Accidental Blogger

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Mohandas Gandhi

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his idol Mahatma Gandhi, both long dead, remain relevant today for the simple reason that their warnings have not been fully heeded by subsequent world leaders. Today is the federally observed birthday of Dr. King in the US and in two weeks (January 30th), India will observe another anniversary of Gandhi’s death. Both the US and India will honor the two leaders  by paying tribute to their far seeing visions and then we will go back to business as usual. Annual lip service to two men whose messages about war, peace, violence, racism and imperialism should serve as our moral compass through the year and the ages – not just as mindless ceremonial sound bites by politicians.

From the editorial pages of Houston Chronicle:

A man without borders

Although he rose to national prominence fighting racial segregation in the South, many of the issues roiling the United States 38 years after his assassination would be very familiar to Martin Luther King Jr.

Before his death, the Baptist minister had denounced America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, a daring stance that fueled the growing opposition to the carnage in Southeast Asia. He was bitterly criticized in the media and by government officials for venturing beyond the sphere of civil rights, as if that were the only area in which he was entitled to an opinion.

With the country now split by the bloody, open-ended struggle in Iraq and by the mistaken justification for going to war, it’s not hard to predict where King would stand on the matter.

Americans debate the revelation that their government is conducting warrantless surveillance of Americans inside the United States. King had plenty of experience on that score. He was relentlessly wiretapped and trailed by the FBI. Then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was convinced that King was a communist sympathizer.

Just as he stood with refuse workers in Memphis in the last days before an assassin’s bullet struck him down, King would championed the dispossessed evacuees of Hurricane Katrina, potent symbols of a race-based economic underclass that persists as a legacy of slavery and discrimination. The New Orleans nightmare that Katrina exposed indicates that the vision King enunciated in his "I Have a Dream" speech is not yet realized.

For a fuller account of  Dr. MLK’s speech on the Vietnam war, please see Deja Vu All Over Again: King on Vietnam at Leiter Reports.