the people have the right to defend themselves. It is an inalienable right!
told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have
tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that
social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask --
and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using
massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it
wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my
voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first
spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my
own government..."
One of the challenges that I know I have in this life is the issue
of using violence to settle disputes. This has been a struggle of
my life.
From my 15th year I did two years of martial arts. Karate, judo and
jiu jitsu.
When I was 17 and 18 the US government trained me to kill people,
and also to hurt them badly in my US Marine Corps training. Then,
I went to Vietnam, and every day since I returned I have had to live
with not just what I did, but what I saw and experienced. Wiping and
cleaning the inside of a bunker of exploded human remains is almost
as bad as killing someone in what it does to a persons heart and soul.
It was the hardest thing that I have ever done.
But, somehow I came out of the brutality and savagery of the war with
greater humanity than I entered with. Yet using violence to subdue and
dominate completely an opponent when confronted with by a dangerous
person or situation, even police violence that has often been my resort.
When I see what the police forces are doing in the United States...
gunning down Black people as if they were slave owners during slavery,
then I remember what Malcolm X said:
"Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and
oppression, because power, real power, comes from our conviction which
produces action, uncompromising action.
Malcolm X
And I also adhere to this principle:
"I don't even call it violence when it's in self defense; I
call it intelligence.
Malcolm X
When a country like the United States, which is really an international criminal
organization uses massive amounts of violence across the world as it has since its
inception, then it also uses violence against it's own people. And that is what is
happening in the US at present.
In Ferguson Mo, Michael Brown was gunned down without cause. He was
murdered. The police have been terrorizing people in an attempt to deny them
the right to protest unlawful killings. They are trying to force the people into
submission.
The Declaration of Independence states "But when a long train of abuses and
usurpations, pursuing invariably the
same object evinces a design to reduce them
under absolute despotism,
it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such
government, and
to provide new guards for their future security.
And, in America as elsewhere that is the case, but especially in America.
If the PO-lice are going to gas the citizens, then the people must obtain
quality gas masks and other materials.
I believe the words of Martin Luther King below, but we have the right to
resist and not be ground down. If the rulers of America are certain that only
violence will continue their rule then the people have the right to use all due
force when necessary, but we must find a way to use the power of love and
non-violence to bring down the walls of repression and oppression.
Martin Luther King Jr. - December 11, 1964
-
"Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions
of our time;
the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence
without resorting to
oppression and violence. Mankind must evolve for
all human conflict a method
which rejects revenge, aggression, and
retaliation. The foundation of such a method
is love."
No comments:
Post a Comment