
In the spirit of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. we have to dare to see the world as it really is, and then to choose justice over tribe or nation or petty self-interest. We need to organize and mobilize against illegal wars of conquest and domination, send a sharp warning right now as the powerful mobilize to bomb Iran under the banner of the same exhausted lies and rationalizations, and press the demand for peace in concrete terms:
1. Withdraw all mercenary forces immediately.
2. Set a date-certain—within three months—for all U.S. troops to leave Iraq and Afghanistan.
3. Dismantle all U.S. military bases in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.
4. Renounce all claims to the natural resources of Iraq.
5. Call for the creation of an independent international commission to assess and monitor the amount of reparations the U.S. owes to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.
This is only a start, and it is still a choice—solidarity with all people, or endless war and death. As King reminded us, those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.
Bill Ayers 
Jarvis @4.26,
If you’re going to call someone “anti-American” you should at least articulate what you mean by that. If the American government is engaging in something that is unjust and morally wrong, namely, the Viet Nam war, which killed millions of innocent people, for simply no good reason. Then, I would say, there is nothing more patriotic and American, to do whatever you can to stop it. Or is our duty as Americans to just nod and do as we’re told?
Millions of Vietnamese, and Millions of Cambodians, and over 50,000 Americans soldiers died and for what? We lost the war and look what happened. Sure Vietnam “went Communist” as it is their own prerogative, but they are also one of our biggest trading partners today – which doesn’t sound too communist to me.
Directing a few bombs at the heart of the unjust, immoral, military industrial complex during the Viet Nam war is a BRAVE act when compared to the crimes that the American government perpetrated on South-East Asia.
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
Jarvis @ 4.26pm,
Have you ever heard of the “banality of evil?”
If I may speak frankly, it is Americans like you, who just nodded along, without critically thinking, why our we attacking Iraq, a country that has done nothing to us, which has led us to this current debacle where we our spending BILLIONS on another unjust, illegal, immoral war, that has diminished our world reputation.
Call Bill Ayers all the names that you want, but he at least stands for his principles. What have you done to try to make the world a better place for mankind?
You do not live in a perfect world. If you wrote this article in Iraq about there Gov’t before the fall of Saddam Hussain, you would have had your head cut off. I think you and Michael Moore would be good together.
Wow… that’s probably the most thought out proposal about how to end our occupation of Iraq and eventually the Middle East.
I’ve always pondered that if we quit funding mercenary oprations in Iraq, how quickly our occupation would end.
While I disagree that violence can be made inevitable (violence is always a choice, not a course of action one is forced to,) I find that your statements portray a necessary moral clarity unencumbered by racism, nationalism, or religious fervency. These undesirable mental states cloud almost all the discussion of the US’s current illegal occupation of Iraq, evidenced by the lack of education among the American public regarding the subtleties and distinctions among middle eastern cultural groups, by the emphasis placed on the 4000 blessed servicemen and women sacrificed but little or no discussion of the hundreds of thousands of slaughtered Iraqis, by the continuing rhetoric which employs phrases such as “religious extremists,” and “ideological struggle,” words that are used without any irony, without any seeming awareness of the fact that for a ideological struggle to take place BOTH sides must be extremists.
As an individual born decades after Dr. King’s assassination, it is fascinating and encouraging to learn he was an individual of deeper substance that what is taught in high school. I sincerely wish more emphasis had been placed on his work as a whole, rather than the fiction that one speech and one act of deadly violence is the entirety of his legacy.
Keep up the good work. America’s “silent majority” is behind you
Thank you for your clarity. For the most part, I think that you are right on.
ROT IN HELL YOU COMMUNIST BASTARD!
Jarvis is 100% correct. You are a subversive vomit stain, a terrorist and a miserable slime mold. The only place a psychotic animal like you could ever be employed is in academia. I too hope a day of brutal reckoning comes for you very soon.
I think you are an anti-American communist that should be shot by a firing squad of US marines.