Recently I noted that, through the miracle of modern scholarship and dramatic reading, Martin Luther King opposed the war in Iraq at Stanford the other evening. Now he’s at it again.
Clayborne Carson, author (well, technically, editor) of THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., has compiled and/or composed an anti-war speech for the formerly dead civil rights hero that ran today in the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline, “What Would Martin Do?”
It will probably come as no suprise that King/Carson opposes military action in the Middle East. Israel’s right to exist is “incontestable,” “he” says, but
[a]t the same time the great powers have the obligation to recognize that the Arab world is in a state of imposed poverty and backwardness that must threaten peace and harmony. Until a concerted and democratic program of assistance is affected [sic], tensions cannot be relieved. So there is a need for a Marshall Plan for the Middle East.
Since the United States is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” (the date of “today” is ambiguous since the speech draws on materials from different year), it is presumably we who have imposed the poverty and backwardness.
History often rescues the voices of the dead from oblivion, but historians don’t usually write the speeches.
