Urgent! Egyptian activist arrested from HUMAN RIGHTS FIRST 30MAR11

PLEASE sign the petition from Human Rights First in support of and calling for the release of Maikel Nabil Sanad in Egypt. His arrest and trial on 31 MAR 11 for insulting the military in Egypt is a violation of his human rights and a threat to the progress Egypt has made since the overthrow of mubarak. The international community can not tolerate a return to the repressive tactics of the former mubarak government. Click the link to participate....

A critic of the military has been detained by the military. Repression may not be over in Egypt. Stand up for Egyptian activists at risk! We have just heard that an Egyptian activist is to stand trial in a military court TOMORROW—for "insulting the military institution" and other charges. Maikel Nabil Sanad called out abuses by the military—and is now facing up to three years in prison for it. Sign our petition to support Maikel and other Egyptian activists at risk. There are reports the military is carrying out arbitrary arrests and torture, and subjecting women to 'virginity tests.' Maikel was calling attention to the military's abuse of power, and now he's been arrested by the military police. Surprise surprise. We could have hoped with the revolution, repression came to an end in Egypt. But since the military has taken over power in Egypt, there are continuing and serious concerns about how they are dealing with dissent. That's why Human Rights First is bringing prominent Egyptian activist Esraa Abdel Fattah to meet with U.S. officials next week—so she can tell them how to make sure real change comes to Egypt. We need to ensure that the U.S. supports the people, not the autocrats, in Egypt and the broader region. Next week, Esraa will meet with dozens of policy and opinion makers—and you can join her by adding your signature to our petition. We'll hand deliver it to the officials we meet and get it in the hands of the authorities in Cairo themselves. We cannot stand aside while activists continue to be detained merely for voicing dissent. Stand up with Egyptian activists—sign our petition. Thank you for supporting Maikel, Esraa, and the countless other activists who have been calling for freedom in Egypt for years and continue to do so today. Sincerely, Brian Dooley Director, Human Rights Defenders Program

Human Rights First, 333 Seventh Avenue, 13th Floor, New York, NY 10001-5004 www.humanrightsfirst.org Join us on Facebook, Follow us on Twitter

I HAVE A DREAM SPEECH

REV MARTIN LUTHER KING JR would have been 82 years old today had he not been assassinated, taken from us much too early in his life. I love watching this speech, hearing him speak these words. I get goosebumps hearing this speech, I get them even reading it, as I do a least once a year. So here it is for all of us, great words from a great man to a great nation meant to make us even greater.....and we need to hear these words, and words like these, more and more in these times.....Thank you Rev King!

"I Have a Dream" I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men - yes, black men as well as white men - would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check that has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and security of justice. We have also come to his hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children. It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end but a beginning. Those who hoped that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating "for whites only." We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today my friends - so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification - one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. This will be the day, this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning "My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my father's died, land of the Pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!" And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi - from every mountainside. Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring - when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children - black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics - will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" --- Distribution statement: Accepted as part of the Douglass Archives of American Public Address (http://douglass.speech.nwu.edu) on May 26, 1999. Prepared by D. Oetting (http://nonce.com/oetting). Permission is hereby granted to download, reprint, and/or otherwise redistribute this file, provided this distribution statement is included and appropriate point of origin credit is given to the preparer and Douglass.

Today is historic for Sudan -- but it's just the beginning from THE SAVE DARFUR COALITION 9JAN11

FROM SAVE DARFUR AND SPOTLIGHT ON SUDAN, an update on the first day of voting in South Sudan and links to keep informed on the progress for peace in Darfur and South Sudan.

Shine a Spotlight on Sudan Share this important Sudan update with your friends & family. Click here Referendum voting starts today, but we can’t turn our backs now. Help us to be vigilant and cast a spotlight on South Sudan, Darfur and the rest of the country over the coming months. Share this update today. Today is the first day of voting in the referendum which will determine the destiny of millions of Southern Sudanese. Voters will cast ballots from today through January 15. And it will take weeks to gather all the ballots from remote areas – only then will the results be announced. The period between voting and the announcement of results could be a volatile and potentially explosive period. Expectations of independence are so high that any delays or complications could spark widespread violence. We can't turn our backs after the vote. We need your help to shine a spotlight on Sudan. Get the important facts on the situation, and then spread the word today. Official observers expect an overwhelming vote for independence, but we may not know the final outcome until early February. You and I know the media doesn’t have the best attention span for these important moments around the world. Will the world stay tuned for several weeks while the votes of Southern Sudanese are counted? When innocent families are most vulnerable to sudden violence, will we have our backs turned? We can't let that happen – we need your help to keep the world's attention focused on Sudan. Click here to spread the word about what is happening in South Sudan and Darfur. The danger for the Sudanese people is a prolonged period in which the international media and world leaders are no longer paying attention. Look no further than Darfur, where last month 32,000 Darfuri civilians were displaced by violence. While the world focused on the referendum in Southern Sudan, the Darfur peace process fell apart – with the government of Sudan pulling out, and all three of the major Darfur rebel groups refusing to participate. This is exactly why we need your help. Keep the spotlight on Sudan. Together, we can make sure the world continues to pay attention, and the United States government continues its high level engagement on Sudan. As we welcome a peaceful start to the referendum in Sudan, we have to make sure Darfur is not forgotten. We have worked too hard to let up now. Thank you for all you do. Sincerely, Martha Bixby Save Darfur Coalition

The Save Darfur Coalition — an alliance of more than 190 faith-based, advocacy and human rights organizations — raises public awareness about the ongoing crisis in Darfur and mobilizes a unified response to promote peace throughout the Darfur region and all of Sudan. The coalition's member organizations represent 130 million people of all ages, races, religions and political affiliations united together to help the people of Sudan. Please join the movement at http://www.savedarfur.org.

