Fill in the Blank

an echo from the past:

"Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of [fill in the blank]. 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 death and corruption in [fill in the blank]. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

"This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of [fill in the blank]. Recently one of them wrote these words:

"'Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the [fill in the blank] and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.'

"If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in [fill in the blank]. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad [fill in the blank] into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of [fill in the blank] immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.

"The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in [fill in the blank], that we have been detrimental to the life of the [fill in the blank] people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.

"In order to atone for our sins and errors in [fill in the blank], we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war."


-- from Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech in 1967 at the Riverside Church in New York criticizing American's war in Vietnam (minor edits limited to [fill in the blank].).

My Comment:

The more things change, the more they remain the same. When war becomes a private enterprise and a profitable business, there can be no end to war. There can be no peace - for if there were peace, the profits from war would cease.