January 15 is the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., born this day in 1929.

He was one of the clearest, bravest, and most powerful voices against racism, poverty, oppression, exploitation, and violence that the world has ever known.

Above is the complete audio recording of his speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence," delivered on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City.

It deserves to be heard again today, in Dr. King's own voice, because its message is as relevant now as it was in 1967.

In this towering speech, he calls each one of us to listen to the voice of conscience, and repeats the powerful words of the executive committee of the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam:

"A time comes when silence is betrayal."

He also acknowledges the "great difficulty of moving against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world" and the constant situation we face in this life of being "always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty."

Beginning at the 32:00-minute mark in the above video, Dr. King declares:

Surely this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and dealt death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world -- of the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours: the initiative to stop it must be ours.

As the world knows, Martin Luther King, Jr. was brutally murdered exactly one year to the day after delivering this powerful and moving speech.

What the world has been prevented from knowing, despite overwhelming evidence which was in fact presented in a civil trial in 1999, is that the brutal murder of Dr. King was not the work of a "lone assassin," but rather of a criminal conspiracy which was vast in its scope.

Even to this very day, nearly fifty-two years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and over twenty years since the evidence of a criminal conspiracy was presented in a court of law in this country, the awful truth about the killing is completely ignored in all official statements honoring Dr. King on his birthday and on the anniversary of his murder, and the media continues to completely ignore the awful details of that conspiracy and its implications, as if that evidence had never even existed.

Noted attorney William F. Pepper, who knew Martin Luther King personally, originally accepted the official story regarding the assassination of Dr. King, but later spent decades researching the evidence that the official story could not possibly be true. He represented the King family in the wrongful death lawsuit in 1999 which presented overwhelming evidence of a far-reaching conspiracy in the murder of Dr. King.

Below is an interview with William Pepper conducted in March, 2018 in which he describes some of the overwhelming evidence which completely demolishes the official narrative regarding Dr. King's murder. It is extremely disturbing to contemplate -- and it reveals how completely collaborators in the media are complicit in continuing to remain silent about this information, even as they give lip service to the legacy of Martin Luther King each year on January 15th and April 4th.

Beginning at 0:32:30 in the below clip (or at about 36:25 in this original version of the interview, in which the "sound" is a little off and not perfectly synchronized with the video), William Pepper says of the media cover-up of the evidence presented in that 1999 trial:

"The media has covered up all aspects of the truth about this case and this horrific killing of this great prophet."

Extensive transcripts of that trial, including the cross-examination of witnesses revealing absolutely damning evidence which points to the inescapable conclusion of a conspiracy in the murder of Dr. King, are presented in William Pepper's 2018 book, The Plot to Kill King.

This extensive evidence, presented in a thirty-day trial, with actual transcripts, completely blows away any attempts by defenders of the official narrative to try to dismiss the damning nature of the witness testimony by launching "ad hominem" attacks against William Pepper himself.

Other interviews with William Pepper in which he discusses the overwhelming evidence regarding this criminal conspiracy and the absolute silence in the mainstream media regarding the conspiracy to kill Dr. King can be found in other alternative media outlets, including among the archive of Bonnie Faulkner's long-running show, Guns and Butter. See for example interview #348 from June of 2016.

If we allow the truth about the past to be replaced with lies, we will be unable to understand what is going on in the present, with grave implications for the future as well. This is exactly what George Orwell foresaw when he warned in Nineteen Eighty-Four (a novel dramatizing the deliberate replacement of the truth with pervasive lies, in order to oppress the people): "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

I would strongly suggest that on the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., everyone take time to listen to at least one of Dr. King's speeches, in his own voice. His words speak for themselves, and speak to the situation in which we find ourselves today. The issues he spoke about are every bit as pressing today -- even more so, in fact, because leaders like Dr. King who can reach across the barriers which tend to divide men and women from one another have been ruthlessly eliminated, and real issues and causes like the ones Dr. King championed have been replaced by arguments deliberately designed to divide and distract and turn one group against another.

The very fact that the truth about his horrific murder continues to be completely silenced tells us everything we need to know about the state of the First Amendment and the media in this country -- and about the power of the truth and the power of the people, should they ever begin to understand what is actually going on.