Are Mennonites (Anabaptist) Taking Over the World? from HUFFPOST 11NOV10

A very interesting read on a little know sect of Protestant Christianity.
 
Are Mennonites taking over the world?
Not likely.
But Mark Tooley wonders in The American Spectator magazine whether Mennonites are taking over a big enough part of Christianity to be dangerous.
Tooley used a recent apology from Lutherans -- for violent persecution of 16th-century Anabaptists -- to emphasize a "neo-Anabaptist movement" that demands all Christians and society "bend to pacifism."
He says the views of neo-Anabaptist religious leaders such as Stanley Hauerwas, Greg Boyd, Shane Claiborne and Jim Wallis are "especially pervasive" and "permit a naughty sense of rebellion" -- evidence of how the Anabaptist message has mainstream appeal, especially its pacifism.
Tooley shows a somewhat accurate understanding of Anabaptistm, while at other times he's erroneous. As an Anabaptist, I want to speak of my heritage from my perspective.
Tooley is right:
1. Anabaptism is no longer a small, persecuted minority. Yes, however, the global Anabaptist church is still comparatively small, at less than 2 million members compared to 70 million Lutherans around the world.
2. Anabaptists are traditionally pacifists and separatists emphasized as "victim" and "outsider." Yes, and we as Anabaptists have not spent enough time reflecting on how we sometimes portray ourselves as self-righteous and arrogant Christians.
3. Anabaptism is becoming mainstream. In some ways, yes, but we also don't fit the traditional Christian molds of mainstream or evangelical. I've been told by various religious leaders and Christian friends how Anabaptism's values of peace, justice and nonviolence are increasingly relevant in our world. I humbly acknowledge this and say, spread the Word!
4. Anabaptists reject support for the "empire." While Anabaptist views of politics differ, a core value remains being "in the world but not of it," which especially applies to U.S. militarism. I'm comfortable with saying "God bless the world" but not "God bless America." I respect the government as described in Romans 13 but ultimately believe my highest loyalty remains with God.
Tooley is wrong:
1. Neo-Anabaptists aggressively demand pacifism. The reality is that not even all Anabaptists embrace nonviolence, much less get the rest of the world to. Rather, Anabaptists try to align daily life as peaceful reconcilers of Jesus' "third way." We invite rather than coerce.
2. Neo-Anabaptists are part of the Left. First, I'm not sure whether this means all Anabaptists are members of the so-called Left, or if just neo-Anabaptists are. Regardless, both interpretations are wrong. Whether it's the Christian Left or Secular Left, neither category fits.

3. Neo-Anabaptists demand an expanded, coercive state. Anabaptists have traditionally forsworn national loyalties, as Tooley said. However, Anabaptists are deeply committed to social justice, since Jesus' mission was to preach good news to the poor. Anabaptists believe faith without works is dead and that the church is uniquely positioned to proclaim Jesus' healing and hope to the world.
This is my interpretation of Anabaptism. I don't know whether Tooley would call me a traditional Anabaptist or a neo-Anabaptist. But as a committed member of a 500-year-old movement that has spread to more than 80 countries, I wonder whether we can really dichotomize the old, the new and the emerging.
Ultimately, Tooley said, neo-Anabaptism is "especially pervasive at many evangelical schools, suburban megachurches, intellectual and hipster circles." (Wow, we're hip!) It's a "rising force," maybe poised for a takeover, he says.
I say, may the reign of God come on earth as it is in heaven.

Burma democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi released 13NOV10

"The release of political prisoners is the most important thing for all those who truly wish to bring about change in Burma." — Aung San Suu Kyi

		Aung San Suu Kyi was freed today! Suu Kyi, a human rights and pro-democracy leader who has been held in detention or house arrest in Myanmar for 15 of the last 21 years, spoke with a crowd of supporters outside her home shortly after her release. Amnesty International has been advocating for this Nobel Laureate over the course of two decades. Although she was recently barred from participating in the first elections her country has held in 20 years, we welcome the news of her freedom today. Thank you for your work on Suu Kyi's case — your letters, public demonstrations, phone calls and discussions with friends, family, and colleagues. Suu Kyi's release is welcome news for a country that routinely imprisons people who engage in peaceful political dissent, but others are still at risk. Donate to support Amnesty International's continued work on behalf of prisoners of conscience. Buddhist monk U Gambira is currently serving a 63 year sentence at a prison in Myanmar for his part in monk-led demonstrations in 2007. While in jail, he has been tortured and denied access to medical treatment. U Gambira is in poor health and should be released immediately. He is one of more than 2,000 political prisoners being held in Myanmar.	Freedom, Finally ©2002 Getty Images Myanmar should never have arrested Aung San Suu Kyi or other prisoners of conscience in the first place, locking them out of the political process. Help Amnesty fight to free prisoners of conscience worldwide.
		FROM THE WASHINGTON POST

