In an address given at Oberlin College in 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. declared:
"There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution . . ."
What revolution is he talking about?
In his famous Beyond Vietnam speech given on April 04, 1967, he tells us:
In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of US military advisers in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas and Cambodia, and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.
It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin -- we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
These words can be more clearly seen to be true today than ever.
Since that day in 1967 when Dr. King made that speech, the United States and the "West" that he admonishes with his words have not turned away from the path that Dr. King describes, of military intervention in order to take the resources of other nations and suppress rebellions against imperialism and colonialism.
Since that day in 1967 when Dr. King made that speech, the United States and the "West" have not turned away from the path of making alliances with the "landed gentry" of South America and of other nations of the global south -- alliances with the comprador elites of those countries (self-styled elites) who would rather collaborate with the corporate and financial and political interests who are appropriating the resources of their nations at the expense of the people and to the neglect of the building of infrastructure and social uplift.
Since that day in 1967 when Dr. King made that speech, the United States and the "West" have not turned away from the path of "feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them." as Dr. King describes.
Since that day in 1967 when Dr. King made that speech, the United States and the "West" have not turned away from the path of considering profit motives to be more important than people.
Since that day in 1967 when Dr. King made that speech, the United States and the "West" have not turned away from the path of spending more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift.
In these and so many other ways, we can see without any doubt that since that day in 1967 when Dr. King made that speech, the United States and the "West" have not only continued down the "wrong side of a world revolution" but have in fact doubled down or even tripled down on that wrong-side path.
Indeed, the forces opposed to that world revolution -- the forces that benefit from the seizure and privatization of national resources, and from ensuring that profit motives are held to be more important than people, and from propping up the collaborating comprador "elites" or "landed gentry" of resource-rich, non-western nations who are willing to sell out their own people, and from spending more money on military projects than on programs of social uplift -- these forces and their paid agents brutally and treacherously murdered Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. exactly one year to the day after he gave that important speech.
And since that murder, these same interests have used propaganda and a stifling control over the media and the supposedly "free press" of the United States (and "the West") to suppress the glaring evidence that Dr. King was murdered by a criminal cabal with the assistance of criminal elements within the United States government (at federal, state and local levels, working together), and to continue to propagate the unsustainable lie that he was instead shot and killed by a "lone nut."
And through this stifling control over the media and the supposedly "free press" of the United States (and "the West"), these forces of reaction and counter-revolution have continued to keep huge swaths of the population of the United States and the West more or less asleep to the world revolution that Dr. King was describing.
But since that day, the universe has not stood still -- and, as Dr. King said on another occasion: "The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice."
That world revolution, against the injustices that Dr. King was describing in his speeches, has in fact continued to percolate -- despite the fact that so many in the West have fallen asleep to its progress and its significance (and even its very existence).
As that "sensitive American official overseas" observed back in 1957, the United States and the West have continued to be the wrong side of that revolution -- but it need not be so.
There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
January 15, 1929 - April 04, 1968
