In the last years of his life, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was able to make a critical connection between poverty, racism, and militarism. It wasn’t very long after MLK depicted the U.S. Government the “Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World Today” that the massacre in My Lie Village was being covered up by those that gave the order. And one year into articulately conveying his realization to the American public, Dr. King was executed on a hotel balcony. Eventually, gross atrocities committed during the War on the people of North Vietnam would be revealed, but it took a soldier with a critical perspective and the courage to speak out.
The Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World Today… Our Own GovernmentDr. Martin Luther King Jr. Riverside Church Address, 4 April 1967
[King’s speech was] “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi,”Time Magazine
[King has] “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”Washington Post
US. Troops Burninating the Country Side in My Lie Vietnam
So what’s changed? The list keeps growing.
Sources:
- John Whiteclay Chambers II. “My Lai Massacre.” The Oxford Companion to American Military History. 2000. Retrieved September 14, 2014 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O126-MyLaiMassacre.html
- http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/vietnam/timeline.htm
- http://history1900s.about.com/cs/martinlutherking/a/mlkassass_2.htm
- http://www.democracynow.org/2003/4/4/the_united_states_is_the_greatest
- http://www.radioproject.org/2003/01/beyond-the-dream-mlk-and-the-anti-war-movement/
- http://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/my-lai-massacre