YANGON, Myanmar -- Myanmar's military government freed its archrival, democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, on Saturday after her latest term of detention expired. Several thousand jubilant supporters streamed to her residence.
A smiling Suu Kyi, wearing a traditional jacket and a flower in her hair, appeared at the gate of her compound as the crowd chanted, cheered and sang the national anthem.
"If we work in unity, we will achieve our goal. We have a lot of things to do," she told the well-wishers, who quickly swelled to as many as 5,000. Speaking briefly in Burmese, she said they would see each other again Sunday at the headquarters of her political party.
The 65-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate, whose latest period of detention spanned 7 1/2 years, has come to symbolize the struggle for democracy in the Southeast Asian nation ruled by the military since 1962.
The release from house arrest of one of the world's most prominent political prisoners came a week after an election that was swept by the military's proxy political party and decried by Western nations as a sham designed to perpetuate authoritarian control.
Supporters had been waiting most of the day near her residence and the headquarters of her party. Suu Kyi has been jailed or under house arrest for more than 15 of the last 21 years.
As her release was under way, riot police stationed in the area left the scene and a barbed-wire barricade near her residence was removed, allowing the waiting supporters to surge forward.
Her release was immediately welcomed by world leaders and human rights organizations.
President Barack Obama called Suu Kyi "a hero of mine" said the United States "welcomes her long overdue release."
"Whether Aung San Suu Kyi is living in the prison of her house, or the prison of her country, does not change the fact that she, and the political opposition she represents, has been systematically silenced, incarcerated, and deprived of any opportunity to engage in political processes," he said in a statement.
British Prime Minister David Cameron also said the release was long overdue.
"Aung San Suu Kyi is an inspiration for all of us who believe in freedom of speech, democracy and human rights," he said in a statement.
"It is now crucial that Aung San Suu Kyi has unrestricted freedom of movement and speech and can participate fully in her country's political process," European Commissioner Jose Manuel Barroso said.
Critics allege the Nov. 7 elections were manipulated to give the pro-military party a sweeping victory. Results have been released piecemeal and already have given the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party a majority in both houses of Parliament.
The last elections in 1990 were won overwhelmingly by Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party, but the military refused to hand over power and instead clamped down on opponents.
Suu Kyi's release gives the junta some ammunition against critics of the election and the government's human rights record, which includes the continued detention of some 2,200 political prisoners and brutal military campaigns against ethnic minorities.
It is unlikely the ruling generals will allow Suu Kyi, who drew huge crowds of supporters during her few periods of freedom, to actively and publicly pursue her goal of bringing democracy to Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.
But some see hope in her release.
"There is no formal opposition (in Myanmar) so her release is going to represent an opportunity to re-energize and reorganize this opposition. So in that sense, of revitalizing the opposition in some concrete way, Suu Kyi's release is going to be very pivotal," said Muang Zarni, an exiled dissident and Myanmar research fellow at the London School of Economics.
Suu Kyi herself earlier cautioned about optimism.
"My release should not be looked at as a major breakthrough for democracy. For all people in Burma to enjoy basic freedom, that would be a major breakthrough," she said after her earlier release in 2002.
Suu Kyi was convicted last year of violating the terms of her previous detention by briefly sheltering an American man who swam uninvited to her lakeside home, extending a period of continuous detention that began in 2003 after her motorcade was ambushed in northern Myanmar by a government-backed mob.
Suu Kyi has shown her mettle time and again since taking up the democracy struggle in 1988.
Having spent much of her life abroad, she returned home to take care of her ailing mother just as mass demonstrations were breaking out against 25 years of military rule. She was quickly thrust into a leadership role, mainly because she was the daughter of Aung San, who led Myanmar to independence from Britain before his assassination by political rivals.
She rode out the military's bloody suppression of street demonstrations to help found the NLD. Her defiance gained her fame and honor, most notably the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize.
Charismatic, tireless and outspoken, her popularity threatened the country's new military rulers. In 1989, she was detained on trumped-up national security charges and put under house arrest. She was not released until 1995 and has spent various periods in detention since then.
Suu Kyi's freedom had been a key demand of Western nations and groups critical of the military regime's poor human rights record. The military government, seeking to burnish its international image, had responded previously by offering to talk with her, only to later shy away from serious negotiations.
Suu Kyi - who was barred from running in this month's elections - plans to help probe allegations of voting fraud, according to Nyan Win, who is a spokesman for her party, which was officially disbanded for refusing to reregister for this year's polls.
Such action, which could embarrass the junta, poses the sort of challenge the military has reacted to in the past by detaining Suu Kyi.
Awaiting her release in neighboring Thailand was the younger of her two sons, Kim Aris, who is seeking the chance to see his mother for the first time in 10 years. Aris lives in Britain and has been repeatedly denied visas.
Her late husband, British scholar Michael Aris, raised their sons in England. Their eldest son, Alexander Aris, accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on his mother's behalf in 1991 and reportedly lives in the United States.
Michael Aris died of cancer in 1999 at age 53 after having been denied visas to see his wife for the three years before his death. Suu Kyi could have left Myanmar to see her family but decided not to, fearing the junta would not allow her back in.

HATRED & Beijing Blocks Travelers To Christian Conference 14OKT10

WORDS of widom from this years Nobel Peace Prize winner and the NPR story about the government of the prc from blocking Christians from attending the Lausanne Conference in Cape Town, South Africa. 
 
“For hatred is corrosive of a person’s wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation’s spirit, instigate brutal life-and-death struggles, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity. I hope therefore … to counter the hostility of the regime with the best of intentions, and defuse hate with love.”
- Liu Xiaobo, a literature professor, essayist, and dissident, awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. (Source: Los Angeles Times) 

Beijing Blocks Travelers To Christian Conference

October 14, 2010

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October 14, 2010

A massive global evangelical gathering known as the Lausanne Congress will begin Oct. 16 in Cape Town, South Africa. But it looks likely to take place without the participation of more than 230 Chinese delegates.
So far, at least 11 people planning to attend have been forbidden to leave China, and many others have come under pressure. Many fear Beijing is moving to exert control over underground Christians.

Lei Yang for NPR Church elder Abraham Liu Guan was turned back at Beijing airport customs and blocked from attending a global evangelical gathering in Cape Town, South Africa.

Christianity in China is flourishing, with tens of millions of Christians openly worshiping. Many gather in private assemblies, or house churches, rather than in the official government church, known as the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. The authorities have largely turned a blind eye in the past.
But when a grouping of house churches decided to send some 200 delegates to attend the Lausanne Congress, the government stepped in.
Abraham Liu Guan is a church elder who tried to leave Sunday for the meeting with six others. Authorities warned him not to meet NPR, but in a phone interview he explained what happened at Beijing airport customs. "The border defense people said they'd received a notice from the State Administration for Religious Affairs and the Ministry of Public Security. It said our participation in this meeting threatened state security, and they should not let us pass customs," Guan said.
Repercussions Felt Already
Some of those who have been turned back have had their passports confiscated. One delegate has been placed in detention. Several others have been prevented from leaving their homes.
For months, across China, officials have been warning almost all the pastors invited not to attend, telling them the meeting was anti-China. For some, there have already been consequences.

I think Lausanne could play a positive role for Chinese Christians. For a short time, there might be pressure or there might be a price to pay. But that will pass quickly.

- Ezra Jin, pastor at Zion Church in Beijing

The Rev. Xing Jingfu from Changsha, in Hunan, said authorities stopped his church from meeting and from preaching. He said they openly said it was because of the Lausanne Congress. If we meet again, they'll arrest us, he said.
China's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ma Zhaoxu, issued a statement to NPR. It accuses the Lausanne organizers of not issuing an official invitation to China's state-controlled church and of having secret communications with Christians from private assemblies.
"This act has openly challenged China's principle of an independent, autonomous, self-governing church. It is a flagrant interference in China's religious affairs," the statement said.
For their part, the Lausanne organizers say there’s been a misunderstanding, and they did invite the official church as an observer. “We very much regret that our intentions and invitations to our Chinese brothers and sisters have been wrongly perceived. We have a profound set of disappointment and incompleteness in knowing that our friends from China are not able to be with us,” the statement said.
Before the weekend, Lausanne Chairman Doug Birdsall said how Chinese pastors reacted to warnings would be up to them.
"There are times when there are matters of conscience for which people take a stand. Most any right that we have, someone has worked for, or battled for, at some time. The apostle Paul gave advice and encouragement to followers of Christ to be faithful to Christ, and faithful to their nations," Birdsall said.
Crackdown Won't Affect Larger Trend
That China's underground Christians could get together to choose delegates and raise more than $1 million to cover their costs would have been unthinkable a decade ago. But that level of coordination is unsettling to Beijing, especially given the explosive growth in Christianity.
Some predict that this current clampdown will alienate house church members further.
“These measures will cause house churches to feel extreme dissatisfaction with the Chinese authorities,” says Fan Yafeng, a prominent Christian. “Stopping the house church members from attending the conference will have a long-term impact on the relationship between politics and religion in China."
The Rev. Ezra Jin from Zion Church in Beijing says even if he's blocked from going to Cape Town, it won't affect the larger trend. "I think Lausanne could play a positive role for Chinese Christians. For a short time, there might be pressure or there might be a price to pay. But that will pass quickly," Jin says.
"Let our blood and sweat drive China's Christian revival," he prays with a visitor.
Beijing's hard line on this congress comes as the authorities were showing signs of tolerating house churches. It clearly undermines Beijing's claims to allow freedom of religion. It's not yet clear how far Beijing will go.
But some fear this could be the start of a new wave of persecution against China's underground Christians.

Related NPR Stories

In The Land Of Mao, A Rising Tide Of Christianity July 19, 2010

Chinese Turn To Religion To Fill A Spiritual Vacuum July 18, 2010

 

Chinese Dissident Xiaobo Wins Nobel Peace Prize 8OKT10

CONGRATULATIONS to the Nobel committee for their decision and to Liu Xiaobo for having the courage to stand up to the oppression of the government of the prc. Charter 08 has been added to the speeches page on this blog.

Chinese Dissident Xiaobo Wins Nobel Peace Prize

by The Associated Press

Kim Cheung/AP Activists hold pictures of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who was arrested after co-authoring a bold manifesto urging civil rights and political reform in China.

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October 8, 2010

Imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for "his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights" - a prize likely to enrage the Chinese government, which had warned the Nobel committee not to honor him.
Thorbjoern Jagland, the Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman, said Liu Xiaobo (LEE-o SHAo-boh) was a symbol for the fight for human rights in China and the government should expect that its policies face scrutiny.
"China has become a big power in economic terms as well as political terms, and it is normal that big powers should be under criticism," Jagland said.
Unlike some in China's highly fractured and persecuted dissident community, the 54-year-old Liu has been an ardent advocate for peaceful, gradual political change, rather than a violent confrontation with the government.
In China, broadcasts of CNN, which is available in tourist hotels, upmarket foreign hotels and places where foreigners gather, went black during the Nobel announcement and when reports about the award later aired.
China's Foreign Ministry did not immediately comment, but a spokeswoman said recently that choosing Liu would go against the prize's aims.
"The person you just mentioned was sentenced to jail by Chinese judicial authorities for violating Chinese law. I think his acts are completely contrary to the aspirations of the Nobel Peace Prize," said spokeswoman Jiang Yu.
It was the first Nobel for the Chinese dissident community since it resurfaced after the country's communist leadership launched economic, but not political reforms three decades ago. The win could jolt a current debate among the leadership and the elite over whether China should begin democratic reforms and if so how quickly.
The Nobel citation said China's new status a big economic and political power must entail increased responsibility.
"China is in breach of several international agreements to which it is a signatory, as well as of its own provisions concerning political rights," it said, citing an article in China's constitution about freedom of speech and assembly.
"In practice, these freedoms have proved to be distinctly curtailed for China's citizens," the citation said.
The document Liu co-authored, Charter 08, called for greater freedoms and an end to the Communist Party's political dominance. It was an intentional echo of Charter 77, the famous call for human rights in then-Czechoslovakia that led to the 1989 Velvet Revolution that swept away communist rule.
"The democratization of Chinese politics can be put off no longer," Charter 08 says.
Thousands of Chinese signed Charter 08, and the Communist Party took the document as a direct challenge.
Police arrested Liu hours before Charter 08 was due to be released in December 2008. Given a brief trial last Christmas Day, Liu was convicted of subversion for writing Charter 08 and other political tracts and sentenced to 11 years in prison.
In a year with a record 237 nominations for the peace prize, Liu had been considered a favorite, with open support from winners Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and others.
When the Tibet-born Dalai Lama won the peace prize in 1989, both the Chinese government and some of the public were angry - the exiled Buddhist leader was endlessly vilified in official propaganda as a traitor for his calls for more autonomy for Tibet.
The son of a soldier, Liu joined China's first wave of university students in the mid-1970s after the chaotic decade of the Cultural Revolution.
Liu's writing first took a political turn in 1988, when he became a visiting scholar in Oslo - his first time outside China.
Liu cut short a visiting scholar stint at Columbia University months later to join the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing in 1989. He and three other older activists famously persuaded students to peacefully leave the square hours before the deadly June 4 crackdown.
Liu went to prison after the crackdown and was released in early 1991 because he had repented and "performed major meritorious services," state media said at the time, without elaborating.
Still, five years later Liu was sent to a re-education camp for three years for co-writing an open letter that demanded the impeachment of then-President Jiang Zemin.
President Barack Obama won the Nobel peace prize last year.
China's Liu Xiaobo wins Nobel Peace Prize

By John Pomfret
Friday, October 8, 2010; 7:11 AM


Liu Xiaobo, an irrepressible, chain-smoking Chinese dissident imprisoned last year for subversion, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize Friday for helping to spearhead a campaign for more freedom in China.
In a statement, the Nobel Committee said Liu, 54, deserved the prize "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China."
Analysts said the honor was aimed at pressuring China to ease its crackdown on religious and political activists. China's government denounced the award as "a desecration" and said the honor should have gone to someone focused on promoting international friendship and disarmament.
"Liu Xiaobo is a sentenced criminal who has violated Chinese law," a spokesman for China's Foreign Ministry said in a statement. The spokesman, Ma Zhaoxu, said honoring Liu "runs counter to the principles of the Nobel Peace Prize."
The Nobel committee lauded Liu's efforts over more than two decades to demand freedom of speech, assembly, religion and other forms of expression for Chinese citizens.
China's "new status" as the world's second-largest economy "must entail increased responsibility," the committee said. It said Beijing must heed the call of Liu and others to award its citizens the most basic democratic freedoms.
"Through the severe punishment meted out to him, Liu has become the foremost symbol of this wide-ranging struggle for human rights in China," the Nobel statement said.
Liu is serving his 11-year sentence at Jinzhou prison in Liaoning, hundreds of miles from his home and wife, Liu Xia, in Beijing. In an interview shortly before the announcement, Liu Xia said she was thankful her husband's physical condition seems to have improved in jail, and grateful that he's allowed to read and that the two can exchange regular letters.
"We have no regrets," she said. "All of this has been of our choosing. It will always be so. We'll bear the consequences together. I've known Liu since 1982. I've watched him change little by little year by year, and we know that we have to pay the price under the current situation in China."
In the weeks running up to the announcement, Liu was considered a top contender to win the award. But China's government had warned Norway not to award Liu its most prestigious prize, saying that the essayist did not qualify for the honor.
Analysts predicted that in the short-term, China's one-party state would react to the award by intensifying an already tough campaign against dissidents, religious activists and non-governmental organizations. Although China outwardly appears strong, with a world-beating economic growth rate, prosecutions for "state security" offenses are approaching numbers not seen since the bloody crackdown on student-led protests around Tiananmen Square in 1989.
But in the long-term, a wide spectrum of Chinese and foreigners said, Liu's award could actually resonate more deeply within China than any similar act in years--significantly more so than the Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to the Dalai Lama in 1989 or the Nobel prize for literature given to dissident writer Gao Xingjian in 2000.
First of all, Liu will be the first Chinese citizen to ever win the award. (The Dalai Lama has status as a refugee. And Gao is a French citizen.) Second, Liu, unlike most Chinese dissidents, remains well-known and well-liked in China.
Prickly, with a thick northern drawl, tobacco-stained teeth and an infectious laugh, he's always been considered part of the "loyal opposition," less a theoretician of a democratic revolution than a tough urban gadfly.
Although in and out of jail for stating his beliefs, writing letters and challenging the state for two decades, Liu has escaped the sentence of irrelevance meted out to so many of his dissident contemporaries.
Some observers, however, said the award would feed into a sense among many young Chinese that the West is out to get China and that "Cold War" thinking still dominates mindsets in the developed world.
"I worry about the effect of this prize on China's younger generation," said Zhu Feng, a professor of international relations at Beijing University. "It will be seen as new evidence about how the West is unfriendly to China."
Liu's latest sentence was his longest. Announced on Christmas Day 2009 - because the Chinese government believes Westerners are less likely to take notice on a holiday--Liu's sentence of 11 years was for attempting to subvert the state.
His specific crime was that he volunteered to have his name lead a list of signatories to a document called "Charter 08." Modeled after the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, Charter 08 called for greater freedom of expression, human rights, and for free elections.
Ultimately, more than 8,000 people have signed China' s charter.
Published on Dec. 10, 2008, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the charter "was to put a stake in the ground and say here's an alternate vision of China," said Perry Link, the renowned China scholar who worked with the group to translate their manifesto into English. "It was definitely a long-term program."
Among the demands were for a judiciary not controlled by the Communist Party, meaningful elections and the freedoms of association, assembly, expression and religion. "The current system has become backward to the point that change cannot be avoided," the charter read. "This situation must change! Political democratic reforms cannot be delayed any longer!"
Liu played an important role as the crafters of the charter hashed out the wording, Link said. He fought to excise any mention of the banned sect Falun Gong from the document because, he argued, the charter's purpose should not be to deal with specific human rights cases.
And he helped work out a compromise over mentioning the Tiananmen Square crackdown - which was raised in the preamble but not in the actual body of the charter.
Link, who spent much of that month talking with Liu and others as the manifesto went from one draft to another, recalled that Liu wasn't a leader of the group in the beginning. "But once he saw it was going somewhere, he naturally volunteered to be out front," Link said.
Liu didn't hog publicity, Link added, "he just doesn't shrink from putting his head on the line. He was like a moth to the flame."
After he was sentenced, Liu's lawyer released a simple statement from his client: "I have long been aware that when an independent intellectual stands up to an autocratic state, step one toward freedom is often a step into prison," it said. "Now I am taking that step; and true freedom is that much nearer."
Ai Weiwei, a signatory of the Charter 08 document who designed the Bird's Nest stadium for China's Summer Olympics, said Friday's award was at least a sign that "the world is paying attention to China."
But the award "won't change much in China," Ai predicted. "More people need to wake up."
Liu has taken risks with his life throughout his career. In 1989, he left a cushy post as a visiting scholar at Columbia University to return to China to participate in demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.
On the night of June 3, 1989, he was one of four dissidents who negotiated with the People's Liberation Army to allow the last several hundred students to peacefully vacate the square. After the crackdown he spent two years in jail.
Liu was dispatched to a re-education camp in 1996 for co-writing an open letter that demanded the impeachment of then-president Jiang Zemin.
From then until his arrest in December, 2008, two days before the charter was released, Liu lived a life of constant harassment by the security services. He was repeatedly questioned because of his views or his essays, which were passed around the Internet by thousands of his readers.
Liu's wife, Liu Xia, said the toughest time for her was after Liu was arrested in 2008 but before he was indicted. He basically disappeared, she said, into the maw of China's security state.
"For those six and half months, I only saw him twice, it was weird for both of us," Liu Xia recalled. "I was taken to a hotel in a suburb of Beijing, Xiaobo was taken there too, and he told me he didn't know where he was."
But when the indictment came, "I felt very calm," she said. "I told our lawyer that Xiaobo would probably be sentenced at least 10 years. Then it came out 11, very close to what I expected."
Correspondent William Wan contributed to this report. pomfretj@washpost.com

 

A CALL TO ACTION...WE CAN'T MISS THIS OPPORTUNITY FOR PEACE! from CODE PINK

I am proud to say I participated in several demonstrations, large and small, against the Iraq war, before and after it started. Hundreds of thousands of us were not deceived by the war pigs of the bush administration and struggled on the streets and with Congress and the media to prevent this illegal and immoral war. It is time for another sustained struggle on the streets  and with Congress and the Obama administration. The waste of lives and resources has to end NOW! I have signed up to participate, hope you will too. 

Share your voice during the week of August 25 to 31 -- the week that most of the US troops will return from Iraq.

  

Almost eight years ago, I made my way to DC to meet up with Medea Benjamin and a few other friends to talk about what we could do to stop the Bush administration's insane push toward invading an innocent country: Iraq. The next morning, eight of us were in front of the White House, on the steps of Congress and in the hearing for the resolution on Iraq; the day ended with two of us in jail. Our message was US Inspectors, Not US War. We had read articles about how the White House had been dreaming the invasion up over the summer and was waiting until September to push it because "you don't launch a new product in August." People's lives were at stake, and they were treating war like the release of a new sports car.
We started CODEPINK in a desperate attempt to try to stop the war in Iraq. We vigiled outside the White House for five months, taking our message and outrage to the halls of Congress, press conferences and every invasion sales pitch we could gain entry to. We met with Nancy Pelosi, who told us she had a briefing with a Florida Senator that convinced her that there were no weapons of mass destruction.  As the Democratic Whip she boldly broke with leadership to oppose the war. Sadly, her words were without action.  The resolution swept through the committee hearing; we sat and listened with horror to Democrats arguing for the war, their arguments terrifyingly ungrounded in any real facts.  Bush wanted to release his shiny new sports car and no one in Congress had the guts to say “This car is dangerous, it’s way too expensive, it doesn’t have any brakes, and it can only end in tragedy.” Congress just sat back and let him have his deadly toy, while we did whatever could to try to keep it off the road.
While we did not succeed in stopping the invasion, we did spend the past eight years organizing, mobilizing, expressing our outrage and exposing the futility, stupidity and enormous cost of this debacle for both Iraqis and Americans. We have countered the constant lies spewing out of the Oval Office, the "think tanks" and the media. We have worked tirelessly to try to bring our resources back home where they're most needed--particularly as millions of Americans are turned out of their homes, people are desperate for jobs, and we need to reconfigure our entire energy system.
By August 31, U.S. troops in Iraq are scheduled to be reduced to 50,000--marking what we hope will be the beginning of the end of this catastrophe. The Pentagon and the war supporters will undoubtedly spin this catastrophic intervention as a success--while Iraq lies in ruins and thousands of our soldiers have died in vain. Worse yet, it seems they have learned nothing from the disaster, as we are repeating it again in Afghanistan. Congress is voting for another $33 billion for the Afghanistan war while our states and cities go bankrupt and EVERYONE knows there is no military solution.
This insanity will have no end--unless we end it. This faulty “product” needs to be recalled.
Will you join with CODEPINK and other peace and justice organizations in sharing your voice during the week of August 25 to 31--the week that most of the US troops will return from Iraq? We need your help getting out the truth that the Iraq war was based on lies, has left Iraq in tatters, has drained our resources and MUST NOT be repeated for years to come in Afghanistan. There are so many who have paid the price of this crime....so many except those who are responsible. Sign up to join our action team for the last week of August; we will help you with tools and inspiration to write letters to the editor and op-eds, to call in to radio shows, to educate your colleagues.  We need thousands of voices—yours counts.

HOPE, HOPELESS, AND CHANGE

One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the U.S. around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better. - Daniel Berrigan, poet, peace activist, and priest.

Hope is the strongest driving force for a people. Hope which brings about change, which produces new realities, is what opens man's road to freedom. Once hope has taken hold, courage must unite with wisdom. That is the only way of avoiding violence, the only way of maintaining the calm one needs to respond peacefully to offenses. - Oscar Arias Sanchez, excerpted from his 1987 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There's too much work to do. - Dorothy Day, The Catholic Worker

IT'S TIME TO END THIS WAR (OR DO WE JUST BUILD ANOTHER MEMORIAL WALL?) from SOJO 1jul10

Expresses my views better than I can.....
 
After his unanimous approval by the Senate Armed Services Committee as the new Afghan war commander, General David Petraeus was pictured in The Washington Post with a broad smile and thumbs up proclaiming, “We are all firmly united in seeking to forge unity of effort.” No, we’re not, General. No, we’re not. In fact, I believe it’s time to begin to unite the religious community against the war in Afghanistan.
Following last week’s resignation of General Stanley McChrystal as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, confirmation hearings began right away for Petraeus to become his replacement. But the real issue is not replacing one general with another because of inappropriate comments and insubordination -- it’s the fatally flawed war policy in Afghanistan.
In February 1968, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong attacks erupted throughout South Vietnam, showing that U.S. political and military leaders’ optimistic pronouncements that the end of the war was near were not true. By then, it was clear to many that the war was not winnable, yet more than half of U.S. casualties in Vietnam occurred from that spring until the end of the war (35,000 of the total 58,000).
I have walked the line at the Vietnam Memorial Wall many times, with tears running down my face as I read the names of my generation who were killed there. And the painful remorse over that awful war is even greater when I remember that the majority of those who died in Vietnam were killed after we knew we would ultimately have to come home without “winning” the unwinnable war. The last of the many reasons for staying in Vietnam that I recall President Nixon saying was to come home “with our heads held high.” We didn’t.
After 9/11, an international police action to bring the perpetrators of that horrible crime to justice would have been one thing. But to begin a war and then an occupation of Afghanistan was the wrong policy, quickly killing more Afghan innocents than the American innocents who died on September 11. It was then further compromised by the completely mistaken and morally unjustifiable war in Iraq.
When will we ever learn? The failed policies are all too familiar: a counter-insurgency strategy requiring more and more troops; creating the continued presence of a large U.S. military force; increasing the resentment and hostility of the Afghan people at a foreign occupation; trying to create a central government out of an ungovernable tribal society; and depending on an incompetent and utterly corrupt political ruler and regime.
An effective anti-terrorism policy was never really tried and was replaced by a “war on terrorism” which has failed. Here’s the metric: Has our primarily military policy in Afghanistan and Iraq killed more terrorists than it has recruited? I think we know the answer to that. The math of terrorism is against us. And our military obsession has made the most important question impossible to ask and even unpatriotic to consider: How might we reduce and defeat the causes of terrorism in the first place?
A new strategy in Afghanistan that focuses on humanitarian assistance and sustainable economic development, along with international policing, was also never tried. It could have been led by NGOs, both faith-based and secular, who have been in the region for years, have become quite indigenous, and are much more trusted by the people of these countries than are the U.S. military. But such assistance would have to be provided, as much as possible, by independent civilian and non-governmental organizations -- both international and local -- rather than using aid as a government adjunct to military operations.
Yes, after taking over the country, we do have a responsibility not to simply walk away. There are ethical and moral issues that need to be considered: legitimately protecting Americans from further terrorism; protecting the lives of U.S. servicemen and women; protecting the Afghan people from the collateral damage of war; defending women from the Taliban; genuinely supporting democracy; and of course, saving innocent lives from the collateral damage of war, to name a few.
And yes, effective development needs security. We could have focused on economic development, starting in areas that are secure and then growing to additional parts of the country, but providing only the security necessary to protect the rebuilding of the country. That kind of peacekeeping security would have been more likely to gain the international support we needed in Afghanistan, both from Europe and even from Arab and Muslim countries.
Non-military strategies should have led the way, rather than the other way around, as counter-insurgency doctrine requires. We should not have made aid and development weapons of war by tying them so closely to the military; rather, we should have only provided the security support needed for the development work to succeed -- led by respected, well-established international organizations with strong local connections.
The current strategy, even with a new commander, will only lead to more casualties -- U.S. and Afghan -- while likely strengthening popular support for the Taliban as an anti-occupation force. It is a strategy of endless war that is ultimately doomed to failure.
Last Sunday, the photo on the front page of The New York Times broke my heart. It showed the family of a military serviceman just before he was redeployed to Afghanistan. He was in his fatigues, holding his 6-month-old son with a look of deep pain on his face, with his wife resting her head against his shoulder. The article told story after story about families being separated by repeated deployments in an endless war. Soldiers who are fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters are dying for a wrong-headed, ineffective, failed, doomed, arrogant, theologically unjust, and yes, immoral war policy. And of course, the ones dying are not the young people headed for our best universities and successful professional careers, but rather they are the ones who have fewer options, or who see the military as their only option. Those with the least opportunities, and their families, are again the ones to sacrifice and suffer. It’s not right and it’s not fair.
The number of U.S. service members killed in June was the highest for one month since this now nine-year war began. It’s time to end this war. Or should we just start building another wall?

End the war, not just the general 28JUN10

I AM TIRED OF MORE OF MY COUNTRIES RESOURCES, THAT INCLUDES FLESH AND BLOOD AS WELL AS TAX DOLLARS, BEING WASTED IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN. I AM TIRED OF THE DEATH AND RUINED LIVES OF AMERICANS AND IRAQIS AND AFGHANS. I AM TIRED OF THIS COUNTRY SPENDING MORE MONEY ON WAR AND WEAPONS OF DESTRUCTION AND MASS DESTRUCTION THAN ON SCHOOLS, TRACTORS, BOOKS.....I AM TIRED OF THE GREED AND CORRUPTION OF THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT AND CORPORATE AMERICA AND OF TOO MANY AMERICANS THAT KEEPS US ENSLAVED TO THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. IT IS TIME TO END THE WARS AND OUR MILITARY INVOLVEMENT IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN AND TO BEGIN TO TEACH OUR CHILDREN AND EACH OTHER IT IS GOOD TO LIVE THE LIFE THAT CAUSES OTHER NATIONS TO LOOOK AT US AND SAY 'BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS'.

Obama fired the general, but not the war. Tell Congress we want more, we want an end to the war.

Last week, President Obama fired Gen. Stanley McChrystal after he gave a crude and candid interview to Rolling Stone in which he insulted the president, the secretary of defense and most Americans for not doing more to support the war.¹ Unfortunately, Obama fired only the general, not his strategy -- and he's planning to continue with the wrongheaded plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan that McChrystal championed.²

Obama made the right decision but for the wrong reasons. Now, we're running out of time to change the future, and not just the leadership, of this war.

This week, the House is set to vote on the funding that will keep McChrystal's war alive after he's gone.³ But Rep. Jim McGovern and a caucus of progressive leaders want to use this moment to end the war.⁴

Can you email your representative today and tell him or her to end the war by refusing to pay for it until there's a timeline for our troops to come home? Click here to tell Congress: "We want more than personnel changes -- we want an end to the war."

http://act.truemajorityaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=70

Obama wants to replace McChrystal with Gen. Petraeus, another general who thinks we can kill our way to a peaceful Middle-East.⁵ But Congress holds the power over whether we keep funding that strategy or change course and begin to bring our troops home.

Sen. Robert Byrd, who died today, was a powerful advocate for that idea. He opposed the Bush-Cheney plan to invade Iraq, and was a master at using the wars' funding bills to call for a new strategy.⁶ But with Sen. Byrd gone, it will fall to a new generation of leaders in Congress to help end the war.

You can help. Click here to tell your Representative to get behind the Progressive plan to stop spending money on the war until we know it will end.

Thanks,

-Drew

Drew Hudson
TrueMajority / USAction

1 - npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128061733
2 - csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2010/0628/Time-for-Obama-to-rethink-Afghanistan-war-strategy
3 - washingtonexaminer.com/politics/congress/Petraeus-hearing-provides-forum-for-critics-of-Obama-war-policies-97180989.html
4 - politico.com/news/stories/0610/39010.html
5 - time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,2000044,00.html
6 - google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ho7Mwjor4AW6m81jFq8Y7vNTT_fAD9GKD2M80

KEEP WORKING FOR PEACE

One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the U.S. around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better. - Daniel Berrigan, poet, peace activist, and priest.

Beyond Vietnam (Iraq, Afghanistan): A Time to Break Silence by Martin Luther King 4APR1967 and NOW

Reading this speech from 1964 one would swear it was made in 2010......and it is one that needs to be made today, or at least shared as much as possible to wake people up, to let them know there is a better way to address the world's problems than war. Substitute Iraq and Afghanistan for Vietnam, the taliban for the Vc and you will realize how the military-industrial complex has prevented peace from breaking out all over the world. That may seem simplistic, but the concepts of non-violence and addressing the root causes of poverty and repression are usually simply and cost a lot less than war. We need to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan now. Read this speech and then ask yourself if you can continue to support these wars, and if not then get involved with Sojourners or Pax Christi and support politicians who are committed in ending these wars.

By Rev. Martin Luther King
4 April 1967

Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

In the light of such tragic misunderstandings, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.

Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.

Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.
The Importance of Vietnam

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have 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 asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked 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. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the "Vietcong" or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
Strange Liberators

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony.

Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some Communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam.

Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators -- our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change -- especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy -- and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us -- not their fellow Vietnamese --the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go -- primarily women and children and the aged.

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them -- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force -- the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?

Now there is little left to build on -- save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.

Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front -- that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the north" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them -- the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.

When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.
This Madness Must Cease

Somehow 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 death and corruption in Vietnam. 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 Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:

"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese 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 Vietnam. 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 China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam 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 Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese 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 Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

1. End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
2. Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
3. Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.
4. Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.
5. Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.

Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We most provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary.
Protesting The War

Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

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 now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" 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 in Colombia 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 investment.

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 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, 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. n 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 is not haphazard and superficial. 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 Latin 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 hands 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 veins of people 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.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove thosse conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.
The People Are Important

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every moutain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain."

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:

Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.

Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out deperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world -- a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the callling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah,
Off'ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and that light.

Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong:
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above his own.

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